LAURA SUTHERLY
0:16
Hello to another episode of AI Marketing Experts. I’m Laura Sutherland with Activation, and I’m here with our great group. We are missing Chris this week, but this team of experts, we’re here to talk about communications and how small businesses can just elevate what they’re already doing in such a strong fashion. But how can they do it efficiently and not leave business or money on the tables? We know that communicating with your clients is utmost important. So welcome to our audience and our viewers and our listeners. And again, this week we hope that you subscribe, like, and share these episodes out because we try to break things down. We geek out all the time breaking things down to really looking at what’s helping small businesses move forward and kind of grasp what AI is putting in front of them, what they should use, maybe what they should wait on because it’s going to get better here in a few weeks, few months. So welcome to all my friends here today.
LAURA SUTHERLY
1:22
Thanks for joining us again.
JOHN CLENDENNING
1:25
Hey, how’s it going? I got an exciting one. I want to jump in quick and then I will leave it to the distinguished panel because you know me, I get all excited. I think this is really cool. So Burger King, and I love the name they chose by the way, Burger King has just added an AI chat to the headsets for their staff. It’s called Patty.
LAURA SUTHERLY
1:43
Oh, I love that.
JOHN CLENDENNING
1:46
And it’s for, so for menu help. For coaching accuracy of orders through the drive-thru. Like, has anybody gone through a drive-thru and it’s like, I don’t know if we have that. Can I have some, you know, whatever on Mac sauce on the side? Oh, do I? I don’t know if we do that. You know, and you get a new employee that doesn’t really know or whatever. And our AI-driven world is now not that person reprimanded and getting a strike against them and stuff like that. We can still have our 14-year-old kids employed by Burger King and all and not get— and Taco Bell and not lose their jobs because, you know, maybe our 14-year-old kids aren’t the smartest or the sharpest tool in the shed. Now they got Patty in their ear.
JOHN CLENDENNING
2:29
So that’s the grand vision. What can a carpet cleaner shop, you know, egg business and corporate and all that do that’s in the communications internally with their staff, with their customers? How can the whole new world of AI that’s being put into everything, including the headsets at Burger King, be a takeaway, actionable items for our listeners this week.
LAURA SUTHERLY
2:58
John, I think that’s a great place to start. I’m glad because I know in the past we’ve done a few episodes about communication forward to our customers and our clients, you know, as business owners. But today we’ll wrap up and go there still because I think there’s been some advancements. And I know, Brian, Jen, you’ve got some great insights on that. But let’s start off with those communications internally. Because as you said, when we have had new hires, and of course agriculture, we have a lot of new hires generally during the summer. That seems to be very popular. But any business that has new hires, whether it be interns or new techs or new positions in there, it’s nice to have that mentor.
LAURA SUTHERLY
3:40
So what you just described is kind of like a mentor in their ear or somebody they can lean on. I know that Chris talks about how he’s recorded all of his calls and that and there’s a, um, a nice system that people can go back to that platform to get his insight. But let’s talk a little bit about how small business owners can give that strength and that extra education, that extra support to their newest, or even some employees that might be cross-training.
BRAD KILGORE
4:10
Have you guys internally— there’s lots of things you could do. I mean, obviously custom GPTs, having something like that internally so that your staff could literally go through a pre-made GPT, you know, try to simplify and make sure you understand, but a pre-made GPT where you’re literally asking the system a question that maybe is a consistent question, a question that comes up a lot, or sometimes it’s similar but not always exactly the same where on the back end of you would have created for that. You could have details about your company, your services, your prices, whatever the case may be, so that if somebody’s new or even somebody that’s been around for a while could go through there and go, oh, well, I thought I knew what that was, but I’m glad I had this custom GPT ready to go so that I could clarify what the answer is. And it can be quick because if you just ask, because it has your brand, it has your company, it has your, your, your brand, your data, your database of information there already pre-made. You can’t just do that if you just go to ChatGPT and ask something about your company. It’s not going to know. But if they have access to a custom GPT or a custom Gem in Google Gemini, then you can have a lot of questions answered quickly where, like, if it’s somebody on the front desk and they maybe in the past could have asked somebody that was a senior person, but they’re not around. They now have that tool at their disposal to quickly get an answer.
LAURA SUTHERLY
5:47
That’s a great way to grab that information. I know a lot of the companies, small businesses, they spend a lot of time and money and energy doing training, team trainings, whether it would be they take them on a retreat or whether they carve out an hour or two once a month, once a week. Different companies do it different ways. But just think if those are recorded or captured. And your team might actually really be able to help also build that database. And they may take great ownership and pride in being able to give that information or help build those databases. And as owners, we can just review it, make sure it’s accurate, add to it. But sometimes having your team help build, like you said, somebody senior at the desk The other thing that helps is having those newer people say, I did not know this.
LAURA SUTHERLY
6:41
It sounds really strange, but a gal that when I had hired here, she said one of her frustrations with her previous job is they said, go get this printed. And she didn’t know whether that meant in the building. She didn’t know whether that meant run down the street to a local printer. She didn’t know anything. So she started to collect questions that she had as a new person to say, wait a minute, how do I even do stuff? Within the business. So again, smart thinking about the Burger King example— how can we reverse engineer that to strengthen how our small teams talk and communicate with customers ongoing? What would you say about reverse engineering that example?
JENNIFER CREGO
7:21
I mean, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll jump in, uh, really quick about, um, reverse engineering. Um, I was just actually talking with a client yesterday, and it We were talking about, uh, he wants to bring in a new ops person, but he’s also kind of, um, dreading it because so much of, uh, of the business is in his brain. It’s just in his brain. Like, how do you bring in a, a, an ops person when, I mean, I’m sh— I’m sure none of us in the agency life can relate to that at all. Uh, but I was basically telling him that, uh, we need to take his brain and put it into, uh, whether it’s a, you know, like you said, Brad, a gem, a project, a custom GPT, whatever, a master prompt. Um, so we need to take his brain. So, um, coming up with the list of things that that could include It is, um, you know, it could be different for every business or every industry, but Laura, I know you do a lot of webinars, and so every one of those webinars is an example of your brain, your knowledge. And so taking that, put it— putting it in, um, for, uh, for this other guy, um, you know, it might be even, um, white papers.
JENNIFER CREGO
8:50
That he’s written for the industry, that would go in there. So it doesn’t— you don’t have to tell the, um, the AI that like, I want you to take this thing. Like, it doesn’t need to— it knows that. You just put it in and it, as long as, as, uh, has that overall, uh, understanding that, that, um, it’s, you know, building your brain, building context. Like, as John, we were just talking about as well. So yeah, that context is— I don’t know if that really reverse engineered anything, but no, no, I think it did.
JOHN CLENDENNING
9:28
Uh, just, I’m gonna jump in again. Sorry, because it’s my, my, I’m jumping through mud puddles in my brain, as I like to say. Um, but so I ran service businesses for 27 years, um, janitorial, maid, carpet cleaning, duct cleaning, you name it. And, um, So putting it into the real world, I told this story the other day there on a coaching program that back in the day we used to put GPS. They came out, you could put a GPS in your vans. And when we put a GPS in the van, Chris, guy’s name, I’m not hiding the— if you’re listening to this, Chris, I doubt you are, but 3 hours at the strip club was not how you kept your job. I’m just straight up saying as a carpet cleaner, right? So he didn’t know we put the the GPS in the van. Um, today’s day and age, there are recording tools like Plaud.
JOHN CLENDENNING
10:18
There are, um, earbuds called, um, RecDots. There’s another one called TicNote. And, um, I think, um, Limitless got bought by Meta or something like that. They used to be a wearable as well. But point being, you could— there’s a couple ways you can think of this. Like, um, the Plaud ones, a lot of them, um, when we go to conferences, all of us meet up at conference stuff like that, there are people that just sit there with their their— it sits on the back of their cell phone and it just records all day long so they, they don’t miss any, any notes and any conversations at the table and stuff like that. So imagine training that person in the real world office, because we’re digital marketers, everything we do is on Zoom and, and we’ve got note takers and we put it all into folders. And Chris has got it automatically happening with his, his AI assistant Hope.
JOHN CLENDENNING
11:04
All night goes into tables and gets All that, okay, cool. But what’s the real story for inside the office? Imagine training that new hire, and this relates to a story, my buddy just got a new job at a nuclear facility and in the project management and development. And so it’s a whole new industry for him ’cause he came from auto. His entire life since trade school was the auto industry, and now he’s a whole new thing. And I said to him, hey, do you know what’d be great is just to get your AI assistant Um, like whatever you want to call it on chat and create a project around your new job. And on the way to and from work, just download and dump like what you’re, you know, what, what you hope to accomplish today. Have that conversation, feel good about it when you’re done the day, how it went, go back and forth so that when you come home you don’t dump on Tara, lovely girl, she doesn’t need to hear the stories, right? So all of that kind of stuff. He thought that was an interesting suggestion.
JOHN CLENDENNING
11:58
Could you imagine he also wore a wearable and recorded the whole thing and took that transcript— there’s the context we just talked about— and then said, hey, and also based on all my interactions today, what insights do we have as my, my, my coach kind of idea? Now that person you talked about that has all the ideas in their head, Jen, um, and has run the whole entire business before, when, when they’re sitting with the new hire and they’re, they’re doing those the first week deep meetings and, you know, and that kind of thing. If they had— the new hire had a recording device as well, just like sort of the old days of sitting in university and, you know, missing 90% of what the professor said unless you could record it and go back and listen again. Well, now you can not only just record it, go back and listen again, you can say, okay, cut out the fluff and tell me the important stuff, right? So everything I just said there over 3 or 4 minutes, um, the 30 seconds of the important stuff I said and the rest of it being verbose is what you would come away with, if that makes sense.
LAURA SUTHERLY
12:59
It does.
LAURA SUTHERLY
13:00
It does.
LAURA SUTHERLY
13:00
Brad, what do you have insight for this conversation on training our teams to understand or be prepared in case someone calls with a question that they are unfamiliar with?
BRAD KILGORE
13:13
So I think it ties back to what we discussed last week. With Google’s Notebook LM. They have an app, so you could have it on your phone. Obviously, everything that you guys just discussed with whatever documents, SOPs, frequently asked questions, the owner’s brain dump of an audio file or a Word doc or Google doc, you could put all that information in there. And again, it’s a company brain. You make it specific to to that, your business, whatever business it is. You put it all in there. So that way, literally, you can have a chat conversation on your phone, on your desktop, whatever it is, with that notebook, which knows everything, most everything about your company.
BRAD KILGORE
14:00
So that would be the most logical thing I would think of.
LAURA SUTHERLY
14:03
I was just going to kind of reiterate what John said and Brett. All of us have talked about different tools. There’s different ways to record this. Loom is even one of the basic ones that if you’re like, wait a minute, my my team’s not actually in the office, or wait a minute, they need to be out doing the service calls, they need to be out in the field. I think that if they’re out in the field, leaving that windshield time is perfect to do a, you know, like you said, a brain dump, to just put all that information in so that it’s all collected. But all these different elements, if we’re able to record or at least document what we’re doing throughout the day, it can be used in not only training our internal teams, but as we were talking about with the Burger King example, well, even the forward-facing port. So yes, they’re in their ears, but, and they’re giving an elevated customer experience. But now, if that team member is not available, how can we look at it going customer-facing? That information that we’ve collected, that information of questions, how we handled situations, now can be in our website, ready for our chatbots, ready for our VA assistants.
LAURA SUTHERLY
15:17
So I think that is a great transition for we talk about, okay, now we’ve strengthened our internal team. How can we help our customers if we are tied up with other customers?
BRAD KILGORE
15:28
That’s exactly right. Laura and I talked about this briefly earlier today about how chatbots in general have continued to advance because of AI. And so I’ll keep it short and sweet, but the bottom line is, is even a year or two ago, or I guess maybe you could still get a chatbot on your website that’s very static and not dynamic. Meaning before, if you went to a website for a company and there was a little chat feature on there and your customer went there and said, hey, by the way, do you guys do XYZ? But nobody answered that conversation. Maybe they didn’t have it on their on a phone app or there was nobody to answer that right away, then once that consumer, that customer log, you know, went away, then that was gone forever. You had no follow-up, you had nothing. Whereas now with modern chatbots, even simple ones, they typically— it’s typically going to ask for a name and/or a phone number or an email. And typically if it’s a phone number or cell phone number, it becomes a text message essentially, where even if that customer is now in their car or they’re already at their next destination and you hadn’t responded, you could pick up that conversation if you didn’t have an AI chatter on there of some sort.
BRAD KILGORE
16:54
Even if it was human, you could still contact that person and say, hey, by the way, I missed your chat, but yes, we do that. Do you want to schedule a time? So you’ve captured their information. But the other piece of it now is a lot of the chatbots have AI built in to where you teach it with your website or with some sort of a script or a prompt on the backend, all of the common questions, all of the services, all the pricing, all the different things that you might offer so that if there’s no human to answer, even if it’s after hours, you have the, the good chance of capturing that client because your AI chatter, chatbot, robot, whatever you want to call it, can then answer their questions to the point of even scheduling appointments off multiple calendars. There’s lots of different ways that it can go down now, but you’re not losing that customer because you have something in place. So I can’t really emphasize this enough for any business out there, if you don’t have anything on your website that can communicate with your prospective clients when you maybe can’t answer the phone or maybe they sent in a form or something that’s, you know, old school, then you’re missing out. And I know Laura and I touched on this earlier as well. We live in a world of instant gratification, DMs, IMs, chats, I mean, that’s every— everywhere we go now, um, that’s especially the younger generation. Um, that’s what’s normal now.
BRAD KILGORE
18:26
So I highly recommend if you don’t have anything like that, reach out to one of us. We’ll show you how they work because they get more advanced from there. Um, but the basics, you need to have the basics covered so you’re not letting money fall through the cracks.
LAURA SUTHERLY
18:41
That’s so true. I know this week I called 2 service providers that closed at 4 and I was really surprised. And did I ever return back to them? No. And so it is leaving money on the table if we’re not able to capture those leads when they’re giving us calls after hours or during our busy seasons. And to Brad’s point too, some of these more sophisticated systems can actually start integrating with your CRM. So therefore, not only do you have their name, their email, their phone number, some basic information that saves that person time in the morning when they’re coming into the office and the phone’s already ringing. For today’s inquiries, they know that the ones that came in after hours are already in the system and being able to be followed up quickly. And you kind of can judge as to whether it’s a rush because again, when we’re dealing in agriculture, you have short windows and you kind of have to look at— it’s not as though you can say, well, that route will be there in the west, you know, on Tuesday or something like that.
LAURA SUTHERLY
19:44
When people are sitting in the fields, they need somebody fast, so that allows them to prioritize. So it’s extremely helpful. And to the other industries, um, very much allows them to have those appointments scheduled as they see fit. So, Jen, John, any insight about Brad’s gold nuggets?
JOHN CLENDENNING
20:06
One thing, one thing that’s really cool about that— so two things that Brad said. One is they’re like you guys have heard me say it a billion times, good, better, best. Good something, something like, so AI voice instead of an answering machine, train it a little bit. AI chat on your website instead of like, at least as a backup. So if nobody answers the chat message within 30 seconds, 1 minute, whatever you put on the timer, then the AI jumps in if you really think I want a human there, right? But so good enough, get something trained. Yeah, scrape your website. We all know that, you know, data in, data out, good in, garbage in, garbage out. That depth that you talked about, Brad, where, you know, there’s, there’s a bunch of ways to train these chatbots where, um, we’re actually just built a— I did it by chatting, literally.
JOHN CLENDENNING
20:55
They call it vibe coding now. But we just built an app that, um, we, with a new client, we do the research of them, their, their local marketplace, their competitors, their unique position in the marketplace, all that kind of stuff. So that we just enter that in and then it sends them an email once it’s done all that research and says, you’re, we’re ready to onboard you. Could you go in and we need all, this is your dad, this is to build your master prompt. This is your dad information. And it’s an interview. It’s an interview about did we get this right? How would you say this? Tell me about the way you price your services. Let’s start with service number 1.
JOHN CLENDENNING
21:24
We will then service number 2, then service number 3. What are you different about it? What equipment do you use? How would you explain that to a customer? All of those deep dive questions that you know, we, we have to do with our clients, don’t always get from them, don’t always have enough the hours, um, on an onboarding to get it. But once you’ve got that data right, you can train an AI assistant just like an office. You can give it the framework of don’t answer this, don’t, don’t, don’t be specific about that. You can kind of give it guardrails and all of that kind of stuff, because now you’re getting into that context we talked about. And where this becomes really valuable, especially to cleaners, um, uh, and stuff, is Um, Google Ads pay-per-click is infinitely less expensive after 6 o’clock at night till about 7 AM because everybody turns theirs off, right? If, if you’ve got pay-per-click running and it goes to an answering machine or goes to a form, um, go check your data. You’re wasting money, right? But if you’ve got, if you’ve got a, a voice chat and a text chat that can give, that can Again, maybe not book the job because you don’t want them on one side of town, the other side of town, and like all that kind of stuff. You still want Nancy in the office to give them a hand, but it’s like, hey, um, you have that conversation, you let them know about the business, and then you say, hey, I, you know, to just kind of wrap this up and put a bow in it, we need somebody, you know, to get back to you tomorrow.
JOHN CLENDENNING
22:44
What would be a good time that we could, you know, about a 15-minute window, we could give you a call back, uh, just to confirm the information and answer any remaining questions before we find the best route for you and to book you in.
LAURA SUTHERLY
22:57
That—
JOHN CLENDENNING
22:57
those kinds of conversations are, are best done that way. And now it’s a central, um, calendar where they tell their answer, the AI, or text it back. The AI can put it into a calendar. Um, they don’t have to get a link and put their own calendar. It’s all now— it’s all can just be this communication layer. And the AI knows to take all that information, put it in, and say, Nancy, call them back between 1 and 1:15. They’re all interested in this stuff. They said this, and they kind of need an appointment you know, within the next 2 days, or they’re okay to wait 3 weeks because it’s for a bar mitzvah coming up or whatever kind of idea.
JOHN CLENDENNING
23:31
And now all the data is there, and, and a real person, human in the loop, can call back and have that real conversation. But you can also have the cheapest clicks on planet Earth running all night long.
LAURA SUTHERLY
23:41
And I’m gonna just ask one, because I think you buried a gold nugget right in there so quickly, so fast, that I want to make sure that we really highlight this for any of our listeners or viewers. And that again is the master prompt, because the way you were rolling it out, saying, hey, we built something, they called, and then they started going through and answering questions about the master prompt. Please go into the importance of that, because I think that ties together what we were talking about before when we were saying owners, team members, schedule, you know, make sure you record what’s going on the day to have your questions. But also then, how does that help your customers over here? You dropped in that gold nugget right in the middle about the master prompt. And I know we’ve gone over it before. But why is that so important for businesses to start there before they would build out the outward, especially the outward communication with potential clients or current customers?
JOHN CLENDENNING
24:41
Yeah, good question. I, I remember, I think I was the, the first person that came across sort of the master prompt concept back last July, August, um, at the depth that it made sense. And then Chris ran with it and like Oh my gosh, he got light years ahead of us. And then we kind of all jumped on it and realized, yes, that is the everything code right there. And that’s now training. And if you want to go to the AI, Amy Insider’s Club, check the show notes, go find the community. We got free login for that and you can kind of see that. And we’ve got some information in there on that and more coming.
JOHN CLENDENNING
25:14
But the whole idea behind the master prompt is if you can dump everything, answer a series of questions, everything about your business, your brand voice, all of that kind of stuff into a master document that every time you talk to AI as a project, you could just drop it into a simple chat. You could put it into a project. You can create a custom GPT we talked about. You can put it as the backbone to a Claude skill if you want to start going up on the complexity levels that we play in this stuff. but all of it starts with your master prompt. And the number of times I’ve gone into even things like Claude and stuff like that, Claude Code now, and said, you know, I’m building a new project. And it says, well, I’m gonna have to ask you a bunch of questions. I need to know this.
JOHN CLENDENNING
25:57
And I just dropped the master prompt and said, anything you don’t have in there? No, that’s amazing. Let me break that all up into all the sections I need. And well done. Thank you. And that’s literally Claude talking to me going, I don’t get that from people. Um, and it’s because it’s, it’s everything about, I’ve got one for me. Personally, who I am, my business, my goals, my dreams, my life, my desires, all that kind of stuff and everything going on that I can have a conversation about me and business and life. And I’ve got one that the team uses.
JOHN CLENDENNING
26:25
It’s, it’s what we are doing right now, our hierarchy in the office, our products, our services, our clients, all of that stuff. And it allows them to just use that. They can write an email in our company brand voice. They can create a Canva in our company brand colors. They can write a training course laid out the way we do training courses. Like, I’m no longer needing to be in the loop because all of it is contained in here’s how we do everything, right? And our mission and our vision and our plan and all that kind of stuff. So I believe every business needs a master prompt because it opens up the possibilities of AI and the simplicity of getting the right answers the first time and being deep into a conversation right from the first question you ask. ‘Cause it doesn’t have to guess and ask a series of questions again and 15 minutes later, okay, you’ve got enough information now.
JOHN CLENDENNING
27:21
Okay, now answer my question please. I just wanted a text message or an email, right? Now it’s just like, boom, here you go. That fits, off you go. So yeah, master prompt is a gold nugget that I think everybody really has to start recognizing is the everything code for AI.
LAURA SUTHERLY
27:38
Brad, Jen, do you have anything that you want to add to that about the importance?
JENNIFER CREGO
27:43
I do want to mention two things. Number one, a lot of times I think we say master prompt, and I think of some of the, some of the people I talk to, they’re just starting to get prompting. And so they sometimes are like, wait, I don’t understand. I’m just like typing a question into like, that’s a prompt, right? Where I’m— and so they get confused on the two. So master prompt, it can be something that you add into a chat window, but it’s more likely something— and John, you already said it, but I’m just highlighting this. It’s, it’s something that you put into your settings, your— so it’s when we say master prompt, we don’t mean necessarily prompting on, uh, in your, in the chat, in the front end. So that’s number one that I wanted to point out. And number two, the importance.
JENNIFER CREGO
28:37
You asked, do we have, do I have anything to add on the importance of the master chat, uh, master prompt? I love analogies. So I was thinking, um, if you’re, if you think of like, I’ll just use ChatGPT as the example, but if you’re Um, if you think of it like ChatGPT is kind of like a paper doll, like no face, no, like nothing. It’s just like one of the, you know, paper dolls. That’s it. Um, not a whole lot of context there, right? Like, like it’s a, um, an outline. It might, you know, so you add a little bit into, into it as part of a master prompt. You add a little bit to it and it’s gonna You know, maybe be a little bit more like, what’s, what’s one of those things that like flap in the, in the wind in like, like the wind dolls, wavy, wacky, wonderful.
JOHN CLENDENNING
29:33
Yeah. My daughter actually knows the name of that and she can say it.
LAURA SUTHERLY
29:35
Yeah.
JOHN CLENDENNING
29:35
Yes.
LAURA SUTHERLY
29:36
Yep.
JENNIFER CREGO
29:36
So you might like, it’ll be like, get to that level. You add a little bit more. Maybe it’s a Gumby. It’s a little bit more firmed up, but you know, I’m totally showing my age when I say that.
JOHN CLENDENNING
29:50
I’m tracking. I’m tracking with you.
LAURA SUTHERLY
29:51
I’m tracking too.
JENNIFER CREGO
29:53
You, you keep adding to it, keep adding to it, or I keep improving it, I should say, instead of adding to it. But you keep improving it, and then pretty soon, like, you’re talking MIT-level, you know, knowledge of you, your business, everything, like a full, a fully grown, you know, entity. So if you kind of think of the master prompt that way, you don’t have to go from a paper doll to everything like that, you can do a little bit.
LAURA SUTHERLY
30:25
But also to that point, John had just said you don’t have to start at ground zero every time because it does get exhausting when it starts asking, well, tell me about your business, who’s your ideal client, and it gets exhausting. So that’s when people go, oh, I just need the answer to this question. But once you take the time and take it from the paper doll— great analogy— up to whatever that shall be, a clone of you, as you’ll hear that a lot of our listeners will hear the clone, clone yourself. Once you have that, you build that once. To Jen’s point, you’re always kind of adding to it. You found some documents that did really well or a program that you really want to add into that strengthens it. And then you’re able to start there every time and to John’s example, when he drops that in, the questions stop. They say, thank you, I’ve got the information I have.
LAURA SUTHERLY
31:17
He does the follow-up question, say, do you need anything else? But it would be like introducing ourselves to our team every single time they show up for work the next day. It’s like the 50 First Dates movie. I watched that a few weeks ago, and we don’t want that where we have to start again every single time. Brad, what other insights would you like to add?
LAURA SUTHERLY
31:38
You know, I’m still, uh, just stuck on Jen’s, uh, animated description. That was so awesome.
BRAD KILGORE
31:45
Of my paper doll?
LAURA SUTHERLY
31:48
The thing flapping in the wind, all of it. I, I just can’t top that. I just can’t.
BRAD KILGORE
31:54
I’m a hand talker.
LAURA SUTHERLY
31:55
As am I. I’m holding—
LAURA SUTHERLY
31:57
yeah, you guys, you guys got it going on. I don’t know how to think that.
LAURA SUTHERLY
32:03
Well, we’re bringing joy and happiness, so that’s good.
JOHN CLENDENNING
32:07
That’s good.
LAURA SUTHERLY
32:08
But I, I know we’ve covered kind of— John, do you have something else?
BRAD KILGORE
32:13
Did you—
JOHN CLENDENNING
32:13
maybe— oh, sorry, the Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm-Flailing Tube Man. That is the exact— right off of the, um, um, Family Guy is apparently where the term got it. The Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm-Flailing Tube Man. I just want to make sure our listeners Had full context. Carry on.
LAURA SUTHERLY
32:31
I can’t believe we now have the title of— we have our title of that movement now.
BRAD KILGORE
32:37
Like, one of you guys better— there you go, Laura.
LAURA SUTHERLY
32:39
There you go.
LAURA SUTHERLY
32:40
You guys have it.
LAURA SUTHERLY
32:43
But yeah, so like I said, this is an episode everybody will remember when they think of and see those wacky wavy arm guys. Yeah.
LAURA SUTHERLY
32:52
Inflatable.
LAURA SUTHERLY
32:54
I’m going to have to practice that term. That’s for sure.
LAURA SUTHERLY
32:56
Exactly.
JOHN CLENDENNING
32:57
I can’t get it twice.
LAURA SUTHERLY
32:58
Is there anything else that we would like to add so our viewers and listeners can really grasp the concept as to maybe starting in-house, figuring out where they can strengthen those client communications, that their team is answering questions, taking that, and then how it can go more to an automated status where they’re able to get the chatbots, elevate that communication from their websites? Anything else that our team would like to provide here?
BRAD KILGORE
33:29
I think the only thing we didn’t really cover is an AI voice receptionist that answers the phone. That’s another simple step where you could integrate AI into your business because we talked about how you might be losing money or business after hours. Somebody went to your website, but if they call your phone number and all they get is a voicemail, a machine or whatever, this is something now that can be a receptionist that works for you 24/7 and can schedule appointments, answer questions, all these different things. And there’s lots of different angles on that or how advanced you can go with it. But that’s just another piece of how you can make sure you’re not letting money fall through the cracks. And there’s even— there’s more to it. But I mean, an AI voice receptionist We’re all familiar with them. I mean, they’re getting better and better.
LAURA SUTHERLY
34:25
They have a sense of humor. They have empathy. They can answer 200 phone calls at one time. They can transfer it to a department, to a person. They can send a scheduling link or even schedule something live on a calendar. And so I think that’s one of the top communication things that we need to make sure businesses know about because a lot of people maybe don’t know how those work or what have you. Like, I kind of heard of it, but I don’t know what they do. Uh, they’re going to become more and more prevalent than they are now.
LAURA SUTHERLY
34:59
So something you want to check out, reach out to one of us because it’s not going away.
JOHN CLENDENNING
35:06
No, they’re getting better. So think of it, um, so you guys aren’t Canadian, I’m Canadian, so everything has to be done in the the dual languages as well. So in the government, so outside of Quebec, nobody else has to, but every time you call the government, so it’s like, you know, welcome, bonjour. And then it’s, you know, if you’re looking for the, you know, the tax department, blah, blah, blah. If you’re looking for this, if you’re looking for that, and if you’re doing this, and by the way, we got this and we got this and it’s this, blah, blah, blah. And then, and then you get the, you know, press 1 for this, press 2. And it’s like by the time you get to the end, you’re going, oh damn, I forgot what number I was supposed to press again. And then you have to listen to the whole thing all over again.
JOHN CLENDENNING
35:48
And it’s like, and think of when somebody calls your office and you have that answer tree set up because you’re thinking you’re being all efficient. And if you want this, you know this and you know that, and welcome to this. And we do this and do you know, like, do you know the extension of the person? I don’t know the ex— I don’t know my kid’s phone number. I do not know the extension of the person I’m trying to reach. Sorry. Never ask me that again. Right? But if we go to AI and it like, hey, how’s it going? You’ve reached blah, blah, blah, Dr. Jones’s office.
JOHN CLENDENNING
36:14
Tell me a little bit about what you’re looking for. And you go, I think I kind of, yeah, okay, well, that’s actually this department here. Like, you know, this doctor and this is their receptionist. Let me put you through right now. Kind of, or whatever. And even just that AI at that level to get to a real human, you’d just be going, okay, thank you.
LAURA SUTHERLY
36:31
All right?
JOHN CLENDENNING
36:32
Because it figured it out for you. You don’t have to know their company structure and who they hired last. Right, and what retreats they went on just to find the person you want to talk to. So anyways, so yes, good, better, best— they’re getting way better. Um, so reach out to somebody if you don’t have that in place because you’re pissing people off if you don’t.
JENNIFER CREGO
36:50
Can I, can I brag for one second? And yeah, and say, so I had a, um, I had someone call, uh, my own line and they got my AI voice, and then I ended up talking to them, um, I think a couple days later. And, uh, as we were talking and I, I mentioned the, you know, AI voice, and she said, oh, wait a second, you, you, you, you built that? I thought that was like Verizon or something. She’s like, it was excellent. It was, it was like the best one I’ve, I, that I’ve ever, you know, encountered. I don’t remember what word she used. I don’t think it was encountered, but so I’m paraphrasing, but, and it needs an update. Like, so it updates all, it’s getting better all the time. So, but I was so happy to hear that about my voice AI.
JENNIFER CREGO
37:53
And you just got to start to be able to get to that. And even then, I still got a great compliment and it still needs an update. So there you go.
JOHN CLENDENNING
38:01
Brilliant.
LAURA SUTHERLY
38:02
I think those are fantastic examples. I know there was a lot of gold nuggets here today, and I know our listeners and our viewers are pleased and very happy with some things that they visually saw today, right? With us goofing off a little bit today. But in all seriousness, like we said, those assistants are getting strong. Their personalities, their answers. They are moving conversations along. And so then when they get to a human— because again, you’ve heard us all along saying keep the human in the loop. We’re just looking at areas where you are busy and you need that extra help with communications. And instead of hiring or keeping somebody on that much longer during the day, keep them at their normal hours, be able to implement one of these others to catch those extra phone calls.
LAURA SUTHERLY
38:59
So if there’s nothing else that the group here has to say, I think we’ve hit a good point where we can go ahead and wrap up. Again, to what John mentioned earlier, check the show notes. We have a free community that we would really welcome you to join. There’s a lot of assets already in there, but we’re going to be adding to them all the time. Different opportunities, different opportunities to learn more about the Master Prompt or how to strengthen your AI assistants, your voice assistant and such. So with that, if no one else has anything else to say, we’re going to ask you to like, subscribe, share, and leave your comments because we read your comments and we’re looking for what other questions you may be having about incorporating AI into your small business.
