Ashley Moser remembers the precise conversation that led to the founding of MelodyArc. She and her former coworker James McHenry were discussing the structure of their respective workdays when McHenry, who had previously worked as VP of customer service defect discovery at Walmart, became exasperated.
“He told me, ‘Ashley, I can’t say the same script again… I’ve said the same script on best practices for setting up customer support teams and orgs. I can’t say it again,’” she said. “And I said, ‘Well, James, if you say the exact same thing every single time, that means we can make it into a product.’”
And so they did. Moser, who is also a Walmart alum, describes MelodyArc as a technology company that “resolves customer inquiries using a combination of A.I. and agents together.” It’s a new paradigm, she says, that “does the job of a customer support agent or chatbot” in order to help businesses deliver fast and high-quality customer service.
How does MelodyArc work with its clients?
Our goal is to enable them to use MelodyArc in a way that fits their strategy, tone and policies. However, we will make suggestions at the beginning around best practices. I would characterize how MelodyArc sits in an organization by saying that we look like agent. A client might have 10 internal agents doing call support—something that we don’t do. And maybe they’re also handling some really intense email or text support conversations. They give MelodyArc 80% of those tech support conversations so that we can deliver really fast, efficient responses and give them the jobs where they actually need someone within their brand to respond to the customer.
What are your biggest challenges?
Educating on A.I. and helping our clients cut through the noise of what A.I. broadly means for them. We use A.I. in three or four different parts of the platform, and what we’re seeing is clients who are sitting in two different camps. [Some are] actually operationalizing A.I. and others are kind of paralyzed. We spend a lot of time educating them on what it means and how we use it.
What’s a fun fact that people don’t know about you?
My first job was in a restaurant in the suburbs. I was working at the counter where you would get takeaway food. If I wasn’t working in the corporate business world, my dream job would be to be a waiter again. I like multitasking, customer service, the logistics and operations of it.
The Fortune Founders Forum is a community of entrepreneurs chosen by Fortune’s editorial team to participate at the annual Brainstorm Tech conference, which took place in Deer Valley, Utah, in July. Our inaugural cohort was selected based on a variety of factors, including the potential impact of their companies, and reflected a diversity of geographies, sectors, and demographics.
