Episode Transcript
Nina Huchthausen (00:07.95)
All right. Welcome everybody to the Makers Business Tribe podcast on this beautiful, I think it's Friday morning for us today. I don't know when this is going to air. You will choose what day or time it is for you, but I can just tell you, it feels magical today. And I am super excited to have a conversation on all things.
AI slash artificial intelligence with our amazing makers business tribe partner, Tala today. So Tala is a mechanical engineering by trade. However, she has owned and managed a lot of different small and medium sized businesses from a gift where retailing to light sounds, importing distribution.
as well as e -commerce. And now she is dedicating her time on building chatbots for product -based businesses. And to me, it's super, this, just this concept of an engineer who very much sees the world as one plus one equals two and a marketer who sees the world as.
100 shades of gray, if not more, how that can merge into one single brain and real magic can come out. So, and we had Tala recently in the tribe for an AI training that anyone who listens to the end will get access to because it was so fantastic on learning not just the technical side of AI, but also how to really
practically apply it in our business. And you do not need to have a technology degree. You do not have to be tech savvy at all in order to use it. And she's broken that down so perfectly in the training that I wanted to get Tala on this podcast today to share with all of you wonderful product business owners today as to how you can maybe let go of a little bit of that.
Nina Huchthausen (02:30.606)
be an uncertainty of AI by us breaking down what it is, how it works, and how you can really use it as an assistant, as a helper, as a support in your business to save you time and grow your business a lot more than you could without it. So without further ado, welcome Tala.
And my very, very first question to you is, how did you get into all of this? It's been a journey. It's been a bit of a journey. You know, they always say, you know, wait and things will just fall in place. And for a while, I didn't know where they were going to fall. And then all of a sudden, chat bots came along and I thought, yeah, that's I like that. And then I came along and I went.
Yeah, this is what I'm talking about. So it just pulls together nicely. So, you know, keep the faith. So as you said, I, you know, educated as a mechanical engineer. So I like all things tech and just, you know, I like to get my hands dirty and jump in and do all that. But through the time when I've been in business, I've always been the one in charge of the computers, you know, all things IT. And then I ended up
over 20 something years developing an ERP system, which is what, you know, the lingo for a system that runs all your operations, you know, enterprise resource planning system. So we had an inputting distribution business, we had a retail chain, we had, you know, information going backwards and forwards all the time. So what I was trying to do is just pull all those things together to make things more efficient. So programming, I absolutely loved it. I loved it.
probably a bit more than I loved running the business, but anyway, I just loved doing it. So that fell into place at the same time I was responsible since I was, you know, everything digital, I had to also be right into the website and the running of the website and the marketing of the website and yada yada yada. So marketing, digital, all fell into place at the same time as we were running the business. At one point we had.
Nina Huchthausen (04:51.534)
18 locations, 67 staff. It was not a small business. A lot of information going backwards and forwards. But anyway, once we sold that business 2016, 2018, thereabouts, we were selling through that timeframe. I thought, okay, what do I do next? And it was, Chad Botz came along and I thought, I like that. And then AI last year as of last year. And that really put a new spin on everything. So that's how it all falls into place.
But the great thing now about AI is that we don't, as in the user of the AI being the business, is don't really need to know anything about AI to use it. You know, you can have the most beautiful Ferrari that'll get from north to a hundred and I don't know how many seconds. You don't need to know what's under the bonnet. You don't need to know what makes it so great. You just need to use it.
right? And it's the same thing here. We're renting the AI. Someone else had to do all the thinking and all the, you know, and just for your information, AI is actually a whole bunch of math. Not something that makes any sense to most people, but it's just a bunch of math. Someone sat there and mathematicalized language and that's how AI came about. But anyway, none of us need to worry about that.
at least the people that are using it. And my job is to make AI work for businesses, as chatbots in particular. Awesome. Awesome. So can you just break down for anyone who might have heard about AI but don't really know what it means and what it doesn't mean? And I know there are different categories of AI. Yeah. And you touched on that. And then where does chatbots fall into? Yeah. So.
So AI stands for artificial intelligence, i .e. the computer trying to imitate or to do what human brain does. So it started off with computers doing calculations and things for us, and it just evolved into more and more complex operations. But it's really the, there's types of AI, in particular generative AI, something called generative AI. So generative AI is,
Nina Huchthausen (07:12.91)
the computer or the program generating something. It could be generating text, it could be generating an image, it could be generating music, it could be generating a video that's called generative AI. So big word, but really a simple meaning. And it's not just doing it by itself, right? It's you giving a formula, right, in some shape or form, and then it interprets that formula and gives you a result.
So all it's doing is imitating our conversations, especially the generative AI to do with conversations, conversational chatbots. Like anyone that's played with chat GPT, and I understand some people stayed away from it. Some people have played with it and they can see the power of it. We've all just, above everything else, we've all used AI. We just don't realize it. If you search for anything on Google,
That's what made Google so amazing, is that it understood what we were saying without us actually saying it, because it understood, or didn't understand, it just studied our conversations well enough to know what it is that we're searching for. So it showed us what we need. Now take this a step further, it can talk back to us. So if you've used Google, if you've used Apple, if you've used Facebook, if you've used Netflix,
any of Instagram or any of those, you know, big company products, you will see that things are easier and getting easier and, you know, it's learning your patterns, it's learning what you like, it's learning what you don't like, and it's showing you what you want to keep you on there for longer. And that's the bottom line. They've been using it on us. Now AI has become available to the rest of us. Yeah. So for example,
when I was pregnant and started to search for nappies or whatever, right? And all of a sudden my Instagram feed was full off. All things baby, all things pregnant. That is AI. It's like learning or responding to what I was searching for. That's it. That's it. So, you know, conversational AI or conversational generative AI.
Nina Huchthausen (09:33.934)
is to do with words and conversation, right? And that's where chat bots come into it. So if you've gone onto, and we've all seen this with bigger companies especially, you go onto their website, it's got a little, what they call a widget on the right hand side, bottom usually, which looks like a message, you click on it, you either get put onto a human or you get put onto some kind of a, you know, thing that you click buttons and it tries to shortcut.
your way so you don't have to talk to a human. So that's that widget on the side. It opens up like a little message window. You type stuff into it. And if a human is on the outside, you're having a conversation with a human. A chat bot, if you put, for example, up until this point or up until last year, those were not very smart. If they were not humans, they were just a programmed script, you know, if if
your thing that you want is not one of the buttons that you've got in front of you, you're screwed, you're gonna have to get a human. Because it just didn't understand what you were saying, it might have had some keywords, you might have typed something and it got a keyword in there that says help or whatever, returns or refunds or something and it says, oh, do you wanna know about refunds? And then it gives you a bunch of options, you click a button and then it gives you another bunch of options and you know.
hoping that from the company's perspective that's got that website that they're saving time for a live operator. Which a lot of the time was frustrating too because really it was limited by the knowledge and the ability of the person that programmed this thing. That's all it can do is just some, a human sitting behind it going, what do I think people are going to ask about? Let's put all these things in the hope that we're going to capture some of that sort of.
conversation rather than having a human take care of it because a human would be, you know, more time consuming and more expensive to have to take care of that. So the chat, the AI chatbots have taken over from that because you can teach an AI chatbot. I would teach it for the business. I would give it the context of the entire website and anything else that the business needs to
Nina Huchthausen (12:00.109)
have as background information and that chat bot can have a live conversation, what would almost seem like a human being type of conversation. You don't have to follow a script when you're using it as in as a user, you can just go backwards and forwards in conversation, it will respond to it in a very human -like way. It doesn't follow a script, you can be programmed to have some objectives.
from the business's point of view, like if the business wants to collect leads, if the business wants to point people to a, you know, do some lead qualification and then point people to a calendar link if they fit the criteria, et cetera, you can actually train it as if you're training a junior staff member. That's the beauty of it. This is going to take over the world. I'm telling you now, within a few months, they...
everyone is going to have something like that, or they need to have something like that on their website, because everyone else, all your competition is going to have it. That's the thing is it's moving so fast. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the because you were talking about probably those those chatbots that most of us are used to, and they're incredibly annoying, right? Like, I'm just saying every time when I want to get to someone at my bank,
Yeah. And I type something in and they give me all these buttons and then they ask more questions. Like, that's not my question. And I just always type in, I need to speak to a human. That's it. Exactly. For some reason, whenever I say that, then they give me a phone number. I know. Exactly. Exactly. And it feels like a stupid waste of my time to having to go through this. I know. But the chatbots that you are talking about, and I just want to play that back, yeah, is about that.
is not just giving me stupid buttons to click on to lead me down some funnel, but is actually being able to guide and help me and respond to me like a human. And when it comes to responding, they actually, when I, let's say I'm landing on a, on a website with different pet products. Yeah. And of course I'm landing there because my,
Nina Huchthausen (14:24.589)
my pad has a challenge. Maybe it has eczema. Yeah. And I'm looking for what are all the products that you have. I'm looking for an eczema shampoo. But yes, of course I could just browse through the categories and read through all the different products, but it takes time. Yeah. I'm busy. Yeah. So from what I understand, what your bot does is as soon as I land on that website, it says, hi Nina, what are you looking for? And I can actually say,
Oh, you know, my dog has some eczema and I think a bit of dry scalp or skin. What do you recommend? And then it would actually show me the key products and go like, well, based on what you've told me, this is what we got. Have a look at this, this and this. Yep. So it's it's it to me.
This is so magical because it almost, it replaces the navigation, right? It replaces me having to wander through the aisles. And it's very much that person at the, I'm just thinking Kmart, you know. Always a person at the start of the store because the store is so big that you can just go to and say like, hey, I'm looking for this. And they're like, over there. Yeah, that's it.
And not just that, but they can also tell you, yeah, like the guys, you know, I'm thinking Bunnings, now you go to the same thing, it points you to the aisle, but then you're in the aisle and you want to find the thing that I can screw into wood and blah, blah, blah, to do this and that with. You're going to have to find the person that knows about that stuff for that aisle, because not every person knows everything. They have their specialties. And then you can do all of that with.
that person with that little chatbot and you're not alone you know when you said you're busy everyone's busy like apparently 2013 there was a uh a study uh they said that the the average human attention span in the year 2000 was 12 seconds right as of 2013 it went down to eight seconds it's probably half that now i would say the average goldfish is nine seconds so we're going down we're not
Nina Huchthausen (16:42.637)
We're not in a good place here. So people are, you know, no, no way near as patient as they used to be. They want answers and they want them now. And, you know, if you remember, I mentioned this to you and it was just a shocking statistic. The sales conversion rate, if a business can give an answer to a customer within five minutes versus giving
an answer to a customer within 30 minutes, the sales conversion rate went up 21 times. That's not 21%. That's 21 times. So it's just nuts. And of course, businesses in response to that would have put on more staff so that they can answer more questions and more phone calls at all hours of the night. Whenever, you know, someone wants to ask a question or two in the morning, they're not going to have someone there sitting, answering questions. So,
having something that can intelligently answer questions within a short time is worth millions, it's worth billions to the world. Most buyers end up picking the salesperson that answered them first, right? So if you can manage to do that and save people a lot of pain and suffering, then why not?
The real thing is that there's only about 7 % of salespeople that actually respond within five minutes. So the majority of your competitors are going to be in that bracket. And if they're a B2B business, then I think the, from memory, the average time for them to come back to a customer was like 42 hours by the time they actually come back to a customer and give them an answer. Now just imagine being able to do that in seconds, not hours.
Exactly. And I mean, most small businesses, so I would highly assume the vast majority listening to this podcast, they cannot afford to hire a salesperson who just sits there and answers question, let alone spend the time to train that person and have all the answers. Yeah. Having said that, you know, the average sales rep out there or salesperson will last about two and a half years.
Nina Huchthausen (19:05.901)
in my experience, and that's about right. When I looked up the statistics, I went, how do they know? It's two and a half years exactly. Anyway, between two to three years is how long salespeople were lasted generally. Exactly, because the thing is, it's such a complicated job. It's something you're like, I've said this a billion times. How many more can I say the same thing? So it's an incredible, tedious job.
for a human being because most of our brains don't like the same rut every single day, right? So it's not even that, because I know for some people they might be going like, oh, but like my fear could be AI can replace me. I could do this, I could do that. It's actually, in my mind, it's allowing us to really focus on the things that nourish us as humans versus,
the jobs that really suck the lifeblood out of us. And as a small business owner, if I invest all my time to just answering the same damn question every single day, I'm not going to move my business forward. And I'm not going to move my soul forward because I feel like I'm stuck in this hamster wheel. Look, I mean, the argument that this is going to replace me or that's not going to replace me.
you know, think back to the days which we did not live when they had a scribe that had to read everything for everyone, right? Not everyone could read. And then when people started learning how to read, that person became redundant. Of course, it became redundant, but the world became a better place for that. And then the time, you know, after that, they were printing rather than writing books. And then they were doing them on the typewriters rather than putting the letters next to each other. Every one of those stages, the Industrial Revolution, every one of those stages.
someone or a bunch of people got replaced by a machine, but the world was a better place for it. So this is just another iteration. This is just one more. And if we're not on board with it one way or the other, we are going to get left behind. You know, the horse and cart became a car and the car becoming even faster car and then, you know, a plane and then a rocket. Every time one of those things comes along, yes, of course, there's going to be people that become redundant.
Nina Huchthausen (21:30.317)
But then they shift, they move, they move up the ladder to things that the machine can't do yet. Exactly. And to me, if it's because if I'm thinking small product business and they're one or two people in the business and what is the highest value items or tasks they can focus on, right? Yeah. Like, of course, number one, you need to really perfect your product in itself and then you want to get that outsourced so somebody else can make it for you. Second one.
is the big sales, is the sales that not just one product at a time, but it's 100 units, it's 1 ,000 units. It's the part of expanding your business and really getting your brand out there, right? And strategically grow what you've been nurturing, right? The one -to -one conversations, Nina wants one product, right? And needs a 10 -minute support. If you calculated that,
That's not going to move the needle of your business. However, of course, Nina needs it and all these other people that are coming to your website who have a single question to be answered in order to get them to say yes to your product or to find what they are looking for. So it is a needed support, but it's a trainable support, right? Because once you've sold your product 100 times, you know what questions customers always ask.
That's everybody can tell me that, you know, and everybody knows the general objections and everybody knows the confusions and the clarity that customers need. So as soon as we have that on the table, then we can in a very, as you said, in a very simple way, train and, and, and, and, and AI chatbot to have those conversations for you and to guide your customers effectively.
And once it's trained, they're not going to leave you. And they just become smarter and smarter over time without you having to pay more money for the staff. And they learn so quickly. They learn so quickly. You add a new product on your website, this thing knows all about it within seconds or overnight. It knows the prices of everything off by heart. It knows the relationship between everything on your website. It knows your terms and conditions off by heart. I mean, I don't know. Look, it's...
Nina Huchthausen (23:57.997)
There's probably more to be learned and as they are developing them, they do get better, they're still getting better. But at this point, I find also with integrations, because there's again, with, for example, e -commerce businesses, there are other things that people ask for that are not just information on the website, they're gonna ask for...
Oh, I need to add something to my order or I need to cancel my order or I need to organize a return or this thing showed up broken. There's other things, right? I'm actually working on those sort of integrations now, next, so that you can, you know, depending on the website or the engine that you're using on the e -commerce, this thing can actually, it's called a deep integration into actually doing processes that normally humans only would have done. So,
And it's going there, you know, and with things like calendar bookings. Oh, I have some time on the Monday at 10. Can you do Monday? Oh, no. How about Monday at 1030? You know, it can do conversations like that. That's kind of a deeper level of integration that I'm currently working on in my solution at the moment. So but, you know, up until this point where we're at now, it can easily just pick up anything that you've got on your website.
plus a whole bunch of other documents, like you might have Q &A, and you might have ways to work out pricing, and just a price guide, and things like this that you might compete into it. It can handle all that, and it can just go grab from it and come back to the customer within seconds. So I'm really personally, I'm very much in love with the whole situation right now. I'm loving it. It's a big jump. It's a massive jump. Yeah.
That is freaking fantastic. But like, what, what is the, like, if someone is like, OK, cool, I want to do this. So first of all, what, what, where should that business be at in order for this to create a return on investment? Yeah. And then what, what, what would be the, what is the investment? Can you, like, she has some, some sort of rough numbers, because of course,
Nina Huchthausen (26:22.125)
This is like a 50 grand thing most people are going to icon for. Let's say that you are spending, let me just work it out to make it easier. If you feel that you are...
Nina Huchthausen (26:41.549)
Depends on the size of the website, but usually I would say if you feel that 20 bucks a day is a fair price to pay for saving yourself a number of hours, then you are fine. This is perfect. And even less than 20 bucks a day. Yeah. So yeah, that's usually what it will end up being. Yeah. So that's about $600 a month.
Yeah, even less. So some websites I can do it for, um, for four 97 some websites, even if there is a tiny little website, I could probably get away with 300 bucks a month. Goodness me. Hardly anything changing on it with some small setup fees depends on how much integration I have to do with the CRM because that's the other thing I program it to, uh,
to literally ask the customer for their name, their email, put it into your MailChimp or Clavio or whatever program. So the more integrations, the more in the setup, and we're usually talking hundreds, not thousands in terms of setup, and then some number of per month. And that number usually depends on the integrations and the size of the website, because AI, they charge by how much conversation is coming and going.
So there's a lot of data on the website. There's a lot of stuff coming and going all the time. Of course, a large number of users, then there's a lot of information coming and going. So yeah, I would say, you know, it's just so crazy cheap to me. You can't even imagine because like 20 bucks a day, that is what maybe 15 minutes of our time, right?
And who only spends 15 minutes a day to answer customer queries? And the majority of the time, customer queries come to us via email because the website couldn't answer it. So they emailed. That's it. And not including the distraction, because then whatever you were working on, you have to stop and then you have to come back to it and you lose even more time. You don't just lose the half an hour or an hour.
Nina Huchthausen (29:01.549)
that you're actually doing the work, you're losing all the other concepts, the focus, the stuff that you can't, that no one else can do. Yeah. And I think at the same time, because return on investment, right? I think from what you mentioned to me before, once it's integrated, you can easily track how much business the chatbot has generated, right? Yeah. Yeah.
You can store the conversations like, you know, I can integrate it with a Google Sheet, for example, which is online for everyone. And you can just, as in for us, you know, internally share it with the business that you can, the business owner could look at that and see what's happening with conversations. We always look at that and check what it hasn't been able to answer. We might come back and have a look at, you know, the information available and we keep adding to the training. So I don't just.
leave it there. That's the whole point of the maintenance is that, you know, part of the fee is to do with maintenance is to do with us going through the conversations, seeing what it hasn't been able to answer or what it didn't answer perfectly, adding more to the training, asking the business owner, how would you have answered this and the business owner would give us the answer and then we would train it and keep training it and keep training it until such time that, you know, hopefully we've covered 99 %
percent of the conversations. Yeah. That's how it gets better. Yeah. Here's like one probably critical question for you, because for me, on like the one side, this sounds all amazing, right? Someone who knows knows anything and everything about my business and can have all conversations. I don't actually have to be there, right? Yeah. But if this artificial intelligence knows anything and everything about my business,
Yeah, could it also just could someone just steal all of that data and then know anything and everything about my business? Well, look, it depends on first of all, who is that? Like, you know, if you're talking about us, for example, well, we're just like another marketing company, you know, or an IT company or whoever builds your website. Majority of the time, it's answering questions that are already on your website. You know, if you.
Nina Huchthausen (31:19.277)
If most businesses could afford it, they would have had a quoting system on their website. And there might be things that you don't want to have an AI assistant answer anyway, because you don't, you know, there's far too many variables that you want to like, you know, if it's a complex sort of quoting system, but the majority of e commerce applications, the majority of, you know, educational sort of applications, uh,
They're just wanting to save time because their answers are already on the website, but no one has the patience to look for them. And that's where the AI chatbots are going to do the majority, like 90, 99 % of the work. It's answer questions that could have been answered already if people just had a little bit more patience, but they don't. Patience, but they don't. Okay. So I think that that's... Well, we only want to tell it, we want to tell it. Yeah, because I think that gives my critical...
mind, a lot of peace of mind, and hopefully our listeners too, because it's really, the information that we feed it and the knowledge that we give it is the knowledge that we have available in all different sources, in all these different, like, knowledge plots, where the knowledge plot is the website. We could have some other information on Facebook. We could have some other information, maybe,
recorded in sales trainings, in YouTube videos, you name it, right? But we are giving it all to this one source because we always love to like, ah, I wish I had all my knowledge in one single source. So I don't have to go everywhere. But we never as humans achieve that, right? Because we always have stuff stored in our phones, stuff stored in our brains, stuff stored just between our coworkers.
stored on the website, but just by working with you on this, number one, what I'm hearing is you, first of all, first step is to pull everything that's somehow available together first round. And then each month you will keep pulling from different sources based on what else the bot needs to know. And then everybody gets to feed in. Bear in mind also that the bot actually has a hell of a lot of
Nina Huchthausen (33:40.685)
background information. Like if you had a play with chat GPT, it basically knows everything that's on the internet right now. It knows everything that's on the internet. If you just ask it about anything in history, anything in statistics, anything in anything, it's going to have an answer for it. Now, it doesn't necessarily know right at this second which website and which link has the information.
but it has a lot of information already. Like I did a chatbot for a crypto website. So they had their own crypto currency and they wanted to target people that were trying to get into crypto. So I didn't have to do a lot of training for the bot to be able to answer the most basic of questions about, oh, what's on ramp? What's, I don't know a lot about crypto myself. So the bot knew.
more about crypto than I ever did. But I programmed it, I trained it on this particular product, this particular information to do with the site and whatever they were doing and their app and all of that. And I trained it to encourage people to use this particular direction and then join their Telegram group and whatever else. But any question outside of
that specific information, it was just answering from its general information. It wasn't answering it from information that was on the website. It was answering it from its general knowledge information. Now you can limit its flexibility because there's creativity. You can adjust that. I would, you normally wouldn't, but I would in terms of the flexibility of how far it can go.
with its creativity and going outside the square. Some customers don't want it to go outside the square. Some customers are happy for it to go a little tiny bit outside the square so that it can answer general knowledge information. And, you know, we can train all that. Yeah, yeah. Because I would, so if I'm thinking about a certain health product that was approved by...
Nina Huchthausen (36:03.277)
the FDA or needs that stamp of approval, right, then we probably don't want to have the bot mix up information that you have had to it that is FDA approved and you can claim that versus anything from the internet, right? Then it has to stick to you can say this, you cannot say that. That's it. That's it. And that's that's what I do. That's my job is to train it and train it well and
you know, draw the lines for it as to where it goes and how far it goes and how far it doesn't go. Yeah, that's exactly it. You know, all you have to do is explain to me what you want and how you want it and how far you want it to go and what you want it to push and what objectives do you want it to achieve because you want you wanted to act like a salesperson for you at the same time. So yes, answer everyone's question, but also, hey, not them towards this or not them towards that.
or ask them the qualifying questions and if they seem to fit the bill then nudge them towards an appointment or nudge them towards buying this item or nudge them towards a lead magnet like a download or a discount or all these things. You're training it just like training a human being. Something that we couldn't do as a small business with the other scripted type of bots because it would have been too expensive to try and program all that stuff into it. There's too much.
that we have in our brain. Yeah, too many variations. Too many variations. But you can do that now. You can do that. It can handle that. It can handle thousands and thousands of words, mushed in together into a bunch of instructions. It can actually handle that. Yeah. Oh, that's why it's so amazing. So me from a, because if I'm putting on my business brain, because I want to kind of like put a recommendation out on when.
when it's really the right time for someone to look into this. And what comes to mind for me, and I'd love to hear your thoughts as well, is, number one, if you have some type of online presence, right, and you feel like, just overridingly, it could perform better, right? Because you put some money down to build that online presence, some money and some time. So you must have an expectation on what the return should be.
Nina Huchthausen (38:28.333)
What should it get back to you? Are you happy to sell one product a month? 100, 1000, what is it, right? If you don't feel like your online presence, whether your website, your Etsy store, whatever, is killing it, then you probably want to look at, okay, where are the drop -offs? Yeah. And if some, of course, if nobody can find this site, I'm not sure if the bot's going to help much. True. Probably not.
But let's assume you have set up your online presence in a way that people keep finding it. But then they start looking at your product and for some reason they don't buy. Yeah. Number two, of course it could be that your products are shit. You know, of course that could also happen. Probably the bot could not really juice up like an ugly pig. But if it was a beautiful pig, all right. Yeah.
But then the bot can actually really help whatever customer comes there to make sure that they can easily find what they were looking for, their questions get answered, and it guides them to the checkout to actually make that purchase. Because oftentimes, when we're kind of like, ah, yeah, when you have that maybe gone, the chatbot can probably guide it to its checkout. Is that? Yeah. Let me put that in.
you know, pure business terms like you're putting it. So an AI chatbot can help with lead acquisition. And I'll give you more details in a second. So we're talking, you know, the whole journey, right? So you've got bringing traffic in, you're trying to acquire leads, trying to convert the leads, and then you're trying to retain customers, right? You know, that's the business 101 for all of us, right? So you bring in the traffic, the lead acquisition,
So the AI chat bot could help with lead acquisition, with the lead conversion, and with the customer attention. So if you put, for example, a lot of us would have put a little pop -up or something on a website that says, download this thing, but give us your name and email. Why? Because we all know that email can give us at least having some way of
Nina Huchthausen (40:52.397)
Connecting that with that customer gives us a chance to convert that customer. So we all want to get leads We all want to get more emails or more connections or more Whatever it is. It's just a way to capture the customer or potential customer So a chat bot compared to a pop -up Performs I have seen it perform up to four to five times better than a pop -up Because it just simply sits there and asks questions like a normal conversation
As opposed to a form that pops up that's kind of annoying you click it it disappears. Oh, yeah. Thank God that's gone so It performs significantly better at capturing late what that means cost per acquisition of a lead Has just reduced to like 20 % of the cost that it was before right? That's step number one lead conversion
As we said before, if you answer someone within five minutes versus within 30 minutes, you've just upped your conversion by 21 times. Conversion rate by answering their questions, by giving them answers faster, has just jumped by a significant percentage. Then customer attention, of course, if they have a question that needs to be answered quickly, that needs a query that needs to be answered quickly, they're a happier customer, they're more likely to stick around for longer and buy again.
So really it can just sit in all three critical aspects of business or upping the numbers of business. An AI chatbot on the front of a website could do a lot of good. And that's why I like them so much. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. So anyone who has an online presence really, I think in my mind, should look into it. And...
do it as early as they can, because as Talia was saying, a lot of businesses keep adding this to their site. So it becomes, it will become an expectation very quickly. Yeah. And because if I know, because there's also always the question, well, should I, and I do this all the time, should I find it direct or should I just go to Amazon? Because it's a really powerful site, you know?
Nina Huchthausen (43:13.517)
And if we want people to go direct, we got to need to step up the service, the support, the findability, the guidance from start to finish. And at the same time, it really helps us to capture leads, because that way we can build long -term relationships and get a much better understanding about our customer. And it does a really great job at that.
So yeah, super powerful, Tala. And I know we could be talking about chatbots for hours, but to me, I feel like you have, you have shared so much with me today, the audience today, my brain is full and I'm already thinking, oh, they're like a couple of questions I want to ask you about my business. After this, so really, really appreciate your time. So of course, you're an MBT partner.
Yeah, but you also run your own business. So can you just share with me, what's the name of the business and how can people reach out to you? Yeah, my business is called Pivot Point. So if you could go to pivotpoint .biz, B -I -Z, that's the website and you can contact me from there. That's really all there is to it. And you can play with the chatbot, the AI chatbot on the front end of the website as well. Awesome. Awesome.
So they can contact you that way. And of course, secondly, so I will link, I will give everybody, because the training that you did for our Triad members was so exceptional. Yeah, I will pull out a snippet and make that accessible for everybody who's listened to it, because that way they can, I think, first of all, gather so much more knowledge, right? I particularly loved your part on, in the training on chat GPT.
on how to maximize its usage and time because I think it's super freaking fantastic and I want to share that with everybody as well as image generation. Because every business needs images all the freaking time, right? And if you're just to put it in perspective also, it's not just, I mean, a chatbot doesn't all just need to be on the front end of a website. It can be on Facebook Messenger, you know.
Nina Huchthausen (45:33.005)
messaging customers on your behalf or your page or it can be on email. We can set it up on email address. We can set it up on SMS if your customers are more likely to SMS and so on. So it doesn't just have to be on the front end of a website. Yes, because we hadn't even spoken about that. So we have a play in all sorts of areas for lead generation, for answering questions and get people to convert and purchase their product. Amazing. So yes, Tala.
Thank you. Thank you so much for your time. So everybody check out Tala, check out the training. I will put all those links in the show notes. And I honestly, I would love to hear from you guys who has now implementing chat bots in their business and how much, how much goodness that is driving and how much time it's saving. Because I think it's like the time's now. The time is not in two years. Yeah.
Yeah, the technology is ready now and it will make a massive difference for any business. So yeah, thank you, Tala. Thank you. Thank you.
