Exploring Human-Centric Support, AI Integration, Trust Building, & Training with David Sohn

[00:00:01] Dave Sobel here with another bonus episode of the Business of Tech. I'm an IT Nation Connect talking with David Sohn of Help. David, thanks for joining me today.

[00:00:09] Thanks for having me.

[00:00:10] Alright, I gotta start with the headline, right? You have a particular look going on today. Is there a reason behind all of this?

[00:00:17] The beard? I got it trimmed.

[00:00:19] See, that's natural for a tech guy. It's more green stripes than a beanie. Is there a reason today?

[00:00:24] Green stripes just look good on me.

[00:00:26] Well, you do look fantastic in it. Now, I've also noticed your team's dressed similarly. Perhaps a theme?

[00:00:33] I don't know. Maybe it was just a coincidence?

[00:00:36] Perhaps we ought to ask more about Where's Waldo.

[00:00:38] Oh, Waldo!

[00:00:40] But let's get into some of the more stuff. I'm intrigued to get a little bit of a sense of how you guys identified a particular opening in the market for Help's offering.

[00:00:47] Like, what was the impetus behind all that?

[00:00:49] Absolutely. So, previous to starting Help's, I was working for a company that sold transceivers.

[00:00:53] Things that go into the data centers for like Verizon, Comcast, startups, massive companies.

[00:00:58] And what they required of us was 90-second phone answer time. And that was crazy. It's hard to do, especially 24 hours a day.

[00:01:07] And so, what we ended up having to do was get a partner that was able to have the coverage that we needed.

[00:01:13] And so, we worked with a handful of partners that weren't fantastic.

[00:01:18] Okay.

[00:01:18] And so, we ended up saying, you know what? The market needs less.

[00:01:21] Our goal is really to be that front-line support, to be somebody that can take care of your customers just the same way that you'd want to take care of them.

[00:01:29] Okay. Got it. So, you're doing that with humans, right?

[00:01:32] With humans.

[00:01:33] Okay.

[00:01:33] Human-powered.

[00:01:34] So, talk to me a little bit about the approach. Like, what makes your set of humans different than other people's humans?

[00:01:39] Yes. Absolutely.

[00:01:40] Okay. So, we are all human. So, we don't recommend IVRs. We want somebody to be able to pick up the phone, ring in, and get a human immediately.

[00:01:48] We're all from the U.S. We are a distributed workforce, but everybody's here within the Continental 48, or however you call that.

[00:01:56] And then, we're all the time. So, it's a 24-7 offering just to be there when, again, your customers need us.

[00:02:02] Okay. Now, you clearly would be a company then that's on the front line of thinking about the impact of AI automation and generative AI.

[00:02:10] Give me a little bit of the sense of, particularly based on the fact that you're talking about the differentiator as humans.

[00:02:15] Yeah.

[00:02:15] This is an area that could have a lot of disruption. Tell me about the way you're thinking about that.

[00:02:19] Yeah. When was the last time you called in and had a great AI chatbot experience?

[00:02:24] So, I will tell you it's actually a subtle change. That I'm starting to have interactions that are distinctly more bot driven that are starting to be a positive experience.

[00:02:32] Okay.

[00:02:33] Which is why I'm tracking this a little bit differently because it's clear that there's something changing about the way this works.

[00:02:39] Sure.

[00:02:39] If I'd gone back in time two years ago, I would have said 100% they're bad experiences.

[00:02:43] I don't think that's necessarily true anymore and there's some subtlety going on.

[00:02:47] Okay.

[00:02:47] So, how are you thinking about the problem?

[00:02:48] Okay. Okay. So, I do know that the technology is going to continue to advance.

[00:02:51] At some point in time, we won't even know that we're talking to AI.

[00:02:54] Yeah.

[00:02:54] Right.

[00:02:54] It's just going to be how it goes.

[00:02:56] Yeah.

[00:02:56] However, there are still a lot of people that are going to hold a prejudice against that.

[00:03:01] Okay.

[00:03:01] It's a weird way to think about it, but we're going really fast with technology.

[00:03:05] And there is still a massive generation of folks that remember when they came home and turned on the radio.

[00:03:10] And so, I think that more traditional people are going to always want to get a human.

[00:03:15] The AI is going to empower our agents to be able to perform even better.

[00:03:18] Okay.

[00:03:19] But we're still going to be able to provide the warm and fuzzies.

[00:03:21] We're still going to have the empathy that a human can possess.

[00:03:23] Okay.

[00:03:23] We're still going to be able to learn on the fly, maybe a little bit faster, maybe at some point, than the AI will be able to.

[00:03:29] And hopefully, we'll be able to continue to provide a great expense.

[00:03:32] So, interesting you think that way.

[00:03:33] So, let's talk out what an AI augmented human might look like in this case.

[00:03:38] Because that's a distinct approach and a good strategy choice.

[00:03:42] Yeah.

[00:03:42] How would you think about the potential use cases where it might make a lot of sense to empower your humans a little bit more aggressively with AI?

[00:03:50] Yeah.

[00:03:50] I mean, it goes back to this idea of screen pumps.

[00:03:53] Right.

[00:03:53] If I were to be taking a phone call or grabbing a ticket and something popped up and gave me all of the information that I needed to know,

[00:04:01] it told me that it was Dave that was calling.

[00:04:03] It told me that Dave works for a particular company.

[00:04:05] Right.

[00:04:05] Dave called in the last couple of times about a particular software.

[00:04:08] Here's a handful of things that you can do if Dave's asking about the software again.

[00:04:12] And so, I think it's just going to really put the things that we need at our fingertips.

[00:04:16] And that's what excites me about the empowerment of the retails.

[00:04:19] Okay.

[00:04:19] One of the things I think you also would have spent a ton of time thinking about, and I'm really curious to get your perspective on,

[00:04:23] is sort of high speed efficiency.

[00:04:25] So, like a help desk is a space where speed matters, right?

[00:04:29] And speed and resolution.

[00:04:30] But if you're trying to particularly with a human-based approach where you're trying to make sure that it is not impersonal,

[00:04:35] how are you thinking about that approach and getting that balance right?

[00:04:40] Yeah.

[00:04:40] That's really a good question.

[00:04:42] I think our brains can only process so fast.

[00:04:46] Yeah.

[00:04:46] And so, you and I are having a conversation.

[00:04:48] And if I was going too fast or if I was talking too fast, which I have a feeling I'm still talking too fast.

[00:04:53] Yeah.

[00:04:53] But if I was talking faster, it wouldn't really benefit us in this conversation.

[00:04:57] And so, the AI being able to go faster and present our agents something faster just means that they're ready with that information.

[00:05:03] Okay.

[00:05:04] They're not going to pour that information out and blow up everybody's brains with it.

[00:05:08] They're going to use it to still have a natural personal conversation.

[00:05:12] You and I are looking straight at each other.

[00:05:15] Yeah.

[00:05:15] We're making a connection.

[00:05:17] That's something that AI can't do.

[00:05:19] Whether you know it's AI or you don't, there might be some things that are in the way of that.

[00:05:24] Potentially.

[00:05:25] I think it's an interesting area to explore because we anthropomorphize a lot of these agents.

[00:05:31] Sure.

[00:05:32] And so, in a way, our brains rewire themselves a little bit to create that connection because humans want it.

[00:05:39] And there's ways to make that a positive force.

[00:05:41] There's also ways to make that a negative force.

[00:05:43] You know, but I think it's interesting because you're in a space that's going to be considering a lot of that.

[00:05:47] I really wanted to get your sense of that.

[00:05:50] Now, the other thing that I really wanted to talk about is tell me a little bit about the way that you are doing things to build more trust.

[00:05:57] Because again, if you're leaning into that as an element of that, like what are the things that you focus on for helping build trust with your people and your people to customers?

[00:06:06] Build trust with our people and our people to customers.

[00:06:11] You know, think about us like more like a call center than a help desk.

[00:06:15] Okay.

[00:06:15] And I know that that sounds funny because we're a help desk solution.

[00:06:18] But if you think about the fact that when you go in and sit down and work at a call center, you really focus on the experience.

[00:06:24] You focus on all the things that you need to say.

[00:06:27] If you were to work for like a Royal Caribbean or a cruise line, they would do three to four weeks of training and say,

[00:06:32] Yeah.

[00:06:32] You need to do this. You need to do that.

[00:06:34] I always hear the Disney example.

[00:06:36] You know, if there's an experience at a Disney park, Disney World, Disney Land, whatever it might be, it's going to be very curated.

[00:06:42] And so our focus is really on the beginning of that experience that the customer is going to have.

[00:06:47] Okay.

[00:06:47] Because nobody might be able to resolve it right away.

[00:06:50] But everybody should be able to let the customer know what's going on, let them know that, hey, we're here to provide that support to you.

[00:06:57] The trust piece is really hard.

[00:07:00] If you make a commitment to somebody and you don't meet that commitment, trust is immediately lost.

[00:07:05] But if you set an expectation and you meet that expectation, then it's easy to build that trust.

[00:07:10] When we sat down, you said, hey, we're going to be talking really close together.

[00:07:14] And I said, okay, that's neat.

[00:07:16] And you told me all the things that I needed to expect by us.

[00:07:18] If you hadn't told me that, I would be a little bit freaked out.

[00:07:21] But since you did, I trust you now.

[00:07:23] Okay.

[00:07:24] You chose Disney in that example to talk about like the kinds of companies that you're thinking about.

[00:07:28] Give me a little bit of a sense that you guys intentionally set out to think about principles and starting with humans.

[00:07:34] Like were there organizations?

[00:07:35] Was Disney an intentional choice now or was that like some part of the founding?

[00:07:39] Give me a sense of like the framework of when you guys sat down to come up with the idea, the principles that drove it.

[00:07:44] Absolutely.

[00:07:46] So Maya Angelou said something along the lines of people aren't going to remember what happened, but they're going to remember how they were made to feel or you made them.

[00:07:52] And I think that's been something that's been a guiding light for us.

[00:07:55] Disney, Amazon, American Express, these massive corporations have spent a lot of time researching what people are going to want and how they're going to, you know, kind of carry an experience.

[00:08:05] And so, of course, we want to emulate that as much as we can.

[00:08:08] And as humans, we've learned from that.

[00:08:10] And so we're going to continue to leverage that.

[00:08:12] One of the silly things that I do is that if I'm responding to a text or an email, instead of saying no problem, I say all good.

[00:08:20] And I know this seems innocuous, but no is negative.

[00:08:23] Problem is negative.

[00:08:25] All is positive.

[00:08:26] Good is positive.

[00:08:27] Okay.

[00:08:27] So these are the things that come together.

[00:08:28] Now, I love that talking about it in this sense because that's very personal and intimate.

[00:08:32] Now, but the tension you're dealing with is you're trying to scale that.

[00:08:35] Yeah.

[00:08:36] Which means you've got to have thought about some of the ways that you're going to measure that.

[00:08:40] Of course.

[00:08:41] I would guess things like time to resolution and ticket closures and stuff are not measuring that particularly well.

[00:08:48] How are you guys thinking about measuring that to make sure that the experience is consistent in the way you want it to be?

[00:08:54] Of course.

[00:08:55] And so, you know how earlier I was saying it's all about the human experience and that AI is going to empower our agents?

[00:09:00] Yeah.

[00:09:00] AI sentiment analysis is something that is available to a lot of folks.

[00:09:04] Okay.

[00:09:04] And it's something that we leverage.

[00:09:05] Somebody calls in, they have an experience, we're able to kind of get a baseline of how that experience went.

[00:09:10] And frankly, the volume is high enough that we can't listen or hear everything to be able to score that thought.

[00:09:16] Okay.

[00:09:16] But if we had something that was able to do it all at once and kind of point out the problem areas, then we can continue to coach and train the team so that we kind of immediate.

[00:09:24] Okay.

[00:09:25] So, give me a little sense then, there's got to be some structure around that.

[00:09:28] And I'm interested in the kind of management structure of how you're managing those people to help them be effective.

[00:09:35] Give me a little sense of how that works.

[00:09:36] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:09:37] Okay.

[00:09:37] So, we've added way too many layers.

[00:09:39] What we have now are our agents that are just our base level agents.

[00:09:43] We've got a team lead, we've got a service manager, we've got a VP of operations, and then we've got us.

[00:09:48] And the idea behind that is that we continue to have the safe place, the next level, so that an agent can say, hey, you know what?

[00:09:56] I was having a bad day.

[00:09:57] That's why that call kind of went sideways.

[00:09:59] Okay.

[00:10:00] And they can do that with their team lead.

[00:10:01] They can get a provider service manager.

[00:10:02] Okay.

[00:10:03] So, that helps.

[00:10:04] And then I guess I want to get into those.

[00:10:06] How much is something like an NPS score or stats around like that?

[00:10:09] How much are you leaning into those approaches to it?

[00:10:12] That's a great question, Dave.

[00:10:13] Okay.

[00:10:14] So, long-winded names are coming.

[00:10:17] Cool.

[00:10:17] One of the things is that we work directly within our clients' tools.

[00:10:20] Okay.

[00:10:20] So, if they're doing NPS, if they're doing like a smile back or a, oh boy, what's the other one?

[00:10:25] A crew who or one of those other tools.

[00:10:27] Yeah, sure.

[00:10:27] Sure.

[00:10:28] Then we get to see that, but it's through our customers and our actual with their consumers.

[00:10:32] So, we end up with something that is indicative of an experience.

[00:10:37] However, when was the last time that you filled one of those out or you did something like that because you had either a really great experience or a really bad experience?

[00:10:46] Have you ever done one when it's just been like, okay?

[00:10:49] Idiot.

[00:10:49] So, much less likely.

[00:10:51] Exactly.

[00:10:51] Occasionally, depending on my mood, but yes, much less likely to do that.

[00:10:54] And so, that's how we see it.

[00:10:55] I mean, that's fantastic.

[00:10:56] Of course, night promoters are a good thing.

[00:10:58] Of course, we want to look at CSAT.

[00:10:59] Of course, we want to look at all that stuff.

[00:11:01] And we do.

[00:11:01] We do our own kind of internal focus thing.

[00:11:04] Our external clients, they're looking at themselves as well.

[00:11:07] We're able to go back to those call recordings.

[00:11:09] We're able to go back and review and treat our agents.

[00:11:12] But the whole experience has to be awesome.

[00:11:15] Everything has to be awesome because I don't want to just see the great ones.

[00:11:18] I don't want to see the bad ones.

[00:11:19] I want to see that everything is on the A-level.

[00:11:21] Gotcha.

[00:11:22] You mentioned something that intrigues me that I want to get a little bit more insight into

[00:11:25] because I see a parallel in you using your customers' tools with the challenge that MSPs have when they talk about co-managed IT

[00:11:33] because they're trying to also let customers.

[00:11:35] What have you learned from a success perspective about using your customers' tools rather than trying to do your own?

[00:11:43] Oh, it's fair.

[00:11:45] You should get paid to do this.

[00:11:47] You know, maybe I should have a podcast to do this kind of stuff.

[00:11:50] I got it.

[00:11:51] So I think that for us, what we've done is we've, again, enabled the agent.

[00:11:55] Our focus is really a platform that we provide to the agents so that they can switch seamlessly.

[00:11:59] We do training on each one of the tools that the agents are using, but we make it so that it's so low overhead.

[00:12:05] So if a call comes in or a ticket comes in for a particular client using a particular set of tools, I've been trained on those handful of tools.

[00:12:11] I go into that platform.

[00:12:13] I click a button and I see all the tools that are available to me for that client.

[00:12:16] I then go in, do what I need to do, those that take it out, whatever it might be.

[00:12:20] What we're doing, frankly, is building super agents.

[00:12:23] Okay.

[00:12:23] We're building people that have used the top five and the next five tools in all these different categories.

[00:12:30] We've got folks that are on the ConnectWives ecosystem entirely, but then we also have people that are outside of them.

[00:12:36] And so when our agents leave our organization, which we're happy to see because I feel like we've kind of molded them in a place that makes it so that they're more attractive to the market.

[00:12:44] Yeah.

[00:12:44] They then go off to an MSP and they say, what tool do you have?

[00:12:47] Oh yeah, I've used that a bazillion times.

[00:12:49] Okay.

[00:12:50] So I want to get, because you said something there, I want to make sure that my assumption is right and I want to get a little bit more of the learnings there.

[00:12:55] It sounds like the key element there is investing in training, right?

[00:12:58] Getting the people.

[00:12:59] So what have you learned from that training process about what really works to make those effective agents?

[00:13:05] I am going to completely fumble the way that this goes, but it's learn, do, show.

[00:13:13] Okay.

[00:13:13] That's, I think I got it right.

[00:13:15] We'll see what happens.

[00:13:16] I'll Google that.

[00:13:17] Okay.

[00:13:17] Learn is that we're going to teach the agent how to do it.

[00:13:20] Then we're going to have them do it.

[00:13:22] And then we're going to ask that they show us to do it.

[00:13:25] Okay.

[00:13:26] We find that course retention is really low, but as you continue to build up, as you continue to get to that point where, hey, I've learned 20% of what I need to do.

[00:13:35] Okay, now I'm going to go do it and I'm going to learn another 20%.

[00:13:37] And now I'm going to show somebody how I did it, maybe that's another 20%.

[00:13:41] Okay.

[00:13:41] And then we just get better over time.

[00:13:42] Okay.

[00:13:43] And so I've been asking a lot of leaders that I've been talking to particularly about this, and it seems like your answer would be particularly fascinating based on the way you're spending so much of your time on people, right?

[00:13:53] Ultimately, you could position as a tech company, but what you actually are is a people company because you've got to manage so many of that.

[00:13:58] So I'd really like to get a little bit of insight as a leader and founder in your organization.

[00:14:01] Like, what is your decision-making process that helps you come to conclusion, particularly as you're having to make so many decisions about people?

[00:14:39] Oh, wow.

[00:14:40] Yeah.

[00:14:43] Yeah.

[00:14:43] And that's how we try to really position things so that we can teach them.

[00:14:47] So when it comes to the experience, when we get to a point where maybe you need to make a decision to put somebody on a performance review or whatever it might be, we always say the sooner the better.

[00:14:56] You know, yeah, it's not going to feel good for anybody, but then we're going to find out what the result of that is going to be sooner if we do it sooner.

[00:15:02] Gotcha.

[00:15:03] Well, David, you've made such a case for training.

[00:15:05] It sort of resonates with a lot of the topics that I keep talking about on the show, and I really appreciate you spending some time with me today.

[00:15:10] This has been great fun.

[00:15:11] Awesome.

[00:15:11] Thanks, Dave.

[00:15:12] I have a question for you.

[00:15:13] Okay.

[00:15:13] Because our initials are so similar, I'd love to know what your middle name is.

[00:15:17] My middle name is Paul.

[00:15:18] I'm actually named after my father's foster dad, so that's where it all comes from.

[00:15:23] So you're DPS and I'm DIS.

[00:15:25] Well, there we go.

[00:15:26] And both acronyms meaning two different things in tech.

[00:15:29] So we'll leave the listeners to figure that one out.

[00:15:31] David, this has been so much fun.

[00:15:32] Thanks.

[00:15:33] Thanks for having me, Dave.

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