AI Customer Service Done Right

Introduction

0:05 Go and look at your website. Is your phone number easy to find? Or is it buried under seven menus? Someone took the trouble to get there. My guest today says don't make them go on a scavenger hunt. Notice this isn't a technology problem. It's a listening problem. And that's his whole argument. Fax machines, dial-up, social, now AI. The tools keep changing. What people want hasn't moved an inch. To be heard and to know what happens next. So fix the process first. Because if you throw

0:34 AI at a broken one, all you've built is a faster way to deliver the wrong answer.

Meet David Levine

0:40 My guest today is David Levine. David is the founder of I Am Your Virtual Professional and best-selling author of Old-School Service, New-School Tools. Drawing experience in IT, project management, and almost two decades running a retail business, he helps small businesses get found and keep customers coming back. His guiding belief, technology changes, human nature doesn't. He's just a man of his word. He shares practical ways to use AI and automation while keeping customer relationships personal.

1:10 Welcome, David. So great to have you today. Thank you for having me, Shaun. It's a pleasure to be here with you today as well. So you've obviously got a wealth of experience. And one question I would love to ask you actually is what sort of some of the stories, some of the things that have come up in terms of that example of how you have that focus in terms of how you approach technology? So as you've been talking about, I've been talking about how you've been talking about

1:36 as you could see, I don't have a lot of hair and the hair I have is grey.

From fax machines to AI

1:40 I've been in the game for a while. And, you know, when I took one of my first jobs in the real world way back many, many years ago, we're using fax machines. And, you know, we went from fax machines to email. And if you think about email, I think you look probably about my age or a little younger, but you probably still remember the dial-up modems and that terrible crunching.

2:06 So we went from a fax machine making a weird noise to an email making a weird noise. And then, you know, we went to, you know, faster email. We went to different types of Instagram, Facebook, obviously first and Instagram. And then there's, you know, Yelp. And now there's Google reviews and there's all the different LLMs, the AI models of ChatGPT

2:33 Perplexity, you know, co-pilot.

What hasn't changed: people want to be heard

2:36 Technology keeps changing. And I think the one thing that hasn't changed is customers still want to feel heard. They want to be listened to and they want to be valued. And I think that's important because it doesn't matter whether you're faxing something into somebody or you're emailing it. What matters is the person that's sending it or reaching out, they want to be acknowledged that you received it, number one. And they also want to understand what the next step is.

3:06 And that's really, so the technology is changing. And I promise you 10 to 15 years from now, where we think AI is the most incredible thing in the world, there'll be something faster and better than AI. But the point is, you and I are still going to want, and your listeners are going to want, when they reach out to a business, whether it's a brick and mortar, whether it's an online company, they're going to want to feel heard. They're going to feel valued.

3:31 And they're going to want to feel that when they reach out to somebody, they're at, understand what the what the end result is and how they're going to be responded to and what the

The Zurich Insurance story

3:43 time frame is absolutely it reminds me of a story i heard recently about Zurich Insurance where all of their front ends you know yeah you couldn't get to them without going through a bot of some form informs the customer service and they were getting so many complaints about this they ended up working with an organisation and flipping that around and actually putting people back at the front and using AI at the back end to actually help support the people at the front

4:10 of course as you can imagine the actual customer service quality just shot up and i think that's an example it was speaking about isn't it people want to be heard it's frustrating particularly when you're contacting an organisation about a problem you want it solved you don't want to go around in loops and loops and loops and loops and eventually have to insist on getting through to a human person just so you can actually be heard so i haven't heard that story but i i believe it tremendous i i truly believe it because

4:41 one of my vendors who going to remain nameless they put an AI bot in the front and was terrible and you know i used to think it was annoying where it said if you want department a press one department b press two and then all of a sudden you have this bot that's trying to do it which is even worse than the phone tree and after everybody complained they went back to it so where you're saying you know Zurich went back to the phone tree and they went back to the phone tree i think that's really important because when you have a problem you're stressed if you're calling

5:12 your insurance company and i think let's take them for an example and i don't know if they made this change but one of the biggest changes a company can do to help their customer and you said customer service and i'm going to say they upped their game in a way that it changed the customer experience because they brought the human touch back into it that's the old school component hey we need to listen to our customer but one of the things that if you don't have the budget to do

5:41 that in your smaller business i challenge each and every one of your listeners today right now

Is your phone number easy to find?

5:48 look at your website is your phone number easy to be found people are reaching out to you are they searching for it is it buried under seven menus or can they easily find your phone number in the footer just something to think about let's talk about the customer experience how to make people feel valued that you're not making them go on a scavenger hunt they're on your website however they got there you should value that the fact that they're there yeah

6:19 absolutely i think it's about giving choices wasn't it i mean i might go on there and look on a website and if i can get what i want or if i can find the information or if there's a way to easily contact them i might do that before i call but if there's no number and i can't get what i want then well if i if i'm a customer already then i'm probably not gonna i may not be a customer for much longer and if i'm not a customer well i'm gonna go and find somewhere else so you bring up

Chatbots that don't answer the real questions

6:48 two interesting points a lot of companies put chatbots on their websites now because they feel that they need to like everybody's doing it we need to do it some slick salesperson comes in and sells them this is the greatest chatbot ever and we'll scan your website and come up with what we think you know are the questions people are asking my challenge to your listeners here's another

7:13 challenge if you're putting a chatbot on your website please make sure that you're actually answering the questions that people want because if you're not answering the questions that people want the chatbot's useless and like you're saying like you said you won't be a customer much longer and i think a lot of people they don't always complain if it's like a low level problem they're not going to complain they

7:42 just go away and that's a problem because then you don't know how to get them back and you don't know how you're losing other people and i think these are you know these are the small things that businesses could do whether you're the size of a large company like zurich insurance or whether you're a two-person shop or a one-person shop you need to address the customer experience from their perspective not from yours yeah absolutely and it makes me think about that what i pick out from there is is something that we

8:12 haven't covered spoken about yet but it's really it's looking at the information looking at the data but you're saying you put a chatbot on there well actually how are you going to monitor it how you're going to make sure that it is giving information to the customers in the correct information how you're going to manage that so that you can improve it so often it can be i've done it it's there whether it's a contact whatever it is you're putting up there on your website that if it if it's not working correctly for example having a phone number that maybe people

8:43 are trying to click on it because they're on their phone and they just want to click on the phone number but it's not clickable and so it could be just a simple thing of understanding oh i can't actually they're wanting to click on it well maybe i should let them click on it and make make that like their life that experience just a bit better so you know you bring up a you talk

The 800 number mistake

9:00 about the phone when i think back to many years ago when i had my brick and mortar i had to change websites because you know we changed our website because google went responsive and you know if you weren't going to be responsive anymore which and responsive means you know your the your website changes if you're on a computer screen it's one size if you're on a tablet it's another size if you're on your phone it all adjusts so the platform i was using wasn't

9:29 responsive we had to make the change hired a company to do it and the they thought it was a good idea and they didn't tell me they were doing it and they didn't tell me they were doing it this which i was not happy about they put an 800 number on my website which for tracking purposes was great the only problem was how did i know they did this because we were doing the you know the rollout and they just rolled it out and my cell phone started ringing as opposed to the line

9:57 at the store they programmed the 800 number to contact my cell phone because that's the number they called me on personally when we were during development phase and so that kind of went into a whole other customer experience issue for me and my vendor but for my customers my customers the experience was terrible all of a sudden my cell phone's ringing and i'm doing other things and had it been going to the store they would

10:25 have been getting answered properly and getting the right voicemail and you know so i think that's really a big you know a big thing testing is important and sometimes you know you need to back and you know one of the things i talk about in my book old school service new school tools is i bring up mistakes that i made i talk about some of the bad reviews i got over time you know i i talk about the good ones too obviously my business would not have won business of the

10:57 year had i just got bad reviews but i think it's important for any business to objectively look at what they're doing and then look for ways to improve it and how to improve their customer experience as a result of it yeah absolutely so we've spoken about some of the negative aspects of the technology side of it and some of the things they could do so in terms of in terms of ai what do you what advice have you got

11:25 if you're going to use ai for your website for your business how are some of the ways that actually you can do it so that people do feel heard and get what it is they need so the first thing i'm going to say is when you're using ai ai you know it's a multiplier it makes everything happen faster take the time that you save from ai in order to improve your customer experience

11:53 but how do you do that and i challenge everybody once again everybody thinks that you need to implement ai today everybody thinks that you know look at every software company out there they're all adding an ai component to it and everybody feels that

Fix the process before you add AI

12:09 we need ai and so when i have a customer come to me and this actually recently happened and you know they wanted to implement ai i said to them well what's the process and i think that's an important thing first you need to identify the process you want to add ai to because if you have a broken process what's going to end up happening is you're just speeding up the bad information that you're getting and whatever task you wanted to go and do if you just throw ai out and you're

12:39 at a bad task you're just getting bad output that much faster so what i say is hold the brakes take a pause look at the process you want to fix or you want to speed up after you look at the process you want to speed up great now let's take a step back make sure it's working if it's working let's find the right ai tool to make it work better if it's not let's fix the process first

13:09 give it a little time test it then implement the new ai tool whatever that might be and once like i said at the start of this once you've fixed and you have a process is working and you have ai that's improving something now take that time and invest the time saved into your customer experience into making your customers feel heard valued that you're listening to them and i think that's the

13:37 that's how ai can work in hand with you know technology customer service could all work together when you take a global approach of just not shooting forward without understanding what it needs to do first and making sure what you're trying to do works yeah that's really good i mean it's so important coming we keep coming back down but it's important to re-emphasise the importance of customers need

14:04 to be heard and need to feel like they're actually valued very important they're not just another statistic in terms of your you know your bottom line and it makes me think as well in terms of you said about going to the process that i was in a course a few months ago and one of the things they looked at was the your user journey or whatever the journey in the process is i'm just using sticky notes you know sticking sticky notes on a wall and going right this is what happens here here here

14:31 and here and really so you sound understanding where is it where is it broken where is the where is it are you going to speed it up or where is it being slowed down if it's broken well where's where's the actual web or what part is broken you might you know the outcome output might be one thing but maybe it's broken somewhere else once you understand that then those are things you can you can focus on so i love what you say there that yeah understanding what is the what is the problem is such a it's such a important thing to do and I love you talk

14:59 about sticky notes because that's really old school and I think that's really important and I'm going to throw another idea at you old school when people are taught and it's going to kind of tie into a chat bot and kind of pull a couple different things together you know when it comes to programming your chat bots and you know creating good content you know my tagline is helping small businesses get found and keep customers coming back

15:27 with the way that search engines are working now they're working with answering questions that people are trying to search for and what I tell people to do when they're like we need to

Write down every question a customer asks

15:39 create content on the website I tell people the first thing to do is start asking yourself to get a notebook every question that you're asked by a client for a month write it down in the notebook kind of like you said take a sticky note you know going the sticky note approach I'm not saying write the answers down right away I'm saying every time there's a question write it down that will build

16:05 your content that old school process of actually listening writing down the questions and then crafting answers will be how you could build content for your website and for your chat bots and your faqs in a way that's actually answering the question and not using industry jargon you know you and I could sit here and I could start talking about SEO search engine optimisation and then I could throw a whole bunch of acronyms in there and

16:34 people get lost and rightfully so that's not their business but I think if you talk to people you know but when they're coming to your business and let's you know let's say you're a concrete company and there's a 10 questions that you need to answer have you know people answer before you can actually move forward with a project you should tell the people

17:01 what the questions are up front if you're you know heating an air conditioning company the same idea you need to let people know are there permitting processes that people need to go through because every municipality is different you know every region is different and I think all that is very important that we need to acknowledge but the only way to do that really is to take a step back and

17:27 go old school and write down those questions and not just the questions of the user but survey the different people in different departments and see the questions they're asking their clients or potential clients so you can kind of gather all the information up in a way that helps everybody yeah absolutely i think it's it's so key with what you're saying

17:53 that actually we really need to understand what is going on and i know for maybe some people listening and thinking well actually yeah but i just want to get it done i just want to get a aie you know i just want to solve this problem i just want to fix this process but really understand what's going on the advantage is it's not just a short-term thing you're not just doing it in that moment that is that process by doing that as you said like the writing in the book you know the problem you know the the questions are getting asked you are going

18:21 to be setting a foundation that's going to actually help with so many other areas of the business i think a lot of people are seeing ai ai ai and there's like this need that they feel that they have to do something about it and they're not going to be able to do it they're not going to have to do it and i'm actually i'm in a networking group and i'm um i'm giving a presentation in the networking group on how to you know implement ai and rather than it's not being driven by me

18:55 the presentation over you know over the next month different people are sending in questions that they want to learn how to do something and then i'm going to the presentation is going to all be on answering those questions of like real processes that people want to do that i could explain and you know obviously i'm not going to go from each person's you know fix everybody's problem but i'm going to take it at a high level

19:25 and explain well this is the problem this this is how we got to the solution and i and i think that's an important thing i mean like today what i did for one of my clients he's

Using AI as a book editor

19:36 in the process of writing a book and i'm going to go from there and i'm going to go from there and he's in the process of writing a book and i'm going to go from there and i'm going to go from there and i wish i would have thought about this myself it would have saved me a lot of money the whole different story but he gave the he had a college student edit his book to look for grammar mistakes and or grammatical mistakes i should say make it correct and he thought she did a good job gave the book to his editor and the editor's like

20:04 there's mistakes all over the place you missed all sorts of stuff and and he he was freaking out because she wanted however much a page and so what i did was i created a prompt today and you know i yesterday i said send me the chapter send me a chapter so we could experiment on it and i created a prompt that had analysed and i said to the and this is

20:30 something important when you're talking about ai how to make it better i told ai to act as a is a book editor and i created a very detailed prompt for him that when it reviewed his first chapter of the book you know the chapter that he sent me the sample chapter that it found 47 mistakes that you know so that's like a place where ai can save time and money but and i think

20:55 it's an important thing to understand that if you just keep saying i'm doing ai i'm doing ai i'm doing ai ai is really going to

Garbage in, garbage out

21:05 give you a lot of bad information because i think back to in the old days in computers we we had an expression called geego garbage in garbage out for programmers and it's true for ai if you give it garbage it's going to give you garbage out and i think the difference is if you give it value and you tell the prompt exactly what you want it to do you'll get the value on the back side of it and you'll truly get value but the only way to get the value

21:33 is by using the sticky notes like you said put the sticky notes on the wall to kind of get the project process out you know take out a notebook write down the questions you know you really got to understand what you needed to do before you just do it it's not like a nike commercial so so i think we've been talking a bit about ai in terms of now we've also you've also talked to a bit about automation and maybe

22:02 it would be good to to look a bit more about the automation side because i think sometimes people might lumpy know what they're doing and they don't know what they're doing and they don't know what they're doing and they don't know what they're doing and they don't know what they're doing and ai and automation and ai and automation together obviously there can be ai in automation ai can be used to build some automation but when we're talking about automating something then we're obviously talking about a series of tasks that can happen either with some ai thinking or not maybe we should we could look at that a little bit more so i had a client several months back that was

22:33 trying to use one of the automation you know one of those he was using zapier which is not a automation tool and he was trying to get it to talk to from his website to zapier to his crm and he couldn't get the automation to work and after spending some time trying to figure it out the reason the automation would won't work was because the crm was not

23:06 programmed in a way to talk to zapier and you know they have the apis and i apologise i don't remember what the the api acronym stands for and they have you know the different hooks and they just weren't talking so i looked at it and you know he's like oh i

Automation, and when you don't need it

23:23 need this automation because you know he saw a commercial that you need automations and in the end the solution i created for him was not a new automation it was not custom coding the solution was looking at the crm which actually had intake forms that you could embed through you know code on your website that pulled all the information

23:49 directly into the customer relationship management tool which is what crm stands for so i think you know you talk about automations and sometimes before jumping into an automation like this customer did taking two steps back and saying what is my problem my problem is i have a website i have a crm i want them to talk to each other and you know well i saw the commercial zapier could have the talk to each other

24:18 but you didn't talk to the crm company and say you know was it built to talk to you know which workflow programs was it built for and they had encoded theirs to talk to any workflow programs because as far as they were concerned you should be able to have use their embedded code and pull the information directly without the third party and i think that's kind of what you know it goes back to the sticky notes

24:46 before you go to look for an automation look at the process and if you look at the process that's the best way to move a task forward absolutely i think also it's interesting that there you've pointed out something else which is look at what you've got you know what what do you already have it doesn't necessarily mean you know another additional tool to solve the problem that you've got and i've done that sometimes so we talk in terms of technology stacks and i've done that sometimes so we talk in terms of technology stacks

25:11 don't we in terms of which is the the tools that you have the some bits of software that maybe you already already have that exists now some of them you might find you don't even need that you've been paying for but certainly when you i do that sometimes i'll go to ai and ai knows what i've got and i say well looking at what i've got this is what i want to do can i do that within the remit of what i have or maybe i could build it with ai or not or sometimes it's just the case of oh it's just a tick box you know it's a tick box on a bit of software that you didn't even know existed and

25:41 enables some functionality that you didn't know you had so i think that's another thing thing is and that's again i say about with the sticky notes and the notebook if you're writing down you're doing the research into what i've actually got who's doing what what are they actually using then you understand not just what you you understand what you've got but also you understand what the where the process is broken most definitely i i could not agree more and i and i really think you know we're talking about ai one of the things that you know

26:11 pick your chatgpt gemini perplexity claude i don't care which one you use grok if you feed it enough information you say here's my problem and i and i don't think enough people take advantage of the this part of ai if they say this is my problem this is what i'm looking to accomplish so they you know they say that they start at the high level this is the problem this is what i hope to accomplish

26:42 give me some suggestions how to get there and then you know chatgpt one of the things i love about chatgpt is you're actually chatting and then you're chatting with all the llms you know the tools but i like you know because it's chat you chat with it but you know it'll you'll tell it a problem you'll tell where you want the solution you know what the solution needs to be not how to get you and it'll give you ideas how to get there and it'll ask questions and then you know like you said there might be a tick

27:11 kickbox that you could check off. And I think people don't realise that a lot of these tools have the ability to really understand things, and they have a vast amount of information out there. And what I've noticed with some of these tools, you know, you talk about automating processes. Sometimes you're looking at a software, and you go to the company's chatbot on the website when you're trying to learn how to do something or figure something out, and it doesn't know how

27:39 to do it. You ask one of the, you know, one of the AI tools, and because it's looking at so many different threads out there in different websites, it'll actually find the answer faster than the company's own chatbot, which I find mind-blowing, but it happens on a regular basis. So it's all about asking the right question and knowing where you want it to go. Yeah, that's actually one of my pet hates as well, is when you're asking. And when it's AI

28:08 inside of you, it's like, oh, I don't know how to do this. I don't know how to do this. A piece of software where it will say, okay, you ask it a question. Oh, I don't know. But you're the, you know, you're the AI inside of this software. You should know this thing. So that's a really important point that in some respects, and certainly in my experience I've seen, I've got a lot better results by asking, by actually doing the research for external tools than I have often inside of the actual tools within the software. And something else that you covered

28:39 is that there are elements within, you know, you talked about your detailed prompts as well, elements in what we include in there. So, so that, you know, we talked about content. So, so what is the actual, what is the actual thing that we want to, we want to get out of it? What do we, what do you want to achieve from it? And then there's the, the context that you were saying, you give it a context of what information, what expertise should it be pulling on? Like you, you gave an example of. Then the clarity. So being specifically specific at what it is,

29:09 what is the output? What do you really want to get? And constraints. And I think constraints is one of the things that people often forget what I don't want it to do. So we talked about what software have we got? So saying to it, okay, I only want you to look at what I've got right now rather than, because if you don't do that, it might go off and say, well, actually, yeah, everything you've got is, you know, that's not going to do the job. You need this, you need this other thing. And you go, okay, maybe I can't do this other thing. But I think

29:34 that's, that's again, when we talked this bit before as well, the human things come in, if we don't understand what AI is coming up with, or it's, it's suggesting we make particularly big or costly decisions. Those are the points we still need to come to the some like yourself, other professionals that know what it is they're talking about and can advise whether or not that's a good approach or not. And I really think that's where customer service. And I said customer service, but I really mean customer experience.

30:05 It kind of comes back. It comes into play because the more time you spend analysing a problem and finding the best solution for it, you're ultimately making the customer's end journey a lot better. So going back to the person in my example that had the CRM, the website, and you know, the automation tool in the middle that wasn't automating and not working at no fault to Zapier. It was totally because the

30:32 CRM wasn't designed for it. Once we remove that piece from their website and had the website talking directly to the database, the database had automations built into it because, you know, it's streamlined a lot of different processes and made a lot of things move a lot faster for the customer and increased the speed of which they were getting their

30:59 quotes. And I think that's an important, you know, these are the little things that, you know, you can improve customer experience by listening, you know.

Listening starts with your own team

31:09 Where I said listening to your customer, sometimes the listening starts by listening to your internal team. And I think that's an important thing to realise as well. A lot of people don't listen to their internal teams. And, you know, I remember back to one of my early jobs in IT, there was a brilliant developer and he really was a brilliant guy. He always wanted to build the software the way that he thought it should work. He didn't like listening to what, you know,

31:40 the people were saying. He didn't like listening to what the people were saying. He didn't like listening to what the people were saying. He didn't like listening to what the people were saying. And I think it's important that, you know, at so many different levels, you need to listen to your team and take advantage of what they learn from their customers and from the engagement with different people, which improves the customer experience as well. Because all those

32:06 different pieces come together. And, you know, as a developer, you have to be able to take advantage of what people are saying. And I think that's a big part of what I do. And I think it's important that, you know, as a developer, you have to be able to take advantage of what people are saying. And I think it's important that, you know, as a developer, you have to be able to I believe it was Tony Hsieh from Zappos Shoes. And I'm sure, I hope I didn't say his name wrong. But he talks about customer experience being in every piece of the business, not just, you know, when you have the Acme Widget Company. I can't insult anybody because, you know, it's in all the textbooks. Go to the Acme Widget Company, the widget breaks, you contact customer

32:32 service. Well, that's not customer experience. That's like something broke. You're calling somebody. buddy. Customer experience is from the minute they originally call Acme widget company and they find out what they're looking for. And then it takes them every step of the way in order to make them a raving fan, which I think is really important. Because going on to a, just jumping to a different

33:01 topic for all small business owners and midsize and large business owners, we all know it's easier to keep a customer. And there's actually, I believe it's a Harvard Business Review article that said it's five to 25% more expensive to get a new customer than to keep an existing customer. And how does that all happen? Through listening to customers, looking at your processes, and then making sure as you look to grow, you keep improving your processes, look what you're

33:30 doing good and keep doing it and figure out if you can do it better and look what's not working so well. And then. Look, how do you improve that as well? Yeah, that's so good. And there's a couple of things that that jumped out for me there is one is I love what you said about a customer experience, or the customer support. It's part of the experience, but it's, you want the customer experience to be good from the very moment in which they, they first

34:00 interact. So that actually, you've built it up, they're a fan, they might not get they might not be they're contacting you, it's broken. You've already built up some, some actual goodwill with them. You know, so they're, they're going to be a bit more open to it, they're going to be a bit more, a bit more understanding, and all those sorts of things. But if, if you haven't, if you've had a very cold, you know, customer experience, and this is your, and that your customer experience is the first time you're coming in, something is broken, it's going to be a tough, it's going to be a tough thing, tough thing to manage. And the last thing I would say is that you also said a really good point.

34:41 So, in terms of, like you said in your example, well, actually, if I'm a developer, technical support my customer, everybody I interact with is at some point, if I'm another developer in the same team, but I've got to deliver some code for someone else to work on, then they're also my customers. So, having that mindset in terms of customer experiences is all around me, I think is amazing. And just as we come into land.

Where to find David

35:07 how do people get in touch with you David David how do they how do they yeah easiest way to get a hold of me is i'm your virtual professional and you go to backslash podcast you'll find different tools you'll have a link to my book and you know i offer some free resources there as well and you could always i'm sure you're gonna in the show in the show notes i'll send you some links

35:33 that you could share with people that you know happy to talk to anybody on linkedin connect with anybody and i feel that i'm always happy to have a conversation you know virtual coffee spend a little time if i'm a good fit great if i'm not a good fit i might be able to you know recommend somebody that is or you know you never know where a conversation is going to lead so always happy

36:01 to start a conversation and see where it goes from there yeah thank you so much i think it's been a really valuable conversation in terms of some advice and a few tips and things we've we've put into there so if you're watching or listening and you've enjoyed what we talked about then obviously yeah get in touch with David and also like and subscribe on the various platforms that we're on Better With Humans and let us know if there's any other topics that you want to find out about you

36:29 go on to the website just contact us if there's other things that you'd love to hear us talking about once again David thank you so much it's been a great time thank you for your time i really appreciate it was really an enjoyable conversation and wishing you continued success thank you take care thank you