“It’s your customers telling you what they think about your company, what your product about your service; it’s incredibly valuable if you can use that to your benefit.”

Etie Hertz, CEO of Loris.ai, is featured in this episode of Be Customer Led with Bill Staikos. Currently, Loris provides customer service employees with real-time coaching. When transitioning to chat and email-based customer care, firms employ Loris to assist the support team’s shift to these more current channels of client communication. In 2019, Loris transformed into a technology firm with an interaction-level impact. They developed a software solution based on natural language processing that can be integrated with existing customer service platforms to guide agents in real-time with their best practice language suggestions. In 2021, Loris emerged from stealth mode as a potent AI solution in the form of a chrome extension. Having such expertise and experience, Etie investigates the influence of conversational AI on CX in great detail throughout today’s episode. 

[01:02] Etie’s Journey – Etie shares the defining aspects of his life and career that led him to become the CEO of Loris.

[04:05] The Evolution Of Conversational AI - How conversational AI has altered over the past 15 years and how the B2B sector has adopted this technology.

[08:18] Benefits – Etie describes some advantages of customer involvement he has observed while working with his clients. 

[12:32] Rush to Digitalization - Etie explores if he sees some individuals rejecting technology due to corporations pushing more digital towards them and whether businesses need to be more thoughtful about how they engage customers across several platforms.

[15:51] B2B and B2C - When it comes to the application of conversational AI technology, how do business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations differ?

[19:51] Horizon – Etie expresses his thoughts on the future of conversational AI, emphasizing real-time conversational awareness and disclosing insights. 

[22:15] Digitally Immersive Environment  - We pondered what it might be like to have an agent in a digitally immersive environment.

[24:48] The Policy - Does Etie’s company have a policy that is so customer-friendly that it causes customers to perform a double take?

[26:30] Inspiration - Etie shares what has been influential to him.

Resources:

Connect with Etie:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/etiehertz/

Website: loris.ai/

Etie Hertz on Conversational AI impact on CX

[00:00:33] Bill Staikos: Hey everybody. Welcome back to another week of B Customer led. I'm your host, Bill Staco. I've got a really amazing guest for you this week. EAI Hertz is the Chief Executive Officer at Loris ai. Now, Loris is a really interesting organization. We're gonna get into what they do, but they're working with some of the world's fastest growing companies to have better conversations with their customers, and I cannot.

Just because the topic is super interesting, the conversational AI is just really blowing up a lot. Lo is doing some pretty amazing things in this space. Etai, welcome the show. So excited to have you here. Thank you so much for having me, Bill. Absolutely. So Etai, the first question we ask every one of our guesses, and you've got a really cool and interesting journey too.

Just what is, just share your journey with our listeners and even like what were some of the more differentiating factors for you in your career? And certainly leading. Being the CEO of la?

And I did that for a bunch of years advising a lot of startups, and then I was trying to kind of figure out a way to do these on my own. I started advising a lot of people who were kind of my age and had a really great ideas and I thought I had some. So I left in oh seven to, start an investment company with partners that were in Europe, investing in distressed ethic.

So the timing was pretty good, but then the recession happened and it was kind of a tsunami and we couldn't get anything to work. So I went from like a fancy office to struggling to, to get any business off the ground. I was renting a windowless room from a, friends who were running small companies.

And in, 2010 or so, I met founders of the first iPad base point of sales system in the app store and in the country, basically it was called Shocky, one of the first SAS companies in New York. And we hit it off and I ran around the country looking for anyone building on iPads. And that whole space really took off in 2015.

They, they bought our business, we joined them, and then now we grew that business. 14 or so to almost 50 million of revenue and sold that company to a public company in Canada. Wow. So that was a really cool journey. And then, and then onto Lori.

Just tell, share with our listeners what you guys do, the space that you're focused on and like what differentiates you guys. So

And then as we got more sophisticated, we've been able to expand our real time technology to actually provide guidance to agents on their specific policies, how to answer the question, that's in front of them. So imagine, agents are dealing with many conversations at the same time. People are upset, sometimes they're not.

Some want to cancel, some are happy. And navigating that for agents around the world is incredibly challenging. So we keep people focused on the task at hand. we're able to drive better efficiency, better quality, better policy, adhere. And ensure that churn is low and, and, and LTV and C are high.

I, I love what you guys are doing in this space. C let's talk about just sort of conversational AI generally, just really quickly and just the evolution of it, cuz it really has evolved in a pretty significant way over the last couple of years. Right. You've got your simple chatbots, or dumbbots, whatever you wanna call 'em.

Obviously live agent chats to present day, like how has the market for you and what you've seen, not only through lores, but just, just the space. What are some of the bigger differences that you've seen from an evolution perspective and how has that really changed even how, how you guys approach the market?

It was tour. And then there's the first chatbot was developed by MIT in like 64, called Eliza. Yeah. And it would kind of make you think that you were talking to someone. If you said, mother, it would ask you a question about family. So it kind of tried to replicate humans. The first chatbots really started coming out in around 2001, and then smartphones became a thing.

So 2008 neural networks started to improve NLP tasks, incorporate larger contexts, the databases got better, and small companies were able to just manipulate this stuff and get really, really, Very quickly. Now Google's come out with this thing that almost looks like you're reasoning with a human being when you're talking in chat.

This is, 48 hours ago. So that's like a huge development and that will go down in the bullet points of history, I'm sure at some point. But today, so what this allows us to do at Laris is we can do very sophisticated things. So not only understanding the intent, and the sentiment, the topic of the inbound message, but also being able to sift through tons of data and give you the right policy suggestion at the right time based on the emotion of the end user.

To ensure that these agents are having the best conversation they could possibly have,

[00:06:14] Etie Hertz: So what's cool about today is it used to be only available for large enterprise clients. The whole category is pretty new, although there are a lot of folks that have been in this space. Around this space. Yeah. But being able to suggest text language and policy within a second, that's very, very new.

Usually reserve only for large enterprise clients, and we're really bringing that to, to the mid-market and even below. So, we very much wanna enable all companies small and big to, to be able to do that. And for the first time ever, because of all these advances happening at the same time, we're able to, to effectively actually do that.

So, b2c, b2b,

Like, how does Lauras dot a fit into like the whole sort of customer experience continuum? Because essentially you're hel, I, I think you're helping agents deliver a better on-call experience in real time, which leads to another things, right? Like, and I'm just gonna assume like I wanna hear from you, but like lower, handling time.

Higher experiential scores for agents, higher experiential scores for, customers and, and the brand overall better engagement. What I'm curious though, as well is just like, what are the, some of the benefits that you guys are seeing from your customers on your end? maybe some of those are, but also if you think about where you might have, are you, is it just contact center?

Are you like going into sales and other customer facing kind of roles as well? Like, I'm just curious to hear. Oh, that's a lot of questions there. Yeah, I know. That's a lot of questions we could, Well, let's start with the first one. What are some of the benefits that you are seeing from a loyalty and customer engagement perspective?

when you are working with your clients, on, on, and delivering the solution?

Yeah. So we bring that kind of first and foremost, improvement in inefficiency, 20 plus percent improvement in csat, nps, et cetera. And what's been interesting in the last six to 12 months is we've been able to really hone in on some really differentiating things like limiting churn, boosting ltv.

Predicting your coupon spend. Just, there's a lot of decisions that agents have to make around dollars, around saving customers. What are customers worth to them and how they, how should they interact? We're really able to guide agents in a way that is very, very material and objective. So CX leaders can say, Hey, I just saved a million dollars a year in my coupon spend because Laura's predicted what I should give you because Bill a fantastic, customer is super loyal and he deserves a huge refund exchange, et cetera, Whereas someone else think I should just talk to them.

I shouldn't be doling. Coupons all day. also, we have a lot of companies coming to us now with, I want to, churn is the biggest thing I have to keep my existing customers. How do I limit churn? What should I upsell them with? And now because of the downturn in the market, that's upon us, folks are, this kind of delves into the second part of your question.

They're asking, Well, what do my agents. Doing today? Can they do more? So can I upsell with them if things are going well and I've turned a bad conversation, a good one. Is that a good opportunity to now say, Hey, by the way, do you wanna upgrade to a better plan? Do you wanna order more from us, et cetera.

That's a super interesting shift that I expect to really exacerbate over like the next few months.

[00:09:58] Etie Hertz: At the moment, we're starting with, with the customer facing side on CX and, and customer service. we are getting requests to have those people start to do some selling and also can we take this into a, into a sales motion? But we're not, we're not there yet. We found that over the last few years, I mean, thinking about the last X number of products or, or applications that you bought, you download an app, you get started.

And the only time you really interact with a brand is when something bad happens. So you're talking to customer service, so it's up to them to do a lot. They have to say to you, keep you happy, potentially upsell. You kind of, they're holding down the for, for the entire org. So it's a really interesting relationship and, and pipe of of dialogue that's happening there.

[00:10:55] Etie Hertz: So it's a huge, huge focus for us is, to basically empower the human right to make that job better. It's a super difficult job. You're not typing in probably language. English is not second, third, even language of, of a lot of agents around the world. Tons of pressure on them. So we are very focused on making sure the agents like it.

They can handle many conversations at the same time. We actually did a study at Harvard Business School, did a. On our agents and how they perform when they use us and they're empowered and they feel much happier and better than When they're happier, the, the end user is happier. So it does actually translate to the bottom line for the brand.

Making your agents happier and more effective will, will do wonders for, for your

[00:11:37] Etie Hertz: it's coming soon. Yeah, it's coming. Cool. We'll, we'll see about the timing, but

Yeah. Awesome. So let, let's talk about just sort of the rush to digitalization. I, I think that just the pandemic has really accelerated, I guess is the right word to use. There's also this thread of rehumanizing of the workforce, and I think that something like Lauras like helps in that process. Do you see some folks pushing away technology as a result of companies pushing more digital towards them?

Or do you think businesses need to be smarter around how they're engaging their customers through different mediums, kind, agents being one of them.

But it's probably not the case. It's right. It's doubtful that that tech will get there. When we talk to leaders of large CX orgs, they all say some semblance of this, which is, if in five or 10 years there's 10 companies in my space and everyone's. digitize everything. It's all bots. Then I'm gonna have a human in the loop because everybody wants a white glove service.

And then I'm gonna win, and then everyone else is gonna have to have a human in the loop. So you're basically gonna get to this world of human plus machine being the best outcome. And that's kind of the bet that we make here, is that's the, the best outcome for, for end users. So it's a, it's a whole like, process between where we are today and where that goes.

Mm-hmm. . But, I think it's people figuring out what channels they want to find. they, everyone says, I want to go to where my customers are. If they want, Chad, I have to provide chat. Yep. It's easier said than done. It's tough for a lot of folks that have been doing something the same for 15 years to switch and, but that's, that's the nature of the world we're, we're in right now, you have to kind of go to your customers in that way.

Yeah. So

So agencies used to have part of their day dealing with easy conversations, part of their day, dealing with difficult conversations. They're not inundated with difficult cuz the Easy's gone and that's just gonna keep going. So the agent's job's gonna keep getting harder and folks are gonna try to automate more of the easy stuff.

So the agents are really kind of, they, they really need tools to help them deal with this new world as their pressure keeps mounting. And the expectations of end users, especially through Covid, has gone through the. People think their brands owe them a lot and mm-hmm. , and they take that out oftentimes on agents.

So agents really have to step up. It's getting harder and harder for them. So it's a, it's a really interesting evolution.

Just, actually Forrester recently came out with some recent research around their customer experience. Index has fallen for the first time in, in several years. It's been pretty flat for a number of years, I'm sure. That churn has had something to do with it. You talked, you, you mentioned B2C versus B2B at the top of the show, for you, what do you think you, some of the differences are when your clients either B2C or B2B are using the, the technology, how does it differ for them, even from a benefit perspective?

perhaps.

We started off in b2c. We got inbounds from a lot of B2B companies, and it's actually turned out to be pretty, pretty phenomenal. There's a lot of challenges for B2B companies from a QA and CSAT perspective. A lot of B2B companies deal with more complicated problems. They need critical thinking. They need to sometimes just get so deep in the weeds.

They kind of skip the empathy part. Mm-hmm. , and then their quality suffers. And then their CX leaders, Oh my God, we have to fix this, and how do we do that? And to add to that, in B2B, they, generally speaking, people don't get a lot of survey results. Yeah. 15, 20, 20 5% maybe. B2B seems to get a lower amount of surveys, so they have.

They're like in the dark and they, and these leaders are really sophisticated and smart. They just want more visibility. so I didn't mention, we also have a, a back office insights tool for our, C-suite leaders. cool team leads, qa, and they basically get scored on a hundred percent of conversations That is helping a lot of B2B companies surface up issues.

Not just related to cx, but Hey, product. You said this thing came out, it was gonna fix this thing. I'm seeing trends here. It's not working. Mm-hmm. or marketing. You ran a campaign, by the way. I'm, we're seeing spikes around this. People are asking for these. And now these, these b2 B CX leaders, can actually bring these issues to the sweet suite and get ahead of it.

And instead of being re reactive, they're proactive and they can go to all different departments and kind of lay out what they're seeing in, in the text of their conversations. So it's been really fascinating.

Sharing ideas and learnings. I'm even seeing sometimes organizations have CX reporting the product. JP Morgan's a, a huge organization, actually their product organization actually has CX embedded into the organization. Sometimes I'm even seeing the inverse where you have like a chief experience officer and now owns product too.

So it's kind of cool to see that evolution and things start, those insights starting to come together. Customer experience insights are being embedded into product teams as led to better user stories, large technical debt, et cetera, et cetera. It's pretty cool to see that evolution. I hope it, it continues.

Everything they're thinking about how valuable those conversations are. It's your customer's telling you what they think about your company or your product, about your service. It's incredibly valuable if you can use that to your benefit. And that's kind of where this is all going.

That I think that there are a lot of organizations, unfortunately, that are not looking at it and not digitizing those conversations and, and mining them for, for. I think that's changing more and more. I've seen the tide shift in the last, let's say 12 to 18 months, but I think that part of that was sort of, the technology being expensive, but I think that's obviously evolving in a major way as well.

it's table stakes today. Oh, for sure. I mean, it absolutely is. It's, and it's a game changer in your business too, for sure. Eta, what's on the horizon in this space for you when you think about. this sort of real time understanding of what's happening in the, in the conversation, surfacing insights, where do you think it's gonna go next?

[00:19:04] Etie Hertz: So if you think about the ideal experience for the end user of a brand. They're probably within, I don't know how many years they're gonna inbound to a company and they're gonna basically vacillate between a bot and a human, but they won't know the difference.

So Bill will inbound, he'll get, he'll be asked some questions, maybe some mundane tasks. If I'm, the agent will be done for me while I focus on using my judgment and my reason to get you to the best place possible. So for Bill, he'll have the best experience ever, but he's not gonna be talking to a bot.

He's talking to, as far as he knows a human, the entire. And on the other side of the screen, there are gonna be a lot of things happening that automate the really mundane things for the agent. Mm-hmm. and letting the agents spend their time and their effort really on using their judgment, and letting the, the machines sift through large amounts of data so the humans don't have to do that anymore.

Say we're working

Right. Like I have to jump between, I have to make sure this, and that's just gonna get better and better.

So totally. It's about how do you have that conversation on a human to human level. I love the test analogy. But how do you just have a conversation on a human to human level and then just, leverage the technology to do the heavy lifting for you as a, as a person, but being able to connect in a much deeper way with the other person on the other line.

And I'm, I'm really like steeped in Metaverse right now and just researching it, like how cool, you know. Would that also be sort of in that environment where you have the agent kind of avatar that salesperson avatar? Engaging with the customer and not worrying about sort of doing 50 different things around them.

Totally. In a, in a, in a digitally immersive environment too.

They can line up a bunch of agents to try one version and a bunch of agents to try another and see what works. Cool. cause we, we heard even a year ago, we heard from folks, my team is grown to hundreds or thousands of people. They're everywhere. I have no idea what anyone's doing. I'm trying to get qa, I'm trying to get a score.

I can't feel it out. And in such a short amount of time, we can basically say like, this policy is doing X, Y, and Z for you. This policy is not, and you can just get better and better and keep iterating, getting smarter in real time. It's pretty,

I think that so many companies. Really invest a lot of money in qa. So if you can automate that process or automate as much as possible, it's a huge cost to serve win, for your organization. And when I was at Freddie Mac, we, we were using something different for the QA piece, but. we automated, we had eight people just doing UA listening to like 2% of the calls coming in.

Ah, right. And then you automate it and you're listening to a hu in theory you're listening, quote, unquote, to a hundred percent of calls. Right. And then say, Okay, well let's get these people on the phones, or let's, let's find what other skills that, they wanna hone and repurpose them in an organization.

It's a huge benefit from a contact center perspective. Be able to leverage the technology for that. I, I've started a process here in the show where I ask the previous guest, To ask a question of the next guest, So I've got a question from you. My previous guest is actually used to head up customer experience for the entire retail, organization for Chase Bank.

Guy by the name of Mar Brown, mentor to me, amazing individual. He's writing a book on customer obsession, actually former Amazon. And, he wanted to, his question to you is, Does your company have one policy that makes your customers or competitors make them do a double take? Because it's so favorable to your customer, your direct, your client.

So, and you may not, that's okay, but it, Yes sir. The way you guys operate. Does it have customer or your clients come to me like, Wow, that that has never happened to me as a customer. I love that you guys are doing.

We get CX leaders tell us all the time, you pitch us, you tell us what your co, what your product's gonna do. And I, I kind of understand it, and then I see an agent use it and after three clicks I'm like, Oh my God, I can't believe it does that . but I, I guess from an internal, standpoint, policy wise, for us as a business, I think our, our CX team is absolutely above and beyond anything that kind of exists in this space.

Folks come to us and they say like, AI is this thing and I know I need to use it, but what does that mean for me? Mm-hmm. and just us and our data team as well, spending the time to kind of show them what's possible. We always start off in one lane and then they go, Oh my God, can you do 2, 3, 4, 5 for me as well?

And that's really a testament to our CX team, educating them, working with them. Really being building partnerships. People look to us like an AI partner for them. and that's very much what we wanna do. It's making, it's beneficial for both sides, but it's, it's pretty unique moment in time for the space and the product that we're building.

so we're very lucky that we have such a strong

team.

[00:24:45] Etie Hertz: So I guess I would ask the biggest struggle they've encountered building their business that they've learned from. So the, the one mistake they, they won't let themselves make again in their life.

I love hearing about, about those kinds of painful lessons that people take with them.

Where do you go for inspir?

You feel like you don't know anything ever. But I, the first place I guess my mind goes obviously is, to my kids. I have three little kids and every, we just talked about it before we started taping. We had a big sports weekend this weekend. But every day they do something that just odds you and this little thing that they appreciate, that you stopped and you probably take for granted now.

And you're like, Life is too important. That is super. That's a really cool moment. I gotta remember that. That's, that's what matters. And the rest is take it or leave it. So I think I would say, my kids every day gimme inspiration to, to push.

I've got three little ones as well, and I love talk. Well, at least for the nine and the seven year old, the four and a half year old isn't there yet. But I love asking them questions around what they think different products or things will look like, and being the future . And like the answers they come up with are just like, so off the wall and amazing.

Just creative, we talk about planes and travel and cars and, different products around the house. Like, or, whenever, once in a while I'll be like, We think a toaster's gonna be in the future. Like, are you using these things? Right? And then like you see, like the wheels start turning on these kids and they're like, No, and it's gonna be this, it's just like this amazing thing.

And then the seven year old jumps in. It's pretty cool to. It's pretty, it inspires me a ton.

[00:26:46] Bill Staikos: smash it and they've, you start hitting it it was like high school kids or college kids. Actually, I've seen one of those.

Yeah. We're in a completely different time. Totally. Well, e eai, this has been awesome. I really appreciate you coming on the show and the, giving us a little bit of your valuable time talking about Laura. I think what you guys are doing is really just amazing in this space. And I, I hope, if for our listeners out there, go check out the company, check out the technology that they're putting out there, I think it's really making a difference and an impact, personally and I just being in, in the customer experience space for 20 years, like I've seen firsthand how this technology can really be a game changer for organizations.

So love what you guys are doing and yeah, I'm excited to see your, you and your company's success. And maybe at some point we'll have you back on the show at. Awesome. I can't thank

[00:27:32] Bill Staikos: Awesome. All right everybody, another great show. Eat Die Hertz from lauras.ai.

go check them out if you're not familiar. We'll talk to you next week. We're out. Talk to you soon

Until next time, we're out.