Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: It was not just a project management bottleneck or time drain on each customer, which was valuable work, but just a huge investment of time. It was also understanding how's the client actually performing from a metrics point of view. So a good CSM would not only just look at the project, they'd be looking at the performance metrics and forming a blended view, for want of a better word.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Welcome to the Agency Hour podcast where we help web design, SEO, AI and sorts of digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, their clients, their families, their communities and the world at large. This week we are joined for the second time on the podcast by my good friend Simon Chin from Flowstate Agency here in Melbourne. He has built an incredible AI platform that brings all of the tools together that they need to manage their client relationships. So we're talking project management tools, we're talking Google Analytics, performance marketing, Klaviyo, Shopify all the data points that you need, bring them all into one platform and give your client success team insights so that they can spend more time being creative and thinking and problem solving for their clients. This is a very interesting episode. If you're a nerd like me and you love AI, you're going to love this. Stay with us.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Agency Hour podcast. Simon Chinn from Flowstate. How are you, Simon?
[00:01:25] Speaker A: Great, Troy, thanks for having me back.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: No worries. You're a two timer here now. I gotta say, mate, I just want to. You're in, you're in elite company. It's very rare that we actually ask someone back on the podcast, so you must be doing something right.
[00:01:37] Speaker A: Well, thank you. Yeah, and thanks to your support, of course. And Mavericks. No, thanks for having me.
[00:01:42] Speaker B: Pleasure. Full transparency. Simon is a Mavericks club member, has been now for quite some time.
Just give people a bit of a heads up on what you do, what the agency does and paint a picture of. This is not an ad for what we do, but paint a picture of where you were before you started with us and kind of where you are now.
[00:01:59] Speaker A: Okay, so Flow State, at its heart is a CRM and marketing automation agency we've been around for almost seven years now. Based in Melbourne, we have a team of 20.
Our main customer base has always been E commerce and helping them use email and SMS and more broadly their CRM systems to get a better lifetime value, better relationship with their customer, all that good stuff that they're looking for.
I joined Mavericks I think about three years ago now, Troy, and at that time I was really looking for a trusted advisor and A mentor who could guide me through the next stage of growth for my business. And it's fair to say since the time I've been with you guys, it's been nothing but positive growth. A lot better structure within the organization, much better role clarity from everyone that's in my team.
I mean, there's listing goes on, so there's a lot of good stuff that's come out of our partnership and it's certainly something that I value a lot.
[00:02:54] Speaker B: Great. It's not all rainbows and unicorns though, is it?
[00:02:58] Speaker A: Running an agency is certainly not all rainbows and unicorns. There is always things you've got to manage and deal with. And I think the best thing about working with you guys, this is a plug necessarily for Mavericks. But I have someone I can reach out to if there's something that I need to solve. And whilst I'm good at solving most problems, it's. It's also very good to have a sounding board. And I think that's what yourself in particular, Jane's been excellent at.
It's just saying, hey, this is where we're at, this is my decision or where I think I'm going to go with this. Can I just sound this off you? And I think that's what's become very valuable for the business.
[00:03:35] Speaker B: Yeah. Awesome. Well, that's good to hear. Now we're not here to blow smoke up my tires, so to speak.
You've now kind of reached a point in your agency where you're identifying new constraints. Right. And so the three areas of constraints that we talk about in any agency are you've either got a conversation problem, a conversion problem or a capacity problem. Yep. You're kind of at that point now where you're trying to solve a capacity problem using AI. So can you just walk us through the problem as you see it before we start talking about what you're doing to try to fix it?
[00:04:10] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So to give you some context, let's say 12 months ago, circa 50 active clients or accounts on the go at the one time. We have a team of customer success managers and also email specialists who essentially will manage those projects.
There are a lot of moving parts. We deal a lot with creative. Obviously what we do is visual, but also content based. There's a lot of subjectivity in what we do as well. So at the heart of it, even though we are a technical team, we are almost seen as a creative team as well. So herding the cats, for want of a better word, and trying to make sure that all the customers are happy, their feedback is heard, the amendments are made, can be a challenge.
And despite the fact we've got a very good customer success team, a very structured way of working within Asana, it's not a perfect science and unfortunately, some things do slip through the cracks. As much as we try to be there for every customer, it just physically, at times, is not possible. We also work quite extensively in the US as well, so we have the management of time zones.
So that was sort of the start of where this thinking came from, was, well, is there a better way that we can assist our teams, that we can continue to grow, but also manage our customers more proactively?
And that's where we started looking at AI and how that could augment how we offer our service to our customers.
[00:05:35] Speaker B: Okay, so I'm going to play devil's advocate here, just, just on behalf of the listener, like, you're using Asana as a project management tool, right? So why aren't your clients just in Asana and why aren't we all just chatting and commenting in Asana and like, is this really a problem that needs to be solved or are we just trying to be, you know, too queued by half?
[00:05:52] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's a good question. I mean, we tried Asana with our customers and, and we still do. There are a number of customers that don't have a problem being in Asana, but what we did find is for the vast majority, they just don't want to be in there. There's too much detail.
They get lost between Parent Task and Subtask. They don't know where to leave their comments, despite the fact we sit with them quite extensively, especially during onboarding, and help them understand how we utilize the boards and how we communicate. And it just wasn't a perfect approach. And there are some customers we deal with too, Troy, that are, you know, they could be directors of marketing, they could be C level people. They, they, they're not used to going into the weeds, so to speak. They just want the 30,000 foot view. All right, are you doing your job? Are you getting a good return for my investment? And you know, are we ticking off the milestones or the KPIs? You said you would. That's all they care about.
[00:06:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
So what other communication platforms do you use within the agency and to communicate with your clients other than Asana?
[00:06:48] Speaker A: So we have notion, so growth portals, that's something that we have taken borrowed from the Mavericks model. It's a very effective way of working.
That's essentially a, a Central library for all of our content and all of our documents to live for the customer. It's worked really well.
We have Slack and we operate primarily out of G Drive as well. So there's a number of different platforms there where the complexity of managing customers started to come into it, especially as we started to grow even further.
And old fashioned customers who just want to have stuff sent via email. Now email is just, you could just get lost in two seconds if you're not keeping track of everything really strictly even Slack is not a perfect science either.
[00:07:32] Speaker B: No, it's not. I mean I using SMS more and more these days now to tell prospects and clients to go and check their email. Yeah, yeah, right. It's crazy, but it's like. And when it happens to me, I found an email, I found an email in my notifications folder yesterday that was really important and it was a fluke that I found it like, and I wish the company would send me a text and say, hey, we just sent you a really important email that you need to sign off on. Go and check your inbox.
[00:08:06] Speaker A: Right? Yeah.
[00:08:06] Speaker B: Because text message or WhatsApp is the other one. Like we're getting verified through high level. We're now getting our WhatsApp business verification so that we can message people through WhatsApp. Because I don't know about you, but you know, I'm a parent, I've got two kids. Right. And when you have kids, all of a sudden you're in about 8,000 WhatsApp groups that you never wanted to be a part of. But WhatsApp is kind of like text messaging. You will respond to a WhatsApp message because of the nature of it and also the nature of the conversations that you have in WhatsApp and SMS are very personal versus email, which is just business. LinkedIn is business, Slack is business. So all these different platforms that, you know, give me an example of, like what was the impact of the disparate way that the information was being collected and used? Give me an example of what was falling through the cracks and how that was impacting you and your clients.
[00:09:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I think the best one to share with you is just project tracking. So we have fortnightly or monthly whips with our clients to just obviously give them a sense of where everything's at and update them on performance.
We tried for a long time to run that through Asana. And don't get me wrong, there are some customers or clients that are more than happy to be in that environment, but for a lot of them it just Wasn't working. So we had to get our customer success team to put together Google tracking sheets, as we call them, that are essentially a watered down version of what's in Asana. Now that was taking two to three hours per week for the customer success manager to accurately update the tasks in that sheet just so the customer could get a good understanding of where we're at. And don't get me wrong, like we are very good and transparent in our communication. So we're letting customers know at all times where things are asked. They can ask us questions at any point, so we're very accessible. But that still wasn't having the cut through. Especially for the people within the client's organization that needs to know the high level headlines of what's going on.
[00:10:02] Speaker B: Right, got it.
[00:10:03] Speaker A: So you multiply two to three hours a week by 50 projects. There's a lot of time going in there, right?
[00:10:09] Speaker B: 150 hours a week, five full time staff.
[00:10:12] Speaker A: Right?
[00:10:12] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:10:13] Speaker A: Exactly right.
[00:10:16] Speaker B: So AI, obviously if you're not, I mean, you know, I don't, I mean I just. It's kind of like it's happened so quickly. I don't know how I would work without AI now. It's ridiculous. Like it's you. I was talking to Thomas the other day, Thomas Amos, our Coach in the UK, he's using agent mode in ChatGPT. He just booked a flight somewhere and he said, and some accommodation and he said he just sent the agents off in ChatGPT to do it. And then he just got a notification and a link to go to the airline and make the payment. The checkout was all done for him, was all ready to go.
[00:10:51] Speaker A: Right.
[00:10:51] Speaker B: It's mind blowing how quickly it's evolving. I was thinking about this last night actually. Not only is it incredible what AI can do, right? Like we're moving so quickly and getting such deep insight. So Yesterday I built two, I built two custom GPTs yesterday and I just want to park here for a minute and just because I think it's very easy to forget what this was like two years ago, even, even six months ago. Right. To do what we're doing now. I built two custom GPTs yesterday. One to analyze sales calls and give and basically become a coach and like give insights as to what our customers are struggling with, what their challenge is, what their objections are to joining our program, what their actual problems are, who they are, do they have families, what are their desires? Build the psychographic profile. Just feed that straight back to our marketing team and our sales team. And to do the same with our client success call. So you know, every time we have a one on one call with our client, it's recorded in fathom. Just taking the transcript of that, dumping it into a custom GPT, getting an analysis so that we can understand whether clients are engaged, what their sentiment is, how they're feeling, whether they're having wins, what their challenges are and maybe what we missed, what we could have recommended that we didn't. Right. So now I can get insights within a couple of minutes, I can get really deep insights into a prospect or an existing client and then I can collate all of that and put that into another GPT and get overarching kind of brushstrokes that I can play with. I couldn't do that six months ago and in six weeks time I'll be able to do things that I can't even imagine now. Right.
So it's moving so quickly. You're obviously across this. You've been doing a lot of work with AI.
How do you wrangle the possibilities and the capabilities of AI to try and fix this problem and not make yourself, not make your own solution redundant in 3 months time?
[00:12:47] Speaker A: I think maybe the best way to answer that is that I always start with the problem that we're trying to solve first. So be really clear on the workflow or the bottleneck or whatever the issue is within the organization. I just feel like you need to be super clear on that first and understand the outcome of what good looks like. Because I think, I mean AI is exciting. I think a tendency for all of us, we've all been there, is you just jump in and start playing around, but you don't really know what you're trying to build. But if you have a very clear definition and you've spoken to your team and you understand exactly what's going on and that maybe that thinner part of the problem to solve first, that's when AI becomes so powerful and you can then pass something back to your team that they're like, oh great, this is doing exactly what I wanted it to do. So thank you.
[00:13:32] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So I want to dive into your solution in a minute. Before we get there, there's two very quick things I want to say. One, I ran a workshop this morning in the agency GPS community about documenting your automations before you automate them.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:13:44] Speaker B: Right. And it is, it is, it's like write the thing down. Like if it, if, if it's going to run automatically write down what it does. So, so everyone in the agency knows how it works. So when it breaks, I don't need to call you in Bali and go, hey, Simon, the fucking thing's broken. How do you fix it? Because you're the only one that knows how it works, right? So that second piece is everyone's, you know, having a fun time playing with Sora too now and making stupid videos of themselves, you know, in a boxing ring with Muhammad Ali and hey Jen have incorporated Sora 2 into their platform, which I don't give a shit about because guess what? It's not on our quarterly strategic plan, right? And so I think the my message is, right? And Layla Hormozi, who I don't really follow the Hormozies very much, but I did see a post of hers today in my feed that said, fuck your mood, follow the plan, right? I was like, oh, that's like, ignore the innovation and the shiny widget and just stick to the plan. And that's how again, I'm just going through this process again of saying no to everything. That does not get me closer to our quarterly objective. Right? And those things are decided in advance.
Here is the, you know, the three year plan, here's the 12 month plan, here's a quarterly objective. This is what I'm doing today to move closer to the hole in a, in a golf analogy. I know you're a big fan of golf, so I just want to give people a couple of little nuggets there. So having said all of that, what have you built and what does it do and how does it work and what's the results?
[00:15:17] Speaker A: Yeah, so I'll add one more bit before I talk about the solution. So with what we do, as I mentioned, CRM and marketing automation systems, we're not just dealing on a project capacity and in our case, Asana and it could be ClickUp or Trello, whatever you're using. As an agency, our customers are also using performance marketing channels and a large one for us is Klaviyo.
So as a customer success manager, I sort of go back to the problem that we were solving or looking to solve was it was not just a project management bottleneck or time drain on each customer, which was valuable work, but just a huge investment of time. It was also understanding how's the client actually performing from a metrics point of view. So a good CSM would not only just look at the project, they'd be looking at the performance metrics and forming a blended view, for want of a better word, that says, hey, Troy is actually performing really well. He's turning up to all these whips. He's really communicating through Asana or whatever channel he's chosen.
The health score of his account's great, so we're going to give him an 8 to 9 out of 10. There's really nothing to do here, just keep doing what you're doing.
Conversely, if we have customers that aren't communicating as regularly as we like, their campaigns or workflows, whatever it might be, aren't performing as good as they have been, or against Benchmark, then that client health score would obviously be quite low if you're a human looking at that.
So what we set out to build and have built now is a platform with multiple agents that essentially monitor Asana, monitor our clients performance marketing channels and let's use Klaviyo as a good example and provide a blended view of exactly what's happening in real time.
The agents have been trained as a task specific agent, so they are obviously Asana or Klaviyo whatever it might be and they know exactly how to look at the data and interpret the information.
[00:17:15] Speaker B: I'm using AI more and more now to write prompts and to. Because I'm not a prompt engineer.
[00:17:21] Speaker A: Right.
[00:17:22] Speaker B: How do you have the confidence that the agent that you've trained to analyze what's going on on Klaviyo is the. Is the best practice and you're getting the right insight. Right? Because this is the thing that I'm always nervous about with AI is, is it does hallucinate. How do you sleep? Easy at night, I guess going yes, the agent is trained and knows what it's doing.
[00:17:46] Speaker A: Yep, good question. So what we try to do with the agents that we train with the system instructions is essentially we're trying to replicate as close to as we can to a human that's already in our team. So not from a replacement point of view, but from an enhancement point of view.
So if I use myself as an example, you know, strategy marketing automation and email specialist is essentially what where I've come from. So my goal was to try to build me and I thought, well, if I was to put all of the knowledge I have into a bucket, where am I going to get that knowledge from?
So as part of that training, the agent, it's looking at the Klaviyo knowledge base, looking at the HubSpot knowledge base, finding all the resources that I would typically tap into if I had a question, if I didn't know the answer, and then also understanding the best ways to actually tactically implement change for my customer. So if you've if you're looking to increase signups or welcome series conversion, whatever it might be, I will have the answer to that. So I needed to train the agent to be able to have the same answers.
Once we built or trained the agent to be able to do that, we obviously tested thoroughly. So we have a lot of data that we manage with our customers. We have access to all of that through the Klaviyo or the Asana API.
And we've done a beta test within our own business for about two months now where we've been rigorously testing the platform and the agents to make sure that the responses are good.
And we're getting to the point now where they are pretty good.
And I will be very confident to almost have these agents operate independently within my business and alert the right person. So the human in the loop when there is a particular issue, because the responses or the quality of the output is so good that I know that that is the right thing that they should be looking at.
[00:19:38] Speaker B: Got it. And so the use case here is that we're, and this is where I think AI is really shining and will continue to shine, is that I think of AI as like a team of really hungry, young, intelligent, but slightly inexperienced interns who need a bit of training, who, you know, don't need a break. They work 247 and they give me the information and the context I need so that I can spend more time thinking about how to communicate with the client and help the client solve the problem. So I'm not spending my time, not spending 140 hours a week in different platforms compiling shit together into a spreadsheet. That's all done for me. The context, the insights are given to me.
I can then spend more time thinking about the application of that knowledge for my client.
[00:20:33] Speaker A: Correct? That's exactly.
[00:20:34] Speaker B: And so your CSMs are still going to be interfacing with the clients. This isn't. We're not replacing your system. Your CSMs are just going to have more time to think strategically and creatively and come up with solutions for your clients, because all of the context is going to be done for them and the insight's going to be provided for them. Right?
[00:20:51] Speaker A: Correct. Correct. And I think the analogy is around a sort of a very enthusiastic graduate is a great one because any grad still needs to report into a manager within the organization. So we call that human in the loop. So there's always that human who is overseeing what's going on, making sure that the answers are correct to your earlier question and really Vetting from a quality point of view. Yes, that's on the mark. Or maybe we need to just tweak this a little bit before we share it with the customer.
Now one thing I will say is that you did mention communication with the customer. We've actually built into the platform the ability for the agent to communicate directly with the customer as well.
So as an example, let's say we've got your WIC call tomorrow at 12 o' clock or whatever it is. We'll send you an agenda in a full email that's been generated by the agent with the priorities that we need to talk about based on what's sitting in Asana that goes to you directly without the CSM touching it.
[00:21:44] Speaker B: It's great, isn't it? It's great. I mean yesterday with the custom GPTs, I ran an analysis over one of our one on one calls that Yasi did with one of our agencies and I was just like far out there's a, like a 24 minute Zoom call and in 30 seconds I can see, you know, if she's missed anything. I can give that feedback to Yasi and Yasi can go, well, I should have suggested that. Or you know, and I can also get a sentiment analysis on how the client feels about engaging with us, you know. Yeah, within, within less than two minutes. And so that, then you, you, you know, the, the, the. I think the danger is, and I want to talk about what your plan is with this platform in a moment, but I think for most of us is that if we free up time, a lot of us aren't sure what to do with that extra time because I think we've spent since the mid-80s when the knowledge economy really started, we kind of came out of factories and that manufacturing became automated and we then put humans in front of computers and we've been there for 40 years. Really.
If we're not looking at a screen, typing on a keyboard, we're not really sure if we're being valuable.
Right. And so I think one of the challenges that we're going to have with AI is how do we divorce ourselves from the device and still feel like we're adding value to what it is we're doing. I actually think we're more valuable if we're not tethered to the device. But I think that's going to, that's a, that's it. There's a generation of humans that they're worth, has been because they've been tethered to a device. Right. And so it's like the factory worker, you take the factory worker who's been pushing the same button for 40 years out of the factory and tell him he needs to go and get another job. And he's like, well, I don't know what to do. That's all I know how to do. Right. And so I think it's a real challenge. I'm hoping that you'll see your client success team will transition out of that quickly and realize that the most valuable thing they can do is spend time thinking about creative solutions with their clients. A book that I think everyone should read is called Creativity Inc.
Written by the former president, I think it was, of Pixar.
The takeaway is creativity takes time.
So let's give the humans time to think of creative solutions and use the AI to do all the grunt work underneath, Right?
[00:24:07] Speaker A: Absolutely. And we think about training upskilling, so we're trying to fill that time, to your point, with creativity, but also with upskilling. So how do I make the CSM team in this example, or even the email specialist team even better at what they do? Because now they've got some breathing space essentially to focus on that. And that can be a challenge for any agency that are managing multiple projects and communications and all sorts of things, implementation. So yeah, that's a good point.
[00:24:36] Speaker B: Yeah. And so what's the plan with this platform? Is it something you're using internally? Are you going to spin it up as a SaaS, as an AI, as a service? What's. What's the plan?
[00:24:44] Speaker A: Yeah, the plan was obviously to road test it on ourselves first, which we've obviously done. And I think if, you know, ultimately we would like to help agencies run a more efficient business and I truly believe that tools like this can be the way to unlock that. I think one point I probably should have made earlier too is that, you know, people listening to this might think, well, Asana or ClickUp, whatever it might be, they've got a really good AI assistant. How come I need a platform like this?
What happens is you're going to be using multiple platforms within your business and there is no, there is not really an easy way to connect all this together, which is what we've done.
We have an engineering team who have actually built this solution for us. So we're not using Zapier or Nasn or anything like that. This is a more of a custom built solution which gives us a lot more flexibility and it's more robust as well.
But that's sort of where we're connecting all the Data points. And as I said, I mean, we just sort of focus on our lane. But if you're a Google Ads meta, TikTok, whatever platform you're using, you just, you can pull all that data in and get an instant overview and then start getting insights. Because the insights are the biggest things, right? Sure. There's an issue with Troy's signup form, but what does that mean? What do I do next with that piece of information?
That's what our agent in our use case will actually say. Well, there's an issue. And these are the three things that we think you should test to improve the performance of that particular problem.
[00:26:07] Speaker B: You know, I imagine some people, I mean, I'm kind of trying to figure out where to position this. Right. We use Segmetrics to pull in all the data. Segmetrics doesn't have any AI built into it yet, which is remarkable. But we're using Segmentrics are pulling data from ads, from all of our content marketing, social, high level stripe, collate all that data, find out our value per lead, you know, where our marketing effort is best spent.
Hiros is another one that people will be familiar with that. You know, apparently I've never used it, but I've heard that it's supposed to be really good at like click attribution and attributing which ads or which links are driving the revenue.
If you've got someone that comes in that's a Specialist Meta or TikTok agency, do you have agents that are trained in that platforms? How hard is it to kind of spin the platform up for that type of agency? And where do you see this sitting in terms of something like attribute IO or Hiros or Segmetrics? Is it in that kind of, is it in a similar space there?
[00:27:06] Speaker A: Maybe I'll start with that question. So I think it's more of an operational tool as the way I'm seeing at this point. I think the agents obviously will become very, very good at understanding the metrics or any data broadly that is coming into the platform. And that could be again, project infrastruct information, you know, performance metrics, which you just mentioned. But I think really where I'm seeing the, the uplift for our business is operationally where people, as I said, who are spending 100 to 150 hours of doing a particular task each week don't have to do that anymore.
It also is allowing us to be a lot more proactive. So instead of potentially receiving a call from the client to say, hey, have you seen this?
We're now seeing everything well before the client will because you know, we've got real time data and it's instantly being flagged with us. If there's any, essentially if there's any large deviation away from their benchmark or their baseline metrics, a flag goes up immediately to say, hey, we've seen something, you need to look at this and let's get in contact with the client.
[00:28:04] Speaker B: Got it.
[00:28:05] Speaker A: So yeah, so that, that hopefully that answered it. But I do see an operational layer.
[00:28:10] Speaker B: Yeah. Whereas you know, the high rise in the segment of the world are really for marketers, therefore, you know, agencies, but also for businesses who are doing digital marketing.
It's not going to give them the same insights that you're talking about and it's not going to improve the efficiency of their CSM team. And so what's the goal? What are you like, are you looking for beta users at the moment or what's the go to market strategy?
[00:28:30] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So we're already out to market and we've been presenting to agencies who have teams. They're obviously just trying to make more efficient. So that's our sort of core focus right now.
Obviously coming from a strong agency background, it's easy sort of for us to be able to talk about the experience. Cause we've lived and breathed it for seven years now, so we get the pain points.
So we're bringing our first users onto the platform.
The platform itself is whilst it's been built for flow state to begin with and now a number of agencies it is, there is a level of customization and the reason I mentioned that is that every business I speak to are using different software, have different workflows, have different people in their team. There's not a one size fits all approach here. So what we like to do is get an understanding of the workflow that they're trying to solve and then we implement the agents. So then we train and manage those agents to be able to provide the outcome that the agency wants.
[00:29:26] Speaker B: Got it. And then, and then once they're onboarded it's, it's, you know, they have access to the platform, it's kind of a self serve, they go in and they can access everything. Got it.
[00:29:35] Speaker A: Absolutely. And as can the clients that they're dealing with. So the clients that the agency are managing would have their or do have their own access which allows them to then ask the platform or the agent about their own piece of work. So what that's done on our side, it's reduced the in between whip communication or questions that we were typically getting and having to and of course happy to answer. But now the agent can answer, oh, where's this project? Or wasn't I expecting to see this piece of work tomorrow? Yeah, sure, it's on track and you will receive it tomorrow. Those type of in between WIP communications, it was also a big drainer of.
[00:30:12] Speaker B: Time and so the client can now just access that in real time, right?
[00:30:17] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:30:18] Speaker B: Curly question for you, but can the client or your CSM team log into the platform and chat with the agents to ask questions and get answers?
[00:30:27] Speaker A: Yes, so you can. It's prompt based so like any LLM that we're experienced with now, we will use them and it's also scheduled. So as I mentioned earlier, the agent knows what baseline looks like and if there's any deviation from that, instead of a prompt to find out if there's a problem, the agent would surface the problem instantly and it could be a project issue. For example, we have a deadline for tomorrow and we haven't heard from the customer. We need to flag this. Or it could be performance issue that we haven't seen yet and that we need to be alerted to so we can go and solve that problem.
[00:30:59] Speaker B: Got it, mate. It's a super exciting time to be alive and I'm very excited to see how this rolls out. I'm looking forward. I had a bit of a demo of the platform the other day. I'm looking forward to seeing it evolve and seeing more of it. What are you most excited about over the next 30 days? We're, you know, almost. What are we, halfway through October now? It's just crazy, isn't it? Look, I reckon there's 30 days left of business in Melbourne in Australia, right, because there's a Melbourne cup and then everyone's pissed until Christmas, right? And then hungover in January pretty much.
[00:31:27] Speaker A: Look, we're, we're doing a lot of, we're doing an active roadshow at the moment. So as I said, we're presenting to a lot of agencies. We're just trying to get, gather as much feedback and interest in what we're doing.
I think where we're starting to get some cut through too is that I think agencies know that they need to be doing something but they haven't quite worked out what that is with technology and AI. So we're able to come in and actually give them some direction even before we talk technology so we can help them understand what that roadmap looks like. And then we introduce sort of how we do what we do and then there seems to be some really good alignment there. So, yeah, to answer your question, I'd love to speak to as many agency owners as possible and operations managers, et cetera, and just get a steer on sort of what they're dealing with internally and how we can help solve that for them.
[00:32:16] Speaker B: Great.
What's the best way for people to get in touch with you and inquire?
[00:32:20] Speaker A: Yeah, best way is just to email me directly. So it's simonlow State Agency. That's obviously my direct email. Just get in contact with me and happy to set up a demo.
[00:32:30] Speaker B: You're going to be busy, man. I don't envy your inbox. Simonlow State Agency. I hope you've got some AI running in your inbox, mate, to filter.
Do you?
[00:32:39] Speaker A: Yeah, I do.
[00:32:40] Speaker B: Right. What are you using in your inbox?
[00:32:43] Speaker A: I use. For my mail client, I use Superhuman. I find that's the best inbox experience I've had.
[00:32:47] Speaker B: I tried that. I tried that a while ago and it just.
I don't know. I tried it.
I use Spark and is any of the AI shit in it at all? Right, what I'm looking. I want an AI to go through my inbox and just tell me what's relevant and piff the rest.
[00:33:02] Speaker A: Yep. Yeah, well, that's essentially what. Yeah, it does. Or what we've got internally, so.
[00:33:07] Speaker B: Okay. Superhuman.
[00:33:08] Speaker A: Yeah, Superhuman.
[00:33:09] Speaker B: I might have to revisit it. I'm going to Met. It's probably six months before since I use it, so I imagine it's evolved since then, you know.
[00:33:14] Speaker A: Yeah, it's fantastic. So, yeah, I know a lot of.
[00:33:17] Speaker B: Our mavericks use it. I'll have to revisit it. All right, Simon at Flowstate Agency, thank you so much for joining us for the second time on the Agency Hour podcast and look forward to having you back again in the future sometime.
[00:33:27] Speaker A: Thanks, Troy. Thanks for having me.
[00:33:31] Speaker B: Thanks for tuning in to the AgencyHour podcast. We really appreciate you. Please share this with someone you think may enjoy it and may benefit from it. And if you are an agency owner and you want to put your prospecting on autopilot, if you would like to add 20 to 30 targeted prospects into your CRM or your pipeline every single day on autopilot, then click the link near this episode and jump on a call and have a chat with our team about Hawkeye, it's our new AI prospecting tool that we've launched. We're giving away 20 free leads to any agency owner who schedules a call. So click the link near this episode and book a call with us. And please, like share, subscribe and all the usual platforms so that we can get this podcast into the ears and eyes of more agency owners. All right, I hope you're enjoying this as much as we are. I'm Troy Dean, and remember, animals that lay eggs don't have belly buttons.
