Mike Ritzima, founder of Superior Trucking Payroll Services, joins the podcast to discuss innovative ways his company utilizes AI to enhance customer experience and streamline operations. He shares how they are developing an internal knowledge base to ensure seamless support for clients, even when primary account managers are unavailable. This project aims to clarify processes and improve communication, reinforcing the importance of transparency in the payroll industry. Mike highlights how AI is not just a tool for generating content but acts as a coach for both employees and clients, fostering clearer communication and better service outcomes. As they explore the evolving landscape of AI, they emphasize the need for businesses to embrace these technologies to stay competitive and relevant in a rapidly changing world.

Takeaways:

• In this episode of Lead with Trust, Mike Ritzima discussed how AI can enhance clarity and communication within organizations, especially in payroll services.
• Mike emphasized the importance of building a transparent knowledge base to improve customer experiences and maintain trust in the trucking industry.
• The podcast highlighted that clarity in expectations is crucial for leveraging AI effectively, as it leads to better outcomes in communication and operations.
• Ritzima shared that AI serves as a useful tool for training new employees in communication skills, particularly in a world where texting is prevalent.
• He also mentioned how AI assists in generating content for marketing and internal communications, helping to articulate ideas more clearly.
• Overall, the conversation revolved around the evolving role of AI in businesses, underscoring its potential to reduce friction and improve efficiency in various processes.

Links referenced in this episode:

• truckingpayroll.com
• drivenforsuccess.com

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Superior Tracking Payroll Services
• Zoho
• ChatGPT
• Claude

Mentioned in this episode:

Preview

Welcome to another episode of Lead with Trust.

In today's episode, we have a special guest as part of our mini series, AI Advantage Conversations, where I interview 12 CEOs about their journey and about their work with AI.

And I am super thrilled to have with me today Mike Ritzima from Superior Tracking Payroll Services.

Mike, why don't you give us a little bit of background as to what do you do every day?

Just introduce yourself to the audience, give us a little bit of background as to what Superior Trucking Payroll Services does, what makes you special.

Sort of, you know, a two minute overview of who are you?

Yeah, thanks.

I'm Mike Ritzima.

I'm the founder of Superior Trucking Payroll Service.

We specialize in payroll and payroll tax services specifically for trucking companies.

And our mission is centered around helping trucking families and helping small to medium sized fleets operate more cleanly and with more clarity.

And so a lot of what we do is helping them pay their drivers because drivers don't necessarily get paid by the hour or things like that like most payroll services would do.

And so we try to help them explain what they're paying to the drivers and how they're doing it, which builds transparent with the transparency, builds trust and helps the drivers stay around longer.

That is a really cool mission and so worthwhile.

That's awesome.

Well, thank you for that.

So we connected way back when because we're both into the world of they ask, you answer, endless customers, and we both really love and appreciate the idea of trust.

And when you were sharing a story of how you're using internally, I thought, hey, that would be a really good conversation for the two of us to have.

So what I would like to start us off with is could you tell me two to three ways in how do you use AI currently in your company that you're just genuinely proud of?

Yeah, thanks.

I'm going to start with one that we just started working on and that is kind of an internal knowledge base.

We have hundreds of clients and all of those clients have individual needs and, and we have them all recorded in places including our CRM.

But it's hard for someone say that is pinch hitting for our employee that week because our employees on vacation are sick and we need to make sure that we take care of our customer properly.

Going to find the particular thing in the particular line item of the CRM can be tedious.

And so what we're doing is building our own internal help desk that just runs, goes, gets the information out of the CRM, brings it back to the employee.

So the employee can just say, how do I process the retirement plan for ABC Trucking?

And it'll give them the answer.

And so we're just cracking the.

Just starting to crack into that.

But I'm really excited about it because it's really going to affect our customer experience.

Our customers will get a seamless experience even when their primary account manager is not available.

So that, to me is a huge win because again, our mission's about helping trucking families.

And so we're trying to use AI to better deliver on that.

So it sounds like you're building a rag system.

I'm building it through our internal chat, which references the CRM.

I use Zoho for a lot of things and it's going to go through there and we're going to build a project in Zoho Creator, which is going to kind of put all the data together and then click, which is like their teams chat.

That's where you can ask it.

You can just put in a slash and client help.

How do I do this thing?

And it's going to go find it for me.

We also looked at using ChatGPT, which we were going to do, but Zoho has a way for me to do it without moving all the data over to ChatGPT.

So I think that's probably going to be better.

Yeah.

And less exposure points.

Yeah, that's a big deal.

Yeah.

So that's one really cool project.

Any other ones that you want to mention?

Yeah, we've got a couple of them that like, it's not as much projects, but one of the things we really use it for is communication.

Not only to help me write LinkedIn posts or things like that, but which I do use it for that because it helps me communicate more clearly.

I have the idea in my head and I know what I mean.

But the people reading it will get a different interpretation.

And I want it to be clear what I'm trying to get across instead of just me telling them things.

So we use it for that, but we also use it for our account managers to communicate with our clients.

A lot of our people are new to office jobs.

We hire for what we call mindsets, and if they have the mindsets, we'll teach them the skills.

And so some of the.

One of the skills that a lot of people entering an office job for the first time don't have is business email.

It's just not there.

Right.

They're.

They're a texting world now, and so we have to teach them to communicate in complete sentences.

And I'm not judging them.

I'm just saying that's how the world is.

And they're willing to be taught.

So using a tool, even ChatGPT or Claude or whatever your.

Whatever your AI of choice is, really helps them communicate what they want to do.

And then they help gives the.

Again, gives the customer a much better experience.

So we use it for that all the time.

I also use it for my own podcast to help me script out the episodes.

Because I will do a 20 minute podcast in four minutes if I just leave it to myself.

I'll just.

Here's the thing.

You need to know two sentences.

See you next week.

And so that doesn't really.

I need to explain it better.

Even though it's in my head clearly I have.

I think they call it the curse of knowledge.

And I need to be able to walk people through how we got there.

And so I use it for that too.

And it's been really helpful.

I also use it.

I feed the audio back into like ChatGPT and have it evaluate how I'm speaking because when I get excited I start talking too fast.

And like my, my.

I see it more in my kids.

They do it all the time to me, but I do it to them too.

And so it helps me.

Hey, slow down here.

You really want to.

It's like a.

It's like a vocal coach.

And so that's really helpful.

And you.

A final way is we.

We use it as a.

Like a help desk for other people's tools if we're using again.

I talked about Zoho.

Zoho updates a lot and their help support desk doesn't keep up necessarily all the time.

So I just go into one of the AIs and say I want to do this thing.

What Zoho tool should I use and how do I do it?

Walk me through, step by step, like I'm five years old and it walks me right through it.

And it's fant.

It's like the most updated help that I can find versus me trying to search around there.

They have volumes of support, but they're almost cursed by it because it's so vast.

Yeah, I find it interesting how you use chat to voice coach you, but I totally get the scripting because I have the opposite problem.

Right.

If I do a solo episode, I don't talk myself into clarity.

I get just so excited that I just talk for 45 minutes.

So those were really awesome sort of projects and way to use AI.

Is there any other way?

Like If.

If you and I walk through your office tomorrow, that AI gets daily used by your employees.

I think the, the biggest way you'd see it is in communication with each other and with our clients.

We use it for each other, too.

It's funny, we have a weekly meeting about some software things that we do here, and my operations manager just this week had put a note in there of something we had to discuss, and it was clearly straight out of an AI.

But it was great because it told me, she told me, this is the problem and this is what we need for the solution.

This is the result we need.

And it was phrased in a way.

I knew exactly what she meant because often I don't, because that's computer stuff and it's my world more than hers, but it was perfect.

And so just the idea of even just communicating with each other and we, we don't have a communication problem in that.

Like, I mean, we get along great and, you know, I generally will just ask questions if I don't understand what she means.

But that made it so much easier.

Another way we use it is, is with our external communication email, like, even on our website, things like that, building the graphics, like, up.

We'll write an article and we'll have it suggest graphics for us to make the article more compelling.

And then we have someone here who uses that to build the graphics for us.

And then if she's not clear, she can ask it a question and say, okay, I don't understand what you're trying to do with graphic number three here.

Give me an idea.

Give me more details.

And it, of course, spits it right out.

That's fantastic.

But that, that's where a lot of it is.

We're.

We'll use it for other things too, like if there's tax questions.

It's not perfect, but at least they get us on the right idea or confirm our suspicion about something.

But this state has this kind of tax.

Do they have any local taxes to make sure that we're.

Again, we're taking care of our customer?

Because that's always.

That's while we do.

Yeah, it does a lot of research.

As long as you back it up.

Right.

As long as you just make sure it's actually correct.

But at least it gets you down the right road.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

Living in the Italian bureaucracy, that's often very helpful.

All right, so if you think back six months ago, I mean, AI is evolving so fast, right.

It's like, it's super hard to just keep up with it.

If you go back six months ago and you think about your.

What you believed about AI, then what is something that.

Where AI maybe surprised you for better or for worse?

Well, I can give you an example.

This happened not long ago.

I was rebuilding a page for our website, as I will do from time to time, and I was focused on the words on the page.

I was focused on, you know, making sure that my messaging was clear and all those kinds of things.

And I think it was.

Claude pointed out to me, hey, your schema is all sideways on this.

Your FAQs aren't listed as FAQs.

You need to change that.

And I was, I was blown because I wasn't even asking about that.

I was just like, can I make the page look pretty?

Can I get the message across?

I'm trying to get across knew from other.

I'm assuming it knew from other conversations that we talk about AI discoverability and SEO and all that kind of stuff.

And it said, yeah, you're missing it right here.

And so it was when I realized, like, AI is much more useful than just generating content for the page.

It actually is almost like a, like an SEO coach in that role or an AI discoverability coach.

It said, your scheme is bad, you need to fix it or no one's going to find it.

And I'm like, wow, I wasn't even asking that, but I needed to know that.

And that was so helpful because I.

Otherwise I just would have worked on that page and I would have been, look how pretty it is.

And no one would have seen it.

So it's just fantastic for stuff like that, or even just suggesting pages, hey, this needs, this article you're writing needs to be a page, not an article.

It's an evergreen thing.

Things like that, where it just act, it just kind of takes over the role of consultant and pushes back a little bit when I need to be pushed back on and things like that or just considers a new perspective that I hadn't thought of.

Yeah, Any example that comes to mind where it was like a negative experience,.

Sometimes it pushes back a little too hard.

You know, sometimes it's.

I've had that happen where it'll push back and I'll tell it no and it'll push back again.

And then I'm like, stop it.

No, I'm right about this.

I'm dug in now.

And maybe I wasn't right, but it was what I wanted to do.

Yeah, yeah, you know, I'm like, no, no, no, I'm still going to do what I'm going to do here.

So that's, that's been also times when it digs in.

It's always sure and mostly right.

And so be absolutely confident that this thing is a thing and I know it's not a thing, and then I'll tell it, that's not a thing.

It goes, oh, yeah, I guess that's not a thing.

Well, then don't say it is.

And I, I'm sure it will change soon.

Where I, you know, I don't know is an answer.

And that's okay.

You know, it's okay for you to say, I don't have the information for that, or I'm 60% sure of that.

You know, so we just, we, we learned a prompt around it and say, cite your sources and things like that.

But yeah, early on, especially, like, you know, and even it still happens where they'll be like, your target market is this.

I'm like, no, my target market's not that.

My target market's this.

Or they'll talk about, for my, in my business, they'll talk about a particular problem that might help us get customers, but it's not a problem.

It's not the thing they think it is.

And so I'm like, I keep telling it, that's not an issue.

The issue is this.

I have no data that suggests that's an issue or that anybody's searching about it.

So, like, stop bringing that up.

I love when, when you catch it out on something wrong and then you tell it it was wrong, and then it starts defending itself.

Awesome.

So what did you believe 12 months ago about AI that you now no longer believe?

If you would have asked me 12 months ago about the AI adoption curve, I would have thought we were already there by now.

They weren't going to admit defeat, and that's okay, but they were going to do it.

And I still feel like there's a lot of people who are still really scared to mess around with AI for whatever.

They have their own personal stories and their own personal reason, and I'm not judging them for it.

I'm just surprised that they dwell on what is wrong instead of dwelling on what's right, what it can do.

They talk about, well, it can't do this and it can't do that.

Well, that's fine, but you couldn't do those things before, so what's really the big deal here?

So I, I thought we'd be long past critical, like where the people that don't use AI were the small exception.

And it's just moving slower than I thought.

Maybe I'm just impatient, but I thought, and it happens with a lot of things.

I'm sure this happened with the Internet, this happened with personal computers, all that kind of stuff.

It always takes longer for it to really become a thing.

But I thought this one was just going to move through, you know, just like, like, like it was on fire and just take over everything right away.

So I'm, I'm surprised it hasn't.

But it's still coming in the, you know, it's still improving too.

That's, that's the amazing thing about it is that Even, like for ChatGPT people, if you add it, had it make a graphic for you, the spelling was always horrible and you could tell it specifically, right, don't.

This word is spelled this way.

Payroll has two Ls and it would never spell it right and you'd have it recreate it and then it would, then it would switch other letters or it would do something else.

They fixed that.

Like, I did a graphic last week and I couldn't believe it put all the words in.

I just told it to make it just because I wanted to see what they were trying to explain to me.

And it made this tremendous graphic and all the words were spelled right and they were.

And I was shocked.

I think I, I posted on the day asked you on the Impact plus board about it because I was like, did you guys know that chat can do this?

I was so excited.

And so it is still getting better.

But again, let's, let's focus on what it can do instead of what it can't do.

And I think that there are, there are still some naysayers there and that, that really surprises me that they haven't been completely shut down yet and overwhelmed by all this.

So when you say, or you started off by saying, I'm surprised that we're not there yet, what is there?

What does that mean?

What I meant by that was there.

I meant that we just accept that AI can do things for us and it's a tool that we should all use, much like the Internet, where everybody just uses the Internet now.

Everybody, it's just a there, it's like electricity.

It's just there.

And so for when in, when I'm old enough to have been around before the Internet.

And when the Internet came, it came in little bits and pieces and it took a while.

We just had little browsers and Google wasn't even a thing and all of that.

And it took a while for it to get adopted.

But then, you know, you go to, you know, even 10, 20 years ago, by 20 years ago, everybody had the Internet, everybody had email, everybody had all these things.

And it was just how you did business.

But at first, people were, There were always the skies falling, people that were like, oh, Internet's not going to be a thing.

It's a fad.

You know, person to person.

My Rolodex is still going to be the thing that gets me business.

People can look up what a Rolodex is if they want to know what that.

But, you know, and so I thought that AI people, I thought we were past that and I thought AI was going to.

I mean, because AI is everywhere, but there are still people that still feel like it shouldn't be or that it, you know, it's just, it's not a tool we need.

Well, it is a tool you need and it's a tool that everybody else is going to use and do things much faster than you if you don't get on board.

And so I'm surprised there's still as many people resisting it as there are.

Does that help clear it up?

Yeah.

Okay, good.

The reason why I ask is there's this Microsoft AI CEO quote from the New York Times, right?

When he said, and that was back in February, that in 12 to 18 months, most of the white collar jobs, anyone with a keyboard is going to be automated by AI to near human level.

Right.

And I do think AI will have the capabilities to do so in 12 to 18 months.

I think he's absolutely on point with that.

The problem though is that I think it's 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail because we just buy AI technology and tools.

We don't build the actual foundations for it to run on.

Right.

So you have almost half the companies abandoning AI initiatives and fold and give up.

But there's no, there's no option to give up.

I mean, this is coming.

I always have this like, you know, tsunami analogy in my head.

The tsunami is coming.

The beach is.

Water is drawing back from the beach.

And whether or not you already.

The tsunami will come and get you.

So unless you go to higher ground.

And the time to get to higher ground is now.

So I always have this, like, I think the AI adoption should be where you say it should be.

Absolutely.

And that.

That is surprising to me, too, that people just give up.

But it's this odd.

Maybe it coincides with the.

The trough of disillusionment we're just going through anyway.

Yeah, I agree with you as far as all the keyboard jobs going away, basically, they're just going to change.

They're not.

You know, we don't make paperweights anymore because we don't have fans on all our desks in the office because we have air conditioning.

Nobody mourns the paperweight maker losing their job.

You know, we have the people that used to build the horse carriages.

Right.

We got the automobile.

Nobody mourns.

I mean, that's just how it works where there's always the next thing.

And so I do think a lot of people are scared.

I think they're like, what am I going to do?

I don't know anything about AI and it's going to come take my job.

Well, AI was coming for you anyway, so you have to see what else you can offer.

And a lot of people, I mean, the people that feel that often have a lifetime of skills and, and knowledge that is hard to put into AI, so you still need someone to tell the AI what to do.

And so they just.

If they can pivot to that, they may end up coming out on top.

Yeah, Yeah.

I was just, just before we got on, I did a post on LinkedIn about how I'm not really afraid of mass layoffs due to AI.

I'm more afraid of good businesses going under and those jobs being lost because the companies didn't adopt fast enough.

So, yeah, I think we agree on that one.

Yeah.

So when.

When AI works in your company, you.

You started off with this, like, amazing description of the project that you're building around your customer knowledge base.

So you obviously have thought about this quite significantly, but what is the.

The foundation you're building underneath that really makes your AI work uniquely to you?

I think the biggest thing.

And it's gonna.

It might sound strange, but the biggest thing that makes the AIU work is clarity.

We already had a good culture before we started talking.

We were trading stories about books that we both like.

And so we'd already built a culture around process, documentation and expectations and things like that before AI was even a thing, before ChatGPT 1.0 rolled out or whatever it was.

You know, it's our Goal is we want to be really clear with AI about what the result that we want is.

So when we tell it, this is the thing we're trying to do and this is the thing we want to get out of it.

This is a good result, this is a bad result.

You know, we start with that because it's really just, you know, clarity is like the winner for everything.

For, for me at least it's, it's.

If you could, the clearer we can be about the result we want, the better output we're going to get from the AI.

Also, the clearer I can be with my employees, the better result I'm going to get from them.

And the clearer, likewise with me, if they, the clearer they can be with me.

And so AI has just reinforced all of that.

It's just, you know, I have a bit of a programming background, so I'm na.

I guess I'm just naturally curious about these things.

And one of the old computer phrases was garbage in, garbage out.

If you put bad input in, you're going to get bad output every single time.

And so the clarity matters.

And we, you know, it's so important to us to be really clear with when we're using an AI for anything is like, this is the output we want.

This, these are our objectives that we want to achieve.

In this email, in this LinkedIn post, in our customer knowledge base, any of those things, this is what has to happen.

And for example, we were talking about the knowledge base.

One of the things, the first thing I put in it was if you don't have a sure answer, tell me I don't know or tell me I don't have that information because we don't want guessing like we talked about before.

I don't want it to be very sure.

And sometimes.

Right.

So the clarity there, I think that, I mean, I think we've been fortunate that we've had clarity in our business before AI, but we just, we double down on it with AI tools.

And I think that's what makes it work because we're absolutely know what we want and you can't get what you want right in that old song until you know what you want.

So yeah, that's, that, that's really the, the biggest thing for us.

It's funny because the businesses that had that, that level of clarity and obviously you had a lot of the clarity because you were doing the ask you answer and there's a lot of already difficult questions you had to ask right yourself and you had to answer for your clients.

But those companies that have done this before were doing great before, but they can be exceptional with AI because it just exponentially lets you scale that greatness.

Yeah, I agree.

I think that that's.

It just, it just makes the work of how do we get to the result go that much faster because we know if we know the result that we want.

Yeah.

So just to wrap us off, if you fast forward 18 months and everything goes right with AI in your business, what does that look like?

I know it's a bit of a Pandora's box because 18 months, but give me sort of a.

Let's spin the magic wand.

What would that look like?

Yeah, I love that question.

Because if you just think about how much AI has changed in the last.

The AI when I, of course, when we're saying a, we're Talking about the LLMs and things like that, looking back 18 months to where it's come now and how much better it is, and it's just going to keep improving and just our use of it, our utilization of it is going to keep improving.

And, and so if everything goes right, the way I think of it is that we're going to have so much less friction across our organization between us and our customers, between each other, because our communication will be better thanks to AI because we're going to be able to express clearly what we want.

Like most things, I have it clear in my head what I want, but then when I say the words and the person hears it, they don't.

The clarity is long gone because they don't.

I'm giving them half a sentence or something and I'm thinking that they know the rest of it, which is not fair on my part.

But so as AI gets better, that clarity is just going to improve and it's going to be quicker.

And I think that's going to help so much.

And if I can get, when I get this project running, the better access to our SOPs and our operational knowledge will be easier to share among all our people.

And that just gives a better customer experience, which again is less friction.

Because in our business, we're kind of, I think of us like a referee in a sport.

We're best when we're not noticed.

You know, if you, if you go to the match or the game and you go at the end of it, you never talk about the officials, referees, umpires, whatever your favorite sport is, then they did their job.

And in payroll, that's the same thing.

They just, if, if they don't ever talk about anything that's going on and it's just Friday and all their employees got paid and there's no drama.

That's what we want.

So that's the goal always is the best possible customer experience.

And I think that reducing the friction is just going to improve that experience.

I mean, it is easy to get distracted because AI is kind of candyland right now.

You can just do all these things and I can do this and I can do this, and I can do this.

Can I clone me so I can have one of me do this and one of me do that?

Well, you almost can, but, you know, focusing on the things that really center around the customer experience and, and the employee experience are the things that are going to matter to me the most.

And so I think those are just going to get better.

And I think that, again, it's, it's helping.

It's like I talked about being a coach for me as far as working on my podcasts and things like that, but it's a coach for all my people too.

You know, a lot of them are in their 20s and they're just starting their work career as an adult.

And so this helps them learn how to talk to people in a way that they're not going to learn on their own anymore like they did.

I mean, I'm in my mid late 50s and so we were, we were kind of taught that through school, we were kind of taught that through our experiences.

And people now don't get those experiences.

And so for better or worse, I mean, it just is what it is.

But they can use a AI tool to help them know how to react in a certain situation, how to communicate what they need to communicate, which just again improves the customer experience.

And I think that that's just going to get even better as we keep going.

Awesome.

That is a really wonderful way to end this episode.

Thank you so much, Mike, for coming on.

If someone wants to reach out to you, how would they go about it?

Like, what's the best way to contact you?

Yeah, the best way is to go to our website, truckingpayroll.com, and there's contact us pages all over the place.

If I'm doing my job and they can find me there.

We also have a podcast called Driven for Success where, which is back office wisdom for medium sized trucking companies.

If you're one of those, it's of course it's all free.

We also have a blog on our website too, with tons of articles.

And we always encourage people, especially in, in my market, which is trucking companies, if they have a question and you don't see it, just ask us.

Reach out to us.

It doesn't mean we're going to try and sell you it.

Just if you have that question, a thousand other people do, too.

And we want to.

We want to help trucking families.

That's our mission.

So getting those questions is the best way for us to do it.

Love it.

Thank you so much.

Oh, thank you for having me.