Shownotes
17 - From Aspiring Entrepreneur to Support Innovator: Beant Singh's Story
In this episode, Vit Muller sits down with Beant Singh, the innovative CEO and founder of Extendly, a platform that’s transforming customer support for agencies. Beant shares his journey from aspiring entrepreneur to industry game-changer, and how Extendly is empowering agency owners to focus on their core strengths by providing seamless, integrated customer support within Go HighLevel.
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About Beant
Beant Singh is the CEO and founder of Extendly, an innovative platform that revolutionizes customer support for agencies by integrating seamlessly with Go HighLevel. With a journey marked by personal challenges and transformative experiences, Beant has become a leading figure in the customer support solutions landscape. His mission is to empower agencies to achieve significant growth by providing exceptional, responsive support, leveraging AI, and continuously improving user experiences. Through Extendly, Beant aims to help agencies focus on their core strengths while ensuring their clients receive top-notch service.
Highlights 🔥
Key points we talked about in this pilot episode!
- 01:18 Beant Singh's Mission and Vision
- 02:12 The Birth of Extendly
- 04:51 Early Struggles and COVID Impact
- 06:05 HighLevel and Extendly's Growth
- 08:10 The Importance of Customer Support
- 11:00 Personal Reflections and Lessons Learned
- 15:51 HighLevel Summit and Community
- 28:08 Balancing Work and Family Life
- 28:54 The Perfectionist's Dilemma
- 30:47 Balancing Work and Personal Life
- 32:23 Introducing 'The Beef' Segment
- 32:46 Feature Frustrations with High Level
- 35:16 Improving User Experience
- 40:47 Highlighting Success Stories
- 46:15 AI and Future Trends in Customer Support
- 50:02 Effective Onboarding Strategies
- 54:33 Extendly's Support Solutions
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- Improve Conversations Inbox Speed and Functionality for Better Team Collaboration
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More info about this episode:
- Type: Audio (Explicit )
- Link: https://podcast.highlevelexperience.com/episode/revolutionizing-customer-support-with-beant-singh
- Authors: Vit Muller
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Transcripts
Ep #17 - Beant Singh | HighLevel Experience Podcast
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[00:00:00] Introduction and Guest Welcome
---
[00:00:00]
[00:00:04] Beant Singh: Hey
[00:00:04] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: guys, welcome to another episode on the HighLevel Experience Podcast. My guest today is someone who's transforming the agency landscape by revolutionizing customer support.
[00:00:13] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: From aspiring entrepreneur to game changer. He has identified and tackled a crucial pain point for agency owners with his innovative platform, him and his team.
[00:00:23] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: Eliminates the need for in house support teams, offering a seamless and responsive customer support integrated within the go high level. His journey is marked by a relentless pursuit of excellence, aiming to empower agency owners to focus on their core strengths while his team handles their customer support needs.
[00:00:41] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: This not only maximizes productivity, but also enhances the overall experience for both agencies and their client. Please allow me to welcome to the show, the one and only. Beant Singh
[00:00:53]
[00:00:58] Beant Singh: Awesome. [00:01:00] Thank you so much. I'm excited to be
[00:01:01] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: really great to have you here about really good. What's been, what's been happening lately in your world? I know we, we met in Dallas. I don't know if you remember, but I remember we, we hang out at the bar. It was, it was, it was good. It was good. Good chat. But since then, I haven't spoken to you. Obviously you've been busy.
[00:01:15] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: I've been busy. What's, what's, what's latest, what's been happening.
[00:01:18] Beant Singh's Mission and Vision
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[00:01:18] Beant Singh: You know, continuing to, continue on our mission. So earlier this year we, we, we joined this mission that we created for ourselves that we want to help high level agencies get 100 of them to week. Get 100 customers, sub accounts for themselves so that they can see a significant change in their lives as well, while using the platform.
[00:01:41] Beant Singh: And, silently, what we haven't talked about is that also helps, lots of business owners that those agencies sign up. Because this is an amazing platform that everyone should be, every business should be utilizing. I use them in, in my own local businesses. I know how much it's [00:02:00] transformed, the, the, the marketing and the automation side of things, in my local businesses.
[00:02:03] Beant Singh: So we're, we're excited to continue on that mission, help agencies and help, those agencies help the businesses that they are bringing
[00:02:11] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: I love it. I love it.
[00:02:12] The Birth of Extendly
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[00:02:12] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: Look, Beant, you've had, you've had an impressive journey from aspiring entrepreneur to CEO and the founder of Extendly, what inspired you to create Extendly and how has this vision evolved since you first started?
[00:02:25] Beant Singh: Yeah, it's, you know, it continues to,improve, as we go. And it's getting closer and closer to as a young, kid, when I had this, vision of that, I wanted to build something that helps other entrepreneurs as well. my dad had passed away early on in a, in a car accident. And from there, I was by myself and I experienced that journey of being, Being alone and, being in business by myself and not having someone to mentor me and, and share the, the, the ideas to bounce off of and get, get some advice, right?
[00:02:57] Beant Singh: So, and I understand just generally [00:03:00] the, the, the road for an entrepreneurship is extremely difficult and extremely lonely as well, right? Sometimes we, we just need that one friend, one mentor that. exactly what we're talking about. and, and is able to push us just a little bit more so we can get to the next stage, right?
[00:03:19] Beant Singh: there's ups and downs on a daily, daily cycle, of life. You know, even, even today, to whatever, whatever, whatever. A little bit of success that we've achieved. there's still lots of ups and downs, that we experience in the daily life as well. So, you know, coming back to that, if we built something that would, I used to call it a think, think tank or a think center or something of that nature, where we would provide some level of resources to, help other entrepreneurs.
[00:03:47] Beant Singh: And when I saw the opportunity with, with high level, although it started off with a. tech support company. As we are growing, we're leading and becoming more closer to that vision that I had, which is to help [00:04:00] agencies help entrepreneurs. In this case, we're helping high level agencies who then are helping other business owners that they're bringing on.
[00:04:07] Beant Singh: But, you know, perhaps it's even better than what I had imagined because this is a double tier impact that we're now creating.
[00:04:13] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: I love it because exactly like you said, it's that it's, it's, it's making a huge impact to those small underdogs, to those businesses that are struggling and, and you be by the means of what you provide actually make that, make that You know, can make that huge impact to the, to the end businesses.
[00:04:31] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: So that's really, really excellent. But obviously nothing, nothing, happens, overnight. Right. So are you happy to share some like beginnings? What was like, you know, like the biggest struggles maybe at the beginning, as you were, you know, shaping this amazing company that you now have,
[00:04:50] Beant Singh: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:04:51] Early Struggles and COVID Impact
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[00:04:51] Beant Singh: So, you know, COVID had, just came about, and I was launching, right before COVID. I was planning on launching a digital marketing agency. And, so [00:05:00] launched a digital marketing agency. We hit COVID and,then I had more time. so I've been dragging my feet on launching the digital marketing agency for about a year or two now, just because it with, with my other company, it was super busy and just didn't get the time to do so out of the day to day.
[00:05:15] Beant Singh: And, then when COVID hit, now I had a whole bunch of free time. We had shut down our office. all the Texan stuff we're working remotely. and I didn't, it didn't need my presence. And, and what I found was that I should just stop. You know, showing up and see what happens. The, what I saw was super amazing.
[00:05:32] Beant Singh: The team was able to take it on. They didn't need me as much as I thought they really needed me every day. and that gave me a lot of time to focus on launching this agency. And when we launched the agency brought on,some of the customers that I knew, family members first, right. Reached out to people in my own network and then, kind of grew from there.
[00:05:49] Beant Singh: But one thing that came clear was that I got to buy this subscription, that subscription to this and that, and that to make all the things work together. And that was like active campaign, [00:06:00] MailChimp, or, you know, what a bunch of these other, softwares. To, to put them together, to make it all work.
[00:06:05] HighLevel and Extendly's Growth
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[00:06:05] Beant Singh: And then somehow later that year, someone introduced me to high level, came about high level, checked out their website.
[00:06:13] Beant Singh: I thought, what a scam. They had a 14, they had a 14, their website didn't look all that great, at the time either. and it promised to do all of these things that other softwares do together. I said, okay, no way, no way it's possible, but they did have a trial. So I'm like, sure. We'll give it a shot. So give it a shot to the trial.
[00:06:32] Beant Singh: And oh my God, I am so glad that I gave that trial, a shot. Otherwise there would no, there wouldn't be accidentally, and we wouldn't be here today. right. so it was, it was amazing. and we, I started using it in the agency business, got more involved in the, community,definitely worked, really, really hard, realized the opportunity that there was support need needed as well.
[00:06:54] Beant Singh: And, that's, that's what, then about six months later, after I, six or seven months later, after I [00:07:00] joined, high level, the idea for externally came about and now here we are.
[00:07:05] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: I mean, that's a true definition of an entrepreneur. You came to the community, you saw an opportunity. You jumped on it, you could have easily, you could have easily, just use it in your own business and not worry about, you know, like work out your own support. Right. And not worry about rest. So it's
[00:07:22] Beant Singh: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It could have been just. Just as simple as that, that, you know, and we would have been just one, one layer away from saying, okay, let's take it another step, further and see what happens. I think one, one thing I'll add onto that, the credit goes to my previous company,called Ovis.
[00:07:38] Beant Singh: It's a security camera company. We do tech support there as well. So I was familiar with the tech support landscape, which is what then led me to say, Hey, if we do it over there. We can do something here as well. Although it's on a little bit of a different scale. We do it there for our own company,for our own customers.
[00:07:55] Beant Singh: And this is where we're white labeling it to, to other agencies. [00:08:00] So, but that, that having that company and that experience definitely helped in, making this, grow, faster,
[00:08:07] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: hundred, a hundred percent past experiences are priceless.
[00:08:10] The Importance of Customer Support
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[00:08:10] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: now speaking of support, right, let's, let's, let's dive into this topic because, you know, I, I know what you do. briefly, I think more than briefly, what goes behind the scenes of making this work, because you've got, I don't know how many I probably, I could probably only guess, right.
[00:08:27] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: But you've got, you're probably helping hundreds of agencies at this point. How do you, how does it, like, how do you manage to. To be able, I think on your website, it was like response time under less than 30 seconds or something. I don't know what changes, but how do you manage it? It's I just, I don't get it.
[00:08:44] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: It's I just look at him like he's got probably some deal with aliens or something. I
[00:08:51] Beant Singh: Yeah. you know, it's the, it's the, it's the obsession of providing an extremely amazing, customer service. And the second part is [00:09:00] that extra responsibility that we take on, on ourselves because we understand and we know we're We're, we're dealing with, inspiring, entrepreneurs who perhaps have, this is their first business that they just got started in.
[00:09:13] Beant Singh: And their, their hopes are tied to it. Their dreams are tied to it, right? If we don't do a great enough of a job, if our team doesn't do a great enough of a job, we could potentially be the ones. perhaps silently, but be, be the ones that could have caused that person to fail. And we don't want it. We don't want that type of weight on ours, shoulders.
[00:09:35] Beant Singh: So we, we talk about this regularly in our team meetings, in house, which is why the team performs so, so well, because they have that clear understanding. They know what's at stake if they, don't perform as well as they should. Now, we still make some mistakes here and there. right? But the team almost always goes above and beyond to ensure that the customers are happy.
[00:09:58] Beant Singh: And we've done that over and [00:10:00] over again. We've seen it, through our own growth as well. Customers stay with us. They see the success themselves. Now, I can't promise that we've helped almost every single customer. There's obviously different scenarios and things of that nature as well. But majority of the customers that come on board, stick with us and, and we, we've helped them, we've helped them provide support, to a point where their customers then sometimes leave reviews on their profiles, letting them know how great their support was.
[00:10:29] Beant Singh: And they're mentioning one of our, our agents who, obviously the business owner knows that that person doesn't work for me, but I know exactly where that came from. It's Extelli.
[00:10:39] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: love it. I love it. And look, I'm really curious, like, where's this, where's this desire come from to really sort of want to help. Small businesses, because, you know, this is very, you know, not everybody's like you and, you know, what you do is amazing.
[00:10:59] Beant Singh: Yeah. Thank you. [00:11:00] Thank you.
[00:11:00] Personal Reflections and Lessons Learned
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[00:11:00] Beant Singh: I think it's, it's my, it's my own journey that, that sort of, got me here. Like I mentioned, when my dad passed away,early on, I was 19, at the time and,thereafter I quickly saw the failures in business. So I got my start at the age of 16. I launched a security company, which we still have today.
[00:11:19] Beant Singh: And, that's done great for me. but because, that company, started early on, I found I got some success, in the beginning. And then after that passing away, I got into a couple other businesses, restaurants and marketing company was the exact two businesses that I had started thereafter. And I failed in those businesses because I thought I could, business was easy and I thought I could succeed, fast enough, and those as well.
[00:11:42] Beant Singh: but I didn't have the mentor or the experience. experience that I needed to be able to, to be able to succeed in those. And then there, I saw an extreme amount of downfall, in our family, as well, all, all because of, you know, what I had caused and through the, the failure. And then, I was able to, you know, through the [00:12:00] hardworking nature, I was able to pick up,quite quickly and, work my way up.
[00:12:04] Beant Singh: and when I say quite quickly, it took 10 years to get back to,normal. Okay. thereafter and, and ever since then I've had that desire to, that I don't want anyone else who may have a certain situation, or maybe they don't even have a typical situation as I did, but I don't want anyone to go down that path.
[00:12:23] Beant Singh: So, I want to, go in and create something. And I didn't know if that externally was going to be that something, but that's what it's now shaping in to be that we want to help the businesses that are tied to us and hopefully we're able to make enough of an impact so they are, able to achieve their
[00:12:43] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: No, that's excellent. Look, going through struggles, I've, yeah, it's definitely not fun, but it, you definitely rise from it and you learn a lot. So I think there's, there's some positives from going through struggles in there. And, and if some business owners have it too [00:13:00] smooth, then, it's, you know, it could, it could bite them later.
[00:13:03] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: And I think it's better if it bites you early on than later. Absolutely.
[00:13:08] Beant Singh: absolutely. That's one of the things that I talk about and, and, and quite often, reflect upon that, you know, when I say. Imagine if I had not failed at that point, then I probably would have been this, arrogant, ignorant kid who found success early on in his early teens and would have likely made some mistakes that would have called a larger failure down the road, right?
[00:13:33] Beant Singh: so I'm glad and thankful to the, to being able to, to be able to see that failure early on. I think it's made me very, very much, much more humble than I was when I was a teen, I think at, at 19, you, you think, you know, the world and you can control the world, little, do you know that you've come to find out that, that's, that's not entirely true.
[00:13:56] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: And if I may, you know, share from my personal experience as well, you know, back in [00:14:00] 2016 culmination of, you know, being in the fitness industry for previous six years up, up to that point, I managed to score a deal. I managed to score this facility management contract in the Sydney CBD. It was a big gym. I ended up taking over all their employees.
[00:14:17] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: I had. You know, another contract in place for exclusivity. I had like five personal trainers, two massage therapists, plus the gym. It was like, and I was like, faint 16. What is it? So that's like eight years back. So I was 29. Yeah. And, and the ego, you know, you mentioned ego. Like my ego was bigger than this room.
[00:14:38] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: Like it was,
[00:14:41] Beant Singh: I know.
[00:14:41] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: felt, I mean, it felt great. You know, everybody's looking up to me, all the other students on student visas were like, how did you pull this off? Like we were all student visa and you, so it's great. You know, school was inviting me for, you know, talking to motivating and, and I was like, yeah, I made it.
[00:14:56] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: And then I lost it all. [00:15:00] Because of that ego, I, I thought that I can take it all on and manage it all. And I wasn't ready. I didn't have the skills. I didn't have, especially the, you know, the managerial skills, managing people. So ended up being, being a disaster, but I'm always look back to that experience because it reminds me that, you know, certain things need to need to come in later on when you build enough experience, but I'm glad, I mean, I'm glad it happened on the same node, because.
[00:15:30] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: I mean, it made me a bit more humble, I guess. I hope.
[00:15:33] Beant Singh: Yeah. And that's what I've learned as well. and I'm, I'm glad you've, you know, sort of experienced, being humble is extremely important, especially in business and growth and in life general, right? that ego factor kills most of us, kills most of us and is the reason why we see failure. Yeah,
[00:15:51] HighLevel Summit and Community
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[00:15:51] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: look, I was just, I was just speaking at the high level expert summit, if you're on wall and there was so many amazing people there and, and [00:16:00] interacting in the chat, a bunch of other agency owners and. I bet there must have been like 200 to 250 people watching it. And it got me thinking, you know, that like, if I look back, you know, how long I've been a high level back, I started 21, 2021, you know, and, and there was like back then the group was like 15, 000 now the group is like, what is edging on 70, 80, 000.
[00:16:24] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: It's crazy, but that means there's new people coming in all the time. And I bet that at the webinar that I just was on, there was probably some new upper cameras. So for those that are newer in our community, they may not have heard of extendly. So what would you, you know, what would you recommend to them?
[00:16:43] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: When the people starting out this SAS, when should they look at incorporating
[00:16:52] Beant Singh: yeah, absolutely. So, you know, first off, when you, when you're just starting out, we recommend, you know, take advantage of some of our free resources that we have [00:17:00] available, so that you don't have to necessarily pay for a ride out of the gate. We have this thing called a free knowledge base. you know, it's part of the support when you, the, the, the, the, the, the When you, when you launch your own white label SaaS, now you've become a software company.
[00:17:14] Beant Singh: And as a software company, you need to have a few things, in your arsenal, in your tool belt. One of them is support and, self service, tech support, even if it's not live. You know, live chat or something of that nature. right. So, the very first thing we, we, we request people to take on, even if you, can't afford,it yet.
[00:17:33] Beant Singh: So don't buy the tech support package, right? There's some affordability factor there, although we've made it extremely affordable as possible. But, there is this free knowledge base that allows you to provide self service, fully white labeled, right? to your customers that the first five or so customers that are signing up and they want to have that experience of, being able to find how do I do this?
[00:17:54] Beant Singh: How do I do that? So they're able to. Click on that little widget that shows up inside of your high level and search whatever [00:18:00] you want. And, now you've got access to that. So you're able to provide some level of support, there. And then in addition to that, when you're, when you're there early on four or five customers, 10 customers, you can likely provide tech support to them directly yourself instead of having to purchase one of the, one of the, the packages.
[00:18:20] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: So we definitely recommend people do that. I was going to say, I was going to say that's not a bad thing because I mean, you, you definitely need to learn the ropes. You want to learn the software and by helping out your customers directly, you get to, you know, trying to find solutions to their queries. And I mean, it's important. I mean, I think if you want to be, you know, that serious that you start your own bite level, you've got to know the software, you've got to, you've got to invest time on regular.
[00:18:44] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: I like my coffee ketchups with Sean doesn't know it, but I call it my coffee ketchup with Sean, you know, like brew coffee in the morning. The first thing I do look at coming at you is, you know, I was sipping on the coffee. A
[00:18:56] Beant Singh: there you go. That's, that's perfect. But yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, I think it's [00:19:00] extremely important for folks to, to learn the platform and know exactly what their customers are doing, how they're using it and the type of questions they're, they're asking. Those questions, that feedback is exactly what's going to help you go get more customers.
[00:19:14] Beant Singh: When you go out, now you're out of your network, you're advertising, or you're getting in front of strangers, maybe you're attending BNI meetings, or whatever the case may be, however you're prospecting to get more leads, now you're talking to strangers, who are going to be asking you those questions.
[00:19:28] Beant Singh: And if you have this feedback from your existing customers by emailing directly being involved and helping them. It'll be an extreme amount of help for you, for you to learn, from their experience and be able to answer those objections that new prospects may have for you. And plus it, it helps you gain your own confidence, knowing that your customers that you put on there are succeeding.
[00:19:51] Beant Singh: Look, no one wants to put out a bad product, put their reputation up and then be able to. Sell knowing that that product doesn't work, right? no [00:20:00] one wants to do that. Everyone wants to have a successful product that helps other people as well. And the only way to gain confidence is by getting feedback from your own customers
[00:20:10] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: percent, a hundred percent. So question, with customers, have you ever experienced a segment of SaaS customers who, you know, they sign up and you might have all the, all the, you know, you might have a knowledge base.
[00:20:23] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: You might do open office hours. You might have a chat widget for, you know, support. You do all these things and they don't engage. They just kind of. Behind the scenes. They're just doing their own thing. How have you, have you noticed some, some, some customers are like that?
[00:20:41] Beant Singh: yeah, yeah. And that's, that's definitely the case, right? I mean, you can't force anyone to engage and take action if they don't want to. That famous saying of, I think it goes something along the lines of, you can take the horse to the water, but you can't force it to drink the water. Right. so you can provide all the different [00:21:00] resources as you want.
[00:21:00] Beant Singh: And we go, especially recently, we've gone, quite far above and beyond what we should be doing as a support company, just because we want to see these, folks succeed. And we're on that mission of helping, helping a hundred agencies get a hundred customers, as well. And, and we're getting closer to that, but.
[00:21:16] Beant Singh: the, the folks that don't want to engage for whatever reason, whether they don't have a trust or believe or their own limitations, whatever the case may be, they just won't do that. so you can't help everyone, but you, the, what you have to try though is do try to help as many as you can just because a few percentage of the people are not listening.
[00:21:36] Beant Singh: That doesn't mean you should stop helping the majority. Majority are willing to listen. They are wanting to take action. So,
[00:21:44] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: Yeah, absolutely. And it also, it doesn't mean that they are not consuming your stuff, right? There might be more of an introvert. It might be more of a, you know, I like to sometimes be like that. Like, you know, when I just want to consume stuff, I don't want to talk to anybody, I just want to look at the resources and then just go through it.
[00:21:59] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: My own pace. [00:22:00] Right. So that doesn't mean that doesn't mean that if they're not talking to you, that you're risking losing them may not always be the case. Right.
[00:22:07] Beant Singh: Yeah, absolutely. That's correct too. Yep.
[00:22:09] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: Now let's talk about this mission that you have a hundred customers in the next, well up, up until the summit. That's that, is that the deal?
[00:22:17] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: The deadline? Yeah. Up on the summit.
[00:22:19] Beant Singh: that's our internal deadline. So, last year we, we had, brought up, 37, agencies, that applied for the, the summit award, the, Sasperner award, 37 of those, out of, I think the 150 or so that one were, our, our own customers when we looked up at the list and that's when we realized, that we actually have a lot more customers that are on our list, they just have not applied.
[00:22:45] Beant Singh: That have a lot more than a hundred customers, right? So, perhaps it was the, the, the, the unawareness of that this award exists, or they just didn't care to list themselves, on the list. But then as we started talking to the team and, Figuring out, [00:23:00] you know, how can we get more of the folks, to see this as an inspiration and work towards it, right?
[00:23:07] Beant Singh: That award meant, quite a bit. We got, three awards ourselves, as a team, last year, almost every single one of the awards that high level had, which I'm proud of for the team to be working so hard to do that. But, it meant that in an entrepreneur can finally be awarded normally. That doesn't happen, right?
[00:23:25] Beant Singh: So we took that and said, okay, can this serve as an inspiration to the folks that we're working with to help them get there faster, right? So we made it our mission. that because the 100 number is what helps you activate the saspinor award and be at level up and receive that recognition. We thought it would be a great amount of, inspiration if someone had help and it would motivate those agencies as well.
[00:23:54] Beant Singh: So we, going back to it, we made it our mission to motivate and inspire and help those agencies [00:24:00] so that they can be on that stage and receiving that award. Essentially what it means is that, let's say someone's charging 300 bucks a month for their, their, their, to resell the white label, under theirs, that's 30, 000 a month in recurring revenue.
[00:24:14] Beant Singh: To them in a, in a, in a place where we're looking at 90, 95 percent profit margins, that's life changing amount of income that they're bringing in to themselves, their family, perhaps their employees that are, that are working with them, that they would have not unlocked. And, I'm hoping that helps them inspire and do more good for the businesses that they're serving as
[00:24:40] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: I love it. I love it. That's a great mission. And by the way, guys, for those who are listening, if you, if you, if you haven't heard about, the high level summit, you definitely need to check it out. I've been there. It was my first, you know, first one last year, I made that commitment to go there and bought my ticket my first ever trip to us and.
[00:24:56] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: What an event. Let me tell you, I mean, you [00:25:00] get in a room, I should say, you know, a conference room is a big hall, whatever, but big place, it's a nice hotel to, of 800 like minded individuals, all sasspreneurs, agency owners, you know, fellow marketers, plus bunch of amazing vendors, you know, that you may not Even known about until, you know, I got those, that was like 30 vendors, I think.
[00:25:24] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: And I only knew about five of them before I went in there. I'm like, Holy crap, that's a whole marketplace. And they all had amazing, you know, services, solutions. So you get to hang out with everybody. Plus. I mean, high level, like by the name of like, what an event, right? I mean, they put on, they put on some serious show.
[00:25:45] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: Like this is not just some, you know, boring conference guys. Like you go there, it's fun. It's entertainment. You go, like they had, they had drummers, like drummers, drumming, like all these cool, like little lit up. [00:26:00] As you were walking in the, the, the launch of the conference of the four day conference, like there was this whole, you know, they had like these, these banners on the wall that had like, you know, present, like, I don't know if it was, present, like, from the projector or some special, I think it was special panels anyway.
[00:26:18] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: I mean, they put some serious money. I think I spoke to somebody from the team and yeah, they said, but about a million bucks they throw at this event. For 800 people, that's, you know, huge, that's huge. So if you know, and one important thing is I want to say is prior to me going there, making a commitment, I was just sitting here in my own bubble, you know, like trying to, trying to make this thing work.
[00:26:40] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: but you know, I. My, my wife doesn't care about this tech stuff, you know, so you don't always get to, to, to talk to people that like are aligned, you know, with what you do day to day, it feels a bit lonely,
[00:26:51] Beant Singh: that's right. Yeah,
[00:26:53] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: And so I take it, I had to get on a flight and fly around half around the world to, to get to a room where I [00:27:00] straight away, I was like, Oh, what an, what an amazing event, really, I highly recommend it.
[00:27:04] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: Ticket is not cheap, but you know.
[00:27:08] Beant Singh: it's worth it. Definitely raising a bit.
[00:27:10] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: it. Yeah. I mean, it was my jumpstart to, to what I offer as well. Now, it was, it was getting to meet, you know, other vendors, creating new partnerships with, with my products. And yeah, it's just, yeah, really, really good. I got to meet Andrew. We started a podcast.
[00:27:25] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: This podcast was started by. You know, just meeting a dude at a conference and we just click, hang out and started this podcast. Unfortunately, he's no longer part of it, but, nothing, nothing, you know, nothing against, you know, our relationship, like we are still mates, but that way it's just, he can't do it for, for, because of his involvement with, what he's doing now.
[00:27:43] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: But that aside, you know, so many, so many amazing, you know, experiences that, that happened there.
[00:27:51] Beant Singh: Absolutely. I mean, a lot of, a lot of, ideas and businesses get started from just meeting at these events, having [00:28:00] conversations, you don't know what's going to click where, and sometimes we're not even thinking about it. And something comes out of the blue.
[00:28:05] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: Yep. Exactly. Exactly.
[00:28:08] Balancing Work and Family Life
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[00:28:08] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: so Bernd, on a personal note, what do I like to do? What do you like to do when you're not busy running extently? What's what's, what's, what's your favorite thing to do?
[00:28:18] Beant Singh: You know, I've been, I've been guilty of being an extremely hard worker, and spending a lot of time working. But, the, I'm, I'm trying to make that shift to, spend more time with family, more time with kids. As kids are growing up, they're realizing as well,we've got, two kids, seven and three, and, They happen to be born on the same exact day, so they're growing up fast and growing together, and, spending, spending more time with them.
[00:28:40] Beant Singh: My, my son's into soccer now, so taking him to soccer practice and watching him, get engaged with, with sports. That's, that's, that's what,helps me relieve from the, the work stress.
[00:28:50] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: Yeah, no, you're totally right. My son is three as well. He's going to be four in November.
[00:28:54] The Perfectionist's Dilemma
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[00:28:54] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: And I sometimes wonder. What am I doing? You know, like sitting in the office all day, cause I'm the [00:29:00] same. I work a lot. I mean, I work way, way, way more than I should be, but, it's to my own detriment, right? It's us, what we do being perfectionist to always try and like go the extra mile, go a little bit more.
[00:29:13] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: Like sometimes I look at the clock and I'm like, I know my wife, she's going to be mad that it's like. I should be going home, but like, I just need five more minutes and I'm going to get this done and take it, take it off the list and I do it. And then like, and then I get home a little later and it's like, yeah, it's, it's bad.
[00:29:30] Beant Singh: Yeah, I, I know, I know exactly what you mean. I've been there too. And, it happens,on my end as well. A
[00:29:35] The Importance of Hard Work
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[00:29:35] Beant Singh: nd I think, you know, hard work is also an important part of the journey as well, right? It's to a certain degree, it's, it's there, it's needed, and you can't just succeed without it. Because otherwise, if you're all you're doing is just working 40 hours a day, and that's it, well, there's millions of other people that are doing exactly that.
[00:29:55] Beant Singh: How are you planning on getting ahead? There's, there's no, there's no possible [00:30:00] way to do that, right? So in initial stages, you need that hard work, you need that dedication, you need to put in the 80 hour work weeks to be able to get ahead. and then, you know, eventually there would come a time, where you can.
[00:30:14] Beant Singh: afford to scale back and have,delegated duties to, to your team members and enjoy a balanced life, there, but initial stages, anyone who's getting started in business. I remember, when I started with my first company, obviously I was married at the time and I was, I didn't care whether it was,a hundred hours a week, 120 hours, whatever.
[00:30:34] Beant Singh: It didn't matter. I would do whatever it took. And, that's what eventually led to being able to see a little bit of success, a little bit of success. And then it eventually starts to scale faster as, as, as more time
[00:30:46] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: Yeah.
[00:30:47] Balancing Work and Personal Life
---
[00:30:47] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: And I think an important thing to that is to say that, you know, going, going that extra mile, working the extra hours, sacrificing few things in a personal time, as long. As long as [00:31:00] whatever that is that you're doing is a leveraged activity with a longer view objective than going ahead. Cause that's why I like, that's my, like, I keep, I keep saying it to my wife.
[00:31:10] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: I'm like, yeah, I know. But here's the plan. Like I want us to retire at 50. I want us to, I don't want to be doing this. Like she thinks that I love it. Like, I mean, I am workaholic. and, and more, you also get into a habit of doing it, but, but ultimately I don't want to be sitting here. Ultimately, I want to be hanging out with my son.
[00:31:31] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: I want to be sitting in, but unfortunately money, money moves the world. Money is the currency. Money is what is required in order to have the quality of life that, that we all want. So it's, it's always, that's tricky. Dichotomy between, you know, like she says, well, yeah, but you're missing out on like, this is happening while you're not here, it's always tricky.
[00:31:52] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: But I think, I think, I think I'm on the right path. I think, you know, it is important and I'm starting to see some leverage. [00:32:00] Hey, I was just speaking at an event that. Wouldn't have thought I would be speaking at a long 20 other amazing speakers. So, it pays off. Hard work pays off.
[00:32:10] Beant Singh: It, it definitely does. It's a, it, it's, it's a necessary part of,of a successful, entrepreneur as well. And it definitely pays off. most of the time, I should say. Most of the time.
[00:32:23] Introducing 'The Beef' Segment
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[00:32:23] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: we've got, we've got, when we were designing this podcast, we came up with some, some segments and, you know, I decided to keep it more of a, you know, kind of a fluid, like if it happens, it happens that if it doesn't, like I decided I'm not making it so rigid for it to happen every episode, but we've got some time and I thought, well.
[00:32:39] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: Why don't why don't try and dive into one of this? so there's one it's called it's called the beef. Have you heard of it?
[00:32:45] Beant Singh: have not,
[00:32:46] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: the beef.
[00:32:46] Feature Frustrations with High Level
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[00:32:46] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: The beef is basically What's you know, what's frustrating you right now with a feature of high level? We all love high level but like what's your beef and the whole purpose of the beef is not to just you know Shit on high level it's to [00:33:00] it's to highlight an issue that you know may not not be good enough Enough upvotes because if you guys knew to this community, high level, doesn't let you promote your upvotes in the community.
[00:33:11] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: It's just part of the rules. And I totally understand why they do it. but you know, if you haven't got a reach and you've got an amazing, amazing proposal and you submit it through ideas. gohighlevel. com site, which is, which is what the site is designed for, where you upvote, you know, or come up with a new or suggest a new, new feature or a new feature upgrade.
[00:33:30] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: the way it works, it's community based, you know, it's, it's That the team at high level, they've got so many amazing developers. I think close to 600, 700. Now you probably know more clear number, but you know, it's, it's impossible for them to, to look after all the different submissions, right? So it's totally understandable that they work on, on like on a democracy, kind of like they look at what's got the most upvotes, but I have noticed there's some features in the ideas, got a high level.
[00:33:54] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: com site that are really amazing, but they kind of buried and they need. [00:34:00] Some extra life, some extra shine, you know, some extra light on it, on them. So they get more upwards. Do you have a particular feature suggestion that is, you know, like something that you use day to day and it's frustrating you and we'd like to change it.
[00:34:15] Beant Singh: not, not, not particularly. Well, there's, there's one and, and, and I think this is an important one because, a lot of businesses use this on a regular, it's the conversations inbox, the conversations inbox, the speed of that inbox is a bit slow. and if, you have multiple people working in a company, that are attempting to respond back.
[00:34:36] Beant Singh: You can't see who's responding, or if someone's typing. So sometimes what'll end up happening is a few people will end up sending a message to the same customer at the same time, to an attempt to an answer. So if there was a way to see that, oh, Joe is typing now. So I'm gonna let Joe answer this question.
[00:34:55] Beant Singh: I'll go to the next one. in the, in the conversations, there, it's not, it's not [00:35:00] necessarily end of the world. It still works. it, it. Could definitely be, definitely be improved, but that's, that's, that's one we're seeing overall though. the, the beef that I do have, there is, that, high level, you know, first off wonderful platform.
[00:35:15] Beant Singh: It's amazing.
[00:35:16] Improving User Experience
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[00:35:16] Beant Singh: We all wouldn't be here if it wasn't, it wasn't here, but I, I feel at times what it's lacking is the convenience factor. and by what that, by that, what I mean is that there's a lot of features, but there's a lot of features that are partially built out. They should be built out furthermore to make, to make them a bit more friendly, user friendly and more convenient to use.
[00:35:43] Beant Singh: Right. I would literally be taking a look at how many clicks does it require to do X? How many clicks does it require to do Y? Right. Right. Right. Can we cut down some of those clicks and make it more intuitive for the end user, to, to, to act upon the, you know, being on the, on the [00:36:00] support side and seeing thousands and thousands,customers, interacting with it.
[00:36:04] Beant Singh: what I'm interested in improving is not necessarily the agency level experience, agency level folks. This is their job. They'll, they'll figure it out. They'll spend time on it. But your end user, your business owner who's buying the product from, in a white label format from that agency, it is not their job.
[00:36:23] Beant Singh: They are not going to spend time to figure, figure out the entire platform, right? They want convenience. They want easy, intuitive, factors involved to be able to use the platform. So they don't have to spend the time to watch a course, to learn how to use it. Software, right? It should be intuitive enough where they, where they're able to, figure it out.
[00:36:46] Beant Singh: And, and part of the, part of the problem is that high level is so much customizable, and there's so many ways you can customize things and everyone does it a little differently to the way they like it. and that becomes a, a challenge in [00:37:00] itself because now, you've got to, you've got. Bunch of different people doing things, bunch of different ways.
[00:37:06] Beant Singh: how do you bring convenience and, and intuitively, intuitivity to that? that's, that's my, my biggest beef. I would say to, to make it, more intuitive for the end user rather than the agency owner.
[00:37:19] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: All right, what we'll do guys, we'll make sure that now that this has been highlighted, if you agree with this, head over into show notes of this podcast. If you're looking at, if you're listening to it on your favorite podcast app, you won't see the show notes, but if you head over to a high level experience, podcast.
[00:37:35] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: com and then up the top, You look at the recent episodes that will take you to a dedicated page for this, for this episode. And in the show notes, you will find a link where you click and it takes you straight to this, to this feature,suggestion from Beant and you can upvote on it. We'll make sure we add a link in there.
[00:37:51] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: N
[00:37:51] Social Media Scheduling Challenges
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[00:37:51] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: ow my, here's my beef. I, I've been recently,you know, working on how I can How I can squeeze more juice out of every episode on this [00:38:00] podcast. Right? So I started to create, you know, these short reel reels using Opus clip. I've got like 30 ended up doing like a 30 really cool sort of short clips of the most powerful stuff ends up being eight months worth of content marketing per each episode, which is, you know, which is really good.
[00:38:16] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: You'll get those as well, by the way.
[00:38:18] Beant Singh: Yep.
[00:38:21] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: uploading CSV bulk uploads into scheduler, right? Really cool. And I know that, I know that for Instagram, you know, you've got some limits up to 90 seconds, YouTube up to 60 seconds. You know, there's some criteria that you to fulfill.
[00:38:33] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: However, when you upload it and you select all your channels, you select Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, all those channels that you've got linked up to your high level account, and you just want to like do one book upload, set up all channels, what happens then is it'll throw you some errors, especially with Instagram.
[00:38:51] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: It'll throw you an error saying that, Hey. This video is longer than Instagram post is designed for. However, [00:39:00] I'm uploading reels. They're already supposed to be used for us for a story or for a reel type format, not for a post, unfortunately, A- it doesn't let you toggle. Like if you just like, cause you do have a little toggle that lets you, you know, adjust the copy of the post per each platform separately.
[00:39:18] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: Right? You could do that, but even if you did that and just selected Instagram, it still doesn't let you change it to, to, to a reel in the bulk uploader. All right. So A) ideally it should be intuitive enough that it picks up that this is, you know, this is going to work for reel, automatically selects it.
[00:39:35] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: But even, but even for now it should let you manually like change it. So that's kind of like my beef. It's like book uploading is amazing, but because you can't do this, it kind of defeats the purpose. The other thing in there would be really cool. It's for TikTok. So when you're actually uploading for TikTok, you still have to select, whether you want people, whether you want to allow people to comment and stage and this other thing, and then by default they're [00:40:00] unselected, but, wouldn't be awesome if in the settings, you know, in a, in a master settings, you say, Hey, for TikTok, everything I post through TikTok always make it selected, so I don't have to, you know, less clicking about, but in the grand scheme of things, when you, when you scheduling 30 different posts for next eight months and having to click about for each thing.
[00:40:16] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: It ends up being, you know, pretty time consuming. So that's, that's, that's my,beef and suggestion for improvement on the social scheduler side. You know, I know there's just been, it hasn't been, there hasn't been many releases lately, except for the amazing YouTube, obviously we're going to, highlight that.
[00:40:31] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: The YouTube is so good. So good. But yeah, there, there are a few little nuances that would make it even, even more efficient for uploading. So I'll put a link in that, down below guys as well. If you agree, give it an upvote. That's how the high level team will, we'll get to find out about it.
[00:40:47] Highlighting Success Stories
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[00:40:47] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: I, we've got another segment, this one's called three, four, three. And we actually had,what we do is, and partly, partly, I'm going to ask you a question, but partly also I want to ask you a favor. cause this segment hasn't gotten out of love [00:41:00] recently or ever really hasn't kicked off the ground properly.
[00:41:02] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: But my, my idea was like, Hey, let's give agencies an,an Highlight something amazing they've done for their end client for a small business owner, you know, hey go on a high level experience Out of calm. There's a thing called share your story And basically the idea was like, hey, let's give give people a chance to upload really short 60 seconds audio Just audio memo recording of like, hey, here's billy bob or here is jimmy from xyz agency Here is what we did for this topic This, you know, this and that client we, and then, and then, you know, not just the results that you delivered for them, but what it meant for them.
[00:41:42] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: You know, I would love to be able to have this segment going a bit more. And this is a bit of a putting a, putting up on you guys listening as well, if you have done it, if you have done something amazing for a local business owner. Please share that story. You don't have to disclose the details of course, but please submit your story because we want to, [00:42:00] we want to highlight it.
[00:42:01] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: The whole idea is that this motivates others. This motivates all the other agency owners that may not be, you know, not, not be as successful just to show them, Hey, this is possible. If you have a story like that, would you, would you begin to share that?
[00:42:16] Beant Singh: Yeah. Yeah. matter of fact, I'll, I'll share, I'll share my own, story from my own local business, in, in using high level,how, how that changed. I, and I, sometimes I literally call it, this was magic. Right. so we, in 2021, we bought a few restaurants, pizza restaurants, right before we were buying, the restaurants, the,The previous owner said, Hey, if you just hired more staff, to answer phone calls that we, that, that come in because we miss a lot of phone calls.
[00:42:45] Beant Singh: So we miss a lot of phone orders, coming in to the, to the pizza shop.
[00:42:49] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: It's kind of, it's kind of important.
[00:42:52] Beant Singh: Yeah, it's definitely important, right? And he goes, if you just did that, that would increase your sales, there because we do get a lot of phone calls, but [00:43:00] we don't have enough staff to be able to, you know, so the obvious question is why, well, why haven't you hired more staff to do that?
[00:43:06] Beant Singh: and so what I thought was. Okay. Well, let's implement high level instead of hiring more staff and increasing the labor and with, you know, pizza shops or restaurants in general, you're dealing with really thin margins, right? Which, which understandably so why he hadn't hired another staff member to answer all those phone calls as well.
[00:43:25] Beant Singh: So implemented high level, into it, turned on the missed call text back and, every time we would get a, get a call, instead of just saying, Hey, we're sorry you missed your call. We said, Hey, we're sorry. it looks like we're helping other people. but if you're looking to order, did you know you can order online and here's your order.
[00:43:42] Beant Singh: link to order online, right? And that immediately we started seeing more online orders increasing and phone calls not affecting the business as much. If we, so the magic here is that not it only increased our sales, but it also allowed us to keep our [00:44:00] expenses down as well, along with improving operations like order accuracy and things of that nature where staff didn't make the mistakes and this and that.
[00:44:08] Beant Singh: Right. so all of those are like side effects of it, but more importantly, a, an employee in, in a restaurant business costs about 20 bucks an hour. Right. Roughly that's, you know, 17 or 18 as a minimum wage in California. and, so you've got to pay about 20 bucks an hour, and they're working eight hours a day.
[00:44:25] Beant Singh: you know, 30 days is what you need for the business to operate. So an extra employee could cost you a significant amount. Versus this was, this would have been safe. I was the, the local business owner who bought the product and if it wasn't my own business, it would have costed me at least 300 bucks, right?
[00:44:40] Beant Singh: to have that and, 300 versus three or 4, 000, what would, what have been the difference of the, investment? there, and it extremely improved order accuracy as well. So we had less people complaining about why their order wasn't right, or they ordered this and the topping was missed or whatever, [00:45:00] right?
[00:45:00] Beant Singh: When they're ordering online, they're selecting exactly what they want. It also allowed us to add, upsell messages on the, on the online ordering platform, that were consistent. The online ordering is a system it would almost every single time it would ask them, Hey, would you like to add a soda with this or this or that with that?
[00:45:20] Beant Singh: Right? And that increases your ticket volume. versus if you're relying on a, on a staff member who might be busy and they're just, you know, dealing with a rush or whatever the case is. And they might just be taking the phone order and trying to, okay, quickly, I got it. And I'm not going to order upsell this time because I've got a, you know, another customer to attend.
[00:45:38] Beant Singh: Right. So that consistency, Would have, driven away revenue versus just simply sending a message back saying, Hey, did you know you can order online? And here's the link led to a lot of people ordering more, online. So that's, that's my, that's, that's my magic
[00:45:57] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: Yeah, by the way, [00:46:00] yesterday, I forget the name, but one of the speakers there, he talked about AI voice agents and he gave a demo on inbound. He said outbound doesn't work that well, but for inbound, freaking amazing. That could be like the next level,
[00:46:14] Beant Singh: yeah,
[00:46:15] AI and Future Trends in Customer Support
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[00:46:15] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: so another question I've got is, it's about trends. What trends do you foresee in the agency and customer support industry in the next few years? And, and how do you reckon Extendly is, is preparing to meet these changes,
[00:46:29] Beant Singh: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, with the, the, the rise of the AI, there, and, a lot of shift is happening to streamline operations and provide answers at the tip, right, instead of having wait times and this and that, or human interactions, more and more, customers as well from the end user experience are looking for.
[00:46:51] Beant Singh: Instant answers, right? The only way to do that is using, some sort of an AI. Now, AI is not necessarily there, today to be able [00:47:00] to as accurately answer. It's getting very much, much better, right? and in a lot of cases, it answers questions, extremely well as well. But, the user is looking for, again, intuitive, convenient, ways to ask a question and receive an answer immediately instead of having to wait a couple of minutes for then someone to look up and see what's going on and be able to answer it right.
[00:47:23] Beant Singh: it, that whole chat conversation may last, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, right? instead the end user is looking for an immediate answer and a solution that leads them to that. So at Extendly, what we're also doing is, as we're developing our AI, and, and we're using the AI and training from, receiving the questions and the chats that our team, Answers and then rating them and creating a database, especially because we have a large variety of, you know, how do you ask people asking the same question in many different ways.
[00:47:55] Beant Singh: So we have that data available to us to be able to say, okay, regardless of how that question is [00:48:00] asked, this is how we're going to answer it. And this will provide an immediate answer to, to that,to that customer. So we're hoping within the next, six months to a year or so, we'll have, you know, an AI assistant so much more trained on high level to a point where it will, it should literally be able to answer almost any question.
[00:48:19] Beant Singh: Every question in an immediate fashion. And, also then lead to step-by-step instructions of how to accomplish whatever it is that they're looking to do. So, you know, a small example is, let's, let's say someone comes in and says, I want to know how to change my password. Right? what an answer would be.
[00:48:38] Beant Singh: Sure. No problem. You go to settings, click on your profile, and then on the, on the right side, you'll see the password change window, and you can type in your new password there and that, and hit save it. That's it. Right. And then the added step to that, that we're working on is, when that happens, it'll provide that answer.
[00:48:55] Beant Singh: And then it'll say, show me how to do it, or take me to take [00:49:00] me to take me to the section so it could be done and they'll
[00:49:02] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: like a deep link? Yeah.
[00:49:04] Beant Singh: Yeah, like a deep link. So they'll click on it and it'll take them exactly where it needs to go, to be able to then update or make that change. And, or it'll provide, you know, step one, click here, step two, click here, step three, click here, so that they're, they also learn along the way as well.
[00:49:18] Beant Singh: Our whole idea is that we want to train the customer To a point where they ask less questions, right? So that they're more trained. Who gets a better user experience? One who has to constantly ask questions, for a platform or someone who's knowledgeable and knows exactly how to use it. Obviously it's someone who's knowledgeable and knows exactly how to use it, right?
[00:49:40] Beant Singh: And that is also the type of customer that stays longer with the agency as well. So we're combining that understanding with, Hey, we want to educate the customer more. Okay. At the same time, that means they'll ask less questions at the same times. That also means they'll stay with you for much longer and they'll recommend your business to [00:50:00] others as well.
[00:50:00] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: I love it.
[00:50:02] Effective Onboarding Strategies
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[00:50:02] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: Hey, when it comes to SaaS customers, not just to support, but onboarding, onboarding can sometimes be, you know, the biggest friction point. If you don't get it, if you don't get it right from the beginning, right. If it takes too long, especially like for us in Australia, you know, we deal with, we deal with either like either a bit more complicated, well, actually it's on a same par right now, cause you guys are A2P 10 DLC, but we had a regulatory bundle and sometimes these things take a little bit longer.
[00:50:29] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: What do you. You know, what is the ideal onboarding? How quickly can you guys onboard a customer and what are some of the important things that you want to point out?
[00:50:41] Beant Singh: Yeah. So when we do, what we call a white label onboarding, we're on behalf of the agency owner, we are onboarding their customer. so one of the things we do is make sure we set up all of the, all of the items that they, all the technical stuff, right. And that could be the A2B, the domains, the email, Right.
[00:50:56] Beant Singh: calendar connecting, connecting to GMB, whatever the case is, [00:51:00] getting all of those, sorted out. and then we actually divide that onboarding into two calls. we used to do it in one call. We found it was, you know, too overwhelming, too much information for a person to take in. So we learned from that and said, divided it into two calls.
[00:51:12] Beant Singh: And now one is just a tech call. The other one is a training call where we show them how to use the platform. And, we take care of all the tech stuff for them, during that, including getting the ATP approved and whatnot, for them as well. And ATP has gotten much faster these days where it gets approved generally in 24 hours in most cases.
[00:51:29] Beant Singh: And there may be a case or two that might take longer. depending on, the particular scenarios there. But, once that's done, now the customer is ready, set up, ready to go. you know, as part of the service, we also allow the, the agency owners to hop on the call if they want to. and we also send them recordings, of the, onboardings as well.
[00:51:47] Beant Singh: So that they're aware of exactly what happened if they wanted to go back and listen to it.
[00:51:51] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: I love it. I love it. And, when you say you set up everything for them, you know, send things like integrations require access to their [00:52:00] assets. So how do you handle that?
[00:52:01] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: Do you send them an information prior to the call? What they need to have at hand, or do you ask them to give you access to some of their assets? Or
[00:52:09] Beant Singh: Yeah. So, you know, let's say it was, a domain or something. Well, first off, let me back up, you know, when we do an initial setup, and intake from the agency owner themselves, we ask them those questions, Hey, what are the items that you want to set up? What are the items you want to give access to?
[00:52:22] Beant Singh: Right? what's important for you to, for your customers to know which features are you selling? We get all of that. so that way we have, a semi customized, it's not fully customized, but semi customized onboarding experience for, their end users, there. And then, once that, onboarding has, intake has happened, we've set up the onboarding process for them.
[00:52:42] Beant Singh: Then we, then we know exactly what this, customer would need. So for example, if they needed to connect their domain or something of that nature, we, the, emails that do go out, do let them know that, Hey, prior to your onboarding, we will need access to this, this, and that. So make sure you have your login credentials to this, login credentials to that, so that we're able to help you, get [00:53:00] things set up.
[00:53:01] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: does it ever happen that even if you send it to them, they show up and.
[00:53:06] Beant Singh: Oh, yeah. you know, our traditional human factor, right? That definitely,definitely kicks in. and that does happen as well. And then we do handle it case by case. a lot of times they're able to find it. And it's also happened where they just can't find it. And we've spent 30 minutes for them just trying their passwords.
[00:53:22] Beant Singh: And, you know, it's not, it's not working out. in those cases, we just ask them, Hey, let's go ahead and reschedule. as soon as we have, the, The credentials, because we really can't do anything without them having the credentials. So we asked them to reschedule it for as early as possible, get your credentials.
[00:53:37] Beant Singh: So, and, but we do go ahead and set up the remaining of the items, whatever was missed, we come back to it, or we ask them,go ahead and find these credentials. I'm going to get you in touch with one of our support reps, who will then get on a zoom call with you and help you configure this, part.
[00:53:51] Beant Singh: So they don't have to go through the entire onboarding cycle
[00:53:53] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: Perfect. I love it. You got it worked out. It's good to hear, it's good to hear that, that, you know, makes me [00:54:00] feel confident and it should make you guys feel confident. If you're listening and you're considering a white little support partner. There are a few other ones on the market as well. You know, they're, they're not bad, you know, they, it all depends on your preference, but externally is definitely one of the best on the market that I know of.
[00:54:16] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: one of the, one of the top three best ones in the market. So definitely check them out. Now, if somebody is at that stage that they, you know, they are. You know, too big for their shoes. They can't handle the support for their customers themselves. They really now need some support. where did they go?
[00:54:29] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: What is the offer? How did they start?
[00:54:33] Beant Singh: Yeah.
[00:54:33] Extendly's Support Solutions
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[00:54:33] Beant Singh: So we offer, you know, full 24, seven, live chat support, to, to our customers, it comes with our support OS software as a base that there's a bunch of different things, that,that are helpful to agencies that are there like self onboarding, the knowledge base that we talked about earlier, the product wars, onboarding forms to fill out custom values and things of that nature, that are, that are there, and they can also add in their own, knowledge articles and.
[00:54:57] Beant Singh: things of that nature, as well, but, 24 seven [00:55:00] support is the, promise there. the stats that we have are, we've got, 94 to 96 percent general,satisfaction rating.
[00:55:06] Beant Singh: And these are the agency owners, customers rating, our agents. every time they have a chat with them, through, every time they engage them through the, the live chat support, portal there. And then, Under a minute is 56 seconds to be exact is, our current,response, first time response rate, there, it's extremely fast.
[00:55:24] Beant Singh: now I, we don't promise that every single experience would be in that nature. It may take, depending on, you know, time of the day
[00:55:31] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: we're talking averages guys. That's an average.
[00:55:34] Beant Singh: Exactly. Yeah. So, you know, if in case it takes two minutes, please, you know, give us, give us a little, a little bit of breather there. We, we do try our best, but on average, 56 seconds, that also means majority of the time you'll connect within five, 10 seconds or 30 seconds or less, there as well, where it feels like an immediate connection, but yeah.
[00:55:54] Beant Singh: So, unlimited amount of customers you can bring on a sub accounts. it's 599 [00:56:00] per, per month. for, folks to, take advantage of the 24 seven, live chat, you don't have to go train people and deal with hiring and firing and training and management of the day to day. We take care of all of that.
[00:56:12] Beant Singh: our staff is trained on high level and how to support, everything related to high level, there.
[00:56:19] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: I love it. So that's the deal for, for unlimited. Do you have a, do you have a downside deal or is it just one deal?
[00:56:25] Beant Singh: Yeah. So we, we do have, you know, up to 10 client, access as well. That's 299, per month. If you guys want to check it out, the, the *highlevelexperience.com/extendly*. check it out there, start a trial and, you'll be able to see everything we offer.
[00:56:40] Conclusion and Farewell
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[00:56:40] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: so much for being on. I appreciate you. Appreciate sharing your, your wisdom and what you do for the community is truly amazing. You're a great human being. And, yeah, so thank you again for, for coming along to the podcast podcast. I know you've got to go, so we'll let you go.
[00:56:53] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: Hey guys, thank you for listening to today's episode as well.
[00:56:56] Vit Muller @thatvitmuller: If you've enjoyed this episode, then please share it with your fellow agency mates and other [00:57:00] high levelers that you think would also benefit from listening for show notes, links, extra tips to help you grow your agency or yourselves with high level, please go to highlevelexperience. com. Thank you. And have a great rest of your day, everybody.
[00:57:10] Beant Singh: Thank you guys. Thank you Vit.. [00:58:00]
