Episode 216 : How to use AI for customer and sales support

Paul

Hello everyone, and welcome to this episode of Marketing Guides for Small Businesses Podcast. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about AI and how small businesses can use it to help with their, their sales and marketing. And going to start with Ken here, because AI is really just another tool and I think a lot of times people forget that. So, Ken, first of all, let's talk about what, what is AI and what is it not, and what are some things people need to remember when implementing AI?

Ian

so I mean, AI is really just a super smart computer that has been trained to learn and think like a human. So, you know, they're, it's fed massive amounts of data, but it's a copy of old information. And that's what's important for people to realize is that, you know, it can only be trained based on the educa, on the, on the data sets that are provided to it. Data by default is old. Once it's created, it's no longer, I mean, it may or may not be in date, you know, up to date. So from that perspective, AI is always going to have some limitations. And so if you're, if the nature of your business is such that you need to have very up to date recent data, then AI is going to have some limitations potentially for you. It's not to say that it doesn't have a massive value, because it does. But you know, if you're, if you're in a world where like, like in the world of marketing, you know, we know that there are several things that are just good best practices that have been true. Let's just take SEO for example, you know, over the last 15 or 20 years, we also know that there are some really bad practices that were in, in SEO. And so those have probably been pretty well defined. And so AI is going to be able to, you know, give you good guidance potentially on a topic like that, because it doesn't change very rapidly. Now the algorithms that deliver the search results, those change all the time. And there are tweaks, you know, and, and there are probably things that happen on major shifts, somewhat, major shifts maybe happen on a quarterly basis, but not like on a day to day or even moment by moment basis, like, you know, in the world of healthcare, for example, where there may be just changes happening, very rapid pace. So AI for marketing purposes is really, I mean, there's a lot of ways that you can use it ranging from, you know, figuring out who your ideal customers are, what they like, writing ad copy, developing draft messages to send either an email or text and automating automate boring tasks or, or tasks that maybe they're not boring, but maybe they're not really value add. I mean, if it's a redundant task and you can train AI to do it, then there's usually a productivity gain there. A caveat I do want to point out is that you should not share sensitive information with ChatGPT. You shouldn't put anything in there that you, because it, it may use that to train its models. And so if you're putting proprietary information into chat GPT, it's not private, it could be used by them. So you have to be very careful there, there are measures that you can take to protect that. But most small businesses aren't even thinking about anything like that. I really see AI as a tool, not a replacement. For example, for us, you know, we're, we're seeing it as a way to get customers to book faster because, you know, it can have conversations either through voice mechanisms or through, you know, chat feature type mechanisms. In the world of SEO, we see it helping us identify problem issues faster, maybe giving us a good, decent set of recommendations, but they're not the final recommendations that should be implemented just without scrutiny and review of a human expert. So, you know, I constantly hear from people I can, why am I paying you guys to do this? When I can plug in a topic in ChatGPT and it'll generate a blog post for me and a matter of seconds and it's like, great. That has no unique value. It has no differentiation. You know, I mean, you can train it to become a better producer of that content still requires human review because it's not going to be 100 accurate all the time. And, and, and certainly, you know, for most small businesses, they're not, they're not. I mean, part of the reason we write blog posts and we're huge fans of, of, you know, blogging and written content in general is because you can bake in search engine optimization if you know what you're doing as you're writing that content. You write it for search engines, but you always also write it for humans. And you know, if you just take what AI spits out, it doesn't sound like a human always, you know, I mean, firstly, secondly, thirdly, you know, when it introduces that kind of language, that's not how most normal people talk. So, so they're, they're, it's not just set it and forget it. Which is, which is another thing that I think a lot of people think they hook up an AI tool to do a function for them and they think it's just all good and they'll never have to go in and touch it and mess with it. That happens with chatbots and, and, and voice agents and, you know, search engine optimization. I mean, whatever you're using AI for, it's going to give you bad information from time to time. You can't just set it and forget it. And unfortunately, Ian, I'm sure you come across this as well. We run across competitors all the time that are talking about all this stuff being set it and forget it. And they're, you know, they're trying to get business at a lower price because they don't know what the hell they're doing and they don't know what they're talking about. But it's pretty easy to seduce people with the technology and it's pretty easy to run a demo to show them a cool result from AI. So my recommendation to our listeners is don't fall for that. It's not that simple. If it was, you wouldn't have a job. None of us would. So just be aware of that. The quality of the data that you input into the prompts matters tremendously. You can get a lot of great results. But you, and look, they call it Chat GPT for a reason. It's a conversation. You're having a dialogue. If you just put in a single prompt and take what it spits out and you don't have that conversation to refine it, tweak it, modify it, you're, you're gonna get vanilla, you know, bland results. That's certainly not going to help you from a search ranking perspective. And it's not gonna, you know, it's not going to differentiate you at all. And it may not even be accurate. So, so be careful with that. I, you know, for me, I still, I stress, and this is a very gray area and I'm not an attorney and I'm not providing legal advice, but I still think there are a lot of ethical and legal considerations around the use of AI. I think you need to be very careful with it. You know, you can put in prompts to, you know, write a response that sounds like John Janch or Donald Miller from storybrand. And it'll do a pretty good job of using language that makes it sound like it's something that they've written. A lot of people might take that and, you know, and make it sound like, you know, it's something that he said or, or they'll use it and claim it as their own and really, there are, there are a lot of gray areas around this, but I just think the best thing to do is be respectful of other people's contributions. Use it as a, as we have for, for a very long time, where you reference the sources, you don't steal them. And, and so that's just my, my caveat there. Yeah. And, and really just the, you know, the last point is again, it is not 100% accurate. It's not even close. You may get 100% accurate results occasionally when you plug in a prompt, even a simple prompt. But, but I think you're, I think you're really playing with fire if you're expecting AI to generate 100 accurate results and, and never scrutinize the, the output.

Paul

Yeah, and just Something that added AI is, is far from 100 accurate. And if AI has been around for a while, it's not exactly new, but the way it is being used and implemented recently is new. And you know, when building out some AI chatbots, it can just completely go off the rails. I mean, bad it, it'll just come, you can ask it something and it'll come back with something that is completely irrelevant. And so it's, it's being. AI has been around for a long time, but it's being implemented in a way that it has not been implemented before. And I think everyone needs to be aware of that. Ian, do you have anything to add to that? I think you're muted, Ian.

Ken

You are muted. You're probably telling the best joke ever, but we can't hear it.

Ian

Ah, I even gave you a compliment, Ken.

Ken

Oh, wow.

Ian

Sorry. My dogs were barking so I muted myself. So, yeah, I was just saying I agree with everything you said, Ken, which is un. Unusual. But yeah, I one, one thing, I was going to mention this in my segment, but I think it fits better in this one that people are so excited about AI because offers this reward of free or cheap content creation that has traditionally been very expensive. Right. And free and cheap. Almost a democratization of expertise, so to speak. And as you've explained, it's a tool. It's not really there. You actually need an expert to handle the tool well. But one of the things I've seen, which I, I think is such a gap in people's mindset related to AI, is that if you're not currently doing something in your business, meaning you are working at a higher level because you're the owner or managing it or business development, and all of a sudden you have at your disposal something that can help you do something that you weren't doing before, the chances are good. Meaning, like content creation, the chances are good that you shouldn't be doing that now either. Even with the help of AI. Right. You're actually making yourself work more and harder, which is a horrible plan. So I've actually seen businesses go down this path where, you know, we had a small client at one point, they were, they were like, I think we're gonna do all our own blog posts and all our own SEO and everything because AI is going to help us do this. I was, I was just looking up their rankings recently, and it hasn't helped them. Right. Like, it's, it's because, you know, content creation at its core is not about just creating content for content's sake, it's about strategically doing it. Right. And yes, you can ask an AI bot what are the best strategies for me, but it only has a certain amount of data. It won't understand your whole competitive set. It won't be able to bring the expertise that a marketer can bring to the table. So I just caution people, like, if. If you're enticed to play with AI, then do it. It is so much fun. It's. It's really cool to watch it evolve quickly, but don't give yourself more work. That's just foolishness. Right?

Ken

Yeah. Yep. Absolutely.

Paul

Good points. So, Ian, what are some of the opportunities with AI, and can you kind of just explain the good and bad of what they are?

Ian

Sure, yeah. I'll start with ideation, because ideation and brainstorming is where AI for me started. So I started using Chat, GPT and some of the other AI tools out there years before it became like, publicly big, you know, and I think you guys did too. We were, we. We who were in the industry had kind of tickets to get in and play with it because they wanted experts to play with it to. In order to help it evolve more quickly. Right. And one of the things that I've always found really valuable is this ideation and brainstorming because you can bring to the table something to the chatbot. So, for example, you say, say I've developed an SEO strategy for a client. I have a whole bunch of inputs into that, meaning I know who their strategic competitors are. I've done a keyword gap analysis, all of these things that Chat, GPT or some of the other tools can't do. And then I can come and say, okay, here's. Here's the five SEO ranking gaps that this particular client has, and I need to create Content around that. Here are my initial ideas. And again, as you said, Ken, like, if you give an exhaustive, detailed, directionally correct prompt, you're going to get far better results. And so if, say I feed in this prompt and I say, you know, here are my ideas. Give me 30 more topical ideas related to these five topics. Put it in. Put it in a table. Number them. Tell me why this is a good choice. Like, you can go into exhaustive detail about what the chatbot should be feeding back to you. Right. And from that process, because I'm an expert in that field, just like our listeners are experts in their fields, I get a ton of information back, a ton of ideas, and I can pick and choose and go, okay, out of these 30, you know, 20 of them are crap or 20 of them are mediocre, because I do find there's a lot of mediocrity that comes out of the chatbots. And if you want mediocre results, then take those and run with them. But if you want good results, pick and choose the ones that are really good.

Ken

Yeah, Ian, if I could kind of just jump in there real quick on the whole ideation. So, so I'm board president of the Modern American Dance Company, and we had to rewrite our strategic plan. And so I, you know, I developed, you know, three, you know, probably three long paragraph prompt to put into chat GPT to give me a structure of a strategic plan. And, and it, it did a fantastic job of organizing that and structuring it. And, and, you know, then what it, what the end result was, we were able to take that to our planning meeting where we hadn't, we had, we had been kind of circling around this topic for a while, struggling to kind of get movement on it. And, you know, we're able to use this document and finalize the strategic plan within an hour and a half meeting, because it did give us a good structure. It gave us key topics to talk about so that we could finalize the language. But the key thing is humans had to come together to finalize this thing.

Ian

Yeah, Yeah. I would say, you know, just as a generalization, anything we use AI for, we, bar none, we always have a human perfected or bring it to a better level. But my, my quotient or my percentage of, you know, if I were just to take a stab at it, like anything we use AI for. Nothing is ever close to 100%. It's probably between 60 and 85%. Sometimes you hit like a, a home run and it's 85%. The way there. Otherwise, like you have, you still have a lot of work to do. So. And, and the other part I would stress too, just from what you were talking about there, Ken, is. And, and it goes back to the previous points you were talking about is that if you don't understand what you're trying to accomplish well enough because you're a layperson in marketing and you're asking Chat GPT for an answer to something or a solution to something, or, you know, tell me what I should be doing in this case, you're the only check and balance in that whole process. Whereas with, with us, just like, just like if I were to say, hey, I have a toothache, Chat GPT, what are the potential causes and how can I fix this myself? Right. Like it's going to give me some answers. Hopefully it will also put in like a disclaimer saying, you know, you should not perform any health things from our results. But, but what, what I'm trying to show is that a dentist who did the same thing would be able to very quickly scan those things and go, bad idea, bad idea, bad idea, bad idea. It's probably one of these two ideas, but without that expertise, a layperson is just guessing and just going personal biases. And that's never a good thing, Right? So, yeah, from an ideation brainstorming standpoint, huge opportunity for anybody, you know, for all walks of life, for your business, for your professional development, for how to handle tough employees, how to write an email, right? I have this circumstance. I have a client that wants to leave. Give me three different options for an email, but be sure to give it lots of context. You'll get some good ideas out of that process. SEO. We are all very deep in SEO. As marketing guides. I would just say we've covered off some scenarios already related to SEO. I would say that kind of stuff doesn't really get me excited anymore. The content creation through Chat GPT and some of the other stuff, it's not there yet and it doesn't have enough context. But what really gets me excited is AI built into the tools, the expert tools that we use. For example, we all use tools to help us do analysis of existing search engine results for our clients and our competitors. Right? Because we want to determine how best can I take my client who's here today, and my competitors who are, are against them because you never exist in a vacuum and how can I very quickly move them up in rankings? And so these tools give me the data I need as an expert to make those decisions and we've all been using these tools for 15, 20 years. The tools have evolved, they've gotten better. Now they've put AI in these tools, which provides us, as experts, an extreme amount of intelligence, meaning it can help us far quicker get to the end result that we're after, because it helps fill in some of the data gaps. AI is extremely good at taking large amounts of data and coming up with consolidations of, you know, like, here's this big bundle. Bundle all this data into three buckets and tell me, you know, what the results are. It can do that very, very well, far faster than humans can. But we need to take that and we need to then implement it. Some of the SEO tools we use, which are not cheap. Right. We pay a lot of money for them, can also help us do some of the implementation, which is fairly new still, you know, highly untested. But I think it makes us pretty excited because it gives us some efficiencies.

Ken

Yeah. You know, which I want to point out their efficiencies, but, you know, I don't know about you, Ian. I assume you're, you're the same way. We get to things faster because of the AI, we find problems faster because of the AI diagnostics. We may implement some solutions a little bit faster because some of the recommendations that it provides, and while they're not perfect, it eliminates the analysis paralysis or just that complete, fresh restart that you have to work on, because it gives you a starting point. We're actually using it to go beyond what we've been able to do before within the, you know, within the, the pricing and the scope of our agreements, because we, we have those, those efficiencies. It. And so a lot of people are like, well, why. Why am I paying you all this money now? Because AI can. And it's like, because it gives us the ability actually to supercharge what we've been doing in the past from what we've been able to do in the past.

Ian

Yeah, yeah, 100 agree. And I would say, like, the. Go ahead.

Ken

What? Well, I was just gonna say, I, I mean, at the end of the day, you know, in the case of SEO, you're paying to rank. I mean, you know, whatever strategy, whoever is doing the SEO work that you're paying. The whole purpose of that is that you're trying to, to rank and outrank your competitors. That doesn't. The, the, the level of effort that's required these days to do that is greater than it's ever been. So it's like, yeah, it's just it's, it's crazy to think that it always. AI always should equal cost reduction.

Ian

Right. Well, and, and it's kind of a m. Misnomer too that any business should only be compensated for the amount of time they spend doing something like that's, that's not true in almost any industry that the people with the greater expertise get paid more because they can solve the problem better, faster, you know, less, less downtime.

Ken

Yeah, yeah.

Ian

You know what Paul asked me to talk about kind of the good and the bad. I would just say the bad part of this is that because of the proliferation and the sexiness, for lack of a better term, of AI right now, like so many people have gotten lured into this and spend enormous amounts of effort, time, energy, whether it's the top level owner or whether it's the receptionist or secretary or whoever. Because I've seen it kind of play out in multiple scenarios. First of all, is it getting the result they want? Usually the answer is no. And has it distracted them from their primary roles? And the answer is yes. And neither of those things are good. And then the third one I mentioned earlier was just like what it's doing because, because AI has proliferated so fast and people are so excited about it and the potential, like, hey, I don't need to pay a marketing expert anymore. I can do it myself. My, my secretary can do it for me, is that there's this swamp of mediocrity, swamp of mediocre content that has just like it's growing, it's rising. And so there's an opportunity there that exists for the businesses. And this has always been true. This is not new. There's just more mediocre content now because it's easier to produce. But this, the foundational elements are always or have always proven true. And that's implement SEO best practices, create great content, create it consistently and have an expert do it for you. And with AI now and that's an unbeatable team.

Ken

Yeah.

Ian

So content, content writing, that's a huge element. A lot of people are using this. Even some of our. So we do content writing in house. We also thing with a content writing partner for man, probably five years. Like we love the content these guys produce. They're people that produce it. They're expert writers. They can write like I'm a good writer, but man, it takes me a long time. So that's, I'm not a writer by trade. Right. So it takes enormous amounts of energy, time, which is ultimately cost to my business. And so I Have other people that are really good writers do the work. What's interesting is even there, it's a good model where they were like, well, if we can't beat it, let's join it. So they've actually introduced AI written human edited content as part of their service offering now, which I think is an interesting model where, you know, because we do some of that in house as well. So again, it's the experts leveraging AI to produce good content. Another neat area where AI is just exploding is. And, and most people know about this one, but image generation and video generation. Video generation is just now starting to get prime time. Image generation has been there for a while, but it's, it's really funky. I'm sure you guys have had lots of interesting experiences. In fact, I was just on a webinar, a conference yesterday and I missed the beginning of it. So I don't know if the head speaker, the keynote, mentioned a disclaimer saying, hey, there's going to be typos all through my presentation because I used AI for the images. But AI image generation, it can create some really cool imagery very fast. Again, it's the ideation process that if you say, hey, I want an image about, you know, you know, it could be anything. I want an image. You know, I, I was doing a presentation once and it was related to exterior remodeling. And I wanted the image of a senior falling off a ladder. Right. Because. Because this particular company offers leaf gutter, leaf cleaning. Right. And so one of the most, you know, the, the things that seniors really are worried about is I climb a ladder, I'm cleaning out my leaves, I fall off the ladder, I'm ruined. Right. And that's a fair fear. And so, you know, I asked for that. And it probably took about 10 iterations to get the image right. Because, you know, the, the ladder had multiple ladders mixed together GE geometrically. You know, the person's leg was missing, like all sorts of weird things, but only I got one and I had to keep massaging it. And would it have been faster to see if I could find a stock photograph? Stock, kind of. Because it took so freaking long to do this. But image generation is very cool. Watch out for text in the image because it's notorious. The AI is notorious for bad text typos in your text. Again, it probably gets you like 70 to 85% there. And then you have to massage it, usually to get it across the finish line.

Ken

Yeah.

Ian

And it's, it's improving. Video is actually an area that I've been spending a lot of time in because video, video is the hardest form of content to produce for most businesses. It's time consuming. It takes somebody that's confident in front of the camera. If you're just doing like B roll stitching and stuff like that, it takes a lot of work. Right. The editing is. Is onerous from a marketing standpoint, like a marketing team standpoint. So it's tough to get good video. And one of the things that I'm really excited about is just some of the. The advances that they've made where you can now with some of the tools out there. Again, it's. It's a tool that's custom designed to get the result you want. But. And it's made for, you know, marketers and agencies. But, you know, I can. They just launched a little while ago where I can upload a PDF. So I have a CPA as client. We've done multiple lead magnets for them. And one of them is how to optimize for profitability. Right. Using accounting stuff. That's my technical term for it. I'm a marketer, not an account. So we were able to upload that PDF, give it instructions and say, hey, this is the type of video we want. This is the length of the video we want. This is the call to action at the end. We want it to give an overview of the video. We were able to choose an avatar of somebody that was very appealing, who's a real actor. And we were able to choose a voice and a language. And it chugged away for a while. It took some time. It gave us a script, it gave us a rough video. We were able to edit the script, we were able to massage the video. We were able to put like a bumper in at the end, which was, you know, logo call to action at the front. We were able to put a logo call to action or logo intro. And it was a finished product faster than we've able ever been able to produce a video client loved it. You can now take, take your own videos. Like we do podcasts all the time. I do webinars all the time. And you can take that and you can create your own custom avatar now. Kind of freaky. I haven't done it. Makes me squeamish. But the, it's, it's pretty cool stuff again, we're spending time on it because we see the value of it, that we can help our clients and we can upsell this as a service.

Ken

Yeah.

Ian

For, for the average business, you're going to spend enormous amounts of time learning the tool, knowing what you should actually do a video on. That's going to have impact in your marketplace. Producing it, editing it, publishing it. So again, makes more sense to have the experts do it than that. So that's kind of the good thing. Creating video content is getting faster. You can do talking avatars that are good. Like, they're not glitchy, they're not. I don't know if you remember Max headroom from the 80s, but. Yeah, but the bad news is that the chance for fakes. Right. Fake video, hugely gone up. Intonation. So this is both for video and audio. The intonation is really bad. Like they haven't perfected, like, you know, know, make the person excitable. Like my voice is going up and down. Your voice is going up and down. Because we get enthusiastic right now. It's. Even if you choose an enthusiastic avatar, it's not really there. It's kind of robotic. The energy isn't there. So those are just a few things. I mean, there's a ton of other things we could talk about, like AI bots. The other one I do want to add though, that's getting me really excited is it could be called an AI assistant, an AI employee, an AI automated call center. Because I see a huge need. Like we have clients who pay a lot of money to have after hours call centers answer their phones. And because we do call tracking for them, because of the various marketing strategies we're doing, we want to measure it. Like the quality of call centers today, especially the cheap ones, are absolute disasters and most businesses don't audit the quality. So part of why we do what we do is we're able to go back to our clients and say, hey, we've been generating all these leads for you. They've been resulting in after call, after hours call. Those leads aren't converting because your call center is disastrous. When people ask, are you accepting new patients or are you accepting new clients? They're like, oh, I don't really know, but I'll have them call you back. Like, yeah, stupidity. Is that right?

Ken

Like, yeah.

Ian

So you, you can train an AI chatbot or, or automated call center basically to accept the call, to answer questions. And this is live, it's instantaneous, it's responsive.

Ken

Yeah.

Ian

You can populate it and train it with answers to common questions. And you can have it guide people through the process of booking an appointment. Like, it is very cool. It will save you money. But more important to that, it will help you not lose leads anymore.

Ken

Right, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Paul

You want cheap, you'll get cheap.

Ken

Yeah. Well, the other thing too, you know, is so even if, you know, like we have features, you know, through the CRM tool that, you know, we use, I know you use and Jeff use, uses Ian, that basically if you miss a phone call, you can, you can send a text right back to, to the person calling. But the reality is, you know, most people are no longer leaving voicemail messages if they get into your voicemail. And so the importance of having a live agent answering your phone is, is probably never been higher. Now the number of phone calls, I mean, some people are perfectly comfortable communicating with the chatbot and getting what they need that way, but other people are going to want to do that by phone. And so not only is it, you know, the cost savings, like you said, is, is tremendous. The quality of the responses is going to be dramatically better. This thing can be, you know, can be educated and trained and, and it sticks. As opposed to, you know, call center staff, they change. They're not the same people from one shift to the next. So they, you know, they're, they're not going to give you that consistency over time, you know, in, in, in regard to answering questions about your business. So between the fact that people aren't leaving voice messages anymore, the fact that the call centers aren't always the best solution in terms of answering correctly for your business, we've seen it as well. It's like, oh, well, I'll have to take your information and have them call you back on Monday. And it's like an emergency plumbing service kind of issue. That's not good. And then, you know, really just being able to go in there and consistently add and update information as it changes relative to your business and not have to spend massive amounts of time training people, variety of people. These things are huge. And, you know, people are like, we, we've got a couple of customers we've talked to. And they're like, yeah, I don't think my customers are going to want to talk to AI. And it's like, well, they've been talking to an automated phone system for years, which is just a recording with a tree structure, a logical tree structure. They don't freak out about that, you know, and if you really are concerned about that, if you feel like you have a group of people who are very cautious about talking to AI The AI can identify itself. Hey, I've. You've reached the AI agent for such and such business. How can I help you? If you would prefer to talk To a live human, you know, press one and.

Ian

And they'll be back tomorrow when they wake up.

Ken

Yeah. So, yeah. So there's the AI. The AI phone systems and AI voice agents are incredibly powerful. And I think it's the hottest topic going right now from a marketing perspective. It's a game changer.

Ian

Yeah. You know, you know what gets me so excited about it too, Ken, is as a, as a marketing agency, many, not many, but some of our clients have asked us to, to. What's the right word? Like bookend the framing of their ad campaigns to only business hours because they're like, I don't want to be paying for ads that are going to my voicemail or to my crappy call center.

Ken

Right.

Ian

This me is a game changer because it's not a call center that doesn't know the answers and is constantly changing. It's not a voicemail that can't do anything right. This, please. You know, imagine somebody that could answer the live questions people have within your constraints that you provide. You know, you don't want to be giving away like medical advice or anything like that as a dental clinic, but you can tell it not to do that. Right. You could say, you know, are there any open appointments on this day between this and this? Right. And can I book that? And the, the chat bot or the AI agent could actually do that for you. So not only have they taken a cold contact, turn them into a warm contact, because they could answer the questions they had, but they could book an appointment. That's to me, astounding because it's so new. Like, give us a year and it'll be old. But yeah, you know, it's so cool.

Ken

Yeah, it is absolutely a game changer. And it just accelerates the process. You know, I mean, we always talk about the buyer's journey and, you know, having a facility like this where, you know, unless they happen to reach the owner or, or the subject matter expert on that phone call. And I, and I, I would venture to say that those experts probably don't get to the, to the booking any faster than the AI agent. And how many missed phone calls, you know, are those experts, you know, missing because of, because of all of the other things that they have to do in their business.

Ian

And imagine this. I want people to imagine this. So, so we've talked about the scenario. You, you make a phone call to the auto mechanic you want to. You, first of all, hey, I got in an accident. I have some auto body issues, but also there's some mechanical issues. I Need taken care of, Care of. Can you do that? The, the AI agent could probably answer some of those questions. Probably not all of them, but answer some of them. And then it would try to book the appointment, right? Do you want an appointment? Yeah, like, of course I do. When's the soonest appointment I can get in? It would give them the options. They would book it. The coolest thing to me is that because this is integrated into a CRM and marketing automation system, first of all, that contact will be created in the CRM system. The transcript of the discussion will be there waiting for you in the morning. It can task you. Like if just in your scenario when you were saying, hey, it's an emergency, you could have the system flag it and send you a text or send your team a text that there's an emergency issue right now and you could, you could escalate that all through the CRM system. You could have a follow up email go out to the person you like. There's so much you can do because of the integration with a CRM and marketing automation system that it's so amazing. Like, anyways, I know I get excited about this.

Ken

Yeah, yeah. And that leads to, you know, I know this is a topic that we're going to be talking about here, but you know, all of that just leads to speed of response. You know, speed of response. As we've said over and over and over again, it is, you know, and we had Jay bear on and he, he proved, you know, he provided key data to back up his findings, you know, just how important being the first to respond is. And you know, I mean, statistics don't lie. And the other thing that Jay pointed out, which I think is really critical and this should be, this should motivate every business on the planet, is that it takes price largely out of the equation. If you're first to respond, you're going to win the business the majority of the overwhelming majority of the time, irregardless of price. And that is just so important. And so many small businesses, especially in a down economy like we talked about last week, you know, we're providing marketing ideas. You know, you don't want to race to the bottom in terms of prices. You know, you can't survive that. That's not a survivable model in a down economy or a stressed economy. And, and you know, there's the new norm. People expect fast response. That's why they're turning to interacting with, with text widgets or chat widgets. You know, that's why they, you Know, they're, that's why people go to DoorDash and book an order online as opposed to calling a restaurant and going through a phone tree system. Well, guess what, restaurants, you can now create your own AI assistant and accelerate that process and make it a much better process. And you know, DoorDash is great. You know, UberEats is great. They take a healthy chunk. You know, they, they provide some benefits because you're listed on their sites, which is great because you, you become discoverable when people are hungry and they're looking and they'll go to those sites to look for restaurants that they can order from. But if you can, if you can build a loyal audience of people that can come and just buy directly from you and you know, and use the AI assistant that you create for, for your restaurant, for example, that's even better. And, and you're, it's, you know, and responding quickly, you know, instead of having people have to call three or four restaurants waiting to see what, you know, if they get anybody to even answer the phone, you know, is going to be a big deal.

Ian

Yeah, yeah. So, so cool. And, and people, you know, we as business owners, we, we all need to understand that as generations become more adapted to a AI being part of society, meaning AI chatbots, these AI agents, like the tools. Like I have no doubt that the younger generation right now would actually perceive this as an added value because a lot of them don't want to, you know, talk to a live person, but they're happy to talk to a robot. Right. Because it's monkey, it's cool person.

Ken

Yeah. You know what, even, even the, the call transcript records show that people are actually having a little bit of fun with the AI. You know, they'll ask it a question just to see what response they get, you know, and people are enjoying it. So right now, you know, it's not only, it's not only a massive efficiency of driving speed to lead, lead to speed, whatever, getting your lead faster, you know, it's saving you money, but it's also creating a novelty effect where people are actually enjoying using these.

Ian

Yeah. You know, you know, your example, I had never thought of your example of a restaurant like, because I don't think the technology is there yet, seen it yet for like a complex order of food yet, but it, I'm sure it's only months away. Right. Like, it just makes sense. But man, like, like I think of some of my favorite restaurants in the area where the, per. The server, like it's a small restaurant, it's you know, there's probably a cook or two, maybe two servers. One server, two servers. Right. Like answering the phone for takeout orders as well, like something. And they're stretched to the max, they're rushed on the phone, you know, like. Yeah, I just think there's huge opportunity there as the technology develops further. Pretty cool.

Ken

Yeah, absolutely.

Paul

You know, a few things I'd add because you know, think people think that AI is a magic bullet that can solve all their problems and it's not. And a lot of times AI is implemented incorrectly and use a live example, Facebook. I love Facebook because I hate them and they screw everything up. I'm member of a Facebook group and someone asked a question related to a CRM and I think Ken knows where I'm going with this, that about how they did something. And someone responded saying, when you look at your steps in the workflow, there's an icon with a little person in there and if you click on that, it'll open a. Facebook banned him from posting because he used the term little person. And you would think that a company.

Ian

Like, rather than an avatar or something like that.

Paul

Yeah, you would think Facebook would be able to look at the context in which he was using that. Apparently they can't. But the biggest Thinging with, with AI is depends on input. It's all about the input. And there's the same garbage in, garbage out. And that's what you get. You put something in, AI will spit something out. But if what you put in is crap, what you're going to get back is crap. That, that's just how it works. And you know, a lot of the, the tools that we use for, you know, that use AI to help us do things more quickly, it gives you all this, it spits out all this data. But if you don't know how to analyze that data, if you don't know what it's telling you, you will come to some very wrong conclusions. And I think that's important to, to know and I just want to touch on that. But we're coming up on what can.

Ian

I, can I add to that, Paul? Yeah, like so you know, AI chatbots have now been around for a couple years, right? They've definitely exploded this past 12 months. You know, we were pretty early adopters of it. We were testing it on our websites early on and then we started to talk about it with clients and we put it on one of our clients websites and we trained it. And one of the coolest things is that really good AI chatbots can actually scrape your whole website and then determine how to answer questions. One of the unforeseen circumstances of that is sometimes you do blog posts, long tail blog posts on a specific topic that your business actually isn't an expert in. You're talking about it at a high level about something specifically, but you might be sharing some information that isn't really relevant to the service you provide. It's hard to think what I'm talking about. Except all I would say is when we were training that chatbot, some of the answers it was giving us were like, where the heck is it pulling this out of? Because it doesn't make any sense. And then we were able to determine, oh, it scraped this competitive analysis blog post that was actually talking about competitors of this client in this particular area, and it was actually promoting those people as the chatbot. We're like, that's dumb. Like, why would we possibly promote competitors as that data existed in an old post that existed on their website. So, yeah, you got to be super careful about training your bot.

Paul

Yeah, it can go off the rails fast.

Ken

Yeah. It's all about the source of truth. You need to specify what that source of truth is, because if you let it just run wild, you know, it's going to find incorrect data. I mean, another thought I had, Ian, is in that same scenario, if you're a home remodeling contractor and your focus is really just external site, you know, siding, you know, you might, you might write a blog post about the top 10 home improvement projects to increase the value of your home. And maybe one of those is related to a service that you provide, but you want to, you want to provide the context because as people are thinking about it, you want to kind of get, you need to, you know, when you write content, sometimes you need to be writing it to a pool of people that have an interest larger than the narrow set of solutions you have, so that you capture them and maybe draw them in. Right? And so, you know, you may only provide one or two of those services of the 10 that are listed. And so if you had that blog post on your website, it may tell people you do those. All of those other eight.

Ian

That's, that's a perfect example, Ken. Yeah. And it's a reminder, like, this whole part of this discussion is a reminder that just like you have to monitor your real staff, you have to monitor what your AI is doing in order to improve it. Right? You, you, you wouldn't hire a junior person and then not monitor how they're doing their job. You have to. Right. If, especially if they're customer facing, you would be coaching them on like, hey, you talked about it this way. We actually don't do that. You know, we need to talk about it this way.

Ken

And yeah, yeah. You know, another interesting thing, we talked about this a while back when we were talking about Google reviews and reviews in general and review responses. You know, Bright Local did a study which actually shows that people prefer AI generated responses to reviews over what are typically written by the average business. You know, which, which I thought was really interesting. But you know, the, what the AI does is it takes the review that somebody wrote and it basically parrots it back, but in a, but in a complimentary way. You know, that. And this is completely legal and acceptable, you know, on a platform like Google. And, and you know, people, when they read that, they feel like they're getting a more valuable response than just like, oh, great, thanks. We love you guys. Thanks for coming in. You know, it's like when you pair and you're also creating a little bit more content for that review to help you maybe boost SEO a little bit because you are, you are reusing maybe some key phrases that your customers wrote in their review, like, oh, I came in and I got the key lime pie, you know, and it was the best key lime pie I've ever had. And then the response is, we're so happy you loved our key lime pie. You know, we love the fact that you come in and we hope to see you sometime soon and elaborate a little bit on that. You know, guess what? You. Now, if, if key lime pie is a big feature of your business, you've got a lot more content that was created just because the AI pirated back. But people who are reading it are like, they must have damn good key lime pie.

Paul

Yeah, the only thing I'm Pie, come on.

Ian

Key lime pie is delicious.

Ken

I don't know where I came up with that because I, I'm not sure I've ever even had it.

Paul

But you don't want to have it.

Ian

So I was, I was just trying to. Well, I guess it's okay. The, the one thing I, because I, I too looked at that. I think we all did look at that survey, Ken. And the one thing I would say is that it was a pretty small study. Like it wasn't massively large and it was very early on, like it was beginning of the year when AI, you know, we're pretty early in the AI realm. So I always caution the use of data when it's a small study. But yeah, and Also, because I also find, like, AI is highly repetitive. Like, you know, if you had AI answer all of your reviews by itself, they would all practically be the same, which looks really dumb. But, you know, so you have to have, again, it goes back to the previous comment about you have to have people monitor this stuff and.

Ken

Yeah.

Paul

All right, so we're coming up on an hour here. Maybe we can just go through a few things real quick. Ken, start with you. Is there, what are some other ways small businesses can use AI?

Ken

Well, I, I think, you know, with the, with either the chat bot or the, or the, like an AI voice response, you know, assistant, frequently asked questions, answering questions about the scope of the area that you serve, like the geographies that you go to, the, the types of services that you offer. Do you take insurance, you know, or not? Like, if you're, you know, if you're a dentist or a chiropractor or whatever, you know, those are all fantastic things that you can train the, the AI to answer. And as we talked about before, it's going to do a better job. I mean, you know, you have to monitor it, you have to train it, you're going to have to tweak it, but it's going to do a better job than 90% of the call center results that I've seen, honestly.

Ian

Yeah.

Paul

Ian, any thoughts?

Ian

Yeah, I, I, I think my final thought on AI is just like, I've seen this model played out many, many times with my clients. When I've worked with a client for a while and I become their trusted marketing partner and advisor. They come to me when something, when a new shiny object or a particular need comes across their desk and they're like, hey, you know, all the solutions out there, because you're keeping your ear to the ground, you're trying things all the time. What can we do to solve this problem? Or what can we do to introduce a new technology? I think that's where instead of a business owner going out and chasing the shiny objects and trying to determine which one's the right solution, like, what's the right CRM system? What's the right AI chatbot? Like, talk to your marketing expert, your advisor in your world, especially if you, if you have a marketing agency that you're working with and partnering with, reach out to them, ask them, like, hey, I was listening to this podcast. I heard some things that sounded really cool. Can we implement that? Or what do you think about implementing that? What are the pros and cons? What are the systems we would need to do? What are the costs? Because what's really important is that your advisor can actually tell you, here's how we could implement it, here's the cost, and here's how we can keep it becoming a burden to your team. Because again, if you add on tools yourself, you're adding burden to your team. So I would just say trust. Find a trustworthy marketing advisor, hit yourself to them, ask questions, get them to be involved in your business at a deeper level and they can help guide you, which is enormously powerful for your business.

Ken

Yeah.

Paul

Yeah, I just add that we've talked about speed of response. It can, it can help you with FAQs, appointment booking, which we didn't really talk about. Automating, Google Reviews. AI can help you with a lot of things, but has to be properly implemented and it has to be monitored. It's not set it and forget it. And like to thank everyone for listening. Hope you found this helpful. If you did subscribe and share it with other business owners. And Ian, take us out.

Ian

Yeah, I just wanted to say thanks to our, our listeners, our viewers. I was just pulling a report today and we've had over 32,000 downloads of our podcast over the last three years, so. Or actually, that's only two years, so I didn't even pull a full report. So you, you guys are awesome. We greatly appreciate you letting us add value to your business and speaking into your world. If you have a particular challenge or question, reach out to us. We would love to do a podcast on that. And until next week, folks, keep calm and mark it on.