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A.I. in Customer Services – a conversation with Aria Webster Berry
12 Plays6 days ago
How A.I. can add value to customer relationships
Aria Webster Berry, is an accomplished marketing entrepreneur and the founder of AWB Marketing and Ignite Funnels.
In this episode of the Abeceder podcast The Independent Minds Aria and host Michael Millward discuss how any organisation can improve customer relationships by making appropriate use of artificial intelligence (A.I.) in their Customer Relationship Management system (CRM).
Aria explains how AI has developed, what it is now capable of, and how it is developing.
They discuss
- How a traditional CRM focuses on administering the relationship with the customer and how applying AI to the system enables it to manage interactions with the customer.
- Why organisations need to have a comprehensive AI strategy
- The importance of training your A.I.
- The work opportunities that A.I. will create
Far from removing jobs they agree on the opportunities that AI will create for people who are willing to adapt to the rapidly changing technical landscape.
This is the podcast for any business person who wants to explore how AI can make a difference to their customer relationships.
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Transcript
Introduction & Podcast Aim
00:00:05
Speaker
Made on Zencastr. The all-in-one podcasting platform that really does make every stage of the podcast production process so easy. Hello and welcome to The Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Abbasida and people who think outside the box about how work works.
00:00:26
Speaker
with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for everyone. I am your host, Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abusida.
Guest Introduction & Career Journey
00:00:36
Speaker
Today i will be learning about how to use AI in customer relations from Arias Webster-Berry, who is the founder of Webster-Berry Marketing.
00:00:48
Speaker
Paris is based in DeSoto in Texas, USA. I have never visited Texas, but if I do, I will be sure to take advantage of the trade prices on flights, hotels, trains, and holidays that being a member of the Ultimate Travel Club gives me.
00:01:04
Speaker
You can access those discounts with a discounted membership by using the link in the description. Now that I've paid some bills, it is time to make an episode of The Independent Minds that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading and subscribing to.
00:01:21
Speaker
As with every episode of The Independent Minds, we won't be telling you what to think, but we are hoping to make you think. Hello, Arias. How are you doing today? I'm doing great, Michael. How about you?
00:01:33
Speaker
Can't complain at all. Thank you very much. Tell us about your career and how you ended up running WBM. in high school, I used to throw some parties with friends. They got kind of popular. So we started charging for them. Once I got into college, just continued that trend. And that actually led to me to my first job in marketing. And around this time, social media was also starting. So you had things like MySpace and Black Planet and all these very small, eventually massive companies. And most businesses didn't really understand how to, you know, make this a viable option to get more people to arrive in the physical world. And, you know, me being a young kid, I had mastered social media at the time because we spent enormous amounts of time there. So I ended up doing some small concerts.
00:02:20
Speaker
bigger concerts, and eventually I got into large scale festivals with my largest event being at the Los Angeles sports arena for 17,000 people with a Grammy award winning artist, Janelle Monae, Common, Ludacris, Mixmaster Mike from the Beastie Boys.
00:02:38
Speaker
And I was able to be ah an executive producer on that project. And that was the first time i got a chance to do a full marketing campaign. And that's kind of when I realized that marketing was was truly what I wanted to do and and the the true power of it Right.
00:02:53
Speaker
So how did you come to leave that behind and set up WBM? So I'm doing really well in this this concert space. And then 2009, the U.S. economy collapses. And so I stuck it out for a couple of years around, I think, 2011, 2012. I moved back to Texas. Really, I landed at my grandmother's house in her spare bedroom. My brother helped me get a job as a bartender.
00:03:18
Speaker
you know Within a year, maybe a year and a half, I went to work for the largest digital marketing company in the world at the time, which was Reach Local. And that's where I got my formal training and in digital marketing. I was there for a couple of years. And then after that, I started my own company. oh I started freelancing. And then eventually it turned into a company that we now know as Websterberry Marketing.
Impact of AI on CRM Systems
00:03:40
Speaker
Okay. And now you're focusing on artificial intelligence and its use in so relationship management.
00:03:47
Speaker
Tell me a little bit about that. The industry has changed dramatically. It used to be just having a customer relationship management system, what puts you far beyond all of your competitors. The ability to take all of your customer contact information and the various touch points through email and text and phone calls and all your notes and in meetings and keep them in one place was revolutionary. Instead of you just maybe using a spreadsheet or you know the trusty old pen and paper yeah to remind you who you need to follow up with about three years ago we started ignite funnels which is a crm and it's also an all-in-one marketing and management system everything you could possibly need for your business man it's only been a couple years that chad gbt's
00:04:32
Speaker
been out. But once that came out, everybody was AI everything. no We needed to figure out how to infuse artificial intelligence into our CRM, into our regular workflow. It's it's been amazing.
00:04:46
Speaker
It has helped us and our clients move forward at an amazing rate. So the way we use it, AI enables businesses to provide hyper-personalized experiences at scale.
00:04:57
Speaker
So that's from you know recommending relevant products and services to predicting customer needs. you know the The AI tools that we've infused into our CRM help businesses tailor their interactions in ways that weren't possible before. I'm slightly skeptical about AI. I can see that there are lots of advantages to it. I'm not quite sure that it is AI as in artificial intelligence or whether it's just super fast memory.
00:05:27
Speaker
From what I've seen, it will tell me what has already been done and and do what I want to do based upon what has already been done. How do you get the creativity into the the ai I think it it rests with you. when When you break down, especially a lot of the the the generative AI systems that are out there, it is the equivalent of a baby mimicking sounds, right? As humans, we all start by not actually understanding words, not really understanding context or what we're saying. We're just trying to to mimic what we see and hear, right? AI, especially maybe a year ago was doing very much the same. And I still believe that that's that's the majority of where it is. it's It's growing rapidly, just like a child, right? They they pick up more than you think. um
00:06:18
Speaker
But in that, you know it comes down to the creativity, just in the same that if you use very large words with your child, right over time, their vocabulary is going to be larger, right? to be careful what you say around a child because you never know when they're going to repeat whatever it is that they've overheard but i get i think the analogy is absolutely fantastic in that yeah children learn sounds rather than the meanings of the words that they use and they they replicate what they hear that's how they learn how to speak and it's a great way to describe how ai itself is evolving it is looking at what is already happening, learning from what is happening, but doesn't, I suppose, necessarily know what it is suggesting. It's just suggesting what it's already seen.
00:07:08
Speaker
What is happening now that that is tapping into all the the creativity and and the real intelligence that we start to think for itself? Yeah, and that's where it's moving. Me and my entire team utilize AI in a variety of ways.
00:07:22
Speaker
I am seeing a distinct difference in you know where it is now and where it was a year ago, in the complexity of the things that it is able to generate, in the logic that it jumps to, the depth of information.
00:07:40
Speaker
Even just with ChatGPT, the last year they released youre on the on the app, you have the ability to have conversations with it so you can talk and it responds it very conversationally.
00:07:53
Speaker
It's amazing that you can go in extreme depth with this this thing, this machine, and it being able to keep up with a conversation no matter you know your level of experience in a particular industry. you know It can go the distance. I do think that we're at an inflection point where it's getting to the point where it's not just mimicking the sounds like that baby, and it is starting to actually understand.
00:08:20
Speaker
You know, the amount of information and data that's being fed to it on a daily basis is is nauseating, actually. That's like the child with too many words can get very... gets in trouble, right?
00:08:35
Speaker
And I do believe that we're getting to a point where we we may be giving it too much. The amount of things that these large language models are privy to.
00:08:46
Speaker
you know Without some guardrails, without some safeguards, we we don't really understand what we're giving it. Because right now, you know even even with a kid, right you you give it these words, you tell it things, and it's like, oh, they said a curse word. That's cute.
00:09:01
Speaker
But in an official setting, just the kid turns on the faucet and just starts spewing expletives. Well, then it's embarrassing and you can't shut it up and you can't turn it off. You're looking for the button like stop. I think that we are on a collision course with that with AI. And I do hope that various nation states do take it as serious as say the UK has in trying to you know put in some real.
00:09:27
Speaker
regulations and empowering various governmental agencies to be able to regulate. Yes. Yeah. We'll see what happens with all of that. But it's certainly a very interesting time.
00:09:40
Speaker
How are you using AI in your customer relationship management system? How are we not using it? We use it to power our CRM. So we do automated lead qualification. So it has the ability to look at behavioral data of our customers when they visit websites, open emails, respond to emails and text messages.
00:10:03
Speaker
pairs that with social media interaction
Human-AI Interaction in CRM
00:10:05
Speaker
engagement, and it automatically scores that lead so that our sales team knows who to spend more time with and who to follow up with first.
00:10:13
Speaker
We have it doing automated follow-ups and omni-channel follow-ups. So it will receive a reply to an email or a text message from a customer. It'll analyze it. reference a very massive document that we have about everything about our company and our products and services and some of our protocols. It'll formulate a response and then respond in that particular channel, whether it's email or text. We even have sentiment analysis. So it has the ability to you know scan the message in the context of the the conversation and decide if it's a positive or negative response and even to what degree or percentage it's positive or negative. And that allows us to free up our teams to focus on high value relationships instead of repetitive tasks.
00:10:59
Speaker
Did I respond to Susie Q? It does it automatically and then, you know takes those that are most urgent or and most willing or likely to close as customers and and put them in front of a human.
00:11:12
Speaker
you know we're using AI chatbots and virtual assistants, and that allows us to, you know, engage with our customers twenty four seven It provides instant responses and, you know, also giving links to our knowledge base. So we have a whole bunch of videos and articles that we've written on, say, Ignite Funnels or some of our services on the agency side of WebServary Marketing, and it automatically sends that to them.
00:11:39
Speaker
So it does a ton of stuff. And that's just a few that I can think of off the top of my head. Most CRMs are dealing with the administration. And yeah, it's got relationship in it, in its title, but they're dealing with the dates, the times, all that sort of things. When was the last time that you spoke to this person? Where are the notes?
00:12:00
Speaker
But what you're doing is actually getting the computer, the AI, to look at the interaction and not to just suggest the appropriate response, but actually organizing the appropriate response and and dealing with it itself, which then means that you need potentially fewer people because you are able to focus the activities of the people on high net worth type activities. Indeed.
AI's Role in Job Creation
00:12:31
Speaker
The AI, the software, and the people need to be very finely attuned, don't they they? They don't operate in isolation of each other. You have to build in this connection between the two so they they can work together effectively. Exactly. And when it's done properly, the customer doesn't really know where the AI ends and the human begins.
00:12:51
Speaker
Right. Which is a little scary now that I just said that out loud. But, you know, it's especially in the context of what you were saying earlier on about how we need to control the use of the AI and make sure that it's being used for positive purposes.
00:13:11
Speaker
And it actually does add value to the human relationship. It doesn't take it over. It is sort of as someone who's received various different emails over the the last sort of six months and noticed differences in the emails that I'm receiving from mainly organizations that will want to supply things to Abusida. And looking at them back over a longer period of time, you can see a definite change. There is more of a more of a sort of relationship that comes from the email.
00:13:44
Speaker
You can sense that someone is trying to communicate with me je rather than just, here's some information. Yeah. And I mean, i believe that that's what customers are looking for. And I truly believe that is something that recently has been lacking in in sales and business. We've been using computers in business for quite a while now.
00:14:06
Speaker
We have figured out how to amplify the frequency of communication dramatically. However, in doing so, it's become very impersonal and cold.
00:14:17
Speaker
Now, you know, the best marketing teams, even though they before AI, they had figured out ways to make it very clever ways to make things more conversational and a little less salesy. But still, for the most part, it's just a lot of buy, buy, buy. I can smell or intent not being you know purely value add. I think that AI is starting to let us have real value driven conversations at scale.
00:14:51
Speaker
Because i was a sales manager for a really long time. And One of the hardest things to teach my sales guys was how to just have conversations, how to you know have the conversation structured that obviously we wanted to end in a sale.
00:15:05
Speaker
But to start the conversation, just to have an actual conversation, right, build some rapport, establish some common ground. Do an accurate needs assessment that is conversational and less robotic, like do you need product X? Are you struggling with one, two, three? And really just make it consultant consultative. Now with the large language models with AI, it has that ability. It has a preset ability. a of how it wants to move the conversation along, whether it's one conversation or if it's a back and forth through text or email, it knows that it's trying to arrive at a predetermined destination, which may be getting them to an appointment with a human or, you know, getting them to land on a specific page or or take a particular action, but it can still have that conversation that feels natural and robust without, you know, it being very binary. Let me send this email.
00:16:01
Speaker
The only thing that I'm looking for is if you responded or not. It allows the context and it can actually have the conversation for you. It makes me wonder whether, as customers, we need to be more knowledgeable about how AI works and our relationship with our suppliers as a result of using AI. I think it's 50-50. I think for an older generation, they are extremely skeptical of any robot, of interacting with it. That's how I started this conversation, wasn't it? Saying that I'm skeptical about
00:16:36
Speaker
how we use AI. And i think this stage in the development of AI, where as you say, things are moving very fast, we need to be very careful about how we identify how we're going to use it to the greatest effect, which I think is what you're also saying. But it's going to
Challenges in Implementing AI
00:16:56
Speaker
take some time as a customer to get used to the idea that you know, I want to talk to my account manager. well, no, actually your account manager is dealing with something else and the computer will give you all of the answers.
00:17:11
Speaker
There's nothing more frustrating than wanting to talk to a supplier, going to their website and being told you've got to talk to the computer. Well, the questions that the computer asks you are nothing to do with the the issue that you're trying to resolve. yeah It just gets very, very frustrated.
00:17:27
Speaker
In some cases, some suppliers being challenged too reliant too early on the capabilities of the ai that they have purchased rather than thinking what can the ai do and then limiting what the ai does to what the ai will do well right moving to the next stage when the ai can do something else you see too many people thinking it's perfect it will do everything but that's not the case unless you've actually invested
00:18:01
Speaker
in software that will genuinely do all the things that you're asking it to do. I am really skeptical, aren't I? But that seems to be the reality of it. You know, the fact that what you've described, Ignite Funnels, the list of things that that will do is amazing.
00:18:18
Speaker
But that's obviously sort of like the Cadillac, the Rolls Royce end of the market. There are too perhaps too many people expecting something that they've bought at the bottom end of the market to perform like something at the top end of the market because it is AI. And the reality is that you get what you pay for and you have to understand how it can be used, how you should use it. And also perhaps equally, if not more importantly, that you don't ask it to do something that it's not equipped to do.
00:18:50
Speaker
Yeah. And I mean, to to your point, I would say that AI algorithm is only as good as the data that they're trained on.
00:19:00
Speaker
If the data is poor or it's biased, so are the interactions. Companies need to ensure that their AI models are trained on high quality information.
00:19:14
Speaker
A lot of times they go into the basics or, you know, again, a to your your example, right, that the Rolls-Royce or Cadillac end of the spectrum. They bought a $15 or $20 piece of software and they're expecting it to be able to do the the work of 10 highly trained salespeople.
00:19:32
Speaker
of it made They gave it a 500 word description on the business or service and then they're wondering why their customers are having a bad experience. It it doesn't have enough data. It's ah a glorified Q&A bot.
00:19:48
Speaker
You gave me 10 questions and 10 answers and that's kind of the limit of my understanding of your business. I think it's important that one, give it some grace, start small with the implementation of AI. And like you said, be very cognizant of the limits of the systems that you're putting in place. And you also need to plan for the future, right? Look for a roadmap of various ways you can implement various AI systems and And then once you implement them, don't just set them and forget them. You need to regularly evaluate if it's doing the job, if your customers are having a great interaction in responses. You know, are you doing any quality assurance as to how the conversation is flowing and if people feel like they're actually getting any value out of it? Those things are important to inform your next decisions on the development and expansion of how you're using A.I.
00:20:46
Speaker
ai I've got my HR hat on and thinking about the people inside an organization and how AI can replace jobs. But then the reality is that I don't think there's ever been a piece of technology that's been developed that hasn't actually created new jobs to go with it. And listening to your description, which is eye opening, if you're going to use AI, you need to treat it like an employee. and make sure that it's got the skills and the knowledge to do the job that you've employed it to do.
00:21:19
Speaker
I can see a time when large organizations will probably have an AI training manager, an AI training department, collecting all the information to feed into the AI so that the AI can do all the things that you've been describing in terms of listening to a question from a customer, working out what it is that they actually need, and being able to give them the correct current information rather than information it was given two years ago. Indeed. Yeah, I agree that it's going to create more jobs.
00:21:53
Speaker
But that's only for the people who have a growth mindset. If you are stuck in the, hey, I've been doing this for 20 years, and then all of a sudden your position is seen as no longer needed because there's this new system that can do it 400 times faster and more accurate than you.
00:22:12
Speaker
Well, you're still going to be needed because you have a extreme knowledge base that can be valuable to train an AI system. so if you can retool your thinking and say, okay, well, all right, maybe I don't have to do the thing anymore, but I can train the thing to do the thing.
00:22:32
Speaker
And you may have a very long career ahead of you innovate in that space and be known as the preeminent expert in your industry, in this you know particular sector of AI, you could have a very long career.
00:22:45
Speaker
It's kind of the beginning of the end because if once you give all of your information, It's going to do it better and faster. But as far as our lifetime is concerned, you should have a very long and robust career. I can't say the same for those that come after you, but you know at least you and your family will be taken care of.
00:23:02
Speaker
That's true. What we're painting a picture of is an increasingly complex database of information, which is used by an increasingly intelligent and adaptable form of software, which will have the power to change organizations. I'm wondering... How long does it take to implement a so CRM, a customer relationship management system that has got this level of AI capability? Because I can remember implementing our first customer relationship management system. Mm-hmm. it was simply like okay we've got a list of names addresses where these are all our customers we load them up and all of a sudden we can then use these to do all sorts of various different things that didn't take very long but feeding the machine that is going to then analyze all the information about your organization How long does it take to get the actual physical side set up and how long does it take to to educate the machine so that it's no longer a child just mimicking sounds, it's actually able to have these conversations with you or with the customer.
00:24:10
Speaker
A couple of years ago, I would say maybe six months. Now I, you can get this set up in a couple of weeks. Honestly, you can go into chat GPT right now, plug in your, your website and tell it to write 20 pages on everything you and your business.
00:24:28
Speaker
And then take those 20 pages and use that as the basis for the AI to to work from. but Those things would have taken a long time, a while ago, because the computations allowed The responses that say a chat GPT would be able to create in one response after a prompt was limited. And now it's way longer and it's doing it faster. And it is now browsing the Internet. When it first started, it didn't have the ability to to browse the Internet. So the ah the ability to compile data as a base for its knowledge can be done fairly quickly.
00:25:03
Speaker
The biggest issue that a lot of companies will have is figuring out how to integrate it with their current tech stack. That's probably going to be the thing that takes the longest. Because for the most part, what we've been talking about is kind of just conversations back and forth. It's ability to respond contextually and email and text and stuff, even voice that's coming up.
00:25:27
Speaker
and There's a lot of them that are already out there. We're, we're, the ability for AI to have full conversations with your your your customers. But biggest issue most companies are going to have is, hey, we're already fully vested in our current system. Maybe they're a larger company and they decided to build out a custom CRM or they built some technology to manage their business that's custom, that's not all the various ah CRMs.
00:25:54
Speaker
When you're not working with a software that is built to be integrated, then it's going to take you a lot longer, a lot more money, a lot more brain power to get a new system like AI to understand all the inputs and outputs necessary to feed it information, kind of have that back and forth.
00:26:17
Speaker
So i think that'll actually be the the biggest issue. But if you do have some of the out-of-the-box, more retail systems as far as CRMs go, well, I mean, you can honestly, inside of a month or two, you can get this thing, you know, fully set up, tested, and get your staff kind of trained on how to use it. It's impressive. It is
Conclusion & Takeaways
00:26:39
Speaker
possible for even a very small organization to start benefiting from using ai in its customer relationship management.
00:26:47
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you were to come over to us, Ignite Funnels, which I highly recommend that you do, shameless plug, you will have a whole suite of tools immediately. Right. And it's not just, hey, my robot can talk to my customers.
00:27:05
Speaker
You know, it has the ability to take actions in the real world. It can process a payment for you over the phone via text. So the customer can respond with their their payment information and and it can process a payment, generate an invoice, mark it as paid, send an email and a text to let you know that it has been marked as paid and then notify the sales team. That's not anything that's hard. You know, the ability for it to actually have tools tools and the ability to actually take action rather than just have a conversation is where we are with Ignite Funnels and we're we're adding even more functionality. Sounds really interesting. Of course, just the devil in me wants to so investigate what will happen when a supplier's AICRM is confronted with my customer AICRM or supplier relationship management system and and seeing the two systems having an argument that just makes me smile. Yeah.
00:28:04
Speaker
That would be awesome. If we have a supplier management system, which we could program, be nice to this supplier, be terrible to this supplier. And so see how the different responses go. You're bringing the devil out in me, which is I'm smiling about it, but it sounds great. yeah oh it's been really interesting and and i do believe i know some more about ai in crms now than i did less than an hour ago i really do appreciate your time it's been very interesting thank you very much likewise very interesting i appreciate it thank you i am michael mill ward the managing director of abecida and i have been having a conversation with the independent mind, or perhaps it was his CRM, Arias Webster-Berry.
00:28:50
Speaker
You can find out more about both of us at abeceda.co.uk. There is a link in the description. I am sure that you will have have liked this episode of The Independent Minds as much as Arias and I have enjoyed making it.
00:29:04
Speaker
Please give it a like and download it so that you can listen anytime, anywhere. And to make sure that you don't miss out on future episodes, please subscribe. Remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abbasida is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to have made you think.
00:29:21
Speaker
Until the next episode of The Independent Minds, thank you for listening, and goodbye.