EP 53: From Enquiry to Sale (on Autopilot): Ryan Langford’s Bot Blueprint for Online Customer Service
Description:
What if your website had a team member that never clocked off, never missed a message, and actually knew your business better than your staff? In this episode, Chantal Gerardy chats with Ryan Langford, founder of SmartChat AI, about how he built a customer service solution that’s shaking up the way small businesses communicate, convert, and scale.
Tune in to discover:
- The real reason Ryan created SmartChat AI (and how it saved his sanity)
- Why AI bots are no longer optional for modern businesses
- How SmartChat handles customer questions better than humans
- Common mistakes people make with AI (and how to avoid them)
- What every Aussie business owner should know before dismissing AI tools
💡 Whether you’re AI-curious or all-in, this episode will get you thinking about your tech stack differently.
👉 Visit smartchatai.io to explore Ryan’s platform, now with a FREE plan!
Transcript:
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Let’s do this.
Hey, this is Chantal Gerardy from The Meaningful Marketing Podcast, and today we are here with Ryan Langford from SmartChat AI, and we are gonna be talking about the AI agent for customer service and sales. Thanks so much for being here today, Ryan.
Yes, thanks for having me.
Awesome. So tell us a little bit about how you ended up developing this AI thing.
AI is all big right now, but how did you specifically go down the path of going, hey. This is what I wanna develop.
Yeah. Yeah. So let me just start rewind a little bit. I’ve been in business for about 18 years and back 15 years ago, we had, in our business, we used to own our Telstra shops and it was very complex.
In the amount of services that we had to offer customers and Telstra themselves were very poor at their systems and systemization and their data collection. So a group of business owners, a group of us, got together and we started looking at different applications that could help solve our problems that we’re facing internally with our businesses.
And so we got really good at connecting third party applications together, specific applications like Trello for project management. And creating systems for our staff to follow, which made it much, much easier for our staff who, in the young twenties to try and work out the complexities of Telstra.
Their systems were very clunky and chunky, like most enterprise businesses, and so we just really needed to be very streamlined in how we. Served our customers. And so from doing that from the past 15 years, when AI came out, I could really see that it was gonna be a game changer in what it was able to do.
So moving forward, oh, I should mention too that when we’re in that business, we actually developed some of our own software. We connected up a hundred individual stores across the country, and we all benchmarked our data collectively together, and we also created, like I said, all these other systems. Then fast forward to now I in a.
Another business called Biku Furniture and Homewares. It’s also a complex business that seem to be attracted to those types of businesses. And when I say complex, meaning it’s omnichannel like I have to deal with online. We have three and a half thousand products on the website. I have a large showroom, about 700 square meters.
And because we’re in furniture and homewares, we’re not just selling like one little suite of products. We have over 1500 different skews at one given time that are on the showroom floor. And this creates complexity with customers. They want to interact with our business. And so when AI came out. I could just see with the large language models and how it’s able to process vast amounts of data, that it would be able to help my customers with those quick questions, especially online.
So in a retail business, and for anyone that’s got a product business, they would know this too well. Even, in your style business, you, you’re getting hit from so many different places online. So we have customers that visiting our website, we have contact US forms on our website, we have all the social media channels where people are commenting and asking questions and sending messages through, and so it’s a pain in the ass.
To keep on top of all of that, we’ve gotta log into five or six different platforms that’s not counting your emails and phone calls that you gotta deal with, and we’re not doing it very well. We’re doing a shit job at it, at replying and keeping on top of all these things. We’re getting too distracted with customers walking in or interior design.
So that’s basically where the thought come from. And for a small business, we couldn’t afford to really build a decent online chatbot. We knew we had people visiting the website. We have over a hundred people a day, but we didn’t have anyone there to talk to them. And to build that, would’ve cost upwards of a hundred thousand dollars and maintenance of about 20 to 30 grand a month, a year.
Sorry. That to maintain a decent sized bot that these enterprise businesses had on their websites, and I’m sure you’ve used some. You know the, what I call the bad bots before where you jump on and it’s only got predefined questions. You get predefined answers that do absolutely nothing. They’re a waste of time.
Yeah. And so I was really built SmartChat AI to solve my own problem in the business, which was to one handle customer inquiries online immediately and to unify it into one inbox. So it’s just one thing we log into. That we can see the full conversational history of what customers are being asking for that we just didn’t have before.
To me, having a website, without having a digital bot on there is just like having a retail shop with having no staff in it.
Yeah. I love that. That’s so good. And I can certainly see how that would be meaningful because it’s meaningful for you as the business owner. ’cause it’s saving you time and money and like you said, you can log into one specific place and get all the data and information.
And not only that, but you’d be able to survey all that stuff as well. Like you’re getting all that customer feedback. It would be a great source of knowledge as well to be able to have that data. But then it’s also meaningful for the clients because it sounds like the bot is well-trained and has. A little lot more connection is a able to actually answer those questions.
So it’s helping people online be able to get their answers sooner.
Yeah, absolutely. The main thing is the way to think about it. ’cause I talk very technical a lot of the times when people get lost or bored in what I’m saying. So hopefully you don’t fall asleep while we’re doing this. But the best way for me to explain to someone, it’s like having, most people have used chat, GPT, so it’s like having chat GPT.
For your website, trained on your business. That’s the best way to say it. It’s specifically trained on my entire website, I have over 1100 individual links, which are individual product pages that, have extensive amount of information on each one of those products. And the AI bot actually.
Retains information and able to answer the questions better than my actual employees can. It’s hard for anyone to try and retain all of that information about all the products, so now I find it’s quite easy and my customers now are able to get instant answers. Everyone’s chasing that instant gratification.
They don’t wanna be waiting, and my phone doesn’t ring anywhere near as much now for those basic frequently asked questions. You don’t wanna go on a website and be bouncing around from page to page trying to find an answer, right? Yeah. You just want the answer instantly. And this is what it does and it sounds and feels like a human talking to.
So I’m curious to know, is it lead capturing as well? So you’re capturing like their mobile number and email address as well. Is there specific. Time or in the process that would happen?
Yeah, that’s a really good question. So yeah, we’ve got a little form that pops up when you, when the chat first initiates where it asks for their name, their phone number, and email in case it needs human support.
And we’re just in the middle of developing now to make that more dynamic. So that way it will automatically bring that form up based on just natural conversation flow. So it might say. I’m not really sure about the answer on that. I might get someone and then have the form automatically pop up where you might’ve been chatting to it for a couple of minutes.
Love
that. Yeah, so you cut you, you were definitely considering the customer’s journey, like the buyer’s persona of, when you said dynamic. It’s actually looking at where is the right time for things to happen in that so that it feels more organic and feels more authentic.
Yeah. Most of them just pop up immediately.
We capture that information or the old ones just ask for that information. You’ve gotta wait for a human to get back to you. So we really wanted to behave like a human and have human intelligence into it. So we really are focused on it behaving. As organically as possible when having a normal conversation.
If you’re talking to me and I needed to ask one of the staff members the questions, I could go and get that, get your information and go speak to them. At any time. We want our bot to effectively do the same thing, and that’ll increase too with promotions and things like that. We really want to be dynamic and that’s what we’re really building in the system.
So would you say that it works better in certain industries or in all industries? What are your thoughts?
I would look anyone, for me, it’s professional to have a bot on your website. So for me, I think every single website should have a bot. We are actually just about to launch in the next day or two, or free version.
So every single person can actually get our AI bot and put it on the website. Even if you have a small. Template style business, so you might be a service-based business. Where I’m really gonna be tailoring it is gonna be into those omni-channel businesses, so retail B2B, anything along those lines, because that’s where you have.
I think more complexities into that. So we’re gonna be tailoring a lot more down to that. Things like automatic returns, we’re also gonna be putting into the bot where we’ll actually be able to visually show you images. So an example would be, I’ll have a client says, look, I’m looking for a particular style of dining table.
Okay. And they could say that, but it’ll come up and actually show the photos. Of the dining tables that we sell as a business to make suggestions even based on their style. So the real big advantage with the AI is it has the ability to, we have a kind of a hybrid approach. It’s trained on my business, but I also allow it in the custom instructions in the backend, which is where we give a basic outline of what it’s allowed to do and what it’s not allowed to do.
I allow it to answer any design questions. Based on the Australian market. Therefore, if you say how do I style my sofa? How should I place my rug? It can use its own knowledge base to actually help answer those questions while then making recommendations on products that I’m also selling.
Love it.
Can I have a boyfriend? That’s ai. Yeah. Yeah. I’ll just customize him. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so to,
To answer your question, look, it’s good for all businesses, right? We are tailoring it for all and we’ve got industry specific things on there. I. But yet we are, we’re heavily focused on those complexities that some of the more complex omnichannel businesses have to face day to day.
Especially when you’re a small business, you’ve got a small team that you’re not necessarily got the funds to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on creating these programs. And AI now is making everything so cheap, so you know, everyone really should be getting on it and investigating these type of tools to help reduce their support costs.
And. Increase their sales
so what would you say to people who are reluctant to get into ai? Because like for example, I remember when Facebook launched and I was, I became a Facebook strategist and I was specializing in Facebook and everyone said to me, oh, Facebook’s never gonna last. I don’t even have a Facebook account.
I’m never gonna go into Facebook. And now I wish I bought shares in Facebook.
I think that’s just human nature, right? So I think that’s just gonna be a common problem that’s gonna be ongoing. People are afraid of something they don’t know. There’s not like a bunch of people that even I know that are extremely excited about software, right?
Like I love software because of the problem it solves for the business, right? You would be the same with your business, the things that it solves, especially with systemizing and automating. That takes a lot of legwork out. I think you’re just naturally gonna see. People are slowly gonna adopt it.
And I find in conversations now, it’s it, first of all, I’ll just say AI is extremely amazing and powerful for what it can do. But the expectation of what people want AI to do already is crazy. We’re speaking to a lot of people and they say can it do this? Can it do this? And people are getting very creative in, in what they’d like it to be able to do.
And it’s not quite there yet. So my advice would be. Don’t ignore it would be number one. I’m sure everyone that’s listening to this has played with chat GPT, but I find people play with it and stop using it. Yeah, that’s from a lack of understanding of how to talk to it, you gotta talk to it like a human.
You really got to give it a persona. And so I want you to act like this. That could be a business coach to help you with something. It could be to act as a lawyer, and it doesn’t mean that it’s gonna be the same as a human, but at least you can get some information without having to go on. Ask someone or do something, and when you understand how to talk to it and get those personas, then it has the ability to do a lot of tasks or at least help you in the right direction with you using your own brain.
Don’t just listen to everything it says. You want to collaborate with it, but to get to where you wanna be.
I always say, you’ve gotta put the human intelligence into the artificial intelligence. Yeah. And then you still have to put the human intelligence back into it before you do anything else. You have to check it.
You can’t just leave it. I don’t know if you saw it yesterday, but ChatGPT was on the blitz yesterday. Yeah. It was duplicating content all day. It was just duplicating the same thing three or four times, no matter how much you try to actually change it. And if you didn’t actually read it, if you didn’t actually check it.
You could completely like, yeah, you could screw your whole business seriously. Like you can’t just trust it. You’ve gotta actually, use it responsibly.
Yeah. It’s not something you should be using autonomously. It really does need human interaction. So it’s artificial intelligence, but it’s trained on human intelligence.
That’s number one. Humans make mistakes. This is software. You can still make mistakes, so you never want to just take exactly everything it says. While it doesn’t make many mistakes these days, it’s still with updates and development, there’s gonna be issues. You really just need to make sure, while it’s saving you a lot of time, you can get a lot more tasks done and it can point you in the right direction a lot quicker, that you really gotta spend the time going through it, making sure you’re aligned with what you want to do, making sure it’s exploring those ideas correctly.
And so you gotta treat it like an employee. If you’re gonna give the employee a task, what information are you giving that employee? To perform that task correctly for you the least, the less information you give it, the crappier the responses are gonna be. The more information you give it, the better it’s gonna respond, and that’s how you should be.
So if you’re trying to work out a marketing plan or something along those lines, you can’t just expect it just to give you an instant answer and all of a sudden you’re gonna have this billion dollar business the next day because of what ChatGPT said. You’ve really gotta work with it like you would with the marketing manager that you would hire.
And so I would just, yeah, advise everyone to take their time with it, use it, and really sit there and explore and just have patience with it. People get frustrated very quickly with software and when it doesn’t do something they want, they get frustrated and they just don’t want to use it anymore.
Unfortunately with software, you do have to take your time and generally the answers on the screen if you’re having any issues. So I just would say slow it down, speak to it as much as you can. The more that you talk to it, more that you interact with it, it does have a memory. The more I can learn about the business, the better the outcomes that you’re gonna get.
Yeah, absolutely love that. And I think at the end of the days, those that aren’t going to adopt new things in their business, they’re the ones that are gonna get left behind. Yep. So they’re the ones who are gonna end up going outta business because all the expenses are gonna be so much because they’ve now had to put on, a customer service team versus, for example, your AR bot.
So therefore, now you know their profit’s gonna go down. So at the end of the day, whoever does it best gets the customer. So if you’re gonna use your bots and you’re gonna customize it, you’re gonna train it well and it gets good results and your customers enjoy working with it, and you’re constantly looking at how you can improve it.
It’s gonna work really well for your business and people are gonna go, you know what? That was so effortless and simple. I’m gonna go back. I’m gonna work with that business. They’re not even gonna look at price.
Yeah, absolutely. And just when you’re touching on costs there, right? Every single person right now in Australia, their costs have gone up dramatically.
Just electricity, you’re up 20, 30% to what it was, a couple of years ago. So rents have gone up, wages have gone up, everything, insurance, literally everything that you need to live at home personally and in your business has gone up. So I think you can see some of the trends that you see over in the US where they’re really getting down to.
Running on skeleton staff and then using other tools to make sure that they’re still able to service their customers better. It’s about being lean now, I think, in business, and it’s more important now than ever to start exploring applications and software that is much cheaper than a person to help your business grow.
You just have to be as lean as possible. Right now, Australia’s still in a lot of trouble. There’s still more businesses going insolvent than any other time in history in Australia. So you have to look for these things to try and make yourself lean until the market turns back around and these interest rates come down and hopefully someone actually gets the cost of living down, which.
I dunno if it’ll happen or not, but you, I wouldn’t just leave it all in the government’s hands. That’s what I’m saying. There are things that
you can do, you can be, take responsible things and anything new is gonna be challenging. So learning a new software, you getting a new team member, whatever it is, inside business learning, anything new is challenging.
But when you gets to the other side, that’s when it actually starts to be, more profitable. That’s when it actually starts to be more effortless.
Yeah. Like where do you wanna put your funds now in business? And look, a lot of people aren’t gonna what I’ve just said there because it’s all talking about using software and reducing costs, which effectively means you’re reducing people.
The industry is expected to actually increase. More jobs than it’s actually gonna take away. That’s what they’re projecting. That’s all hearsay. But there’s been many examples where we thought that people are gonna lose their jobs. Think of factory workers where robotics have come into and they’ve automated things, but other jobs are still being created out of it.
You’ve gotta do what’s right for your business. And yes, you’ve gotta look after your employees. They’re part of your business. They are your business. That’s what keeps your business going. That’s what keeps your food on your table. But you’ve, you’ve also gotta protect them. To make sure that you’re surviving and you need to be looking at these tools to become more efficient and to have higher output.
I think a lot of people aren’t talking about the output that now you can do with ai. I can get so much more work done much quicker, so therefore my output is much higher. So really just go out and explore some of these applications. Don’t buy any yearly plans. Try and do free trials where you can, so you can test it and see if you’re actually going to get.
The outcome that you’re after.
Perfect. Awesome. So how can people connect with you?
They can go to www.smartchatai.io and then you can check out our plans there. Like I said, we’ve got a free plan that’s releasing in the next day. By the time you guys listen to it, it will be out. So go on there, chuck it on.
If you’ve got any questions, just talk to my bot, put your details in and we’ll reach out to you. So
talk to my bot. So I like it. I like free bots and I cannot lie. That’s right. Thanks so much, Ryan, for joining us today. This is another episode of the Meaningful Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Chantal Gerardy, and if you haven’t already, please make sure that you rate, comment, and like Thanks so much.
See ya. Thanks for listening in. Meaningful Marketing is all about you making your marketing meaningful. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, please hit that subscribe button. But subscribing means that you won’t miss out on future episodes. All about marketing and motivation. Stay inspired, stay focused, and make your marketing meaningful.