Co-founders Chun Jiang and Ben Kramer explain how Monterey turns user feedback in support logs, chat messages, and social posts into actionable product design insights — and why they joined the Comcast NBCUniversal LIFT Labs Generative AI Accelerator.
Working as a product designer for high-growth companies in San Francisco, Chun Jiang juggled so many projects friends often wondered how she finished it all. She longed for the days when artificial intelligence would help.
Chun Jiang, Co-Founder
“I was obsessed with automating my work,” said Jiang.
Specifically, she wanted to simplify the process of analyzing user feedback from a variety of disparate sources — but that process was manual, laborious, and error-prone.
So, she teamed up with coworker Ben Kramer to launch Monterey AI, a product development copilot that helps organizations collect user feedback, drive insights, and take actions that lead to better customer experiences. It works by analyzing user feedback data like customer support logs, chat messages, social posts, and directly submitted feedback, allowing teams to use natural language to interact with that data.
For example, a gaming company uses Monterey to sift through thousands of user messages on Discord, flagging communications about errors and glitches, gameplay questions, and new feature requests. It also captures the metadata of each customer to learn if they play often and how much money they’ve spent on the game.
“It’s about using natural language to get meaningful insights and make data-driven product upgrades”
— Chun Jiang
“After the data collection, product managers can ask questions such as: What are the most common user complaints? What bugs were found by customers last month? Then, they can quickly send that information to engineering teams to improve the product,” said Jiang.
Connecting with Comcast
The founders applied to the Comcast NBCUniversal LIFT Labs Accelerator because of its focus on helping startups secure strategic partnerships with Comcast NBCUniversal. Now, Monterey is working with a number of teams at Comcast to bring scalable and actionable product analytics solutions company-wide.
“I have never seen an accelerator tailored towards helping you get pilots with enterprise clients. The value is just so well-defined,” said Jiang. “The opportunity to learn more about the business and how leaders in top organizations work with startups has been invaluable.”
Setting Priorities and Managing Goals
Before Monterey, product teams had difficulty collecting, triaging, and analyzing user feedback — meaning they’d make upgrades based on anecdotal opinions from executives or salespeople. Listening to the loudest voice is not always a solid product design strategy.
“Our tool analyzes a goldmine of data explaining what end users actually want and need”
— Ben Kramer
Ben Kramer, Co-Founder
“It’s so hard for product teams to understand what to do and when,” said Kramer. “We help teams figure that out so they can make product updates that attract new users and minimize churn.” In the immediate future, Monterey plans to continue improving security, scale, and user experience. As time passes and more companies use the technology, they plan to expand their capability for new data sets and verticals.
“We didn’t initially realize how widely applicable this platform could be,” said Jiang. “In our previous experiences, we always focused on one vertical first, and then expanded to others. But we can actually serve a lot of verticals at once, so the scalability that this large language model tech brings is pretty incredible. We’re excited for what’s to come.”
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