Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You might have a great support team and you love human support, but there are times when a customer doesn't even want to talk with a human. So if you have a question, they don't care if it's an agent telling you or if it's a help center or a bot. They just want their issue solved.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Welcome to the agency Hour podcast, where we help web design and digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, their teams, and their communities. This week, we're joined by Corey Brown, founder and CEO of Simplesat IO. Simplesat specialize in creating surveys and dashboards that allow you to not only analyze, but understand your customer feedback. In this episode, we explore the cadence of when to run particular surveys, like CSAT or NP's customer effort scores, how to create surveys your customers will love, how to increase survey response rates, leveraging feedback for maximum outcome, and much more. Who knew gathering customer feedback could be so much fun? So if you're struggling to decipher your analytics and you want to dive deeper for insights, or you want to craft custom reports to find specific answers, then this episode is for you. I'm Troy Dean. Stay with us.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Corey Brown to the agency hour podcast. Hey, Corey, how are you?
[00:01:15] Speaker A: Good. How are you doing, Troy?
[00:01:16] Speaker B: I'm very well, thank you. Thanks for joining us here on the agency hour podcast.
Those who are listening to this probably won't know who you are, so just give us the too long, didn't read version. Who are you and what are you doing? What are you doing here on the agency hour podcast?
[00:01:30] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. So my name is Corey and I am the founder and CEO at Simplesat. Simple Sat is a customer feedback management platform which helps businesses collect and measure and improve from customer feedback.
Before Simplesat, I co founded Pronto marketing with my dad. And here in Bangkok, Thailand, which is now one of my college friends, Tim, is running the company. Tim Kelsey, who's a maverick.
So, yeah, so after, basically I was doing pronto for quite some time and managing our project managers. This project is an agency doing website management and online marketing.
But we were using Zendesk. Wasn't happy with the CSAT options or the survey options that Zendesk had to offer. This was like ten years ago. So use some tools that were available. Nothing was that good. There was too much spam. We didn't like Zendesk's binary scale.
So that's just when it got in my head that there could be something better. Because we're collecting feedback through Zendesk, where our CSAT score was consistently like 98 or 99 or 100%. But we knew that we were far from perfect, so how could we?
And more stuff just getting in my head. How can we design a survey that could have us get a lower score so we could actually improve our service?
How do we increase response rates? So anyways, that's kind of the genesis of the idea at pronto. And then maybe about five years later, we decided to bite the bullet and start a SaaS company kind of within pronto.
That was about seven years ago. So pronto's kind of been our big sister or mom or whatever, but, yeah, got it.
[00:03:23] Speaker B: I hadn't connected the dots before you came on, but Tim's told me a lot about you and your dad, and now I realize who he's talking about. And I had a question before we dive into a simple set. How was it hiring? So Tim is now a coach at Mavericks club. He went through our program and he's now a coach here. How was it kind of relinquishing control of an agency that you'd started with your dad and having someone else come in as a general manager? I think it's a really interesting conversation point. What did you have to kind of get there? Where did you have to arrive in your head so that you could make that transition?
[00:04:03] Speaker A: Yeah, good question.
I guess, like, over time, I moved around a lot. I wore a lot of hats. At pronto, I was our managing support and production teams. I moved to R and D. I moved to be head of marketing and then finally moved to be managing R and D again. But kind of towards the end, I was like kind of relinquishing control, which is a good and a bad thing, where. Because I was kind of first time manager, doing a lot of this as well. But I realized when I was just managing our R and D team, just a team of like twelve developers, like, well, I have kind of no control in the company anymore. Not control over pricing, over marketing, over the website quality or sort of thing. So it was kind of like sad and scary. But at the same time, watching pronto continuing to grow and thrive without me being so involved was really great. And Tim was kind of gradually taking control more and more.
And I was just getting more and more passionate about simple Sat and the SAS project that we were doing. So I think it was pretty, I was like, it was a natural thing. It kind of happened over time and Tim was just doing a better job than I ever could have done at all those management things. So, yeah, I guess reflecting back, I think it all went pretty well, and we're all happy with it.
[00:05:21] Speaker B: And there are a few players in the.
How long have you been running simple set and what was the competition like at that point? Because I admit I've been super frustrated with the.
I think I was using SurveyMonkey at one point to do an NP's because it was the only platform that allowed me to do an NP's then to do all the calculations in the back end to actually give me a score out of the minus hundred plus hundred scale. What was the competitive landscape like when you started simple set and what gave you the conviction that you can fill a gap in the market?
[00:05:58] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. So not as much competition as there was now, obviously, probably as is the case with most type of things like this. But the thing that gave me the conviction or like the big idea, because we had this idea for like a. A better survey tool, but it was like, what is that exactly? And have you heard of office five? It's an employee satisfaction tool. No, it's really good. So pronto is using that. Maybe pronto still uses it. We've kind of used it off and on, but it's surveys and all the analytics, but only for employee feedback and stuff. And their surveys were very fun and engaging. Like borderline, just cute, kind of animated a little bit. And I remember seeing that survey and that was like kind of the aha. Moment of, oh, like, we can have fun with this. You know, it's a. It doesn't, you know, if you think about even like type form or something, their design's really beautiful and stuff, but no one's really having fun. So that was kind of the idea. We can have fun. We can have. So, like, at simple set, we have these rating icons. We have like bouncing thumbs and these smiling cats and stuff. And try all of our surveys. We were inspired by Tinder, actually. Like that. Would you answer a question like, the cards swipe over to the next one? So, like, what? It's, oh, okay. We could make something that's almost like a game or almost like, you know, fun and entertaining that can actually improve a business's images. Like, this is our, you know, you're asking a customer to answer a survey, but it's also like, here's how cool we are, here's how buttoned up, and here's how good our brand looks. So that that was definitely at the start and, like, the kernel idea.
[00:07:39] Speaker B: Love it. Apart from agencies, which we'll talk about in a moment, who's the ideal client profile for simple set?
And were you clear about that when you started simpleset?
[00:07:50] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. So customer number one was pronto. So that was great to have. Did you be in pronto was in the same building and using Zendesk and immediately get feedback. We could just launch it in Zendesk and get feedback there.
But then shortly after the target we knew was going to be managed service providers, it consultants, which is prontos main ideal customer. So that was a very natural customer base to market to because pronto already had hundreds of MSP's.
Naturally just simple sat had prontos endorsement because I had control of their campaign monitor account or whatever, I could send emails.
So yeah, so that was, yeah, MSP's and MSP's were very good. Natural first customers. They all have help desks. Simple set works best for any company that uses any type of help desk to communicate with customers because you could close a ticket and then you can rate the ticket.
But now we're just, we're kind of following the market now and naturally getting sucked up market a little bit and getting more focusing towards SaaS and e commerce customers. But we still have managed support and we still have marketing agencies and creative agencies as well on board. So it's basically any type of cs or support team that communicates with customers through a help desk and a technical company.
[00:09:16] Speaker B: Do you do things, is it just customer satisfaction or do you do like NP's, employee NP's, that kind of stuff as well?
[00:09:24] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So we do like the bucket group that we're in. It's called customer feedback management.
Anything about customer feedback. So that includes CSAT as we were just talking about. NP's CES is the customer effort score. It could be five star.
Any way to get feedback from customers? We do have some of our customers using simple sat for employee feedback, but we actually, one thing we do with our product is we try to get as much information about the customer as possible, which is great because you want to know who left the feedback and who to respond to. But that's actually not so great for employee feedback because a lot of the times you want it to be anonymous.
So people are kind of hacking simple stat for employee feedback, but we still show the IP address who left it or something like that. So you could figure out who did it. So maybe we'll go into there someday. But yeah, for now just customer feedback.
[00:10:22] Speaker B: Sure. Just for those who are uninitiated, and I wasn't familiar with it, but what's a customer effort score?
[00:10:30] Speaker A: So the customer effort score asks the question, some variation of how easy was it for you to solve your problem? Because, and it's on a scale of one to seven, there's CES 1.0, CES 2.0. Now it's 2.0 is on one to seven. And the idea there is that if you do ask CSAT customer satisfaction, it's generally how was your experience? How did your agent do? So there, the customer is going to be rating basically the agent's performance.
So you might just get a good score if they're courteous or friendly. But maybe there's a different problem. NP's, which maybe we could talk about in a second, is more about customer loyalty and how likely you're to recommend. But customer effort, some researchers have found that that is actually like one of the greatest measures of, of like customer satisfaction or loyalty in the long run is just how much friction can you reduce. And it's not even about like, you might have a great support team and you love human support, but there are times when a customer doesn't even want to talk with a human. They just want their issues solved, you know, so if you have a question and, you know, they don't care if it's a customer or, sorry, if it's an agent telling you or if it's a help center or a bot, if it was easy to get your question solved, then that's going to help your perception of the company as well. Does that make sense?
[00:11:53] Speaker B: Yeah, it does. And I'd love to talk about the cadence of these things and the typical response rates. So one of the things that we teach our agencies is to run NP's CSAT. We have playbooks and templates for employee NP's. We run a start stop keep survey with our teams. So we're big on getting feedback from our teams and from our clients. I'd love to know the cadence of when do you run a customer satisfaction survey?
When do you run a customer effort survey? When do you run an NP's? And I know this is a big question, but. And what are the typical response rates of that we should be expecting from these and how do we increase those response rates?
[00:12:48] Speaker A: Okay, great question. So I would, let's say like if you were to be layering on these things, I think first I would start with CSAT just because it's the easiest to get going. And with Csat you're like with simple sat. The best way to do this, what we recommend is to embed a simple SaT survey in the existing email that is sent out when a ticket is closed. Or solved. So if you're using Zendesk or fresh desk or HubSpot or whatever, when you close the ticket that email is already being sent. It says hey Troy, we've completed the request by the way, please rate us. And then the survey is right there. It's called a one click survey because the rating icons are in the email. So if you click it it'll automatically save the rating without clicking submit or anything.
And that you could launch that in ten minutes. And then now you have coverage over your help desk and now you can see every ticket big or small. The customer has an issue to raise their hand and say that there's a problem here and so that really helps. They're not going to be issues boiling or festering over time and it's a chance to, what's it called? Stop the production line to pull the flag, raise the flag or something.
So recommend that for CSAT then would be NP's. That's the big two that you could be doing because CSAT is going to give you coverage and peace of mind that your customers can rate any ticket and then you have visibility over that. But not all of your customers are active in your help desk, especially some of the business owners or the decision makers. So that's why NP's is great because you can send an email, you don't have to interact with the help desk, you could have it be more of a recurring thing. So you could send it quarterly or twice a year or yearly and that's done over email and then ces might be less and it's not going to be applicable for all businesses and probably less even for agency owners. It could be more for self serve SaaS or e commerce companies.
So this is going to be something when it could have been more of a self service thing, not after a service interaction or you wouldnt send CES quarterly or something. It could be after you read a help desk article or something or went through a chatbot or something like that. So thats getting more technical or tactical. But the two big I would recommend would be CSAT and NP's. As for response rates, I think its pretty similar to what you see with email marketing. Somewhere between five and 40% depending. It could really vary depending on basically the smaller the company is and the better relationship you have with your customers the higher it's going to be generally. So we've seen 5% with way bigger SaaS customers that we have that have tens of thousands of customers that people aren't going to be as gauged engaged.
[00:15:50] Speaker B: Got it. Sorry, I might have missed the frequency of an NP's. So I get customer CSAT is like when the ticket's closed, you know, NP's, how often do we run them?
[00:16:01] Speaker A: Yeah. So I think it could be anywhere from quarterly to yearly. And it's just. You just.
I would recommend starting quarterly and then you can tweak it just based on the responses that you're getting. So maybe at first, like the first two quarters, you'll get a lot of responses and you might start to see drop offs because customers, you know, quarter. Quarter can be a long time. It can also be a short time, but it can also feel like a long time or short.
But if people. It's hard, but people. Customers just might say, I already answered this three months ago.
My opinion hasn't changed. So just play with the frequency based on how many responses you're getting.
[00:16:42] Speaker B: Got it. And NP's, is that also delivered via email or how else is it delivered?
[00:16:51] Speaker A: Yeah, so, yeah, so email or in app are the two most popular cases. And so simple set. We have different delivery methods. You could send through email or embed in the app at the moment or direct link, you could do QR code, but for agency owners I'd recommend email, but yeah, but more for a SaaS or an e commerce company, we have a delivery method where I'm sure you've seen this before, like similar to the chat apps or something. We can have it pop up once you log into the app and that's great to increase engagement as well or get people that might not be reading their emails.
[00:17:29] Speaker B: I've spoken to some agency owners who, and I understand and I think I know the answer to this question anyway, but I'm going to ask it for the benefit of people who aren't inside my brain. Um, the agent centers who want to incentivize people for giving feedback. Right. So it's not, hey, you know, we'll give you an Amazon voucher if you give us a ten out of ten. It's like, we'll give you, you know, you go into the draw to win an Amazon voucher if you just fill in the survey because we want feedback. Is there any.
What are the problems or the pitfalls with doing that? Or is it a good idea?
[00:18:01] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. So, well, I know that offering like Amazon gift cards for leaving like g two or Google reviews works and I fully support that. That's a great campaign.
I've seen it less for like answering the survey and that might actually be a bad thing if you're offering so much money because then you're kind of like guilting them into giving a good score.
The most effective incentive campaign I've seen actually is donating money saying like we're gonna. For every rating you give, we give $1 to this foundation or something like that. That works real especially good for smaller businesses that are local in the community and their customers are all local.
So that's the one I would recommend. It's like way less than. You don't have to do $25 per rating or something. It could just be a dollar, $0.50. But you just say every time you're giving us feedback, you're supporting this food, shelter or something like that.
[00:18:55] Speaker B: That's great. That's good. I like it. I like it.
What happens?
This is probably outside the scope of what you guys do, but you must have seen inside lots of businesses and agencies who are using these. What I've always thought it's frustrating getting data and then not knowing what to do with it. So how does a, how does a. I'll talk about agencies in a moment, but how does a business owner get data from customer satisfaction survey and then what are they typically then doing?
Are most people taking action based on the data they're receiving or is it just a pretty dashboard that makes the c level suite feel good about themselves?
[00:19:36] Speaker A: Yeah. So, yeah, so in like in simple set, there's, or I guess any feedback reporting, there's, I think one way to look at it is high level and like really zoomed in. So like at a high level, like you're saying executive C suite, we have dashboards and you could view your 90 day rolling average for CSAT and NP's. And what's important there isn't necessarily like the exact score, but it's, it's the trend, you know, with anything, let's say tracking marketing stats or anything.
So that's, you know, it's just, it's a number that you, that you need to be tracking and then once you have the number, you can start improving on that. So whatever your NP's is today, there are things that you can do to improve it. So just, and again, just like, let's say revenue or leads, if you want to improve it, then you get with your leadership team, you have a hypothesis and brainstorm some ideas, do a campaign and see if it moved the needle. So that's kind of like a high level. You want you, you need this score. Once you have a score, you know, if you're positively impacting it or nothing. Like, that's why in the beginning, our pronto CSAT score was 99. There's nothing to improve. So I wanted it to be 90 or 80 or something.
[00:20:44] Speaker B: Because you can. Because I've done this in the past. Because you can get in the system, right? You can. In fact, in fact, there's a tactic. I noticed you suggest this as well, which is slightly different. But if someone gives you a five star review, you then redirect them to a Google review or Facebook review page and say, hey, that would be great. Can you share this on social? We're not gaming the system there, but we're optimizing the experience and we're leveraging that feedback for maximum benefit. But you can. We've. In the past, I know that we have kind of gamed our NP's by sending people an NP's when we know they are most in love with us. And simple as you know, they share some feedback that they've had a big win. We tag them in our CRM, it sends them an NP's.
You know, we just flick it to them in slack and they love us. Right. And so that's a. It's a cheat. It's not. It's not. It's not. I mean, I wouldn't say it's 100% accurate. It looks good on the surface, but we're only asking people at the. We're asking all customers, but we're asking them when they love us the most.
So it's a. It's a skewed. We don't do this anymore, by the way. We used to.
We used to because it felt good and. And also because we were. Also. The reason we did it is because we knew that they were highly engaged at that point and they were likely to give us feedback. We didn't say, hey, based on your win, can you tell us how likely you are to recommend us? We just send them the standard NP's question, which I'm happy to unpack in a minute for those who aren't aware of it. But we would send it at a time in the relationship where we knew they were most likely going to give us a great score.
[00:22:27] Speaker A: Yeah. So I guess, like what I would recommend there is.
And it's simple set. You can. You could do like one off, you could just do batches like send all at the same time. But we also have a feature where you could spread it out over time. So based on the lists, the audience size, it'll spread it out over three months or six months or whatever you do. And it's essentially random. So that way you hit the happy people, but they also might be hit people are in a bad mood as well. But you really want that negative feedback. You got to lean into it because you can share these scores with the public, with other agency owners, but you want bad feedback internally because that's how you're going to improve the next part. There's your high level dashboards, but zoomed in.
I think really maybe where the magic happens is all this real time feedback that you're getting. You can integrate simple set with Slack or Microsoft Teams and we have email notifications.
Whenever you get a response it instantly is sent to a Slack channel and then the team can look at it and celebrate a win or close the loop with an issue.
Also we integrate with all the systems that you could add a survey in so it can create a new Zendesk ticket that's ready for your team just to follow up. Or as simple as that, we use intercom. It creates a new intercom conversation. So it's just in our support agents workflow. Just like getting a new ticket for questions or people needing support, a new ticket is created to follow up with this customer about a negative or a positive comment that they had.
That is a big part of improving either your CSAT or your NP's score is just listening to customers and acknowledging mistakes, recording the feature requests and fixing the mistakes. That's a great way just to improve your score too.
[00:24:18] Speaker B: Yeah, got it. Now for those who are uninitiated, what is the net promoter score and what are the mechanics? How does it work and how is the calculation made?
[00:24:30] Speaker A: So the net promoter score was invented by Bain company, the consulting firm. And there's a whole book like the ultimate question. So it's this, it's this like official thing. It's like kind of too official. Like we have to pay a license to even use simple set.
Sorry. Simple set is to pay a license to use NP's.
But it is on a zero to ten scale. And the question is how likely are you to recommend us to a, to a friend or colleague or some very close variation of that? And zero to six are detractors. Those are people that are actively saying bad things about your business. At least that's the theory.
Six and eight are passives. These are people not say good or bad things about you. And nine and ten are your promoters. And these are people actively saying good things about your business. And the calculation, you take the percentage of promoters and then you subtract by the percentage of detractors and then you get your score and it's on a score from negative 100 to 100.
[00:25:37] Speaker B: Do you know the average NP's for an agency?
[00:25:42] Speaker A: For example, for an agency, I think it's a little bit higher.
Maybe like 30 to 50, I'd say. I don't have those benchmarks up here. But basically the benchmarks range from zero would be.
It's actually industry average. Zero is like cable companies or something. You know, everyone hates, hates their cable companies.
And then like the highest are SaaS or very like relationship, really relationship based companies as well. So yeah, so I'd say with agencies, somewhere between like 30 to 50 or something would be an average. But I'm sure some of you guys are way higher and that's amazing.
[00:26:23] Speaker B: And so just to segue into agencies, how can agencies use simple sat? And we understand how they can use it for their own team. How can agencies use this and kind of add simple sat into their service offering?
[00:26:39] Speaker A: Yeah, okay, great question. Well, we have a reseller program.
So like how would you add it to your service offering?
[00:26:47] Speaker B: So for example, if you were, you know, if you were, I just had a call this morning with one of our agencies who's a Shopify agency. They're essentially, you know, CRO email marketing ad management for Shopify store owners. And so I imagine that simple sat might be something that they could recommend or add into their offering to give them data so that they know what to improve for their clients.
[00:27:22] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, definitely. So, yeah, so we have a referral and a reseller program. So the reseller, you could actually own the billing relationship and we bill you. We don't have a white label system so the customers would still be dealing with simple Sat and everything. But yeah, it could be great because we have a great support team, but we're remote. We're in Thailand and Philippines. So if some businesses might want more of a personal or human touch there. So we could work with whatever agency to help set things up or write the intro outro email copy to the NP's survey or anything else that they need help with.
[00:27:58] Speaker B: Who typically are the resellers and the referral partners? Are they. Are they coaches? Are they business coaches? Are they.
I imagine the fractional CMO guys at growth connect are going to be suggesting this.
[00:28:11] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, yeah, so some agencies, basically any type of agency or consultant from marketing consultant, IT technology consultant. There's also like CX or CS customer service coaches and consultants as well.
We have software resellers, Zendesk and Salesforce resellers that I guess theyre resellers but also value add consultants as well that help you set up your Zendesk or HubSpot instance and everything. So thats a natural good partner as well.
[00:28:46] Speaker B: Got it, got it.
Im just stalking your website here at the moment in terms of how have you grown I can see you're doing a fair bit with content these days but in the early days how did you get simple sat into?
I know there are people listening to this that are either in agency moving to software or are just in software. How did you get your 1st 20 or 30 customers?
How did you hack your way to relevance as they say?
[00:29:13] Speaker A: Yeah well it was really like I said I hijacked prontos email list and because Pronto had over 1000 customers and so I had a thousand companies to email and say hey new from pronto uh now we got this thing so that, that I mean that was it, that was how we, how we kick started it. Um and I think it's actually natural for, it's a natural progression for agency owners to go into the SaaS business because um you know simple sat is bootstrapped. Um you know so with an agency you, you know it's like a ton of work but I, you build up this revenue and then you can fund something else and then you have a customer base as well and you have like as an agency you have kind of closer more personal relationships with customers that you know like I was, I built websites for a lot of the customers years earlier so they knew me and trusted me. So yeah that was a great launching pad just to hijack Prontos list.
[00:30:09] Speaker B: Got it. And what are you doing? What does the marketing strategy for Simplestat look like these days? Is pronto marketing in charge of the marketing for simplest?
[00:30:18] Speaker A: No it was, it was too awkward to like like be kind of still an owner of the company and then asking people to help with it. It's like you kind of want with an agency you kind of want someone to yell at you know things go wrong you can't yell at my team.
But yeah the, the main source of leads now is still organic word of mouth and mainly from marketplaces because simple set works best as an add on. If we're an add on to either a help desk like Zendesk or Freshdesk or CRM Pipedrive, HubSpot Salesforce or something we want to integrate and link with the tickets. And also when feedback comes in we can update the contact and HubSpot like update a custom field like latest NP's score, latest CSAT score or something. So we're in all of those marketplaces.
So win prospect, someone's using HubSpot and they just go, I need, you know, I want to integrate NP's with HubSpot. They google that or they go to the marketplace and we're there. So that's, that's still number one for us.
[00:31:20] Speaker B: Got it, got it, got it.
I need to talk about AI because I'm firmly of the belief that I don't know how long it's going to take, but I'm very excited about spatial computing and AI and I'm really looking forward to not having a bloody screen in front of me and wearing smart glasses and being hands free. How do you think, how do you, how, first of all, how are you guys seeing AI's impacting your space and what's your take on. I know this is completely off topic, but what's your take on how things are going to roll out over the next three to five years?
[00:31:54] Speaker A: Yeah, so we're actually doing our, we did one AI feature last year, was basically you could just type in a prompt and we suggest five questions based on that prompts. You could say, give me a in flight survey and it'll give you five things about in flight survey or something like that. But we're working on a bigger AI feature at the moment, which we're actually going to release this or next week, which is about topic analysis. So every time you submit feedback now we're integrating with OpenAI GPT models and it'll read the feedback and associate a topic with it and a sentiment for that topic. We have a predefined list of topics, so it could be positive timeliness if they responded quickly, but negative resolution because the problem still exists or something. So for a business like simple Sat, AI is really valuable because there's so much data, just like you were saying earlier, how do you actually make sense of all this data? If you have, it's great to have a bunch of feedback, but how do you use it? So that's where we really want to start using AI. Wherever you could have these common themes bubble up to the surface. We've all been training, we've been training the models over the past month or something like reading a bunch of customer feedback. And it's crazy. Some businesses, their number one complaint is for e commerce companies is about delivery timeliness or delivery tracking.
Maybe wouldn't have thought about that. Or we have a crypto company who people are complaining about account verification.
They take a picture of their id and it's not working and they're really frustrated that they can't get started. So AI can help, I think, uncover those themes and just present it and package it for you in a very simple way. Like here is your bright spot and here is your problem areas and here's what you need to improve. So we see a lot of potential there with AI basically making sense of a ton of data and packaging it in a useful way.
[00:33:56] Speaker B: Do you think there's going to be a lot of jobs replaced in customer support by AI?
[00:34:02] Speaker A: There might be. I mean, I guess you need to maybe like in any role with AI, I think you need to think that it's not like AI is going to replace your job. The things that's going to replace your job are people who know how to use AI and you're still. I don't. It just. You're going to have to have a humanity touch and support. Like some good examples are dealing with exceptions or something where if you have a bot that's going to follow your rules. Exactly. So what if there's no refunds after 30 days and it's on the 31st day and you have a good excuse and for stuff like that, you need a human to help with that. I'm not really technologist or a visionary with that sort of thing, but I just, I think that it's not going to replace 100%. It's just going to be a tool like computers and Internet and all these applications we use now. So you just got to know how to use the tool.
[00:35:00] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. I am very impressed with. We're using a tool called Close Bot here, which is designed to basically send messages to your database and get them booked in for a demo.
I'm very impressed with their support. I log into their interface as a customer, they're a SaaS product. I log in as a customer, I go to the support chat, which down the bottom I ask a question and they've built an AI bot that actually goes through all of their support docs, which are very well documented and very comprehensive. And I haven't had to talk to someone yet because any, I mean, they are constantly updating their support docs and they also run weekly videos which are all then transcribed and turned into support docs, I imagine with AI, but I haven't had to speak to one of their support team yet. I know they do have a support team because I'm in their Facebook group and we have this conversation, but I haven't had to talk to their support team yet because their AI bot is really good at collating the information in multiple support articles and giving me the answer I need, but from multiple sources within their support, which is a fantastic experience because now, no, I'm not spending ten minutes trawling through the support docs and going back and trying to find the answer buried in paragraph 18 of support doc eight. Right. The bot just gives me the answer. A human being can't do that with that kind of efficiency. So it's not replacing someone, it's actually giving me a better experience that otherwise wouldn't be available. Like as I said, a human being just couldn't do that in that time. Right?
[00:36:42] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Totally agree. And that's, and that's, that's the customer effort score right there. You could, you can see that. So that's a good use case for it where you know there's nothing to rate on on like an agent's performance for what you're doing. But it was, how easy was it to solve your problem if you give it a seven out of seven? So yeah, yeah, love it.
[00:37:02] Speaker B: What are you most excited about over the next 90 days with simple set? What's, what's on, what's in the pipeline that you're really excited about?
[00:37:09] Speaker A: So releasing this topics release. Really excited about this. It was more effort than we thought it was going to be and we just want to launch it now and just start getting feedback and we have a way to log every change people make with adding a topic or removing it if we got it wrong to keep improving the model.
That's exciting.
Actually. The next feature release we're going to do is pretty boring. It's going to be about user permissions, blocking and tackling. You got to do that. But after that, more dashboards, more reporting. That'll be the next sexy thing that we do. We want to have a Kanban board where feedback comes in and then you could sort it in status columns so then you could see incoming or needs to be responded to the customer, things like that. That'll be coming up later this year.
[00:37:57] Speaker B: Love it, love it, love it, love it.
Where can people reach out and how can they get involved and how do they get started? With simple set?
[00:38:05] Speaker A: Sure. So just go to our website, simplestat IO or just google us. You'd find us. You can chat with us live on our website or in the app. You can do a free trial and also schedule a demo. We're happy to give you as many demos as it takes. We have a really great support team and inbound sales team. Yeah. So go to our website and check us out and send us a message. That's the next step.
[00:38:27] Speaker B: One question before you go. You partner with, you've got these great webinars and interviews with a whole bunch of people.
I'm looking at super metrics. I'm looking at upfront, I'm looking at HubSpot. What's your strategy for reaching out to these? Because partnerships are hard work. Yes. I think you need very clear goals when you go into a partnership and very tight parameters so that you have to make it really easy for people to say yes. What's your strategy for getting some of these big names on your interviews and helping grow that way?
[00:38:57] Speaker A: Yeah, well, it's our head of growth strategy. He's doing a good job on this. But I guess maybe in a nutshell, you got to start small because some of these bigger companies, like supermetrics, what they say is, we say, do you want to do a webinar? And they say, well, what have you done before? How many people have attended the webinars before? Or let me see a few more that you do and, well, decide. So you got to start small, maybe even too small. Something that feels too small. Like, why am I dealing with this one person company or something? But you got to start somewhere and you got to build. And then, like you're saying, so you're on our website now, and you're kind of impressed with some of the bigger ones. It's just because we started very small and got in there. Supermetrics is actually a customer of ours, so that just worked out. I know, because we already had a relationship there, and some are like, more integration partners, but, yeah. Okay, so starting small, and I guess the second one would be being a value add. So we do all the work. We design the slides, whether it's our webinar or their webinar. We'll say we'll do the deck. We'll design the deck after the webinar is done. If there's a lot of good content, we try to turn that into an ebook that we give them and we can use as well. And that's all just free. So that helps kind of, I guess, get your foot in the door as well to just be a value add and start small and just build on that, try to get bigger each time.
[00:40:22] Speaker B: Love it. Awesome. Hey, this has been super helpful. I'm glad we connected. I'm glad I know now who Corey is. When I hear Tim talk about Cory, I'll be able to put a face tonight. Thanks for hanging out with us and yeah, we'll look forward to keeping the conversation going and all the best with with simple sat.
[00:40:38] Speaker A: Yeah, well thank you very much Troy. This has been great.
[00:40:41] Speaker B: Hey thanks for listening to the agency hour podcast and a massive thank you to Corey for joining us Mavcon our next live event is happening in San Diego in October and you don't have to already be in Mavericks club to attend, but it will sell out. So if you'd like to get a taste of what it's like to work with us to help you grow your agency and you want to tap into the amazing community of mentors and other agency owners, then check out the link in the description and book your ticket to Mavcon today. Alright folks, remember to subscribe and please share this with anyone who you think may need to hear it. I'm Troy Dean and remember, Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.
