Leveraging AI for Personalized Customer Experiences, with George Swetlitz

Speaker A: Um, welcome to All Things Considered cx, the podcast where we challenge the status quo of customer experience. Hosted by Bob Asman, this show is all about disrupting practices and redefining what it means to truly connect with customers. In this unhinged approach to cx, we're focused on building better experiences from the ground up. Um, each episode Bob dives into the bold ideas, unconventional strategies and fresh perspectives that are shaking up the world of cx. We're bringing you the voices that are pushing boundaries and changing the game. If you're ready to rethink how customer experience is done and drive real transformation, you're in the right place. Let's get into today's episode of All Things Considered cx.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome to another episode of, uh, the All Things Considered CX podcast, Unhinged as always, I'm Bob Asbin, your host and today we are talking about AI. We have had some fantastic conversations about AI in the past podcast releases. But what's interesting and intriguing I think you'll find about today's discussion is what I would say a true utilization of AI to personalize the experience for customers. And that's something I think we're all struggling with as CX professionals. So um, I'm really pleased to have uh, George Swetlitz with me who is the co founder and CEO of M. Right Response. AI George, welcome to the podcast and if you would take a couple of minutes to introduce yourself and your background to our listeners.

Speaker C: Sure Bob, it's great to be here and uh, have this conversation with you today. So, uh, my background is quite varied. So I've been a consultant for about half my career and an operator for half my career. And within operations I've worked with large organizations and most recently with a private equity backed consolidation in audiology. And across all of those years I've really been focused on the engagement with customers and how do you grow your business organically through great engagement. And what happened when I was the CEO of this uh, audiology consolidation called Alpaca, we had about 220 locations across the country. And you know, we, we observed that our best performing locations, um, had better uptake of our ads. So when we would run, you know, when we would do ads, people would come, um, and get into that funnel. We would have more of that from our high performing locations than our low performing locations. And so the question is why? What is it? Same funnel, same ad, same way of operating. But some locations just outperform in the funnel. And what we came to realize was there's this final kind of gate which is reviews. Right. You know, you, you, you spend all your time bringing people to that, you know, to your site. You know, you do SEO, you have a website, you run ads, but at the end of the day, you know, people read reviews. And so that was something as a CEO that we struggled with. We were dealing with it at scale 220 locations. How do you respond, how do you get, you know, all those things. But the principle is the same and we'll talk about it more during. But, but this was kind of a very recent experience I had just a few years ago. We ended up selling the business, it's private equity back. So eventually you sell. We sold the business and um, I found myself with some free time and then uh, uh, ChatGPT got launched and I started thinking right when it was launched and the promise of AI and how it would change the world and I started thinking maybe AI could have helped us with this challenge. Mhm. So a group of us created Right. Response to, to. To. To try to, to get into the middle of that space. Mhm. And solve that problem. I'm sure we'll, you know, we'll unpeel that, you know, onion throughout the episode. But that was.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: That was kind of my background and how I got to where I am today.

Speaker B: Mhm. Very, very interesting background. And I, and I like asking our guests that because there's always variation there. There's never a uh, you know, one path that gets people into any particular field of expertise that they're in. And so George, let's take it high level. And my lord, the noise around AI is overwhelming. So with your background, tell me about what you're seeing, hearing, thinking about, broadly speaking, AI and what we're. And how we're using AI within experience management.

Speaker C: So it's really kind of, it's really an interesting place that we're in right now when you look outside. So social media and the ways that AI is being used, it. It's hard to tell what's true. You look at things and you don't know whether they're real or fake. And a lot of that is, you know, the, the impact of AI on the way that we perceive things. And so that skepticism about AI kind of in an outward way impact us on an inward way. When we try to use AI at

Speaker A: work,

Speaker C: we're engaging in that in the same place where we say it's fake. I can't tell real from fake. It's not authentic, it's inauthentic. And so That's, I, I feel like that's the framework that we're in. So that's one element of the framework. Another element of the framework is a lot of people don't really use AI that much. They use it a little bit. They use ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, but they don't really know how to use it. I mean using, you know, I've just, I, I would be in that situation if I wasn't running this business. But you know, we're in it every day and we learn, you know, we try things. I mean at the end of the day we're trying to develop one paragraph. That's all we're trying to do is write a paragraph. And it's so hard, it's so hard to write one really good paragraph. And people see that all the time when they write long documents. You know, the beginning of it's good, the end's bad. You know, there's all these things that are happening and so there's a question of like, of how do you use AI? How do you actually make it work for your business needs? So there's, there's that element too. And so we're existing in, within all of that. And then we have people telling us that it's going to eliminate all of our jobs when we have a hard time writing a paragraph and it's like this dissonance, right? Like, am I missing something? Is somebody else really good at it and I'm bad at it. So there's all of these elements and there's privacy and all these things that are happening in our lives that we're trying to, to deal with. And it's interesting from, you know, sitting in my shoes now, not as a CEO, but as someone running an AI business.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: How do you make sense of all of that? How do you talk to customers about that when they're skeptical about using AI because they feel like it might be fake? Does it detract as opposed to add?

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: Those are things that we think about all the time.

Speaker B: Right. You know, I might add too. Um, George, I think those are really important points. Uh, having been in the customer service business and contact center business for most of my career and listeners get tired of me saying this, but the first thing that we do in customer service is uh, with new technology is we say how do we cut costs? How do we use the technology to cut costs? So go uh, way back, you know, when chat was first introduced, we didn't look at chat as a profit generating way to interact with our customers we said how many chats can an agent handle at the same time so that we can um, take less phone calls and have less expense. And it feels a little bit like we're doing that same thing with AI. When you mentioned the job reduction, it's like, how do we use AI to eliminate jobs or how do we use AI to cut costs? And I think about this, you can say what you want about AI, but this wealth of knowledge that's going to uh, present itself to us and our response is again, customer service is how do we cut costs? And it's as a professional and experienced management, it frustrates me with that.

Speaker C: Yeah, well, I mean the reality is there are different ways to use AI and it all depends on the leadership team and what their objectives are. And I think you're right. I mean the first thing that people think about is how can I reduce costs, how can I do what I'm doing now, but cheaper?

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: They don't necessarily think about how can I do it better? Because if I'm going to do it better, am I going to get paid to do it better? Right. You know, there's always this question, if people are buying from me now, like why should I do something better? I'm not going to get paid more. Those kinds of things is a normal thing for a management, uh, team to ask. Mhm. But I think what they miss often, especially around AI, is the ability to look at it from a lens of how do I grow revenue, how do I build organic growth? That's how we look at it. We look at, we call it organic growth. So it's how do I, not through acquisition, but how do I just in my daily business increase the revenue of a location organically?

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: Right. And I think we've demonstrated that you can do that using AI. So as opposed to cutting costs, you, I mean I can give you the same answer cheaper or it can give you a better answer which helps you increase revenue at the same price. So it's whatever you want. And we have, frankly. Mhm. We have customers that want both. I mean, one or the other.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: We have people that just say, hey, I don't care, I just want answers, I just want cheaper. I just want to click a button and have it run. And we have others that say we want to put eyes on everything, but we want AI to help us do a better job. So we have both sides and one will drive revenue, the second one will drive revenue and the first one won't. It'll Just reduce costs.

Speaker B: Right. So George, when I was doing some background research on the company and prepping for this discussion, one of the things that kind of stood out to me in your approach to the market was small business and the ability to have small businesses do this. And the reason it stuck out to me is because, you know, um, a few years ago we would have the big CRM people on these podcasts and they talked about all these wonderful things that the CRM is going to do. And small businesses say, yeah, I don't have a million dollars to spend on a CRM system to track my customers. And yet you seem to call that out. So I guess a couple of questions is one, did I read that correctly? Is it, is it small business applicable? And, and uh, are you seeing that, Are you seeing small businesses kind of grab that and say, hey, this, this is, this is a game changer for me as a small business to manage my customers better?

Speaker C: Yeah, it's a great question. So I'm often asked, what's your icp? What's your ideal customer profile? And they, what they want to hear is small business, SMB enterprise. You know, they want to hear that. And I respond with people who are interested in quality and they're, oh, that's a bad answer. You know, it's not, you know, it's not small business. You know, SMB enterprise. I'm like, yeah, but I have all three. I mean, I have all three customers. Why would I want to say that one of them is my ICP when I have all three? So um, what separates us is not are we designed for small business or enterprise, it's we provide a very high quality product. And so therefore, if you're interested in quality, you come to us. If you're not, then, you know, you can probably find something cheaper. Not that we're cheap. I mean, not that we're expensive, we're actually not expensive. But at the very low end, there are people who do, you know, very cheap stuff.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: So for example, on our website we have a free responder and we use like, you know, chat GPT 3.5. It's like the cheapest version. You know, it costs nothing, it's free. And it, but the response is it, it's, you know, what people call AI slob. Right. It's just, it's just a response. There's no, nothing to it. Mhm. We generate thousands of responses on that every day.

Speaker B: Interesting.

Speaker C: We even pop up something that says, hey, you've been here like 55 times, you know, for $15 a month, you could be getting like much better responses. And they click out and just keep on going. Right? Because they don't. Because they don't care.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: And that's fine. You know, it's fine if people don't care. There's a lot of different people in the world and that's a perfectly valid way to think about it or if it works for their business. But that's not our paying customer. So I would say that the, the issue that the small business has is not only price, but it's time. You know, they, if you're a roofer, you want a roof, right. You don't want to learn how to use some system and do all this stuff. Uh, you're tired at the end of the day and you don't want to do it. So we developed a done for you program that where we do everything. So it's very personalized. It's not, it's actually not that expensive. It's you know, 75 to $100 a month. It's like 50, 50 to $100 a month. Realistically if you have multiple locations. Um, and, and we just, we help them develop a strategy. You know, we do a lot of work up front and then it kind of runs after that. But right. We, we do it all. And that is great for small, you know, for single location businesses, one to three location businesses where the owner just, you know, they, they're intrigued by it, but they don't want to do it.

Speaker B: Mhm. Right.

Speaker C: Um, a large company would never do that, you know, because they got lots of people and you know, they have people that can do that stuff. So we don't sell done for you to big clients, but we do sell a lot of it to small businesses.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: Um, and so that's another differentiation for us because most reputation management platforms don't do it for you. You have to kind of do it yourself. Right.

Speaker B: So that's a perfect segue. Uh, George, into. Let's get into the details about the company and what you do and provide our listeners some perspective on um, how you're applying AI in this, uh, in this unique. And what I think is a really unique approach to reputation management.

Speaker C: So, so great. So there are really. So I'll just focus on two elements of reputation management. One is I need to get more reviews and two is I need to respond to those reviews. And you do these things for different reasons. And I'll bring all this back eventually to organic revenue growth because each one plays a part in that so everyone knows they get review. Everybody gets reviews. I mean there's, we did, we did some research and like the number of reviews just keeps on going up. Just every year it's more and more.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: And, and so it's an increasingly important part of business for any location based business. It's also important for product based businesses. But we don't really work with product based businesses. Like we don't do reviews on e commerce sites. We're really focused on location M based business. Mhm. Okay, so let's talk about review response. Well, let's talk actually let's talk about each element and what it does. So getting more reviews is important because reviews are a proxy for popularity. If nobody's leaving reviews, how does Google know that you're popular? You could have a thousand people walking into your restaurant. But if you don't get any reviews, it could be one person Google doesn't know.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: The, the review, the number of reviews, the consistency, people don't think about that either. They'll like go get 100 reviews and then nothing. And Google says, oh, that's a blip. You know, they did something. It I can't trust that. You have to have consistent reviews. So getting reviews is important. It is a signal for popularity and it helps you climb the rankings. So when somebody Googles best Italian restaurant, a lot of things matter. But something that's really important is having more reviews than your competitors, having better rating than your competitors. That's important. That's one piece. So uh, what I always say is you, you get reviews for your ranking. You don't respond to reviews for your ranking. Right. You respond to reviews for the person reading the review that's trying to decide where to go next. M. So you generate a lot of reviews. That gets you higher on the ranking. Someone then says best Italia restaurant, you show up. What's the first thing they do? They go to your reviews.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker C: Right. And they start reading reviews. And so you have an option there, you can say nothing. You don't have to respond to reviews. Some people don't because they're like, well the review is the review. Nobody cares about what I have to say.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: But then you're not participating in the conversation. You have all these people talking to each other except the owner of the business. Right, right.

Speaker B: You're not there.

Speaker C: Like the craziest thing. And so, so you have all this, you have this conversation taking place out in the world about your business and the question is, are you going to engage in that conversation or not okay, so back, way back when, when everything started, people had to write answers, right? They had to write the answer. Well, that takes a lot of time.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: So then the reputation management platforms came out and the first thing they started doing was templates. M. Remember that? You know. Yes, it'd be a templated response and so every third one would look regardless

Speaker B: of what the review was, it would be a template. It was just totally. There were two ships passing in the night.

Speaker C: Right. And that's, that's what we were doing was just templated reviews. Back at Alpaca, we were just doing templated reviews. That's what was available. Nothing else was available. And ah, so we were competing against people. So a lot of our competitors were audiologists who had single location businesses who would write answers, who would respond. How do you compete? Like human being typing great responses versus a template. Who's going to win that game?

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker C: The human. Right. So then Chat GPT came out and all of a sudden you were getting like what I call generic AI answers. So the response, you know, the review would be, oh, you know, I love the uh, I love the ve and the wine was great. And the answer even today is oh, we're glad to hear you love the, you know, you love the steak and the wine was great because it doesn't know anything. So.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: You're not contributing to the con. Even with generic AI. You're, and you know, you're, you're responding to the review but you're not participating in the conversation.

Speaker B: It's almost, it almost is detrimental. The response almost becomes a, uh, negative because it's unrelated to the review and it's templated and it, it, you know, it makes the reviewer probably think, well, they don't really care. Uh, yeah, they responded, but they don't

Speaker C: really care, especially if it's a negative review. Yeah. Because if it's a negative review, they're, they're looking for you to say something. And if you just have this generic, you know, I was really upset with, you know, with the pool at the hotel and. We're sorry, you were upset with the pool at the hotel. Right, right, right.

Speaker B: You know, fill in the blank. We're sorry. And then fill in the blank.

Speaker C: Right. And so it does, it, it becomes so we. So I thought it's detrimental just like you said, it's detrimental because you're just wasting space. But of course I'm in the business, so like I'll, you know, am I biased? So we did some research, we did some research and we asked People and they did say that they viewed it negatively. Generic. Okay. Uh, there's like this increasing. And sometimes I see it look and I'll look through reviews, I'll see sometimes, you know, I'll see it when I look back at a customer's historical reviews. Sometimes we'll see things like, nobody's reading these anyway because it's just a generic AI response. So they, they'll make a comment, they'll update their review with nobody reading this, nobody responding, whatever. Right.

Speaker B: So don't tell anybody I said this, but in, in the surveying days, I used to put in, you know, so not a review, not a public review, but a survey that came back to me. I put in a negative comment and see how long it would take for a company to respond to me. And out of a thousand companies, maybe two would respond, oh, you had a negative survey result. So yeah, it's crazy. But go ahead.

Speaker C: Right. So what we do. So our, our objective again, our objective is organic growth. Right? So one element is getting more reviews higher in the rankings, more people, organic growth. The other is people are now. So you're in the ranking with somebody who's either above you or below you. And their reviews are being checked out too. So their review is this. What about the stake? And it's a silly, you know, generic AI response. And yours is, oh, we're really glad you enjoyed your experience. We only use prime beef and we buy it from a producer in Colorado. We're glad you enjoyed it. Completely different feeling to that response because you've added something that wasn't in the review. You're telling them something about your business, right? You're telling them what you would tell them, um, if they were in front of you, if they came up to you and said, I love the beef. You're like, you know what? You know, we only get prime beef. We get it from Colorado. This, this place we have a relationship with. That's what you would say to them. So our, our goal was that's an

Speaker B: engaging conversation then rather than that all of a sudden, we're taking it to a totally different level now.

Speaker C: That's right. So, uh, if you're reading those two, you're trying to decide, am I going to go to steakhouse A or steakhouse B, right? And one's like, hey, thanks for your 5 star review. And the other is what I just said, you're probably going to gravitate to the one that engage where the owner, the company engaged, you told you something new,

Speaker B: right?

Speaker C: Because you say they care. They Care. They're telling me something I didn't know. They got it from a farm. I like that. I like that we're supporting, you know, these people that are trying to raise good beef. I'm going to go there and have that beef because I don't know what's going on in this other joint. I'm not going to take the time to go to their website and do my own research. I'm going to make a reservation here.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: So, yeah. So now you're converting that incremental customer organic growth. Right. So both of those can lead to organic growth for very different reasons.

Speaker B: And all the people that are reading the reviews that are trying to decide to go to that restaurant now have just read that response to the review and saying, wow, that's, you know, that's an engaging owner of that business, that they want to learn more. So it's a, uh, it's got to have a domino effect on the reviews of people now looking for the first time to say, do I want to go to this restaurant or not?

Speaker C: That's right, 100%. And so, uh, let's loop that back around to AI. Okay. So in this world in which we exist today where nothing's real because of AI, what we're trying to do is make things super real through AI. So what we're trying to do is take what the owner would say, put that in writing, put that into our system, and then when the review comes in, we find what's relevant to that review. Mhm. And we incorporate that back into the response. So how do we do that? Mhm. So when, when a company on boards with us, we read all their prior reviews, all their prior responses and their website, we read all of it. The reviews tell us what people talk about. They talk about the stake, they talk about how friendly people are, they talk about the bartender, like these are the things that they talk about. So we create these kind of messages. Messages, facts, snippets, whatever you want to call it. Messages is the word that I'm kind of leaning towards now. So we identify the things that people talk about and then we look at prior responses and the website to identify what can we say from a marketing perspective that's relevant to that topic.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: Okay. So we create a set of these draft messages. The owner just has to go in and make sure, just read them, make sure they're true. Because, you know, somebody might have said something in a response three years ago that not true anymore.

Speaker B: I see, right.

Speaker C: AI doesn't know that. So all the customer has to do is validate that these messages are in fact correct. And then it just runs. You know, every time a review comes in, it evaluates, it identifies the relevant themes and the, the messages that make sense. It pulls all that together and writes a response. And that's, you know, that's kind of how it works. And so in an age where AI is can be very inauthentic, what we're trying to do is make it super authentic because it's not saying anything that the owner wouldn't say anyway. Right.

Speaker B: Fascinating. Uh, that, I mean, like I said a moment ago, it's taking this to a whole different level because you're right. And I want to tag on something you said earlier about the reviews. You know, you need the reviews to get, you know, Google to show you're a popular place, you know, the more reviews. And I guess I always knew that, but the way you articulated it was just. Of course it is, you know, that's what you want. And then it comes to mind is how many companies are ignoring their reviews or not responding or using can responses. And here's this wealth of customer data. You know, meanwhile we're out doing surveys, but here's this wealth of customer data that's right in front of us that says we're doing really good or we're doing really bad or something in between. And how do we take advantage of that? And that's what I found. You know, throughout my career and experience, management has been, is in some of the most basic places are, uh, where we find out the customer, customer's view of our business. And you know, it's talking to a customer service agent and saying, hey, what's happening today? What are our customers saying? And you, there's just all that wealth of information. And now what you're doing from the review standpoint is just that saying we got a review, let's not ignore it, let's take advantage of it. And I, I just think it's, it just takes it, um, I keep saying it, but it takes it to a whole new level.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, no, we, we actually have another module, kind of a voice of the customer module, where at the same time that we're analyzing that review for the content and relevant messages and things like that, we're also analyzing it for sentiment against a set of things that are relevant to that business. So we, we generate a set of topics for every business that are unique to that business, um, that are relevant. So, you know, the topics for a restaurant are going to be different than the, the topics for a roofer. Right, right. Because different business. And then what we do is we, we create a metric that's called percent positive. So we look at every mention within each topic and we look at the percentage of the phrases that were positive, the percent positive in that topic. What's interesting about that is if you, if you chart the percent positive over time and you chart the rating average rating over time.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: They follow each other. So when the rate average rating goes up, the percent positive goes up. When the average rating goes down, the percent positive goes down. Right. Which is great because it means that it's a proxy. It's a very close. That's calculated completely differently, but it's a, it's a good proxy. What that means is because the rating is only for the whole business and the percent positive is for these individual topics. You can actually see what it is that's bringing your rating down. You might have one restaurant where freshness is really low and that's what's dragging your rating down. So you know what, you have to fix another one. Freshness might be high, food quality might be high, but service is low or some element of service, that's what's dragging you down. So the problem. And uh, we used to have this all the time when I was kind of CEO. You'd have a, you'd have, we'd have a location and they'd have a uh, 3.5 rating and you just yell at them. Get your rating up. You know what, you know, what else do you know? You don't know anything else. Uh, someone's going to go read all like read the reviews and figure it out. Now we can act. Now an owner of a multiple location business can say manager one. Look, you really need to focus on the, you know, on where the customer. The dining area.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: You know, cleanliness. That's what you need to do. If you do that, your rating will go up. And manager number five, you know, you got a problem with temperature control. You know, you really have to focus on that. That's what's driving your rating. And so what we find is that the larger SMBs, um, medium in particular medium sized businesses, enterprise customers, they'll use our voice of customer. The small ones don't because they're like I'm there every day. I know what. Right. Makes sense. Like I know.

Speaker B: Right. Oh, uh, that's, yeah, it's, it's um, it's fascinating. It really is. And I mean I to that last comment you made about you're not painting Everybody with the same brush, right? You're saying this location needs to work on this and that location needs to work on that. George, this has been a great conversation about AI, um, uh, and the application of AI. Probably one of the most effective applications of AI I've heard to date. So congrats on that. Um, listeners are intrigued. How do they get, uh, you mentioned some things on your website, but how's the best way to connect with uh, your company and um, engage with what your services are?

Speaker C: Yeah, so it's WriteResponseAI.com, right? ResponseAI.com that's the easiest way on that site. It's easy to set up a call. You click a button, book a call. Usually it's me. If I'm available, I'm the one. That's all I do is I talk to people. I love it. So, uh, anyone who wants to learn more about what we do or strategize about how they can grow their revenue, location based businesses in particular, happy to talk to people they can come there. We also have some, uh, we do special nice things for our, you know, podcast hosts. So if your listeners go to write responseai cxu cxu, um, that's a special place for your listeners where we have uh, some specials, uh, great trials, discounts, things like that and the ability again there to book a call with us and we know exactly where they're coming from. So um, that's nice as well.

Speaker B: I love it. We appreciate that, as do our listeners. So uh, George, thank you for your time today and we really appreciate your perspective and we look forward to hearing more about right response AI and what the future holds. So, um, it's been a great conversation.

Speaker C: Thank you, thank you for having me.

Speaker B: And listeners, this has been another episode of the All Things Considered CX Unhinged podcast. As always, if you've enjoyed this episode, please share it with your networks and stay tuned for another episode coming soon.

Speaker A: Thanks for hanging out with us on All Things Considered, cx. We hope you enjoyed today's chat and picked up some valuable insights you can use in your own CX journey. If you liked what you heard, make sure to subscribe and never miss an episode. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Drop us a review, share your thoughts and let's keep the conversation going until next time. Keep challenging the way things are done. The future of CX is in your hands.