You might have a great support team and you love human support, but there are times when a customer doesn't even want to talk with a human. So if you have a question, they don't care if it's an agent telling you or if it's a help center or a vibe. They just want their issues solved.

Welcome to the Agency Podcast, where we help web design and digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, their teams, and their communities. This week we're joined by Corey Brown, founder and CEO of Simplesat.io. SimpleSat specialise in creating surveys and dashboards that allow you to not only analyse but understand your customer feedback. In this episode, we explore the cadence of when to run particular surveys like CSAT or NPS, customer effort scores, how to create surveys your customers will love, how to increase survey response rates, leveraging feedback for maximum outcome and much more. Who knew gathering customer feedback could be so much fun? So if you're struggling to decipher your analytics and you want to dive deeper for insights or you want to craft custom reports to find specific answers, then this episode is for you. I'm Troy Dean. Stay with us. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Corey Brown to the Agency Hour Podcast. Hey Corey, how are you? Good. How are you doing, Troy? I'm very well. Thank you. Thanks for joining us here on the Agency Hour Podcast. Um those who are listening to this probably won't know who you are, so just give us the too long didn't read version. Who are you and what are you doing? What are you doing here on the Agency Hour Podcast?

Yeah, sure. So uh my name is Corey, and I am the founder and CEO at SimpleSat. Uh Simplesat is a customer feedback management platform which helps businesses collect um and measure and improve from customer feedback. Um before SimpleSat, uh I co-founded Pronto Marketing with my dad and here in Thailand, Bangkok, Thailand, um, which is now um one of my college friends, Tim, is running the company, Tim Kelsey, who's uh who's a maverick. Um so yeah, so after basically I was uh doing pronto for for quite some time um and managing our uh project managers. This pronto's uh an agency doing website management and and online marketing. Um so but we were using Zendesk, uh wasn't happy with the the this the CSAT options or the survey options that Zendesk had to offer. Um this was like 10 years ago, so you know, use some tools that were available, nothing was that good. There was too much spam, and we didn't like um Zendesk's binary scale. So um it that's just what it got in my in my head that you know there could be something better because you know we're we're collecting uh feedback through Zendesk where our CSAT score was consistently like 98 or 99 or 100%, but we knew that we were far from perfect. So, you know, how could we, you know, and it's again more stuff just getting in my head. How can we design a survey that could um have us get a lower score so we could actually improve you know our service? Um, how do we increase response rates? So, anyways, that that's like kind of the genesis of the idea at Pronto, and then maybe about five years later, we decided to bite the bullet and start a SaaS company kind of within Pronto. Um that was about seven years ago. So Pronto's kind of been our our big sister or mom or or whatever, but um yeah, kind of that short of that.

Yeah, I hadn't um I hadn't connected the dots before you you came on, but uh uh Tim's told me a lot about you and your dad, and uh now I realize uh who he's talking about. Um and uh so I I question before we dive into um simple set. How was it uh hiring so Tim is now a coach at Maverick Club, he went through our program and he's now a coach here. How was it kind of relinquishing control of an agency that you'd started with your dad to and having someone else come in as a general manager? I think it's a really interesting um uh conversation point. What what what did you have to kind of get where did you have to arrive in your head so that you could make that transition?

Mm-hmm. Yeah, good question. Um, I guess like over time, actually I moved around a lot. I wore a lot of hats at Pronto. Um I was our you know managing support and production team as I moved to RD, I moved to be head of marketing and then finally moved to be um managing RD again. But kind of towards the end, I was like kind of relinquishing control, which is you know a good or good and a bad thing. Where because I was kind of first-time manager doing a lot of this as well. Um, but I realized when I was just managing our RD team, just a team of like 12 developers, like, well, I have kind of no control in the company anymore. You know, not control over pricing, over marketing, over the website quality or sort of thing. So it was it was kind of like sad and scary, but at the same time, watching Pronto continuing to grow and thrive without me being so involved was really great. And Tim was kind of gradually taking control more and more. Um, and I was just getting more and more passionate about uh SimpleSat and the SAS project that we were doing. So I think it was pretty it was like it was a natural thing. Like it just it kind of happened over time, and Tim was just doing a better job than I ever could have done at all those management things. So I yeah, I I guess reflecting back, I think I think it all went went pretty well, and we're all happy with it.

And um, there are a few players in the uh how how long have you been how long have you been running SimpleSat and when what was the competition like at that point? Because because I admit I've been super frustrated with the um I think I was using SurveyMonkey at one point to do an NPS because it was the only platform that allowed me to do an MPS and then to do all the calculations in the back end to actually give me a score out of the minus hundred to plus hundred scale. Who what was the competitive landscape like when you started SimpleSet? And what gave you the what gave you the conviction that you could fill a gap in the market?

Yeah. Um yeah, so not as much competition as there was now, obviously, it's probably as is the case with most type of things like this, but um the the um the thing that that gave me the conviction or like the big idea, because we all we had this idea for like a a better survey tool, you know, but it was like kind of what is that exactly? And um have you heard of Office Vibe? It's an employee satisfaction tool. No, it's uh it's it's really good. So Pronto was using that. Um maybe Pronto still uses it. We've kind of used it off and on, but it's all it's surveys and all the analytics, but only for um employee feedback and stuff. And their surveys were very um kind of fun and engaging, like borderline, just cute, kind of animated a little bit. And I remember seeing that survey, and that was like kind of the aha moment of oh, like we can have fun with this, you know. It's a it doesn't, you know, if you think about even like typeform or something, their design's really beautiful and stuff, but no one's really having fun. So that was kind of the idea. We can have fun. We can have so like in SimpleSat, we have these rating icons, we have like bouncing thumbs and these smiling cats and stuff, and trying uh the all of our surveys, we are inspired by Tinder, actually. Like the when you uh answer a question, like the cards swipe over to the next one. So, like what it's oh, okay, we could make something that's almost like a game or almost like you know, fun and entertaining that can actually improve a business's image is like this is our, you know, you're asking a customer to um answer a survey, but it's also like here here's how cool we are, here's how buttoned up, and here's how good our brand looks. So that that was definitely the yeah, the start and like like the uh the kernel idea.

Love it. Who apart from agencies, which we'll talk about in a moment, who's the ideal client profile for SimpleSet? And and and and were you clear about that when you started SimpleSet?

Yeah, definitely. So so uh customer number one was Pronto. So that was great to you know have in pronto, I was in the same building and using Zendesk and um you know immediately get feedback. We could just put launch it in Zendesk and get you know get feedback there. Um but then the shortly after, the target we knew was going to be managed service providers, uh, you know, IT consultants, which is Pronto's main ideal customer. So that was a very natural um customer base to market to because Pronto already had hundreds of MSPs. So and naturally just Simplesat had Pronto's endorsement because I could had control of uh their uh campaign monitor account or whatever, I could send emails. Um so yeah, so so that was uh yeah, uh MSPs and uh MSPs were very good natural first customers. They all have help desks. SimpleSat works best for any company that uses any type of help desk to communicate with customers because you could close a ticket and then you can rate the ticket. Um but now we're just we're kind of following the market now and naturally getting sucked up market a little bit and getting more um focusing towards SaaS and uh e-commerce customers. But we still have uh managed support and we still have marketing agencies um and creative agencies as well on board. But so it's basically any type of CS or support team that that likes to that communicates with customers through a help desk and a technical company.

Do you do things uh is it is it just customer satisfaction or do you do like NPS, employee NPS, that kind of stuff as well?

Yeah, yeah. So we do um like the the bucket like uh group that we're in, it's called customer feedback management. So anything about customer feedback. Um so that includes uh CSAT, as we were just talking about, NPS, uh CES is the customer effort score. It could be five-star. Um any way to get feedback from customers. Um we do have some of our customers using SimpleSat for um employee feedback, but um, we actually one thing we do with the with our product is we try to get as much information about the customer as possible, um, which is great because you want to know who left the feedback and who to respond to. But that's actually not so great for employee feedback because a lot of the times you want it to be anonymous, you know? So you can so people are kind of hacking SimpleSat for employee feedback, but we still like we'll show the IP address who left it or something like that. So you could figure out who who did it. So maybe, maybe we'll go into there someday. But yeah, for now, just customer feedback.

Sure. Just for those who are uninitiated and uh wasn't familiar with it, but what's a what's a customer effort score?

So the customer effort score asks the question, uh, some variation of how easy was it for you to solve your problem? Because and it's it's on a scale of one to seven. There's there's CES 1.0, CES 2.0. Now it's not 2.0 is on one to seven. And the idea there is that if you do um ask CSAT, customer satisfaction, it's generally how was your experience? You know, how did your agent do? So they're um the customer is going to be rating basically the agent's performance. Um, you know, so you might just get a good score if they're courteous or friendly, but maybe there's a different problem. Uh NPS, which maybe we could talk about in a second, is more about customer loyalty um and how like you likely you're to recommend, but customer effort, um, some research have researchers have found that that is actually like one of the greatest measures of um of of like uh customer satisfaction or loyalty in the long run is just how much friction can you reduce. And it's not even about um like you might have a great support team and you love human support, but there are times when a customer doesn't even want to talk with a human, they just want their issues solved. You know, so if you have a question and you know, they don't care if it's a customer or sorry, if it's an agent telling you or if it's a help center or a bot, if it was easy to get your question solved, then that's gonna help your perception and of and of the company as well. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. And I I'll I'd I'd love to talk about the cadence uh of these things and right the typical response rates. So one of the things that we teach our agencies is to run um NPS, uh CSAT. We have we have playbooks and templates for employee NPS, uh we run a start-stop keep survey with our teams. Um so we've we're big on getting feedback from our teams and from our clients. I'd love to know the cadence of you know, do you run a when do you run a customer satisfaction uh survey? When do you run a customer effort survey? When do you run an NPS? And I know this is a big question, but uh and what are the typical response rates that we should be expecting from these, and how do we increase those response rates?

Okay, great question. So um I would uh I let's say if like if you're to be layering on um these things, I think first I would start with uh CSAT, just because it's the easiest to get going. And with CSAT, uh you're um like with SimpleSat, the best way to do is what we recommend is to embed a Simplesat survey in the existing email that um is sent out when a ticket is closed or solved. So if you're using Zendesk or Fresh Desk or HubSpot or whatever, when you close the ticket, um it's already that email's already being sent. It says, uh, hey Troy, we've completed the request. By the way, please rate us. And then the survey is right there. Uh it's called a one-click survey because the rating icons are in the email. So if you click it, it'll automatically save the rating without clicking submit or anything. Um and that you could, you know, you could launch that in 10 minutes, and then now you have coverage over your help desk. And you now you can see, you know, every ticket, big or small, um, the customer has an issue to raise their hand and say that there's a problem here. And so that that really helps, you know, they're not gonna be like issues boiling or like, you know, festering over time, and um you know, it's just a it's a chance to to what's it called, stop the production line to pull the flag or raise the flag or something. Um so yeah, so so recommend that for CSAT. Then would be NPS. And that's kind of like the the big two that you could be doing because CSAT is gonna give you coverage and you know, peace of mind that your customers can rate any ticket and then you have visibility over that. But not all of your customers are active in your help desk, especially some of the like the business owners or the decision makers. So that's why NPS is great because you can send an email. Um, you know, you don't have to interact with the help desk. You could have have it be more of a recurring thing. So you could send it quarterly or um twice a year or yearly, and that's done over email. Um, and then CES might be last, and it's not gonna be applicable for all businesses and probably less even for agency owners. It could be more for self-serve SaaS or e-commerce companies. Um, so this is gonna be something when it could have been more of a self-service um thing, not not after a service interaction, or you wouldn't send um you know CES quarterly or something. It could be after you um you read a help desk article or something, or you know, went through a chat bot or something like that. So that's kind of getting more um technical or tactical. So, but the the two big I would recommend would be CSAT and uh and MPS. As for response rates, I think it's pretty similar to um what you see with email marketing, somewhere between like five and 40%, just depending it's like it could really vary depending on uh basically the the smaller the company is and the more the better relationship you have with your customers, the higher it's gonna be generally. So we've seen like 5% with way bigger um SaaS customers that we have that have you know tens of thousands or uh of of customers that people aren't gonna be as gauged engaged.

Got it. Um sorry, I might I might have missed the frequency of an NPS. So I get customer CSAT is like when the tickets closed, you know, uh NPS, how often do we run them?

Yeah. So it I think it could be anywhere from quarterly to yearly. And um it's just you just I I would recommend uh starting quarterly, and then you can tweak it just based on uh the responses that you're getting. So maybe at first, like the first two quarters, you'll get a lot of responses, and you might start to see drop-offs because customers, you know, a quarter, quarter can be a long time. It can also be or a short time, but it can also feel like a long time or short time. Um but if if people yeah, sorry, but people customers just might say, you know, I'm I already answered this three months ago. My my uh my opinion hasn't changed. So so just play with the frequency uh based on how many responses you're getting.

Got it. And and NPS, is that also delivered via email or uh how else is it how else is it delivered?

Yeah. So yeah, so email or in-app are the two um most popular cases. And so simple side, we we have different delivery methods you can send through email or embed in the app at the moment, or direct link. You can do a QR code. But for agency um agency owners, I'd recommend email. Um but yeah, so but more for of a SaaS or an e-commerce company, uh, we have a delivery method where I'm sure you've seen this before, like it, you know, similar to um like the chat apps or something. We can have it pop up once you log into the app, and that's great to increase engagement as well, or or get people that might not be reading their emails.

I uh spoken to some agency owners who um, and I understand, and I think I know the answer to this question anyway, but I'm gonna ask it for the benefit of people who aren't inside my brain. Um, the agency owners who want to incentivize people for giving feedback, right? So it's not, hey, you know, we'll give you an Amazon voucher if you give us a 10 out of 10. It's like we'll give you, you know, you go into the drawer to win an Amazon voucher if you just fill in this survey because we want feedback. Is there any is it what what are the what are the what are the problems or the pitfalls with doing that? Or is it a good idea?

Yeah, yeah. So well, I I know that uh offering like Amazon gift cards for um leaving like G2 or um Google reviews works, and I I fully support that. That's that's a great campaign. Um I've see I've seen it less for like answering the survey, and that might actually be a bad thing if you're offering so much money because then you're kind of like guilting them into giving a good score. Um, the most effective incentive campaign I've seen actually is um donating money, saying, like, we're gonna for every rating you give, we give one dollar to this foundation or something like that. That works real especially good for um smaller, smaller businesses that are local in the community and their customers are all local. Um so that that's the one I would recommend. It's like, you know, way less than, you know, you don't you don't have to do $25 per rating or something. It could just be a dollar or 50 cents, but you just say every time you're giving us feedback, you're supporting this uh food shelter or something like that.

That's great. That's good. Uh I like it. I like it. With what what what what happens? I mean, this is probably outside the scope of what you guys do, but you must have seen inside lots of businesses and agencies who are using these. What I've always thought, you know, it's frustrating getting data and then not knowing what to do with it. So how how does a how does a I'll talk about agencies in a moment, but how does a business owner get data from customer satisfaction survey? And then and what are they what are they typically then doing? Like are are most people taking action based on the data they're receiving, or is it just a pretty dashboard that makes the C-level suite feel good about themselves?

Yeah, so yeah, so and like in SimpleSat, there's, or I guess any feedback reporting, there's I think one way to look at it is um you know, high level and like really zoomed in. So like at a at a high level, like you're saying, executive C-suite, uh, we have dashboards and you could view um your 90-day rolling average for CSAT and NPS. Um, and what's important there isn't necessarily like the exact score, but it's it's the trend, you know, with anything, let's say tracking marketing stats or anything. Um so that's you know, it's just it's a number that you that you need to be tracking. And then once you have the number, you can start improving on that. So if whatever your NPS is today, there are things that you can do to improve it. So just again, just like let's say revenue or leads, uh, if you want to improve it, then you get with your leadership team, you have a hypothesis and brainstorm some ideas, do a campaign and see if it moved the needle. So that's kind of like a high level. You want you you need the score. Once you have a score, you know if you're uh positively impacting it or not. Like that's why in the beginning, our our CSAT, Pronto CSAT score is 99, there's nothing to improve. So uh I wanted it to be 90 or 80 or something.

Because you can you because you I've done this in the past, because you can get in the system, right? You can, in fact, exactly. In fact, there's a tactic I noticed you suggest this as well, which is slightly different. But if if someone gives you a five-star review, you then redirect them to a Google review or a Facebook review page and say, hey, that would be great. Can you share this on social? We're not gaming the system there, but we're optimizing the experience, right? And we're leveraging that feedback for maximum benefit. But you can we've in the past, I know that we have kind of gamed our NPS by sending people an NPS when we know they are most in love with us. As simple as, you know, they share some feedback that they've had a big win. We tag them in our CRM, it sends them a an NPS. You know, we just flick it to them in Slack and and they love us, right? And so that's a it's a it's a cheat. It's not, it's not it's not I mean, I wouldn't say it's a hundred percent accurate. It looks good on the surface, but we're only asking people at the top we're asking all customers, but we're asking them when they love us the most. Mm-hmm. So it's a d it's a skewed uh we don't do this anymore, by the way. Uh we used to. Uh we we used to because it felt good and and also because um We were also the reason we did it is because we knew that they were highly engaged at that point and they were likely to give us feedback. We didn't say, hey, based on your win, can you, you know, tell us how likely you are to recommend us. We just send them the standard NPS question, which I'm happy to unpack in a minute for those who aren't aware of it. But uh we we would send it at a time in the relationship where we knew they were most likely going to give us a great score.

Yeah, so I I guess like what I would recommend there is um, and in SimpleSat, you can we you could do like one off, you could just do batches, like send all at the same time, but we also have a feature where um you could spread it out over time. So based on the lists, the audience size, it'll spread it out over um three months or six months or whatever you do. And it's essentially random. So so that way, you know, you hit the happy people, but they also might be hit the people who are in a bad mood as well. Um, but you want you really want that negative feedback. You got to lean into it because you know, you with you can share these scores uh with the public, with other agency owners, but it's you want bad feedback internally because that's how you're gonna improve. Um, and I think like so the next part, so there's like your kind of high-level dashboards, but zoomed in, um, and I think really maybe where the magic happens is all this real-time feedback that you're getting. So you can integrate SimpleSat with Slack or Microsoft Teams, and we have email notifications. So whenever you get a response, uh it instantly is sent to a Slack channel, and then the team can look at it and celebrate a win or um close a loop with an issue. Um, also, we integrate with all of the systems that you could uh add a survey in. So it can create a new Zendesk ticket that you know that's ready for your team just to follow up. Or it's as simple as that. We use intercom. It creates a new intercom conversation. So it's just in our support uh agents workflow, just like getting a new ticket for questions or people needing support, a new ticket is created to follow up with this customer about a negative or a positive uh comment that they had. And that is a big part of improving either your CSAT or your MPS score, is just listening to customers and um acknowledging mistakes, um, you know, recording the feature requests and fixing the mistakes. So that's a great way just to improve your score too. Yeah.

Got it. Um now for those who are uninitiated, what is the net promoter score and what are the mechanics? How does it work? And how is the calculation made?

So the net promoter score uh is invented by um Bain Company, the consulting firm. And there was a whole book, like the the ultimate question. So it's this uh it's this like official thing, it's like kind of too official, like we have to pay a license to even use SimpleSet. Um sorry, SimpleSet has to pay a license to use NPS. Um, but it is on a zero to ten scale. And the question is how likely are you to recommend us to a to a friend or colleague or some very close variation of that? And zero to six are detractors, those are people that are actively saying bad things about your business. At least that's the theory. Um six and eight are passives, these are people not saying good or bad things about you. And nine and ten are your promoters, and these are people actively saying good things about your business. And the calculation, you take the percentage of promoters and then you subtract by the uh percentage of detractors, and then you get your score. And it's on a score uh from negative a hundred to a hundred.

Do you know the average in PS for an agency, for example?

For an agency, I think it's a little bit higher, um maybe like thirty to fifty, I'd say. Just I I I don't have those benchmarks up here. Um but that basically the benchmarks range from like zero would be like um like uh like the it's actually industry average zero is like uh the um like cable companies or something. You know, everyone hates hates their cable companies. Um and then like the highest are are um SaaS or very very like relationship, really relationship-based companies as well. Um yeah, so I'd say with agencies, somewhere between like 30 to 50 or something would be an average. Uh but I'm sure some of you guys are way higher, and that's and that's amazing.

And uh so just the segue into agencies, how can agencies use simple set? And we uh we understand how they can use it for their own team. How can agencies use this and and kind of add SimpleSat into their service offering?

Yeah, okay, great question. Well, we have a reseller program. Um so like how would you add it to your service offering?

So, for example, if you were, you know, um if if you were um I just had a call this morning with one of our agencies who's a Shopify uh agency. They're essentially, you know, CRO, email marketing, um, ad management for Shopify store owners. And so I imagine that simple sat might be something that they could recommend or add into their offering to give them data so that they know what to improve for their clients.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So, yeah, so we have a refer referral and a reseller program. So the reseller, you could actually uh own the billing relationship and we bill you. We don't have a white label system, so you you know the customers would still be dealing with with simple sat and everything. But yeah, it could be great because I mean we have a great support team, but uh we're remote. You know, we're in Thailand and Philippines. So if some businesses might want more of a personal or human touch there, so we could work with whatever agency to help set things up or write the intro-outro uh email copy of the MPS survey or anything else that they need help with.

Who typically are the resellers and the referral partners? Are they are they coaches? Are they business coaches? Are they are they the I imagine the fractional CMO guys at Growth Connect are gonna be suggesting this? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So yeah, so some uh agencies, basically any type of agency or consultant from marketing consultant, uh IT technology consultant. Um there's also like CX or CS customer service uh coaches and consultants as well. Um we have uh res like software resellers, Zendesk and Salesforce resellers that um they're I guess they're kind of resellers, but also um like value add consultants as well that help you set up your Zendesk or HubSpot instance and everything. So um that's a natural um good partner as well.

Got it, got it. Um and in terms of um I'm just uh stalking your website here at the moment. In terms of uh how have you grown? I can see you're doing a fair bit with content these days, but in the early days, how did you get SimpleSat into, you know, I know there are people listening to this that that are that are either in agency moving to software or are just in software. How did you get your first your first 20 or 30 customers? What how did you how did you hack your way to relevance, as they say?

Well, yeah, well, it was really it's like I said, we I I hijacked Pronto's uh email list. Uh and because Pronto had over a thousand customers, and so I had a thousand companies to email and say, hey, new from Pronto, uh, now we got this thing. So that that I mean, that was it. That was how we how we kickstarted it. Um and I think it's actually natural for it's a natural progression for agency owners to go into the SaaS business because um, you know, we're simple SAT is bootstrapped. Um, you know, so with an agency, you you know, it's like a it's a ton of work, but you build up this revenue and then you can fund something else. Um, and then you have a customer base as well. And you have like as an agency, you have kind of closer, more personal relationships with customers that, you know, like I was I built websites for uh a lot of the customers years earlier. So they knew me and trusted me. So yeah, it was it was that was a great launching pad just to to hijack Pronto's list.

Got it. And and what are you doing? What does the marketing strategy for SimpleSet look like these days? Is is Pronto Marketing in charge of the marketing for SimpleSet?

Uh no, it was. Um it's it was too awkward to like like be kind of still an owner of the company and then asking people to help with it. It's like you kind of want with an agency, you kind of want someone to yell at, you know, things go wrong and you can't yell at my own team. Um but um yeah, the the main source of leads now is it's still organic, word of mouth, and um mainly from uh marketplaces, because simple set works best as an add-on. If we're an add-on to um either a help desk like Zen Desk or Fresh Desk or CRM, um, you know, pipe drive, HubSpot, Salesforce or something. Um, we want to integrate and link with the tickets and also uh when feedback comes in, we can update the contact and HubSpot, like update a custom field, like latest NPS score, latest CSAT score, or something. So we're in all of those marketplaces. Um so when uh prospect, you know, someone's using HubSpot and they just go, I need, you know, I want to inter I want to integrate MPS with HubSpot. They Google that or they go to the marketplace and and we're there. So that's that's still number one for us.

Got it, got it, got it. Um I I need to talk about AI because uh I'm firmly of the belief that I don't know how long it's gonna take, but I'm I'm very excited about spatial computing and AI, and I'm really looking forward to not having a bloody screen in front of me and wearing smart glasses and being hands-free. How do you think, how do you how, first of all, how are you guys seeing AI is impacting your space? And what what's your take on? I know this is completely off topic, but what's your take on how things are gonna roll out over the next three to five years?

Yeah. Um, so we're actually doing our we did a one AI feature last year, was basically you could just type in a prompt and we suggest five questions based on that prompt. So you could say, like, give me a um in-flight survey, and it'll it'll give you five things about in-flight survey or something like that. Um, but the we're working on the our a a bigger AI feature at the moment, which we're actually going to release this or next week, which is about topic analysis. So every time you um submit feedback now, uh we're integrating with um OpenAI uh GPT models, and it it'll uh read the feedback and associate a topic with it and a sentiment for that topic. And we have a like a predefined list of topics, so it could be like positive timeliness if they responded quickly, but negative problem resolution because the problem still exists or something. Um so for a business like SimpleSat, I that's what AI is really uh valuable because there's so much data, just like you were saying earlier. How do you actually make sense of all this data if you have, you know, it's great to have a bunch of feedback, but how do you use it? So that's where we really want to start using AI, where you could have these common things, themes bubble up, you know, to the surface. Uh, we've all been training, we've been training the models over the past month or something, like reading a bunch of customer feedback. And it's crazy. Like some businesses, their number one complaint is like uh about like um for e-commerce companies is about like delivery timeliness or delivery tracking. Like, I don't like you maybe not wouldn't have thought about that. Or uh we have a crypto company whose people are complaining about account verification. They said they, you know, they they take a picture of their ID and it's not working, and they're really frustrated that they can't get started. So AI can help kind of I think uncover those themes and just like present it and package package it for you in a very simple way. Like here is your bright spot, and here is your uh your you know problem areas, and here's what you need to improve. So we see a lot a lot of potential there with AI, basically making sense of a ton of data and and packaging it in a in a useful way.

Do you think there's gonna be a lot of jobs uh replaced in customer support by AI?

There there might be. So what if you know there's no refunds after 30 days and it's on the 31st day and you have a good excuse? And you know, you so for stuff like that, you need a human to to help with that. I'm not really a technologist or a vision visionary with that sort of thing, but I just I think that it's it's not gonna replace 100%. It's just gonna be a tool like computers and internet and all these applications we use now. So you just gotta know how to use the tool.

Yeah, I agree. I I am um very impressed with uh we're using a tool called Closebot here, which is designed to um basically send messages to your database and get them booked in for a demo. And I'm very impressed with their support. I log into their interface as a customer, the Assass product. I log in as a customer, I go to the support chat widge down the bottom, I ask a question, and they've built an AI bot that actually goes through all of their support docs, which are very well documented and very comprehensive. And I haven't had to talk to someone yet because any all I mean, they are constantly updating their support docs and they also run weekly videos, which are all then transcribed and turned into support docs, I imagine, with AI. But I haven't had to speak to one of their support team yet. I know they do have a support team because I'm you know, I'm in their their Facebook group and I've we have this conversation, but I haven't had to talk to their support team yet because their AI Bot is really good at collating the information in multiple support articles and giving me the answer I need, but from multiple sources within their support, which is which is a fantastic experience because now I'm not spending 10 minutes trawling through the support docs and going back and trying to find the answer buried in paragraph 18 of support doc eight, right? The the bot just gives me the answer. A human being can't do that with that kind of efficiency. So it's not replacing someone, it's actually um giving me a better experience that otherwise wouldn't be available. Like as I said, a human being just couldn't do that in that time, right?

Yeah, yeah, totally agree. And that's and that's um that's the customer effort score right there. You could see you can see that that's that's a good use case for it, where um, you know, there's nothing to rate on on like an agent's performance or for what you're doing, but it was how easy was it to solve your problem? You give it a seven out of seven. So yeah.

Yeah, love it. Um what are you most excited about over the the next 90 days with SimpleSet? What's what's on what's in the pipeline that you're really excited about?

So um releasing this this uh topics release, so we're excited about this. Uh it was more effort than we thought it was gonna be. And we just want to launch it now and just start getting feedback. And we have a way to log every change people make with take adding a topic or removing it if we got it wrong to keep improving the model. Um so that's that's exciting. Um actually, the next feature release we're gonna do is pretty boring. It's gonna be about user permissions, but you know, blocking a tackly, you got to do that. Um, but after that, more more dashboards, uh more reporting. Uh that'll be the next sexy thing that we do. We want to have like a Kanban board where um feedback comes in and then it you could sort it in like status columns. So then you could see you know, incoming or use um, you know, needs to be responded to the customer, things like that. That'll be coming up later this year.

Love it. Love it, love it, love it. Um, where can people reach out and how can they get involved and and how do they get started with SimpleSat?

Sure. So just go to our website, simpleSat.io, or if you just Google us, you'd find us. Um you can chat with us live on our website or or in the app. You can do a free trial. Um and also schedule a demo. We're happy to give you uh as many demos as it takes. We have a really great support team and and uh inbound sales team. Yeah, so go to our website and check us out and send us a message. That's the next step.

One question before you go. You partner with, you know, you've got these great uh webinars and interviews with, you know, um a whole bunch of people. Um, you know, um, I'm looking at Supermetrics, I'm looking at Upflow, I'm looking at HubSpot. What's your strategy for reaching out to these? Because partnerships are hard work. What I think you need very clear goals when you go into a partnership and very tight parameters so that you have to make it really easy for people to say yes. What's your strategy for getting some of these big names on on your interviews and helping grow that way?

Yeah, it's um, well, it's our it's our uh head of growth strategy. Um, he's doing a good job on this. But I guess to maybe in a nutshell, it's you you gotta start small because some of these bigger companies like Supermetrics, what they say is um, you know, we say, Do you want to do a webinar? And they say, you know, well, what have you done before? You know, how many people have attended the webinars before? Or let me see a few more that you do and we'll we'll decide. So you got to start small, maybe even too small, something that feels too small. Like, why am I dealing with this one-person company or do something? But um, you got to start somewhere and you gotta build it. And then, like you're saying, so you're on our website now and you're kind of impressed with some of the bigger ones. It's just because we started very small and got in there. Um, supermetrics is actually a customer of ours. So that that just worked out. I don't know, because we already had a relationship there, and and some are like more um integration partners. But um yeah, okay, so starting small, and I guess the second one would be being a value ad. So we um we do all the work, we design the slides, whether it's our webinar or their webinar. We'll say, we'll do the deck, we'll design the deck. Um, after the webinar is done, if there's a lot of good content, we try to turn that into an ebook that we give them and we can use as well, and that's all just free. So that helps kind of, I guess, get your foot in the door as well to um, you know, just be a value ad and start small and just build on that, try to get bigger each time. Love it.

Awesome. Hey, this has been super helpful. I'm glad we connected. I'm glad I know now who Corey is. When I hear Tim talk about Corey, I'll be able to put a face to live. Thanks for hanging out with us. And uh yeah, well, we'll look forward to keeping the conversation going and uh all the best with SimpleTat.

Yeah, well, thank you very much, Troy. This has been great.

Hey, thanks for listening to the Agent Cow podcast, and a massive thank you to Corey for joining us. Mavcon, our next live event, is happening in San Diego in October, and you don't have to already be in Mavericks Club to attend, but it will sell out. So if you'd like to get a taste of what it's like to work with us to help you grow your agency, and you want to tap into the amazing community of mentors and other agency owners, then check out the link in the description and book your ticket to Mavcon today. Alright folks, remember to subscribe and please share this with anyone who you think may need to hear it. I'm Troy Dean, and remember, Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.