Using AI and Automation to Scale Customer Success

Jason Whitehead: [00:00:00] Hi everyone. Thank you for joining us to another episode of the Jason’s take on, and we’re really excited to be here tonight. We have a special guest Eric Cades with us. Eric has founded and grown several tech companies using a variety of contact center, chat and AI tools to help automate and scale and improve customer engagement.

And we think this is so relevant to the customer success community because many organizations are really struggling to scale their customer success efforts. In fact, many organizations, we find the CSMs have well over a hundred customers in their portfolio, and it’s extremely hard and difficult to stay on top of that many customers.

Now let alone be proactive with them. And today Eric’s going to share some his thoughts and insights about how various tools and automations that technology. Now scale and tell our customer engagement to meet different needs. Eric, thank you so much for being here today. I’m really excited

Eric Kades: [00:00:47] and thank you guys for having me really interesting topics.

This has become my life’s work now and happy to spend some time talking about it. Awesome. And we’re

Jason Whitehead: [00:00:58] excited to be that I think

Jason Noble: [00:00:59] these are such important topics as well. And it’s so cool to have kind of a, someone who’s passionate as you are and where you’re building up services, that customers are just reaching out for this sort of thing.

And I think there’s a lot of really cool stuff here that we can dive into. Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Whitehead: [00:01:14] Eric before we jump in here, can you just take a second to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background and your organizations and how you’ve gotten to where you are and some of your passion for this area?

Eric Kades: [00:01:24] Sure. I’ve been in the contact center business long time, 20 plus years. Now going back to 1994, when I remember sitting in a call center being hooked up selling Energy meters to Delmarva power customers. I was actually the agent in the call center.  It’s been a, quite a long career. And I would say, some of the highlights of that career are in 2006.

I built a hosted call center software platform with my partners that went on and is still used today by. Presidential campaigns, the Obama campaign, for example, used it. Biden’s campaign just use it. And she used by special interests and labor unions around the world. Actually now use that platform to be able to contact their constituents over the phone primarily.

And then in 2009 my partners and I took over a contact center that was. 30 seats at the time. And from 2009 to 2016, we grew it to 2200 employees in five different contact centers. And that was a result of delivering for our customers, customer success. And those customers just kept growing with us.

And I think, one of the biggest secret sauces that we had. Beating out some of the other competitors was, were able to really deliver, reporting that our customers wanted on time and accurately and, that’s the end result that they see every day. So that was really important.

And then in 2013, I started an at-home contact center. Business to focus on non-voice channels, which was, when I got started with a call center today, it’s now a contact center. And I want it to focus in on live chat and answering social media, answering text messages in real time. Built that business into a hundred plus.

Employees now, and we answer live chats primarily for education institutions and are expanding that into app companies and things like that, that we’re doing customer support for. And then in 2016, I actually a couple of years earlier started hearing about these things called chatbots, which I thought, Oh my God, they might put my chat center out of business.

I better start learning about these things. And, had understood how these technologies worked, partnered up with a brilliant CTO and set out to build our own. Chat bot platform. And that’s where I ended up today, where we I have a holding company called jet sense AI, which has two companies underneath it.

One of them is text chat.com, which is a very low level chat bot, live chat solution for small businesses. And then we have jet spring, which is our at-home agent. Contact center business, which, like I said, primarily focuses on live chat, answering social media questions sending text messages to people for a bunch of different colleges and universe.

Jason Noble: [00:04:35] This is an industry that I’m sure over those 20 years, you’ve seen some phenomenal changes, not just through the channels, but also about what engagement means to different businesses and different people and a bigger demand for people wanting. That right. Level of engagement in that kind of pandemic that we’re in now, must’ve shifted that as well.

Could you give us some kind of context now while people talk about all these different engagement tools, including chats, coding, AI omni-channel experience, give us a brief overview of how these different technologies help with the pre and the post sales side of creating an amazing customer experience.

Eric Kades: [00:05:11] Sure. Look, I remember when I got started into this business, agents were making phone calls, calls manually on a rubbery dial, and I’m writing everything down on a piece of paper that happened on their call them. Started putting that into spreadsheets and then scripting. And obviously now all these different channels,

Jason Noble: [00:05:30] I love how you all laugh because we can all remember those days and it doesn’t seem that long ago.

Eric Kades: [00:05:35] And it’s interesting as the channels have evolved, I think the acceptance to them has been very slow, at least here in the U S. And, to give you an example prior to the pandemic, I had always thought. At-home call center agent a, that’s going to give me better access to a wider pool of agents versus in a physical call center, only a certain type of person is going to come into a physical cost center.

I’ve owned both, but yeah, when we would pitch clients, they would always be scared of the fact that. Our agents were working from home. Now in the pandemic, all I got all of a sudden, we’re all the rage and the fact that we are at home is a great thing, they answer your question a little bit more about the different channels.

I think you really have to separate to, to not get confused by all these different options you have. I think it makes sense to separate AI and Omni channel. To start because AI means something to itself. And we can talk about that a little bit later, but I think omni-channel is really the big opportunity right now.

Something as simple as text messaging, which has frankly been around for 20 years, but all of a sudden it’s the sexy thing to do is, text your customers and you’re seeing more and more ads and retargeting on texting platforms. And I think when it comes down to is the management team looking at, what are you trying to accomplish?

What are your goals? If you don’t think about those goals, you’re not going to think about which channel makes the most sense. To use for that specific incident. And then, whether it’s live chat, text messaging, social media, voice in-app notifications, all of those different disciplines have different things that they’re good for.

Yep, depending on that product. And I’ll give you an example, if you’re a business that has hundreds and hundreds of customers, but you’re selling a $15 products. You can’t afford to have someone on the phone with that person for three hours, fixing whatever it may be, because you’re going to lose money on that sale.

It really, you got to look at them individually and look at it at a very high level of what you’re trying to accomplish.

Jason Whitehead: [00:08:09] And, I think that’s such a good point too. When I talk a lot of customer success teams, that they’re looking at a lot of customer success automation platforms.

The first assumption is. No, what is our email chain going to be in our email cadence and our drip sequence. And then they usually go to, Oh, we now have this customer success tool that will support in-app notifications. How do we do a little bit of that? But they really don’t necessarily think through what you said, like what are our bigger goals?

And then how do we map it to the right channel? And to hear you talk about so many different ways to engage people that. I think a lot of customer success, people haven’t really thought through or haven’t really understood the differences is a big challenge for a lot of the CST.

Eric Kades: [00:08:46] Yeah. I think, we still mostly see voice and email support.

That’s really all we have. Here we are. There’s all these other channels. And very few companies are able to access them and consumers today. And millennials being the biggest buying set. They don’t want to talk on the phone and they really want their choice of channel that they want to deal with you in.

If you’re not thinking about these long-term, I think, you’re going to be in trouble.

Jason Whitehead: [00:09:16] Yeah. So we’re not okay.

Jason Noble: [00:09:19] Yup. Gone off. I was gonna say when you look at scaling the services you’re providing across these different channels, how do you know which ones to focus on you?

You mentioned that I think it’s a great example. I’ve got a teenage daughter and she doesn’t even really know what email is. And I think she’s only just realized that you can make phone calls on a phone. There’s so many different channels, but how do you help. Organizations know which ones to use, and which is some of the kind of important considerations that customer success teams need to look at about how to engage and what the different strategies are.

And what are the kinds of things that they to look at when looking at the right approaches to take for customer engagement strategies?

Eric Kades: [00:09:56] I think, the first thing looking if your customers 12 to 15 year olds, you better start looking at channels to communicate with those people.

So I think, it starts with knowing who your customer is and then identifying what the tasks are that you’re trying to accomplish because in certain scenarios, and I’ll just give you a, a higher education example where a student wants to get. And Jason Noble, you may not know this acronym FASFA your fast, via the here in the U S for your For your financial aid,  you could very easily go to a chat bot could ask, answer you a couple of questions through a live chat on a website and show you the school’s FASFA ID.

But then if it’s a student that has problems or a customer that has problems, and it’s a very expensive product you better get that person talking to one of your best customer resolution resemble. Representatives on the phone or on chat if they want to, and be able to even do a screen share and take them through solving their problems.

So I think it, it depends on who the customer is and then what the task is that you’re trying to accomplish. Yeah,

Jason Whitehead: [00:11:13] absolutely.  Think with that as a backdrop to you, we find that a lot of customer success teams, they have one track for their enterprise customers and one for their SMB market.

No, it was different needs and different expectations. What do you see in your experience with some of the different needs and tactics and tools that you recommend for SMB versus enterprise and where might one be a better fit with you than the other, for the different. Different

Eric Kades: [00:11:35] size companies.

Sure. Look, an enterprise customer is a high touch customer. If depending on the value of that customer, you might have a team of five people that are responding to that customer for different level things. And you’re going to have different levels of tickets and what you respond to in within 15 minutes  and, different ELA SLS for that.

But at the same time, Like you said, if you have SMB customers, which we have in our text chat.com business, that’s Gore geared towards small business customers. We know email’s cluttered and you and the three of us are said, spent a lot of our day going through and deleting emails and things like that.

That’s where I think text messaging has a huge advantage to it. Anything else? Cause we know that our text messages get through. So if someone, needs support an appointment, reminder, a update on the shipping of a package, whatever it may be, they’re actually going to be appreciative.

Of you texting them to give them that notification instead of it getting lost in that massive email. So I think that I also think live chat is critical. People can’t always talk on the phone. They, he, you can be at the office and your team members are around you, you have something that you have to get resolved at home while you can.

Do that in a live chat conversation and not be talking on the phone and kind of multitask as that person helps you through live chat. So I think, overall. The direct message based communication tools are the future. That doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that we all know how our kids communicate and don’t even know, like you said, Jason, that they can talk on the phone.

So I think, teams really need to look at message based, but then the consideration is it automated message base or is it live agent message base? And, depending on the level of customer. You might want to have a live agent based message-based solution.

Jason Noble: [00:13:43] I think that’s so key. And that is knowing your audience is a really key thing and how you for different companies, it’s going to be so different.

And the idea of segmentation becomes so critical. Am I do I smile because I know she’s seeing how my daughter interacts and she did. She didn’t realize, these mobile phones, we’ve grown up with an iPhone. We know how they’ve evolved, but the idea that there was a phone up on it. And actually you could phone with it cause they’re in such different applications all day long.

And these are the channels that they use and more and more people starting doing it. In great levels of engagement with things like Snapchat, Tech-Talk all of these things and the advertising in them. Yeah. What are the terms that we hear a lot and you’ve talked about it and the companies that you’ve built up is about AI and machine learning.

And there’s a real buzz around today. I think for a lot of us in customer success, there are some challenges with seeing how it can apply to us what it really means. But also there’s some kind of uncertainty and some risks we see for it. Do you, in the work you’ve done when you’ve talked about live chat bots versus automated ones how good is the AI?

Where do you see it going? What are some of the exciting things that you, because you are at the forefront of

Eric Kades: [00:14:48] this, right? It’s really just a phenomenal question. I think it. This confusion about it is really what is slowing the adoption of it. And, you’ll get, if you’re in a room with a management team, and the question comes up in an AI chat bot, that’s going to respond to natural language and, hopefully represent the brand well, you’ll inevitably get the guy in the room that said I went to back companies.

Chat bot and it was an, it couldn’t answer. I’ll give you a personal example, a major car manufacturer here in the U S came out with a new car. I’m not gonna mention any names, very exciting car. I read about it in motor trend. On my phone, I ran to the website. There was a chat bot on the website that was a AI, open-ended conversation type chat bot, and.

One of the big fi one of the big ones here in the U S one of the big three, and I asked, how much does it cost? And the chat bot couldn’t answer

Jason Noble: [00:15:55] question as well.

Eric Kades: [00:15:56] Yeah. No one had thought of that. And so

Jason Noble: [00:16:00] You’re asking it the wrong way though. Clearly.

Eric Kades: [00:16:03] Exactly. So you know that, but I don’t want to poo it because there is a time and a place for it. And I think that what companies need to realize is that. Like I said, the channel is separate from the AI.

And then when we talk about AI, where especially in conversational interfaces, the AI is such a broad term. That’s why no one really knows what it means. What we’re talking about here for customer success is way different than the AI that’s used to identify. What drug might be best for this cancer patient?

Two totally different technologies, both called AI. So you know what? I, if I can give anyone a little help here today, I think that the biggest thing to understand with regards to conversational AI, which is really what we’re talking about in customer success is you have two core technologies.

You have natural language processing. And you have machine learning and those two technologies work hand in hand to give you conversational AI and, yes, someday, maybe this conversational AI will be able to replace human beings, but today it’s still very much. Human involved, let’s say to perfect that knowledge base.

So it’s not as complicated as you think. It just takes time to tune a chat bot to where you want it to be. And that takes a lot of manual tuning. So here’s how it works. You come in, you ask it an open-ended question. It’s trying to figure out what you’re saying first. By your intent and the words you’re using that it’s tapping the machine learning database to say, okay, what’s the answer based on those words and you better believe on day one, it’s not going to get everything right.

So you literally need a person. And when someone hires us to do AI for them, we have full-time people that sit and see where the chat bot fails. And then go in and manually update the database. So the next time I went to the, and that company, cause I went back a few days later, they had them fixed it.

Clearly isn’t doing that, but that’s what you have to understand that, yeah. It’s not going to be a human being, if there’s a finite amount of things, it can be very useful tool, but at the same time, You may be just better off using a button with some backend automation into data, because it’s like my example earlier on what’s my FASFA ID.

I don’t want to go through a chat bot figuring out FASFA when I could just, say to someone, what are you looking for in FASFA ID? Be one of them. They hit the button and it gives it to me. You have to weigh those things. You have to really look at it like any project that it’s going to be a constant improvement to get it to where you want it to go.

And

Jason Whitehead: [00:19:17] based on what you’re describing too, it sounds like that period of time when you’re tuning the chat bot and the AI to really understand what’s being asked and the context and stuff that could have a hell of an impact on your customer experience during that process, while they’re not getting the answers, let me build the story you just gave about the car dealership or the car company.

I think you need to be prepared for, there’s going to be some degradation of experience in the short term to be able to give a better one in the longterm and really think through that.

Eric Kades: [00:19:43] Yeah. So are you better be prepared for that? And my recommendation to our clients is no matter what the communication channel is, let’s use a human first.

And figure out what, if they don’t know, because inevitably when it’s all on phone calls, it’s very hard to listen to a million phone calls and know exactly what’s going on. Now there’s AI to listen to these phone calls, but a company that. Not the most sophisticated may not even know what type of questions are going to be asked.

So start with a more human based experience, just a live chat agent, get all those questions and say, okay. Here’s where we can use AI to answer this question, because it gets asked 80 times a day and we know how they’re going to, how to answer it. But in this scenario, it needs to go to a human. And I think having those safety valve scenarios is critical.

I have something called wrong answer, hell that I talk about, with chatbots. And that’s the last thing you want to put your customer in. So you really need to have a reading that. Okay. The chat bot didn’t answer right. Two times in a row. We need now to transfer that to a live agent. If it’s a high value customer.

Jason Noble: [00:21:01] Oh, so many businesses don’t do that. Maybe it’s a UK thing, but there’s more and more chatbots here. And you get to the end of the tether with a B. I do wish there were less than that. Two times it’s wrong, and it still keeps asking you the same question. And it does to your projection.

Brick brings across a really frustrating customer experience for you and you just disengage. Yeah.

Eric Kades: [00:21:22] Look, we are focusing on for live chat with our tech shop.com product. And I did a test yesterday. It’s called live chat. No one answers it live. It should be called dead chat. Like I went, I was looking through a data set yesterday and five out of five companies that had live chat.

We’re not answering it and think about the implications of that. First of all, you’re saying we don’t want to talk to you, you’re degrading your brands, you’re losing a customer. You’re not keeping your promise, and you’re never going to get them back. Just like you said, Jason why

Jason Noble: [00:22:03] I’ve got, I love this.

Cause I, I. I’m a huge fan of proper customer experience, which comes into what we do for a living, which is why we’re all so passionate about it. But particularly in a pandemic, the number of organizations that you phone them up and you still, or the using this as an excuse that they haven’t realized as a way of doing it.

And it is so frustrating today, but I phoned up, I had a letter from the tax authority yesterday. Phone them up and they’re incredibly, but they are an awesome organization. Cause you think it’s going to be a pain dealing with them, but phone them up. And they saw I was going to be rural working for him.

It’s gonna be a long time. And two seconds later, someone answers the phone. He’s speaking to human and they deal with a problem. And they’ve, it’s an organization you would not think has got the customer experience. But it’s spot on and they just know, and it’s incredible to see someone answers within a second or you’re already set to think, I’m going to have to wait 10 minutes. Pretty good. I’ve not seen how they use live chat yet, but that

Eric Kades: [00:23:00] is something, but at least they’re answering the phone. There’s, and that’s one thing where I see a big advantage in chatbots that, usually when you call into that system, you’re in this IVR, that’s press one for this press two for that.

Or you want this and you’re tied to it. Whereas with a chat bot and you’re giving someone four selections in a live chat, whether you’re on your mobile phone or your desktop, it’s milliseconds to bring someone down a path to find where they want to go, as opposed to being tethered to your phone and having to listen through this whole thing that you just want to throw the phone out the window.

So

Jason Whitehead: [00:23:44] Eric, let me ask you, cause I think what you described here has such potential, but also what you just described. You’ve got to train your chat bot and it takes time to get there and all these great things. If a company is looking to really implement some of these automation tools, whether it’s the AI or bots or other things for their customer success program one, realistically how long should it take them to do this and where should they get started?

And then I guess related to that, one of the things that you’ve described as it sounds like you need some expertise in AI and chat bot technology to really get tuned well, as opposed to people who have great product knowledge and customer success experience. So it sounds like you’ve got to bring in some complimentary skill sets as well.

So I guess overall, how do people get started and how long should this take and what do they need to do

Eric Kades: [00:24:26] to get there? Yeah, I think, look for me, I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life. When I’m going to go into something that I don’t know about, I like to at least understand the basics, and if you’re that higher level manager go do some research yourself, watch some YouTube videos, try and educate yourself a little bit because you don’t want to go into.

Blind. You want to know some of the buzz words when you’re talking to people and trying to find out who are the people that can get this goal, accomplished timing is different for AI versus channels. And so for AI, you really need to give yourself I would say about a year to get a fully tuned chat bot to your use case.

I would say it’s going to take three to six months in an organization, figuring out what it is that you actually want the chat bot to accomplish. And then it’s going to take six months to nine months tuning it for all the exceptions that come through and. If you’re going to do it in house or you’re going to outsource it to someone else.

The most important factor is that you have the task of, because this is exactly what I experienced with the big auto manufacturer of either a full-time person. If this thing’s going to be doing lots of conversations a day, Seeing where it’s failing. Like that needs to be a full-time person analyzing failures meeting with the team.

How do we want to respond to this in the future? That person who’s might not be able, might have to confer with a few other people to get that answer. Either that, or you need to make sure that the team that you’re outsourcing it to is going to be constantly looking at and tweaking the AI in terms of the channels.

That is, the same thing you need to, there’s so many different platforms out there and. I’m finding in my own experience because I’m, for the first time, instead of going after enterprise customers, going after small business customers, that when you go to the. One size fits all tools these full and we get clients like this, they’re using, one of the name brand that I don’t want to talk negative about anyone, lead management tools that also has a live chat to it.

And also does email and also does text messaging. And, that gets really complicated also. Their thing is lead management. They don’t have enough time to focus on building the best live chat tool or building the best, text messaging tool. But what’s important is as you choose those tools, You make sure that they can API into your CRM so you can centralize that information in one place.

And I think those are really the biggest considerations. You want to get a basic understanding from the high level and then, dig in whether it’s a full-time job in house or it’s something you’re going to outsource.

Jason Noble: [00:27:34] I think you’ve covered some really great points and it is. There’s a lot of talk about these topics and actually to understand it, realize what you’ve got to do is a big step.

And I think a lot of people perhaps scared from how, which is why they want to work with people like you guys, so they can actually build off what you’ve already got. One question I’d love to ask you mean what do you see as some of the big challenges for organizations large or small when they’re trying to.

Scale what they’re doing through their different channels, the whole customer engagement, that customer experience. When they’re looking at things like how they automate it, how they use AI, what do you think about some of the biggest challenges are today?

Eric Kades: [00:28:09] I think it’s looking outside the box a little bit, I’ll give you one example.

I wanted to mention this before. When we, I have been in the call center business, for since 1994. And when I built jet spring, our live chat contact center business, I realized that. It’s a totally different person that is responding to live chat versus who’s responding to phone calls.

It’s a different skillset. That person needs to be able to type quickly. They need to be able to spell well, And often that’s not your best customer support person on the phone. That’s definitely a consideration that you have to think about. And the other thing is, which is really interesting, Jason Melville, since you’re, on the other side of the pond chatbots have.

Advanced in Europe. And most of the stuff that we’re doing, I look towards the European companies to see what they’re doing, to adapt our technology. And I was talking about this with someone the other day. And I think the reason is our customers in the U S are so impatient from what I know of traveling to Europe, like there’s a little bit more of a relaxed attitude towards things and here in the us, Oh, my God.

If something’s not answered like that, even though it often isn’t, but I think there’s this fear that stops people from using it. Like I said, I know in Europe, text messaging has been used prevalently for decades here. It’s the new thing. And it’s been here for 20 years. So it’s you have a lot of these fears.

And then the other thing that I think. Really stops. The innovation from happening is call center. Business has been around for decades or large organizations are very slow to change while the people that are running those call centers. Those people probably don’t spell very well either. So how are they going to build out the chat team, that is now going to deal on the messaging channels.

It’s really, those are the kinds of things that you have to think about,  is it the same person? That’s going to be answering the text messages in the social media. That’s the guy on the phone and maybe it’s a different group of people. So we have to have the messaging group.

We have to have the voice group. Et cetera.

Jason Whitehead: [00:30:37] Eric, one last quick question, before we get into our bowl challenge as I’m listening to you, I’m also wondering for organizations such as startups or small businesses that are now growing or organizations that are first launching their customer success practice.

And they’d never had one, they spend a lot of time just trying to figure out what are our CS services, what our operations, but our internal processes. What level of maturity does an organization need to have before they’re ready for different types of automation, whether it’s. Text messaging or chat bot or AI, or should they actually look to be doing that day one and try and get their automation strategy and done in parallel to their whole building out and train their organization?

Eric Kades: [00:31:16] It’s a great question. Jason and tech chat is a small business, we just launched it in October, we’re launched on the Shopify platform. You can also get it directly, but. So we had to build out all these automations from scratch. And I had been in, big corporate customers, relationships, networking to get clients, sales teams to get clients.

This is now we’re getting them off the internet and I’ve wasted a lot of money already and learn the hard way. So hopefully I can prevent some people listening, those painful topics. I think a, you have to figure out what are the temp poles. What are the automations that you want to have EMA? Is it email?

Is it text messaging? Do we want to have someone answering live chat? First you have to figure out what those are. And then I think really the best thing to do is finding an independent contractor through a platform like Upwork or something like that. We’re having a lot of success with this, where.

We’re able to find someone and this isn’t really a customer success, but I need a Facebook ad expert. I can find that person very inexpensively hourly, and it’s not a full-time job as a contractor who worked for the big agency. That’s an expert in that and it doesn’t matter. You can, it could be customer success.

It could be any individual. You could go to Upwork and find like a text messaging automation expert. You can put that up there and you’re going to find a zillion people that I’ve experienced and then you can interview them. So in terms of building the foundation, it really is figuring out who your customer is, what their value is and you know what we started with and then saying, okay, how am I going to be able to get through this person?

If I’m emailing them, they’re getting. I’m not poo-pooing email emails, definitely a necessary channel that you have to use. When you’re going to start employing some of these newer channels, you really need to think about, okay, we want to do we want to respond to Facebook messenger now, do we want to build a Facebook messenger bot that captures information?

Or do we want that Facebook messenger talking to someone live? So those are the kinds of considerations that you have to make, but I would say get a basic understanding and then look for an expert in the field to work with you on a fractional basis. And that’ll save you thousands of dollars and thousands of hours and time, in trying to figure out from scratch for yourself.

Jason Noble: [00:34:06] I, this has been such a cool conversation, Eric and a massive thank you from us. One thing we always like to end with our guests on is asking one of our bold challenge questions, really to get the listeners to look at what bold action they can take to improve their customer success and other practices based on what our guests have talked about.

The question that we’re going to ask you is what bold actions would you recommend that our listeners tape right now that can improve how they use technology automation and AI. On all of the other good stuff that you’ve talked about to help scale their customer engagement

Eric Kades: [00:34:38] efforts. I would say, start with expanding a channel.

If you’re only doing voice and email, add live chat, add text messaging, add these other channels that your customers really do want to communicate with you with and figure it out and start basic. And there’s so many low cost platforms out there that are really good. That you can use that can actually even grow with you as long as they have the proper API to take that information into your CRM.

So I, if there was a bold challenge and I think we can help the rest of the world out is to, let’s look at not just voice and email for once let’s try and, use something else, like text messaging or live chat.

Jason Whitehead: [00:35:25] Wow. Fantastic. Eric, thank you so much for being here. We always like to take a quick minute to invite our guests, to do a shameless plug and let everyone know a little bit about more about your company or in your case companies and how they can get in touch.

And obviously we’ll have links to your contact information in the show notes below, but go ahead and give a shameless plug for what you’re doing and how people can reach you. If they’re interested in learning more.

Eric Kades: [00:35:46] First of all, guys, I want to thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun. It went by so quickly and, we could talk for hours.

I’m sure. Yeah, my shame was plug is our new product, text chat.com. I’ve been in live chat business for almost 10 years. Now I know how hard it is to answer. We created tech Shep by accident because even though we have an, a home call center full of a hundred plus agents answering live chat, when a high value customer would come to our website.

When one of my agents answered, they couldn’t answer in depth enough to close that client. So I wanted away for our high level salespeople to be able to answer those live chats. And I had this crazy idea in the shower one day. What, if you could answer a live chat with a text message. You wouldn’t have to be logged into a computer.

You want to have one of 75 mobile apps that are already on your phone and you could respond. Just that easily or you got a text message and you respond and. We built it for ourselves. It worked immediately. We gave it to a few people. They said they wanted to invest in our company and we turn it into a product in October this year.

And you can get it, just sign up for a free trial@techshat.com, more logging

Jason Noble: [00:37:07] onto the site.

Eric Kades: [00:37:08] Eric.

Jason Whitehead: [00:37:09] That’s fantastic. It’s really cool. Thank you so much, everyone. That’s arcades and we’re really excited to have you here and we hope you’ll come back for another episode of the Jason’s. Take on.

Eric Kades: [00:37:17] I’d love to. Any time.