The Best SEO Podcast: Unlocking the Unknown Secrets of AI, Search Rankings & Digital Marketing

Converting Questions to Leads: The Power of Human Chat with Ted DeBettencourt

• MatthewBertram.com • Episode 638

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Ted Ted DeBettencourt from Juvo Leads shares how human-powered chat services capture significantly more leads than AI alternatives for businesses with high-value customers. Data shows that human operators outperform chatbots by at least 200% in converting website visitors to qualified leads, particularly for law firms, elective medicine, home services, and retirement communities.

• Human-powered chat services capture 50-60% more leads compared to websites without chat functionality
• Businesses should consider chat services when they have 1,000+ monthly visitors, $2,000 in monthly ad spend, or $1,000+ customer lifetime value
• The "12-second rule" reveals that 40% of potential leads are lost when chat responses take longer than 12 seconds
• While AI bots excel at answering complex questions, humans significantly outperform in converting inquiries into leads
• Proactive chat (video or pop-up) generates substantially more engagement than reactive chat that requires visitor initiation 
• For businesses in regulated industries, using AI to collect sensitive information may create legal vulnerabilities
• Human operators should communicate with prospects through their preferred channels rather than forcing them into specific communication methods

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Guest Contact Information: 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/theodoremdebettencourt/

https://juvoleads.com/

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The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing podcast is a podcast hosted by Internet marketing expert Matthew Bertram. The show provides insights and advice on digital marketing, SEO, and online business. 

Topics covered include keyword research, content optimization, link building, local SEO, and more. The show also features interviews with industry leaders and experts who share their experiences and tips. 

Additionally, Matt shares his own experiences and strategies, as well as his own successes and failures, to help listeners learn from his experiences and apply the same principles to their businesses. The show is designed to help entrepreneurs and business owners become successful online and get the most out of their digital marketing efforts.

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Speaker 1:

Howdy, matt Bertram, here I have a podcast for you today that, before we get into it, I just wanted to kind of tee up a few things that maybe we missed in the conversation that we had a great post conversation about, and also let you know that this was a longtime listener that works in the chatbot space and I was really asking more questions to kind of process it live. It maybe turned into a little bit of a debate. I think it ended really nicely and we had a lot of positive conversation. After the fact, we all know AI is coming and we are starting to leverage a lot of AI. I think that AI is never going to replace humans and I think that there's a lot of great value in this podcast. Some of the things I want to highlight is, if you're going to be using a live chat service, one of the key components to look for is a thousand visitors a month or $2,000 in spend, so that kind of equates to the same and then an LTV lifetime value of the customer of about a thousand bucks. So if the lifetime value is about a thousand bucks and you have a thousand visitors to your site and you're spending $2,000 a month, a chatbot is a great candidate for you, one of the things that we also talked about in the podcast because, as you know, I've been a heavy proponent of SEO.

Speaker 1:

What I'm seeing in the data now is more of a broader marketing funnel. He would rather have a hot lead that comes in through PPC and he believes they perform a lot better. And if you were a little birdie on the wall, if you like this podcast, you would really like the debate where he was talking about an organic visitor versus a paid visitor. I think what he was talking about was the paid visitor is searching for a specific keyword right, and they click on that ad based upon well, the meta description would be the equivalent of the ad to the landing page, to the website.

Speaker 1:

I believe that a high quality SEO lead that you're ranking for the right quality keywords will give you equal to or better type of client, and I've seen that with a lot of our clients. The feedback that I've gotten is SEO produces a higher quality lead than paid ads, and so if you're comparing organic to paid, it's like apples to oranges. But if you're comparing high growth organic to paid, I haven't done that study, or I know people have. If you've done that study. Please reach out to me and let me know more. I hope you all enjoy the podcast.

Speaker 2:

This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. Your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential, let's get started.

Speaker 1:

Howdy. Welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Matt Bertram. I wanted to start the conversation by talking about some of the new updates with Google. I know that human interaction is important. We're going to talk about chatbots everyone we're going to talk about, well, chatbots versus human interaction and why connecting with somebody early on is so important. So I decided to bring Ted D Betancourt on, who has Juvo Leads, who actually runs a human powered chatbot service across multiple mediums, and wanted him to talk about kind of what he's seen in the space. So, ted, thanks for coming on. Yeah, matt, thanks for having me on. Pleasure to be here. Yeah, so what's most topical to you of kind of like all the new changes in the space, because everything's moving so quickly.

Speaker 3:

Sure, well, I love the chatbot space because we don't do chatbots, we do chatbots. Our motto is butts in the seat, not bots in the cloud. So, as more AI comes out and there's more AI solutions out there I love it because right now, none of them are as effective in humans as being able to convert a website visitor into a lead. There's a lot of solutions out there and for the clientele that we serve, we can outperform the best of them by capturing at least 200% more leads. And we know this because we're doing probably like right now, with about 30 to 40 AB split tests, testing against ourselves, different tags and different ways we open chats versus testing the competitors. And right now, the AI power chat you can tell it's a robot pretty quick, whereas when you're chatting with us, you can tell it's a robot pretty quick, whereas when you're chatting with us, you can tell it's a human pretty quick, and that human connection really brings a meaningful difference in the amount of leads we're able to capture for our clients.

Speaker 1:

So how did you? How did you get into this space? Like I just want to know what, what kind of drives you?

Speaker 3:

Sure, Well, I was a digital marketer. I ran an SEO PPC shop in Boston, did it for about eight, nine years.

Speaker 3:

I had a fairly good, stable base of clients. And then I started using the different chat products in the market. This was before AI, but the bots they were really just if-then statements, the bots, the human powered ones and the self-answering ones. And when I used the ones that had other people answering it and they were 24-, were 24, seven, three, 65, I really liked it because they got my clients a lot more leads.

Speaker 3:

At the time I was working with a lot of law firms, home service businesses, elective medicine, think uh, you know, cosmetic, dermatology, stuff like that, dentists and then a retirement home. So those were kind of the verticals I was serving and I really liked what they were doing for chat. But I didn't like how they're answering some of the chats. So I was using all the ones that were on the market at the time and some of them most of them are still around. And I kept saying, hey guys, can you make some changes to the scripts? Like, say things a little bit differently, use the language I'm giving you. And they said, sure, ted, we'll make those changes.

Speaker 3:

And lo and behold, they didn't. So I got kind of frustrated. I kept saying come on, guys, you got to make this change Because my clients were yelling at me like Ted, they're saying the wrong things. I know you like it, but come on. And the numbers were good. But I was getting enough heat from my clients. So it started as me. Answering chats for 10 businesses in Boston has now turned into us as a company answering chats for about 1100 businesses around the country.

Speaker 1:

Okay, wow, impressive. So when people are taught, let's back up, okay, let's back all the way up to one of the big kind of data points that I see is you have to hit people when they're in the mode to buy right, like, and if, if you know, they fill out information, okay, you try to get them on a meeting or whatever. But until they're ready to come back into that buy cycle, they're they're not a prospect right, they're doing other stuff, they're here or there, and what it does is it lengthens the sales cycle right To close the deal If you can get somebody early on and you can move them further down your sales funnel. So can you speak to that kind of concept specifically?

Speaker 3:

Well, I'll tell you we don't serve every vertical. We don't touch B2B. If you're in a B2B business, human power chat like a service that you're hiring somebody else for might not be a great fit. Here's why People come to a B2B website and they say tell me about you. Know they come to your site, matt, tell me about how you do SEO and why PPC or why I should do LSA ads or something like that. We'd say that's a great question for Matt. I'd love to set you up with a time to talk to him. They say, no, I just want my question answered now.

Speaker 3:

So we don't serve every vertical. We're very big in the legal space the home services, retirement homes and what's the last one Elective medicine. That's kind of the verticals we serve. So I don't really know much outside of that. When we try B2B, it's hit or miss. So, on the verticals that we serve, what we find is it's not people coming to the site and saying, hey, I want to get a free consultation, I want to set up an appointment, I want to learn about moving in. It's people coming to the website and saying, hey, I have a question. I think your business might be able to help me solve it. Can I give you more information and you tell me the answer?

Speaker 3:

So not all of our leads are starting off saying like, hey, I want to be a lead. They're starting up with a question, we're giving them a little bit of information, qualifying that person and then turning their information. Once we've built a little bit of trust and rapport with them through having a person-to-person communication, then we're able to turn that into an actual lead for the business. And what we see is that when businesses put us on a website, they get at least 50% more leads. And we know this because we do a lot of AB testing half the traffic with chat, half the traffic without chat. After 30 days we give everyone a free trial. After 30 days we just sit down with the business owner Did you get more leads? How many did you get last month? How many did you get this month? If the answer isn't yes, they walk away and they've paid $0.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so have you done any A-B testing against AI All the time? Okay, can you share some of the results, of kind of how you set up the study and then what you did and what the results were?

Speaker 3:

Sure, so there's not a lot of great AI in the market for what we're doing. Sure, so there's not a lot of great AI in the market for what we're doing Human powered chat for law firms, elective medicine, home retirement, retirement homes and home services the ones we have do. What we do is we do a split test. So how that works is someone comes to the website half the time they see us, half the time they see the AI chat. After 30 days, we sit down with the client and look at the data. We say who got you more leads, who got you more cases, jobs, move-ins, appointments, and then anytime we don't win, I've never not beaten AI chat by getting a business at least 200% more leads. Again, I'm not serving B2B. I know AI and using the drifts and the what's the other one, the drifts and the versions of that is great for B2B Intercom yeah.

Speaker 1:

So I can tell you, you know, if you build a library of information and someone asks a question, okay, and, and, and you get like a AI agent, a semi-autonomous AI, to answer that, if, if you trained it, it can actually answer those questions pretty effectively. Now it can't say, it can't say SEO very well, okay, but we actually have. If you call us, you know you'll, you'll get to the right person. We can answer questions. It's all AI and it's learned and it's trained and there's a lot of services out there and you can use that and you know, I think it's been pretty effective and you know, certainly like I would like to.

Speaker 3:

It's cost effective for sure. If you take, if you took all that and trained a person to do it, you'd have a much higher success rate, because people don't like talking to AI. Yet If people still call the phone or chat, if they find out, our most common question nowadays is are you a robot or a real person? We say real, real person and they do that. When we don't do a good job convincing them, they just get frustrated and leave. We've tried, we've looked into the phone answering side. We'd like it, but for our verticals where a lead, a case is worth, you know, thousands and thousands of dollars. Saving a little bit of money using AI isn't worth it if you have 50% less leads.

Speaker 1:

No, I, I I certainly agree with you in certain skill sets or certain industries, right. So certainly retirement communities you know people are a little unsure have maybe, like I wouldn't say they're the Luddites, but like they're unsure about technology, they want to talk to a person. I think that some of the people outsourcing call answering services to overseas, just kind of, you know, without great training, people have their own impressions of that. I do agree with, like lawyers or things like that, depending on the case size, what it's going to be like. It depends what you're using it for, and I think there's a place for everything. I also think that there's a way to escalate things and so you have a decision tree of coming in asking a question and so the voices in AI, and again, I don't want to necessarily make this into a debate, because I think that having ways to connect with people and answer their questions effectively is what it's about, and catching somebody in that bicycle, and certainly the reason that that that I wanted to connect with you is these things are becoming a reality.

Speaker 1:

Let's talk about the Google. Let's talk about the Google Google business profile update, right when, where now there's a chat function associated with that and, um, you know it makes a lot of sense to be able to connect with the real person and get something moving. Uh is incredibly important today, again, if you're catching that person that is in the bicycle and they're trying to make a decision, if you can't answer their question and move there again. Going back to what you were saying, though, on training the person, well, you know people want to be able to answer their question, and I can see on the b2b side. But, again, if I think about, I think this through, you can upload um into the library like a whole website. Okay, with the ai and anything that's on the website. If they've done a good job through their web development side of things, you can pull any of that information.

Speaker 1:

So you have a large website, a hospital system, a retirement community any of those questions that AI is going to be able to answer that question more than a human. Now, the report component of it is also not there when you're in chat, unless it's voice activated. Wait, I don't know. I'm trying to discover this.

Speaker 3:

Let me say it a different way. If you think of chat, if you have a complex subject so a lot of our clients do let's say they're doing mass torts, so it's a law firm that helps people if they have some respiratory illness. I know Camp Lejeune was a big one for a while, so there's a lot of caveats to what makes for a good Camp Lejeune case. They'll come to there and they want to find out if I have a case or not. When you use a robot to answer those, you can always get the right answer, or you have a better job training that robot to know the different answers to questions, because you've seen all the questions and you have it, whereas you know you can give upload thousands of FAQs, whereas we don't have that ability to answer that many questions. So if you think about it like that, robots AI will do a better job there.

Speaker 3:

If you're talking about the sales component, which is converting a question into a lead, right now humans significantly outperform AI. When it gets to the point where the pendulum switches shoot, we'll be the first ones on the AI trine, but right now what we see is when people are having conversations. They want to talk to a person and have an empathetic, one-on-one conversation Our data suggests and why we grew at least 100% for the past four years. What our data suggests is that by having real people and having empathetic conversations, we're not getting the. Oh, I just want to talk to a person like a lot of our AI counterparts get. So, as of for now, we're noticing and we're able to convert a lot more leads from a website. Are we able to have the amount of in-depth conversations and can we answer 500 FAQs like an AI can? Absolutely not. So I still love chat support with AI. I think you can do things that are incredible with it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I can see that. I can see that. Now the way I'm starting to kind of process it in my head is that you know, when you look at ads on Google and you look at SEO, okay, only about 20% of people click on ads. If you do a study and ask even people not a lot of people click on both, so they either skip the ads, and that's why Google tries to hide the way the ads look right, they're always trying to change it up and people just keep skipping the ads, and that's why Google tries to hide the way the ads look, Right, they're always trying to change it up and and people just keep skipping the ads. But the ads has produced them, like one of the largest companies in the world and like it's it's the majority of all their revenue and, and so you know ads are effective.

Speaker 1:

I believe in getting in front of people and getting your advertising and your brand out there, but the more in-depth stuff is answered through the research and the questions and stuff like that, and so I see that differential and I see specific industries, certain things working better than others, vice versa. Like, okay, you need a plumber. Like immediately right, Like there's a busted pipe or your air conditioning is out, it's in the summer, Like you need a. You need a plumber, like immediately right. Like there's a busted pipe or your air condition is out, it's in the summer, Like you need somebody right now. You're not going to do the research, right, so that if I take that kind of like 80, 20, I can, I can see that um in in the human side of things, Um, and I would tell you I'm not going to say which one's the 80 and which one's the 20. Um, cause I don't know, I don't have enough data like that. You're you're the, you're the expert in that.

Speaker 1:

But but I do see, in certain industries, specifically when you're dealing with, when you need to define what your target audience is, who you're targeting is audiences like the older generation want to talk to somebody. The younger generation, you know, depending on what you're selling, uh, you don't want to talk to anybody. Like you want to order pizza. Yeah, like you don't want to talk to anybody. Like people, right, like I really agree so.

Speaker 1:

So, like you're ordering food, like you're like I don't want to talk to anybody, like I just want. I just want to get what I'm looking for. I want to get to answer my question. You know we used to do like this profiles, like different type of people, certain people like the chat, you chat, you know.

Speaker 1:

Now, you know again, I do think that the curve is exponential because I can tell you, from a sales standpoint, some of the trained AIs Right so you're, you're training them, not just like kind of like what, what the base feed is like? And and also capturing the data, like a Tesla car Right, so you're, you're capturing all the data of how to answer it, how to answer it better. I had a previous guest on and we've actually implemented this on all our sales calls how could we have done better? Like, how do we improve that? And then, eventually, with enough data of how we want to process, it's going to learn that and it's going to be able to do that better and I think it's going to be able to do it pretty quick process.

Speaker 1:

It's going to learn that and it's going to be able to do that better, and I think it's going to be able to do it pretty quick, and so you know so. So I think that there's definitely people and I would fall into this category too of like I don't want to talk to a call center overseas, necessarily. I want someone that understands what I'm talking about and what I'm saying and and what I'm doing. Let's dig into the industries where you're seeing the biggest success and where you've grown the business the most. Let's talk about case studies in those areas, because there's a lot of people from a lot of different industries that listen to this. They're trying to figure out how to make their digital marketing work, and so I agree that you to capture their information early. If you can engage them early, move them further down the sales process.

Speaker 3:

You do it? Do you build it? It sounds like I'm kind of conflicting with you. It sounds like you build AI bots for your clients. Is that right?

Speaker 1:

I have not ever built the AI bot for any clients. No um no, I'm not. I I'm not in the AI bot space. That's something that I think is cool technology for sure.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, that's why I'm asking. I mean, like, certainly, having a live chat is is a huge component to answer questions, but if it's to set up just a call and and they're vetting somebody on how to do it, I have used a lot of different tools and I'm just sharing with you my experience of, like, if you're asking qualifying questions, you're being empathetic. Like you know, you're answering a few questions 80% of time. That works. I think that what you're doing can work extremely effective when you have the right target audience. So that's why I want to dive into what are those target audiences?

Speaker 1:

And, yes, the AI bot can upset people, just like answering stuff overseas. Like, if people don't like that or they're not trained good, like they just bail Right, and I absolutely see that in a decent sized segment. And so I want to tell you, yes, that I agree with you on that. And so let's double down on that and go into those areas where you've grown the most and seen the biggest success, like, let's maybe talk about some different specific case studies that you've done in the retirement community space or the law firms. Tell me about home services I know it looks like you do. Digital agencies and local businesses Can you talk about maybe each segment specifically, what you've seen work well, sure.

Speaker 3:

So let me tell you about probably about 65% of our maybe 75% of our clients are law firms, so we do consumer side law firms and the biggest consumer side law firm in the digital marketing space is called personal injury. That means you know car accident lawyers someone that's been working Yep.

Speaker 3:

Yep, those types of claims. So in that market the personal injury space, the top 3000 PI spaces in the market 85% of them use human power chat. So it's not we don't have 85% of the PI market, I'm sad to say, but so it's not just us. There's a lot of companies doing what we're doing. So in those spaces they use human power chat. It costs more money to use people than AI and it frankly does like there's no way around it. That's just a robot versus you know, versus the AI. Costs aren't that high. People costs are higher Training a team, keep them updated on the chat scripts, the rules for each particular firm. That gets pretty complex. But why that industry in particular has adopted human powered chat is because they have a lot of good marketing people that measure the results. So, for example, when we went live with a firm I'll say the name's, firm name out in Illinois, pialetti Law what we did is they said Ted, I like the idea of chat. This is a guy named Joe Pialetti. Ted, I like the idea of chat, but I don't think it's going to get me more leads. I said Joe, what do you mean? He said Ted, I think you're going to steal my phone calls. So what do you mean by that? He's like well, if someone comes to my site and they would text or chat with you, they probably just would have called you. I'm like oh, I see what you're saying. So you're thinking that we're not going to get you more leads, we're just going to take away your phone calls? He said yeah. I said, all right, well, let's test that hypothesis.

Speaker 3:

So what we did for Joe and we do it for literally every client we work with is we give them a 30-day trial. So we typically just give them it free for 30 days and say how many leads you get before, how many leads you get after. But what we did for Joe is we split all his traffic into two groups. Group A had chat on, group B had chat off. We also can do call and form tracking so we can really isolate chat as a variable. So we did that for and I talk about this story a lot we did that test for 30 days and after the 30 day free trial the group with chat on had 159 leads. The group with chat off had 103. So we're able to conclusively prove that because of chat and chat alone, we got them about what's that 55, 60% more total leads. Because of chat, I'm fuzzy on the numbers. I'm used to, you know, looking at a slide deck when I talk about this.

Speaker 1:

No, no, I that's. This is the kind of information that I'm looking for to to understand, like data-driven um marketing. Um, I love that. I now I'm looking at your site right now Um, does it have any kind of movement? Does it, does it pop up? Or people are um raising their hand and they're choosing to engage. Is that correct?

Speaker 3:

Good question and really, how you start chat varies. We have a million and a half configuration options. That's best for that business, but what we found is the two main ways you do it. You play a video of the business owner to start the conversation. Build empathy. Get the brand name for the business owner out there. Owner to start the conversation. Build empathy. Get the brand name for the business owner out there and then, using that, start a conversation short video 10, 20 seconds saying who you are, how you hype your clients, and then from there, amy pops up or Sally or Steve or Jay and we have a real conversation with them.

Speaker 3:

There's different pop-outs and different layouts, configurations. We do, but we don't like to wait for the. We call it reactive chat If you have a reactive chat meaning someone has to click to start, versus something happening. So we either play a video or we pop up and say, hey, how can I help you? Today, by having that proactive talk, you're able to have a much higher chat start rate and, like anything, the more swings at the bat you get, the more home runs you have.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, anything, the more swings at the bat you get, the more home runs you have. Yeah, I mean, I, I can see, uh, like in the affiliate marketing space, um, you know, as, as we moved into that with like different kinds of products and stuff like that, uh, we, we have a supplement company, um, and and essentially, uh, what I can tell you is most people just start bidding on your own name, right, and the conversion rate. And also a lot of agencies, the bigger agencies, that kind of obscure. What's going on? Uh, and they're running you know one account managers running 80, you know a hundred something accounts. Like I mean, they're trying to hit certain metrics and they're making it look like a certain way in my and this has been my opinion, this is just my personal experience that I'm um speaking and this has been my opinion, this is just my personal experience that I'm speaking to when clients come to us and when we, you know, try to get access to the data, you know certain things look really good, and so I can see how a law firm would say, hey, you're just swapping. You know, rob and Peter to pay Paul here. It's just a different format.

Speaker 1:

I also, I would agree with you, because different people like to engage different ways. Like I talked about that kind of disc profile. You know, some people want to talk to somebody on the phone, some people want to the old school call the 1-800 numbers, right, like that's kind of like. Some people want to watch a video, some people want to chat. Like I can tell you I don't text anymore. Like I video chat or I, you know, do a like a recorded video where I'm talking. Like I don't like typing anymore, like I've just decided I don't like to do it. Like will I do it, sure, if that's the only option. But, like you're, you're trying to reduce friction and I agree with you that, no matter what you're doing, you're trying to hit somebody in the right sense and you're to reduce that friction as as quickly as you can.

Speaker 1:

Um, okay, so um, I I agree with you on on law firms. Why do you think? Um that? Why do you think that that happened that way? Right, why do you? What? Like what you've? You have enough of these businesses. You've scaled it. You data, why? Why is that chatbot working better than um? Like I mean, a lot of people run the chatbots to. Uh, if they're a smaller business, cause you. You deal with local businesses. They'll just run it to themselves or someone marketing on their team. Um, like, what's the differential if someone is going hey, okay, uh, I'm going to weigh the AI chatbots, what's the comparison?

Speaker 3:

versus in-house Sure. So what's the difference between an AI chatbot versus doing it in-house?

Speaker 1:

No, no, no. So we don't need to go down the rabbit hole of a live person versus the chatbot. Now I'm talking about, you know, if we're talking about law firms or we're talking about bigger companies, they might have somebody dedicated that's answering the phone. Why don't they have that person answering the chatbot as well? Or like what are the scenarios where that would work? Sure?

Speaker 3:

So the analysis I said about the law firms, that's true for any big home service business as well. I'm not talking about the pest control where you get a contract it's maybe 300 bucks a year but the roofing job, the plastic surgeon, the cosmetic dermatology, the retirement home, when a sale or lead is worth north of a thousand dollars, the economics of human power chat pay off. And so why shouldn't they do it in-house? Well, if they can do it in-house, they should. In my space there are a few businesses that do it in-house Morgan Morgan. They have their own human power chat team. The reason why most firms, even the ones that have 200 lawyers as opposed to 300. If you have 200 lawyers and you have 24-7 coverage so you can answer every chat in 12 seconds or less, then you should do it in house.

Speaker 3:

The hard thing about chat is if a chat comes in and my team waits 20 seconds to answer it, I've lost 40% of the chats. You have to answer chats in 12 seconds or less or you lose the chatter. So when that firm with 12 lawyers and four and five intake specialists say hey, we're going to do this ourselves. Sarah, michael and Jim are going to answer chats 24 for us during the day. You tried at night. We say, okay, give it your best shot. If you don't like the results you're seeing, try us. So what happens is Mike takes a smoke break, sarah goes on lunch, julie's on on holiday we're busy doing other stuff.

Speaker 1:

They're busy running the business. They're doing other things. Someone needs to be dedicated to to doing this exactly and it's just that 12 seconds the rule.

Speaker 3:

When I tell people the 20 second rule, no one believes me. And then they start answering their chats like they're like oh I can't believe I this chat. The amount of lost chats you get when you try to do it in house is astronomical. What we do is we literally grade and score every chat by how fast their team answers it. So our agents are hired, fired, promoted, demoted and bonused based on how well and how fast they answer chats. And it has to be fast or we get fired.

Speaker 1:

I like that. So basically, there's on one end, doing it yourself on the other, and there's AI. You're operating in that that middle, certainly right now. Um, uh, increasing the, the response rates, right, uh, increases sales Absolutely. Um, be able to understand the nuances where AI is going to get, uh, tripped up, um, you know, in-house. They may be able to understand the nuances where AI is going to get tripped up. In-house, they may be able to answer it better. Or your team might not have all the information, but if they're not getting that person on the hook and not dedicated to that conversation, they're not going to answer it very well. So I'm starting to think that AI, support-powered human is probably the best route to go. Again, when you're talking about high powered or leads that are worth a lot, right, um?

Speaker 3:

yeah, if you can, if you can find a lot of the people in my space are trying to do the ai and then having a human takeover and that's what we're seeing a lot of a competition doing. We don't touch AI yet on that front yet because we're dedicated to our bots, not bots, and we know there are legal implications when you start getting personal information via AI that a lot of our clients don't want to deal with. So if you're getting personal health information from a chat bot, you're opening the door to legal implications. So you got to be careful and a lot of the verticals we're in. So you know law law, elective medicine, retirement homes. That's sensitive information. Do we want to give that data to chat GPT? You know, I don't know.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean, a lot of these companies are are basically carving it off. So where they can use the, where they can use the code, but they're using it in-house and I think that that's a consideration. Can you speak any more to the, your money, your life, kind of areas where that information is sensitive and people need to be critically thinking or double thinking about how they approach that? Right? Sure, say that again. So what are these legal implications Like? If someone's out there like trying to consider these things like you know they they definitely don't need to be just a lot of these companies. I think it depends what they're doing. You got to look at their terms of service, but where that information is being fed to, because there are a lot of these chatbots that are just bolt-ons or AI agents of ChatGPT and that information flows up. So how comfortable are you with talking about some of the specifics of the legal Well, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not gonna.

Speaker 3:

I have a law degree and I don't wanna give legal advice. I know, if I pretend to give legal advice, that opens up the window, but I'll say this there are law firms that are getting sued from using AI wrongfully.

Speaker 3:

What it is basically right now are there are people that find out. So, for example, one of the biggest firms in the world used an AI to write a brief and they didn't check it. The AI used a lot of fake casers that didn't exist because they call phantom answers. They gave a bunch of phantom answers. The person submitted that. The person that was for that firm found out it was a small lawsuit, but they turned around and sued that law firm for using their information illegally and now they're on the hook for a big settlement. So there are ramifications for using AI.

Speaker 3:

I don't know much about it. I just know there are cases out there. I know it's something my competitors have to deal with but honestly, in the human in the chat space for sales, I haven't. I don't bump into it that much because the businesses that I deal with are the high that, like a sale is worth a lot, case is worth a lot, move in. So they know that AI isn't there yet for their space. When it starts to be, it's going to become more. It's usually the smaller ticket items and the smaller websites that are looking for the next shiny thing are the ones that are playing with it. In the chat side there's plenty of good use cases for AI, but I haven't seen a competitor come out and say, ted, we can get as many leads as you. I haven't seen anything close yet any competitor come out and say Ted we can get as many leads as you like.

Speaker 1:

I haven't seen anything close yet. Yeah, no, I think, uh, I think that there's some delicate areas, for sure, and there's uh pause, uh, people need to take pause to, to consider all those ramifications of of how that's built out. I mean, is there anything else that you're kind of seeing in the future of live chat and trends, uh, that are coming up that you could speak to, or do you just kind of have a feeling that that's going to start happening?

Speaker 3:

Sure, well, I mean, it's already happening. It's just as it gets better. It'll become more and more so what would probably happen will be a hybrid approach kind of the approach I talked about earlier, where it starts with AI, then moves to human and then eventually just kick human out of there, eventually fully. But we're on the cutting edge. We're paying attention to all the competitors because we want to see the minute someone can do it, to the point where we get a little bit scared. Then we start adopting those practices ourselves.

Speaker 3:

We haven't seen it. What we have seen is when everyone's talking about AI more, that means people are neglecting SMS. So the better you can serve your clients through talking to them with the channel that they use their phone for the most that's SMS the bigger advantage you'll have. So not only just answering the website chats, but being able to communicate with client via text, being able to answer them in the preferred method that their prospect reached out to them. So we're just seeing it every year, the percent of our leads for our clients that come in from text the text you know the phone is increasing. So the better we can, the better businesses like us can serve that vertical or that communication method, the better we'll all do.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, I, I a hundred percent agree that. You know you need to connect with people immediately. You know talking, connecting through the phone and SMS is there you mentioned earlier. There's there, you know. So somebody now has listened to this podcast and they're like, okay, I need a solution for this right. How should someone look for a service provider? And then, what are some common mistakes when they're trying to set the business that they might need to keep an eye out for?

Speaker 3:

If you're look for ones that we're not the only ones that give a 30-day free trial. You know, try it before you buy it. I get, you know, I get these calls from these, I get these emails from these companies that do like a voice call, an outbound call service. You go on their website. You can't even hear the calls and you're hearing me like, well, that's not there yet. It's kind of garbage. Try everyone, before you buy it, make sure their goals are aligned with yours from a pricing structure perspective. A flat rate price without knowing what you're going to get doesn't make sense. I would try to talk there's a lot of companies that do per lead models and per qualified lead models. Talk to the vendor or the provider to make sure it's a model that fits for your business, that corresponds with your goals. If you're trying to get appointments, make sure you pay for per appointment, not just a flat rate model. Gotcha.

Speaker 1:

All right. So what would you say? This is a newer space to a lot of people. This is something that people know that they need to be doing. They're starting to take that action. I mean, what in everything that you've learned because you're in it and out of it every day? What's one unknown secret of internet marketing?

Speaker 3:

Talk to clients in the channel in which they want to talk to you. Don't force them into your preferred communication method just because it's easier for you. If clients want to text you, you text them back. If a client wants to call you, you call them back. If a client wants to email you, you email them back. Clients want to fill out a form. Get back to them, however they said they want to be contacted. Don't force prospects into communicating in a way that they're not comfortable with. Meet them where they are and then, once you have their business, then you can start your SOP, your standing operator procedure, but not before you've won their trust.

Speaker 1:

I love that. So, ted, if somebody wants to find out more about human engaged, human powered chats and get a free trial because I think that's awesome how do they get in touch with you? What's your preferred method of them reaching out to you? Get on your website and chat.

Speaker 3:

yet that's exactly right. Go to jubileadscom, go to the website, start a conversation and uh see if you like what you see. And uh, the main reason businesses use us because they want at least 50% more leads.

Speaker 1:

We give you the 50% more lead guarantee. If we work with you and you don't get 50% more leads, you walk away and you've spent $0. Hey, everyone, you can't beat that. So I would encourage you to go check it out. Go check out what Ted's doing. If you're looking to build some strategy with your overall marketing funnel, if you're willing to grow your business with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet, the internet, reach out to EWR Digital for more revenue in your business. We work with all kinds of vendors, and vendors like Ted all the time. Until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye-bye for now, thank you.

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