The Same Question, Every Week

A fee only insurance agent in New York was losing 5 to 6 hours every week to the same phone call.

His customers paid on his website, the system generated their reports, and then they called him to ask what the terms in the report meant. Same questions. Different customer. Every week.

He was solo. There was nobody else to take those calls.

Hold that picture. I'll come back to him.

The part CRM never taught you

Businesses depend on customer relationships once the customer is acquired.

We spend real money to acquire a customer, and then lose that customer after one bad experience with our service, our operations or our product.

Software like CRM and ERP builds great businesses, no doubt. But it never taught you how to retain a customer. How to build a long lasting relationship that turns time into money as you spend it with the customer.

Using a CRM doesn't mean you win the customer's heart. It's always the good experience that makes your relationship stronger as you go.

It's like a domino effect. Small good experiences stack up, and the customer stops shopping around.

Good experience, repeated == a customer who stays.

Does software provide that experience?

Will AI today, or any AI in the near future, build the customer experience?

You know the answer. It's a clear BIG NO.

A human needs another human to build trust and to prosper the alliance between business and customer.

But we can definitely use software and technology to make these experiences faster.

That's the split worth understanding. AI doesn't build the relationship. It clears the noise so you have the time to build it yourself.

Speed is the part machines are good at. Trust is the part they are not.

What happens when your customer has a problem?

She has a question, or something isn't working, and she wants an answer.

She has two roads. She looks for it herself, in your FAQs, on your website, in the guidebook you shipped with the product. Or she comes to you, by email or by phone.

Email gives her an answer tomorrow. A call gives her an answer now, and no doubt a call wins every time.

But what if you don't have the people to answer the calls? A few support engineers, always busy. Or in his case, no support engineer at all.

The option that is effective, affordable and quick is a chatbot.

She sends hi, describes the concern, the ticket is generated, and all the information you need is already collected before anyone picks up the phone.

So here is what we did for him

We loaded his knowledge base into an "Ask AI Insua" chatbot and put it right in front of the customer.

Now the customer reads her report, hits a term she doesn't understand, and asks. The answer comes back while the report is still open in front of her. She doesn't hold the question until he's free. She doesn't wait for a callback.

He got 5 to 6 hours back every week. More than 30 hours a month. Almost a full working week, every month.

He also got his peace of mind back.

What did we actually achieve?

We took away the hours spent explaining things that were already known and already answered before.

Those hours are not just hours. For a solo operator they are the difference between running the business and drowning in it.

If you are short on resources and still want to give your customer a better experience, let the machine handle the repeated part.

Then spend the time it gives back on the part no machine can do. Pick up the phone for the conversation that actually matters. Remember what the customer told you last time. Show up when it counts.

The chatbot doesn't win the customer's heart.

It just buys you the time to go and win it yourself.