Latest / The ROI Online Podcast / Entrepreneur Eric Kades on How Technology Supports Business: The ROI Online Podcast Ep. 117

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Entrepreneur Eric Kades on How Technology Supports Business: The ROI Online Podcast Ep. 117 · The ROI Online Podcast

• 0:04
  Eric Kades: You can train AI over time to get better and better at figuring out what it is the the the you're asking. At the same time, once it figures out what you're asking it goes and taps the database and says, Okay, here's the right answer for that question. But what often happens, especially in a new instance, when you're just starting to train it, it takes a good six months to a year to continually update that AI to train it to what you're trying to get to. A lot of times, you'll get stuck in what I call Wrong answer hell, which I've experienced myself.
• 0:43
  Steve Brown: Hi, everybody.
• 0:43
  Steve Brown: Welcome to the ROI online podcast where we believe you, the courageous entrepreneurs of our day, are the invisible heroes of our economy. You not only improve our world with your ideas, your grit and your passion, but you make our world better. I'm Steve Brown. And this is a place where we have great conversations with winners just like you while we laugh and learn together.
• 1:17
  Steve Brown: Welcome to the ROI online podcast. Steve Brown, thanks
• 1:22
  Eric Kades: for having me. I'm excited to be here.
• 1:24
  Steve Brown: So Eric, you have this, this company that here's the thing, we're humans, and we just want to talk to somebody, but often we feel 1000s of miles away from someone that could be like, really resolving a solution for us. But there's not many options. Right now you go online, maybe there's a chat message, and you got to wait.
• 1:47
  Steve Brown: But you don't know if you're talking to a human. Or if you're talking to a robot. And then also you send in an email, you don't know when that email is going to be answered. But yet you have this solution that is shortcutting that process and can really get a connection with a live human in no time at all.
• 2:08
  Steve Brown: Yeah,
• 2:11
  Eric Kades: it's it's something that I came across about a decade ago, I've been in the contact center business for 20 plus years course, you know, started out answering phones making outbound phone calls.
• 2:22
  Eric Kades: About 10 years ago, I started to hear about this thing called Live Chat. And just out of common sense, I said, wow, you know, everyone's paying all this money to bring people to their website. And that now there's this little widget that can pop up and talk to people. So I said, this is a business that's gonna happen in the future. And something that we need to do for our clients went to one of our first or one of our voice clients and said, Hey, we're getting in the live chat business. Now, would you consider using live chat on your website? They did. It was a large for profit, publicly traded, college and university.
• 3:08
  Eric Kades: And we became their number one converting lead source Go figure. So immediately, when someone has a question, one of my agents pops up and answers those questions. And those people that talk with us first, end up enrolling in that college, better than any other lead source that comes in someone who calls someone who fills out a form, no matter what it is, we still to this day, 10 years later, are still there, number one converting lead source and I turned that into a business. We went on to 50 plus colleges and universities that we do this for today. We're still all of their number one converting lead source. And why is that? It's It's simple. It's because we're answering people's questions with real human beings at the exact second that they have the question. So they have anxiety about going to college.
• 4:00
  Eric Kades: And you know, when we're there to answer to these credits transfer, what's your fast fi date, they appreciate it. And they say, Hey, this is a place that I could see myself attending. So all along that journey, I kind of had a problem. The problem was on our own website, when I would put one of my live chat agents on the website. Inevitably, we would get a prospect looking at using us for their live chat on their University's website. And they would come in with a really tough question specific about a certain software, and my agent would know the answer and they would just say, you know what, sir? Man, that's a great question. Let me get your name and number and someone will call you back. And then I would get an email like an hour later saying, you know what, we decided we're not going to use you because you don't really understand your software. We weren't even using our own song.
• 4:58
  Eric Kades: Where, and you know, we're gonna go a different direction. So I went to the live chat software companies at that time and said, Hey, I need a solution for this, I need to get my sales people, you know, answering these questions, so we could answer intelligently. And they all had answers for it. They all said, Great, we have an app for that.
• 5:21
  Eric Kades: I said, awesome. I'll give the app to our sales guys. Now, when you know, University of North Carolina online comes to check us out on our website, we'll be able to answer right away intelligently. And we'll close the deal. Well, college comes on prospective college comes on to our website, and I'm on the phone and someone else is doing someone out something else, they're not in front of the computer. And the prospect is waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting. And we never see the app notification. So then I get an email a half hour later and says, Hey, we just came to your website, and we waited three minutes and no one picked up. We're not going to use you we could never have someone like that represent our brand. And they would shut and I would shut it down. So we sold live chat to colleges and universities for a decade very successfully, without having live chat on our own website. And that was really became the bane of my existence that would keep me up at night that we wouldn't be able to answer our own live chat. Yes, we can answer with our agents.
• 6:28
  Eric Kades: But we couldn't answer when those critical questions came in. And these were big deals. So we didn't want to take that risk. And I would just tell prospective clients to go look at our competitors, go chat with them, and they'll get a good experience. And then we would close the deal. But still, we're a live chat company with no live chat. So one day, you know, sitting here in my kitchen, Steve, I said to myself, What if you could answer a live chat with a text message?
• 6:57
  Eric Kades: That would be so simple. We're all looking at our phones all day long, we could send a text message to multiple people at once. Whoever picked it up first could answer. And then we could close the deal. So I went to the CTO is running our call center software at the time and said, Hey, can you build a prototype of this? Where make it so the sales team can answer with a text message a couple weeks later, he had a prototype and text chat was born. And we started answering our live chats on time and closing sales. So I never really thought of it as a product. It was just something that we were going to use for ourselves. And I told a friend about it. He told his friend about it. I happen to have an e commerce store in Aspen, Colorado small jewelry store called Taylor and SCA and told Adam how we answer our live chats with text messages. And Adams like, Oh my god, I gotta try that we've tried this live chat company and that live chat company and this live chat company. And we're never in front of our computer, right?
• 7:59
  Eric Kades: When the live check comes in, or we're waiting on a customer. And I gave it to Adam called me back 10 minutes later said he just closed at $800 jewelry sale, and how can he invest in my company?
• 8:11
  Eric Kades: We went I said, Adam, you know, why don't you be our prototype.
• 8:15
  Eric Kades: And you know, our first beta customer, we developed it. Over the next four months, I gave it to another buddy. He closed the sale immediately called me and said he wanted to invest in the company and text chat was born.
• 8:26
  Eric Kades: And you know, it's very simple.
• 8:31
  Eric Kades: It's that immediate human connection. When someone is on your website, either in shopping mode or buying mode? And you answer right away, you close them 50% or more of the time.
• 8:45
  Steve Brown: So let's some text chat was born. But let's let's do a little differentiation here. Because in most people's mind, text and chat is the same thing. But it's not. It's very different. So what is live chat app?
• 9:01
  Eric Kades: Yeah, so that's a great question. And our name actually is a little bit a little bit confusing, although it's a good brand name. Live Chat is that widget in the bottom corner that you see on websites that pops up and says, hey, how can I help you today?
• 9:17
  Eric Kades: And then they ask for your name and email, and then you hope to get transferred to a live person. But in today's world with chatbots, some of the time you're just getting automation, and then you're thinking you're going to speak with a live person. And then you get this message that says great. We got your information. Someone will get back to you in 24 hours and often they never get back to you. That's not what live chat was designed to do. Live Chat was designed to foster human communication. Yeah, because it and I know this, Steve because we come websites that have live chat and 80% of them. Do not ask answer with a human being and it's really it's not live at all it's very much dead chat and frankly it's if you do it that way it's very damaging to your brand because you're you're breaking a promise to someone you're like duping them into giving you information and they think they're gonna get someone and then they don't you're losing that customer for life when you do that to them
• 10:24
  Steve Brown: the premise these live chat apps were like okay we are we're gonna use artificial intelligence to sift through these initial interactions these initial interactions are generally superficial they're just starting to search so live chat could interact with these a little bit until they hand it off to a real person but what most people are finding is that the folks that are supposed to set these up they don't know how to program them properly number one and then like you said you they'll ghost you
• 10:59
  Unknown: yeah you know
• 11:00
  Eric Kades: to do live chat right this is why we have a company for huge clients that have millions of visitors a month that get 1000s and 1000s 10s of 1000s of chats a month that's a full time team that is answering those live chats well if you're a smaller business like we don't get a tremendous ton of traffic to our call center business but
• 11:23
  Unknown: i know that
• 11:24
  Eric Kades: when someone's on our website and it's a prospective college that's a big deal for me i want to answer it it's really hard to staff and i think that's the biggest thing that people run into they're like i know this seems like a great solution but i don't have any extra people to handle this i can't afford to hire people to sit by the computer for what might be one or two or three chats a day even though i know that if we have a human we're gonna close them but i still don't have the staff to do that so that's kind of you know what we're trying to change and why text chat makes it easy you know even without extra staff i had a chat come through on text chats website i was on a sales call and a chat came through and it goes out to our team members but i just want to jump out and because i know if i get that person right away i'm gonna close them and they're gonna be a new text chat customer i can answer these when i'm talking on the phone that's how easy it is so that's kind of the big differentiator you don't have to be tied to a computer or hope you see one of 75 apps give you a notification that's already on your phone
• 12:33
  Steve Brown: so what is a like text chat
• 12:36
  Eric Kades: support so it's it's so all of a sudden i've been in the telecom business for 20 plus years texting has been around for 20 years it started in the financial industry for security pass codes all of a sudden it's the hot new e commerce thing something that's been around for a couple of decades and what text chat is you know in terms of text messaging is when someone puts text us you know and you got to give them your name and your phone number to text but my argument is that's great but not everyone wants to give you their cell phone number and has that fear that you might start spamming spamming them right you know just to get a question answered that that might cause them to jump to another site that they can just live chat and get a quick answer so really the difference is texting first of all is not always automatic you know someone might take 10 or 15 minutes to respond to a text message till they log into their computer or using that new text company's app to respond to you where live chat is supposed to be live and immediate and the big difference again is you know with i agree with all of them first of all if i am a big buyer of ralph lauren for example i would mind if loud ralph lauren texted me special sales and things like that but i also don't want 10 brands texting me i want them to my go to brands texting me and that's it maybe i have room for two or three of them so texting certainly has its place in e commerce and any kind of conversion but live chat has its place as well and i would argue it's a better conversion tool than texting
• 14:32
  Steve Brown: yeah the problem is we're mobile and so oftentimes i'll decide i will handle i'll call like energy company or whatever i need to do this this annoying thing that i'm going to have to lose 45 minutes of my life waiting on hold instead of sitting somewhere i want to do it while i'm driving or i'm trying to use my time better I just pictured that your tool would be an awesome intercessor there where it makes it easy to get my answer, I can do it on them move, and it just feels more friendly, it feels more like you respect my time in my way of life. And so I just see that your tools like what, uh, how to make sales and tech support and be so easy with your tool?
• 15:28
  Eric Kades: It really is you get someone in that first minute, I mean, there's a lot of data out there, you know, I can give you a couple stats 78% of customers buy from the first business they talk to, wow, think about that.
• 15:41
  Eric Kades: 78% the other you know, one that blows my mind is, you know, 390, you have a 391% increase in conversion. When you speak to someone within a minute. It's almost like, how are businesses not doing this, you know, customer support I in Forbes just added a new article, customer sought support is the new flagship store. So if you're competing with a bunch of other businesses that are selling similar products, if you can add that layer of instant communication, you're gonna win.
• 16:17
  Eric Kades: Of course, you got to get them to your website, the first place, but if you got them there, you're gonna win?
• 16:25
  Steve Brown: Well, you don't, the default mindset is just send millions of people to my website, and I'll just get a few of them. But in reality, most of the businesses that listen to this podcast, they don't have millions of visits, and they can't afford to, to have 1000s of people come through and and leave without any indication of what happened. And their their solution is to somehow use technology, this artificial intelligence to hopefully meet and greet these people in in, then raise a flag, we got a live one here, bring a human. And yet what you're offering shortcuts that process. How does how, how does artificial intelligence and data add value to businesses?
• 17:13
  Steve Brown: And yet, yet, we still need that human connection?
• 17:19
  Eric Kades: It's a great question. And, look, we're a chatbot company. So I believe in AI, conversational AI, which is really two technologies, natural natural language processing and machine learning, and advanced automation. And I believe in a big time, and where I believe in it, we do this for some of our college customers. Now we build them chat bots, look, if you're coming in, and you need to reset a password, or you need to find out a FASFA ID for your college because you're filling out your financial aid form. You don't need to speak to someone to get that answer quickly. AI can pick that up and say, Okay, here's what that person's looking for, boom, here's your number in a millisecond, you have your answer, and you don't need to talk to a human being. But there are a lot of questions that you can automate that and especially on a product that is you know, more than $50, that you have some anxiety about buying. We like to use AI and automation to get buyers to humans, because we know that AI is 1020 maybe never going to be able to sell as well as a human. So use the technology to either answer someone's question quickly that can be automated or using artificial intelligence to answer it. But when someone wants to buy something, and they have a question, get them to a human, you're losing the game if you if you think about it any other way.
• 18:54
  Steve Brown: That's hard to discern that moment when you need to hand off to human. So what is it about your technology that makes it easy?
• 19:02
  Eric Kades: Well, a couple things, you know, AI and natural language processing and machine learning, which is conversational ai, ai is kind of this broad term and no one really knows what it means and you know, the AI you're using to figure out what's a great drug for certain cancer is very different than conversational AI and chatbots. And, you know, converting on your website, and like I just mentioned, that's two key technologies, natural language processing, and machine learning. So on the natural language processing side, you're the software's trying to figure out what it is that you're actually answering and are asking as though you can train AI over time to get better and better at figuring out what it is Steve, the the you're asking.
• 19:52
  Eric Kades: At the same time. Once it figures out what you're asking.
• 19:57
  Eric Kades: It goes and taps the data. basin says, Okay, here's the right answer for that question. But what often happens, especially in a new instance, when you're just starting to train, and it takes a good six months to a year to continually update that AI, to train it to what you're trying to get to? A lot of times, you'll get stuck in what I call Wrong answer hell, which I've experienced myself, I went to a major automaker one of the big, you know, four automakers in our country, and I am not going to tell you the car, you know, anything personal. I was excited about a car that I read about Motor Trend. And I went to the website, and I first question I asked the AI was, how much does this cost? And they I comes back? Sorry, I don't know what you're asking me like the most obvious question. Right? I went back and asked how much does it cost three different ways, and it still couldn't answer. And then it left me hanging. And I was so you know, disenfranchised by the experience that I didn't even care about the car so much anymore, and just forgot about that new, exciting car. So it's really important that you have that safety valve, that when you get in a wrong answer more than once or twice, that you're Oh, you're able to transfer that to a human being, otherwise, you're gonna lose a customer.
• 21:27
  Steve Brown: Hey, I wanted to pause right here and tell you about a book that you need to get today. It's the funniest book on marketing. It's called the Golden toilet, stop flushing your marketing budget into your website and build a system that grows your business. And guess who wrote it? That's right. I wrote it. And I wrote it just for you. Because I want to help you get past the last hurdles of setting up your business and getting it squared away. I wrote it so that you can avoid time wasting time wasting money, wasting frustration, get the book on Audible. You can get it on Kindle, you can get it on Amazon, but get the book, take advantage of the insights in there. And let me know what you think. And now back to this excellent episode. Yeah, you think about Alexa, you think about, okay, Google, you think about these great tools that I'm going to set this little device on my desk that's going to to lurk in monitor everything I say. But if I happen to ask it a question, it's supposed to spit out this wonderful answer that I just needed, right at that moment. But I would, I would argue that most of us have gotten 80%. wrong answers. I don't understand that. I can't answer that these, these really offensive answers that you realize, Oh, I didn't ask it in the right format. Therefore, it this super smart thing can't understand me, which is, it's not a super smart thing. And that it's so frustrating. And I think it's like this. It's it's a barrier to adoption for businesses to put something like this on their website, when it could be this great solution.
• 23:17
  Steve Brown: But more often than not, it's a big frustrating for the people that are the victims of it.
• 23:22
  Eric Kades: It really is. It's not fair. I mean, that's the biggest company in the world doesn't have it all figured out yet. And, you know, often I will steer our clients away from even using AI. There's a lot you can do with automation, where in milliseconds, you could bring someone down a funnel with buttons, as opposed to trying to guess what it is that they're asking, and get the same result without all that frustration and confusion. So whenever we have no matter how big decline is, I always steer them the starting with automation. And then let's figure out what points of this process does it make sense to have some open ended conversation, but that's not the way most people attack it.
• 24:09
  Steve Brown: We're talking with Eric cades. He's the CEO, text chat calm. It's a great technology to help you connect your clients, your potential customers with humans, Eric. So what I'm curious about is in the application of this for, you know, the businesses, just draw a picture of an example. Like, let's say I'm a plumber, and I want to, I want to implement your technology. What does it look like this solution?
• 24:44
  Eric Kades: Sure, it really requires no training. The hardest part of it is you have to put a line of code that we give you onto your website. Now we're already integrated into Shopify, we're an app in the Shopify app. app stores. So if you're an e commerce store, you don't have to integrate any software, you just go in, you answer a few questions, click a button, and this is live on your website. But if you're a plumber, and you're not on Shopify, you are going to have to have your web designer, or whoever's handling your website, install that line of code for you, we take it a step further, where if you don't have that person accessible, as long as we have a team of developers, as long as we can get access to your website, we'll install the code for you. From that point, you just have to be able to receive a text message. If you can receive a text message, you can then chat with your people via live chat in real time.
• 25:41
  Eric Kades: Because, gosh, yeah, that's it.
• 25:46
  Eric Kades: If you can text with your friends, you can do text chat.
• 25:49
  Eric Kades: And you get a text message when someone's live chatting, not entering their phone number, just live chatting. You click on a link in that text message. And you're in a two way conversation with the person. Like I said, I answer that when I'm talking on the phone.
• 26:06
  Steve Brown: So then the person that's on your website and types in the question they have not giving you their phone number.
• 26:14
  Eric Kades: Nope. There live chatting. We're just using the text message notification as the differentiator because you don't get those
• 26:26
  Steve Brown: app notifications, and then you you know, lose a customer because you told them you were going to speak to them live and then you gave them nothing. And that text message notification has really been the game changer for all of our businesses that uses so when you talk about Shopify, the problem with having a shopping cart, is that people abandon the shopping experience at some way in because they're something they they're not clear on and so they go Forget it. I'm gonna go on and do something else. And this is like a beautiful thing to to reduce. cart abandonment, right.
• 27:08
  Eric Kades: 100% I can't tell you how many stories I get weekly, of this customer came in. This is someone that sells a couple $1,000 it's called airlift. And it's kind of like a new kind of forklift. Yeah, someone came in from Australia.
• 27:30
  Eric Kades: And they were thinking about buying it weren't sure if they were going to buy it because they were worried about the shipping costs. And my customer got the text chat, answered his questions made them comfortable that they're not going to get crushed on shipping. This guy then got his airlift, went on Instagram, promoted his airlift.
• 27:51
  Eric Kades: All these other contractors in his area saw the Instagram, this company now is opening a division in Australia. And it all started with that text chat, because a guy was worried about shipping.
• 28:11
  Steve Brown: So why is shopping cart abandonment a problem for retailers?
• 28:16
  Eric Kades: Because people have questions right? Before you know, we talked about that anxiety of making a purchase, especially, you know, if it's more than $20? You know, you might put it all in there and I'll crap Am I going to be able to get it by this date? Or, you know, does this size really going to fit me? I don't want to go through it. As you know, does this necklace run big? Or how long? Is it? Those kinds of questions? are the ones that cause people to jump out of the shopping cart? So if there's someone there to answer that question and close them, they're not going to jump.
• 28:52
  Steve Brown: So you're your data man. What is the cart abandonment rate?
• 28:59
  Eric Kades: The cart abandonment rate in general on businesses or you know, I gotta be honest with you, I don't have that statistic off the top of my head. I know it's in the, you know, high 80% something like that is crazy.
• 29:16
  Steve Brown: Yeah.
• 29:17
  Eric Kades: I mean, it's like, it's a huge problem on Shopify.
• 29:21
  Eric Kades: And it's, it's interesting. I know, it's a huge problem on Shopify alone. And, look, Amazon's winning, because it's a one click purchase, they have 200 million of our credit cards in their amazon prime. And so you go to Amazon, you know, you're getting you know, and it's gonna get the leverage and you push a button, and boom, you get it when you're a small business trying to compete with Amazon. And someone has a lot of questions and they don't really know you and they're putting in their personal credit card information and you're a small business. They're jumping because they're not secure that this is Is what they really want. So, you know, this is a game changer for cart abandonment, it's a game changer for really any kind of business that you know, is selling something, in my opinion, if you're selling something more than $20, and it's worth it to you to talk to that customer to build a lifelong customer, you know, you need to talk to them right away.
• 30:22
  Steve Brown: So in Shopify, what are like the top three things that you can do now, to reduce cart abandonment rate.
• 30:30
  Eric Kades: One is certainly, you know, trying to collect a phone number, so you can follow up with the person. So, um, you know, having that phone number in your checkout form, and kind of having that express consent that you can follow up with the person. So if you got their phone number, and then they jumped, you have a way of getting back to them. The other is making that checkout process as easy as possible. I mean, if I, as a personal shopper, if I have to go through a bunch of hoops in a shopping cart, and go back to pages and check things, once it becomes if it's not a seamless experience, once it comes, becomes annoying to me, I'm gone. And I'm looking at Amazon to see if they have the same product, because I know I'm gonna get it in a couple of days.
• 31:20
  Steve Brown: And then number three,
• 31:22
  Eric Kades: number three is really I would say, email follow up is so critical as well. I think, you know, if you have that contact information, you need to follow up with that person, maybe offer them a discount, you know, you're sorry, they laughed, but you really want them as a customer and, you know, come back and we'll give you a 10% discount.
• 31:43
  Steve Brown: And then I really see that, that such a trend.
• 31:48
  Steve Brown: Small businesses are trying to establish some sort of shopping cart experience on their websites, and to be able to have your tool to complement that process or hold their hand or to check on him during that, that moment when they're actually almost committed. You think about what it takes to get someone to your website, to decide on a product to start to go through the identification process, get out my credit card, and then I'm about to buy and then I go No, I'm out. Oh, my gosh, that took a lot of effort to get someone there.
• 32:24
  Eric Kades: Yeah, you know, I, I've been battling digital marketers for a decade now.
• 32:29
  Eric Kades: Because digital marketers, and e commerce, especially people think of every way possible to get someone to a website, and try and convert them through automation and technology and website design, and they'll do anything and everything, to not have to talk to someone. And the amount of money that gets wasted in spec is probably trillions of dollars a year on digital marketing, where if you just give that person human connection, you will close them.
• 33:06
  Eric Kades: And again, like I literally, I fight this battle every day, you know, in our contact center business. Always the digital marketing guys, their domain is the website for the College of the university. And they don't want this little thing popping up. They've spent a year on this beautiful design. And bam, when we do it, the higher ups immediately like oh my god, this is something that we need to spend money on. And I'll tell you a really interesting fact about live chat this, this just happened to me. So for years, I've been begging to our contact center managers that we need to get pictures of people in this little live chat widget. And so I actually fired someone because he wasn't able to make that move. Okay. And I was doing research have tons of data, millions and millions of live chats for these colleges and universities. And I we would always be arguing with, you know, the look and design of that chat widget that we call it. And we have this one client, I'm not gonna mention names, who gets more chats, per website visitors than any of our other clients. And would you believe in Steve, they have the ugliest chat widget of all of our customers. But it's got a big picture of someone that says I'm here to help you. So I know that like it's that picture that's driving the people. So finally, just this month, we got everyone converted over to having pictures of people on their live chat widget. Our revenue is up 20% this month, and that's a giant number in our contact center business when I made this switch because I wanted to test it on our own text chat comm web We started getting 800% more chats, because we put pictures of ourselves there, as opposed to just some, you know, digital cool looking thing. It didn't matter, put a picture of a person, people click on pictures, and you probably have you know that experience in your digital marketing. We want a human connection, we crave it.
• 35:21
  Eric Kades: And everyone in the digital world is fighting against it.
• 35:28
  Steve Brown: I know that's and it's like, I've even gone to a chat. And the first question I asked, Are you a robot? Or are you a human?
• 35:37
  Eric Kades: Yeah, you don't want to waste your time with a robot right now you want a real answer?
• 35:41
  Steve Brown: Yeah. So I've envisioned that the future of websites would be that they're not really websites. They're just a big interactive, human chatbot.
• 35:52
  Eric Kades: Absolutely. We have, you know, we're adding Facebook Messenger and all these other channels. So even we come in the other channels. But the next thing we're going to add is video. I've sold someone through text chat, Comm. We don't have video yet, right. But guy comes on I see is in Westlake California. He's an insurance broker. He's looking for live chat, he didn't understand something. He says to me, you know, can we get on a zoom right now. And you can explain this to me, I have the zoom app on my phone, I click a link, I send it to them through the text chat.
• 36:26
  Eric Kades: Here's a total stranger, who wasn't going to give me any information. And I'm having a zoom conversation with the person in three minutes. And of course, he bought it.
• 36:39
  Steve Brown: You know, I've, I've coached like garage repair folks and stuff. You know, here's, here's how the conversation go, they go on the website. Alright, my garage is broke. So I go look for garage repair, I get on a website, I either call them or I fill out a form? And how nice would it be to just do a text and then that person go, we'll walk out in the garage? And let's turn FaceTime on and turn your camera around and show me what's broken. Can you imagine how
• 37:11
  Eric Kades: in the future, it's starting to happen slowly, just like I said, text messaging has been around for 20 years. All of a sudden, it's the new Oh my God, I gotta have this for my e commerce site, which it really isn't, you know, it's a great tool. But it's not everyone wants to give their phone number. So yes, it's going to be live human interaction. I mean, like that Forbes article customer support is the new flagship store. So yeah, it's going to be chat with us go to Video. Let me show you exactly how that looks. I can walk around the car showroom, I can walk around the store and pick up, you know, a blouse and say, here's how it looks. That's the future. And frankly, during when Coronavirus, first hit, we saved a lot of straight retail businesses business. And you know, they call me in tears saying you're saving our business. They didn't even have e commerce stores. But when people went to their website, they could start a chat via text chat, and still have a conversation and go to the FaceTime and still sell them like literally, they weren't even ecommerce enabled, and they were still making sales from their website.
• 38:29
  Steve Brown: I mean, listening or you're watching the ROI online podcast, our guest is Eric cades. His company is text chat calm. And his mission is to help humans Connect remotely to humans to improve business. And so our exclusive question that on our YouTube channel is how to make sales and tech support, you can go there and listen to how he coaches you on how you can make sales right there via tech support online. And Eric. So I always like to ask, what's one question that we didn't talk about that you would love?
• 39:05
  Steve Brown: What's one question I didn't ask that you'd love to answer?
• 39:10
  Eric Kades: Um, I think the answer is, uh, you know, again, back to this AI and explaining a little bit more about this natural language processing and machine learning. When people talk about AI on your website, you know, I talking about AI, to, you know, solve a cancer problem. They're talking about natural language processing and machine learning. So if there's anything that any of the Westerners take away from today, those are the two technologies that you need to educate yourself on, if you want to have AI on your website.
• 39:50
  Steve Brown: So natural language processing is we ask the same questions in all sorts of different ways humans and they'll use different words for different terms but they're asking the same thematic request or they're searching for thematic a theme version of a question looking for solution in natural language processing takes all of our accents all of our our ways that we ask and starts to discern and overtime gets better at going out what eric's asking is this and then machine learning is like having a whole category or curated library of content that can quickly connect you with exactly the information that you need to research for that solution right
• 40:40
  Eric Kades: that's exactly right and another good takeaway is if you're going to go down that path you need someone to be there still human involvement yeah need someone to be monitoring the failures every day so you're constantly tuning it it's it's a never ending process just like building your website and getting it to convert better you have to be constantly checking where it fails and if you're really not gonna either have an outsource company or someone that's focusing on that on a daily basis you're gonna fail at it
• 41:13
  Steve Brown: yeah it requires billions of interactions for this super intelligent technology to actually get a clue and that's the dilemma is that small businesses don't have billions of opportunities to collect data and process it
• 41:29
  Eric Kades: it is and human i mean small businesses can win by having a human yeah
• 41:37
  Steve Brown: that's perfect perfect both to put on this conversation eric you've been a great guest how can folks connect with you to learn more or maybe see about getting this solution on their platform
• 41:51
  Eric Kades: just go to text chat comm you can sign up for a free trial for 14 days and literally right there you get your line of code you put in your name and email and phone number and you're ready to go it's that easy
• 42:05
  Steve Brown: alright excellent eric thanks for being on the roi online podcast
• 42:10
  Eric Kades: thanks for having me steve it was a lot of fun
• 42:12
  Steve Brown: that's a wrap anyone that fun thank you so much for joining us on this short version of a great conversation with another great guest on the roi online podcast i'm your host Steve Brown reminding you that the full version of this conversation exists everywhere that podcasts live and also to remind you that if you need help to grow your business better then visit roi online calm and be sure to stay tuned for another great episode on the roi online podcast