Frictionless

Four years ago, Exec Vision started out of necessity. Their founders realized that when they trained an organization, just thirty days after they left no one in the organization remembered the training.  Aside from being frustrating, it pointed to a solution.  The solution is Exec Vision’s custom platform that takes your call recordings and web conference recordings, adds some AI and backend solutions that help you to customize and organize your customer conversations.  Traditional coaching, marketing use cases, and a slieu of measurable impact means that Exec Vision has helped with on-boarding and ramp times for the sales team, as well as customer success.  Customers benefit because sales teams can listen and find all of the conversations that they’ve had with team members within the organization, making it easy to know where each customer is at in their buyer’s journey.

We spend a lot of time perfecting the customer experience in the sales and marketing process. But what about customer support? Are your customers getting an exceptional experience there, too? Rob May is our guest on today's episode of Frictionless. Rob is Co-Founder and CEO of Talla, a platform and knowledge base that combines Artificial Intelligence, automation, and machine learning to help customer facing teams get the right information when they need it. On this episode of the show, we're talking about how you can create a great customer support experience. Specifically, how you can implement AI to improve the efficiency, quality, and overall experience customers get in support interactions.

“The software is not going to save you.” This was something I learned during my podcast with Dave Fisher, partner at Aerie Consulting which specializes in using the Microsoft platform to build scalable solutions. It’s important to put some thought into your computer system roadmap, because the software is only a tool. Things can always adapt after that, and it's up to each company to use that tool to get the best ROI for that tool.

Have you ever thought, that will never work, about a startup. Or, that’s a terrible idea... until it turns out to be hugely successful? We’ve all been there because we’ve all asked the wrong questions when checking out a startup’s potential. Dave Knox is a global thought leader in digital transformation, a marketing strategist and award-winning author of Predicting the Turn. As a marketing, strategy, and business development advisor, he’s worked with both growth startups and large brands giving him a unique perspective on both sides. So what is the right question to ask? And what should startups focus on in the first five years?

“If we write the questions and then we provide the answers, we only get back some version of our truth.” That’s the approach that Adele Revella, the CEO & Founder of the Buyer Persona Institute, thinks most marketers are using these days when generating buying personas. Rather than making an effort to truly listen to customers about their buying journey, marketers often simply generate a generic template and make a few educated guesses about what their customer wants. What is required to get out of “template” mode is to conduct real interviews with buyers where you truly listen instead of driving your own agenda.  

Have you been reluctant to use bots in your business? With technology today, it can feel like everybody is hiding behind a screen. So maybe you’re hesitant to add a bot to your team because it might make interactions less personal. Dana Tran is the founder of ThinkTuitive where she helps businesses build messenger bots that will simply their business. She’s a self-proclaimed “lazy, hard-working person,” meaning she’d rather spend five hours automating something so that she never has to do those tasks again. And she wants to help others do the same. The strength of bots lay in their ability to have common conservations at scale.They can guide your customers to an answer quickly. But there needs to be a mixture of both an automated system as well as a human system. So while a bot can be used as a tool to guide people, they will not be the ones closing the sale. In today’s episode, Dana walks us through how bots can help your business and simple steps to get started.

Arlo & Co is a destination for personalized and meaningful gifts. On today's episode, we chat with Branka Injac Misic, CMO of Arlo & Co. She discusses how to train your customer service staff to prioritize empathy and create conversation in your emails for a higher sales return. After all, the goal is to ensure the customer permeates throughout the whole company. 

Growth isn’t just about demand generation. It’s about customer success. Ultimately, your current customers determine the future of your company. That’s at least what Adam Shoenfeld thinks. Drift agrees. Adam’s company Siftrock was recently acquired by Drift, where Adam now works as GM of Siftrock, under the Drift umbrella. Before Siftrock, he’s founded various SaaS companies (Cheddr Media, Simply Measured)., and, most importantly, he prefers breakfast meetings. He’s seen way too many companies who just don’t get it: Instead of investing in their current clientele, they invest in lead generation and demand gen. He came on the show to share why he thinks differently.

Dale Dupree, known on LinkedIn as the Copier Warrior, talks about breaking down the human emotion and psychology of people to gain perspective as a salesperson in order to disrupt the patterns people go through everyday at work and earn their business.