Transcript
Hey, Mike matchett. Small World Big Data. I'm here talking about something we don't talk an awful lot about, but that's, you know, the use of AI. Of course, we talk about that all the time. We've got sort of quick here, and we're going to be exploring how you can very quickly and proactively apply some AI technologies to your CSR issues and to your help your sales teams get out there and do a better job, increase profits, boost revenues, increase efficiencies, all sorts of good things. Uh, hang on and we'll bring her on in just a minute. Go. Hey, Asher. Welcome to the show. Uh, glad to have you here. Uh, glad to be here. In case, folks, you know, they probably don't know, but we used to overlap a little bit back in the teenager group analyst days. You were former analyst along with me, although, you know, erstwhile, uh, erstwhile teenager group. Now that that's long gone, thankfully. Uh, we are moved on to bigger and better things. Uh, just tell me a little bit. Bring us up to date a little bit what you've done since then, what have you gotten into? And and why are you in this end of the market doing doing I CSR stuff. So absolutely. Uh, so after uh, I got my feet wet with the analyst, uh, gigs at uh, Teenasia Group and then following that with uh, Giga Ohm and my own analyst company, I, I joined, uh, Huawei and uh, I became their leader of innovation. I was based out of Toronto, Canada, and I was running all of their worldwide innovation. So I was working on some of the latest and greatest technologies. A lot of them leveraged AI, including, uh, self-driving cars, uh, autonomous robots, autonomous drones for deliveries and other purposes. Uh, I was inventing a lot of, uh, cell phone technologies, quantum computing, satellite communications, you name it, all types of leading edge stuff. A lot of these technologies, these these technologies were leveraging, uh, different facets of AI, uh, under the covers, everything from reinforcement learning to machine learning, deep learning, and so on. And now here we are. And I launched my own company, uh, which, uh, is an AI, uh, CSR, an AI agent that answers, uh, all the, uh, incoming inquiries from your customers and prospects and, uh, and, uh, talks to you in a human, uh, human like interface and human like manner. It's amazing how, you know, we storage, storage people. The storage used to be the thing. And that evolved into data and becoming data people and big data people and analytics and AI and how you can squeeze data, squeeze that data to get value out of it. Uh, and now, uh, you know, in the last couple of years, it's all about doing the machine learning at the level of which people are referring to as AI. And the AI has just blown the cover off this, uh, market altogether. Uh, so let's let's dive in a little bit, uh, on this, uh, particular end of the AI market, which is how do you apply AI to help a company do a better a better job of their outreach, of their, of their customer service. What are some of the things that go wrong before you bring AI in the house? Just start there. What are some of the challenges people face? What do you see? So it's basically, uh, humans, uh, humans, uh, we get angry, uh, we're having a bad day. Sometimes we don't answer the call, the calls get missed. And then basically, at the end of the day, um, the customer, um, gets the gets angry about not getting the right service, uh, from the from the human agent. And, uh, we're just, uh, introducing a virtual agent that would, uh, take the human out of the loop. And, uh, this virtual agent, as I mentioned before, is very human like in the conversations. But one of the first things it does is it introduces himself as I am a virtual agent, so that, uh, although a lot of people would think that they are talking to a human, they know that they're not talking to a human, but it talks to you in a very virtual, just like you and I are having a conversation. It provides you all the information that you would need, from the pricing to FAQs to services available, even like what kind of parking this business has and all that. Any questions that you want to know. And then at the end of the day, we'll make an appointment in the in the calendars of the of the workers, uh, for for any services that you're looking for. And the appointment would show up in the calendar of the, of the, of the tech as well as the, the owner of the business. And, uh, there's no industry that, uh, this this, uh, agent cannot satisfy the virtual agent. Uh, but initially we're, uh, going after about five or so industries that we have outlined at vertical industries that are low hanging fruit for us. Yeah. So tell me, tell me a little bit, though. You know, I think a lot of most people at this point are familiar with chatbots, right? They go to a website and there's a chatbot there. So we kind of start there. I think in our understanding of what this technology really does for us. But how does serve extend that? I mean, what are you doing to take us beyond sort of the common chatbot. So we are a multimodal agent. Basically if your customer is contacting you through your to your website, yes, the agent in this case the chatbot will engage with them, answer all their questions. So we just train the agent first with everything that the customer provides us. Then we take that, uh, that that knowledge and provide that knowledge to the customer when we engage with them on their, on their website. But the same information is available. If that customer called to their phone, uh, the agent will talk to them, provide them all types of answer to all their questions, and make appointments and even take payments over the phone and send them receipts. Um, and because we have integrations at the back end with some of the largest payment processing systems like, uh, like stripe, and then, uh, if the customer is coming in through, uh, contacting the business to a text message, it will engage, uh, through SMS messages back and forth with that customer. Uh, Lots of our younger customers. They, uh, they like to come into social media channels like, uh, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and so on. We have integrations with all of them. So, uh, basically what we our value proposition is that when your customer is trying to contact you through to your website, to voice, to text, to, uh, email and or social media channels like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, the agent will be able to answer all of their queries to their satisfaction and then even make, uh, appointments in the in the calendars at the back end. Yeah. So I like I like that multi-channel kind of thinking you're not just making a website rep, you're doing something that can handle the incoming emails. That can. I mean, the voice thing alone seems sort of magical. Like if a, if you have like one person answering the phones, but they're busy or they're away from their desk or it's off hours, you can still have someone answering the phones with a generated voice. That sounds pretty decent, I understand, and, uh, not drop that call and not just, like, put it put it on hold or take a voicemail. You're actually going to give them information and move them to the next stage of the pipeline. Um, one of the main things main value proposition is that, uh, when you have our AI agent deployed in your in your business, your business will never miss a customer call because customer calls can cost money to the to the to the company. So if it's a salon or HVAC company, it could be a couple of hundred dollars for every missed customer call. But then if you're a law office or some higher end business, a cement company or something, it could be 5000 plus for each missed call. And guess what happens as soon as your customer calls you and they don't get an answer? Um, or busy line or whatever they call the next number, which is your competitor from the Google list. And so one of the unique functionality that our agent has is that it will call you right back. So if there was a call that was missed, it will call you back whichever channel that you came in on. So let's say you called to the phone. It will call you back on your phone. Hi. We missed your call. How can we help you and start engaging you? And if you came in to a text message, it'll start a text chat with you and so on. So all the channels that I mentioned. So we also have the capability probably we're the only company in the business that I know of that has the immediate callback, uh, capability. And that's literally like within two seconds after a missed call. And you also mentioned social media as well. So we're not just talking about like the traditional business communication, but a way to reach, uh, more of a consumer audience. In this case, I would guess. Right. So if your business that does a lot of B2C things, this is also applicable. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, that was uh, social media integration was a key, uh, directive to our engineering team because, uh, a lot of young people, they don't use, uh, they don't pick up the phone and call. They use social media to inquire about any business service pricing, any of that stuff. So our agent has the same level of capability of interaction at the social media channels as well as, the regular traditional channels. What else should someone just sort of. When you've talked to customers who are having issues and are looking at this, what are. What else would you sort of tell people to look for as signs that they should be getting into? Automating and using AI and leveraging AI for their CSR. Things like I mentioned before. The key thing is that humans can miss calls and miss calls, or if agent sounds frustrated or angry or anything, that that has immediate customer impact and the customer gets turned off and you lose a potential customer or current customer. So one never misses a call. Secondly, never gets angry. It's always polite. And as I mentioned before, it's very human like. You can go to our website and and click on the demo and you will see that you will say that no, no, no, there's no way I'm not talking to a person. So it's very human like and most importantly it's self-learning. So it's always learning. So whatever you whatever. You teach it initially. Three months later, it will be a lot more smarter after interactions with your with your customer base. And then six months later, it's exponentially smarter. So we're leveraging the full power of AI. And for that you don't need any infrastructure. Nothing. You can just, uh, buy our SaaS offering and, uh, start using it like, pretty much immediately. Yeah. This sounds like something that, uh, you know, sort of our, our IT enterprise, uh, medium enterprise and small SMBs could all possibly use, but particularly those shops that don't have their own AI solutions or best practices and have an initiative and a mandate to roll out some AI for the good of the company. They could just give you guys a call and get started right away and be adding value. And you don't have to start. Uh, so let's say you're an insurance company and you have nine different products. You don't have to deploy this, uh, AI CSR agent at, at all different, uh, products and services. You can start with the, the, the, the, the least, uh, important product. Let's say if you're an insurance company you want. Renters insurance or board? Insurance and so on. And when you see the success, you can then deploy it across other departments, uh, as uh, at your own pace. Well, definitely, definitely way to do things. Incrementally kick the tires, so to speak. Uh. All right. All right. Uh, sure. If someone wants to, uh, try this out, learn a little bit more about what's going on at surf quick. Uh, you guys got a lot under the covers going on and a healthy roadmap. I'll attest to that. Uh, what what would you have them do? So our website is, uh, surf comm. It's s e r v q u I k.com. Uh, and, uh, you can contact us, uh, either at that or, uh, success. Uh, at Surf Comm is our email address. So you can, uh, go to our website. You can contact us through email or our phone numbers are also listed on our website. You can contact us directly there. You can start by just, uh, talking to us, or you can, um, opt for a seven day free trial. And. And if I call off hours on the on the weekends on a holiday. Am I going to get your service or am I going to get someone? Someone? So because we are an AI CSR company, you will always get a person, an agent that would answer your call to your satisfaction and guide you to the right direction and provide you with all the information. So we don't we we drink our own Kool-Aid to. This is great. This is great. All right folks, you heard it from Azure. If you've got if you've got any clients, if you've got to service those clients, if you've got to have someone answer the phone, answer the emails. Here's a way to start doing things in an augmented way without too much trouble at all. Right. You can just turn this thing on and get it going. Um, and it will just learn over time. So great stuff. Uh, for that. Thank you for being here and explaining that to us. Thank you. All right. Good to catch up with you again in person to, uh, take care, everyone. And, uh, we'll we'll see you next time.
