The Human Side of Ai in Automotive BDC: Strolid's People Centric Approach

Are you ready to discover the fascinating intersection of artificial intelligence and customer service in the automotive industry? Buckle up, because our special guest, Thomas Howe, CTO at Strolid, joins us on this enlightening episode.  We explore the impact of over-automation in customer service, shining a spotlight on the indispensable role of human empathy. We also delve into the roles of CRM and IVR systems, emphasizing the significance of clean data in effective business management. All the while, we caution against the potential pitfalls of an over-reliance on AI.

In a world increasingly driven by automation, merging AI with human automotive BDC agents can dramatically enhance customer communication. Our experiences at Strolid are a testament to this, as AI has notably amplified our human automotive BDC agents' performance. We walk you through our process, underlining the importance of using scripts as flexible guidelines rather than rigid rules, and the need for well-trained agents. Remembering customer conversations is a crucial aspect we touch upon, underscoring AI's potential to capture interactions, enhancing customer relationships and personalization.

We also discuss the revolutionizing role of AI in capturing customer data, especially in the automotive industry. We introduce vCon, our groundbreaking technology that offers a comprehensive view of customer interactions. Discussing how it aids in transcribing and summarizing customer calls, we delve into AI-based dialer CRM integration in the automotive industry – a key factor in improving efficiency and customer experience. Lastly, we tackle the hot topic of data security and the promising vCon standard that aims to tackle deep fakes and privacy concerns. So, tune in for a riveting conversation that marries AI, customer service, and the automotive industry into one cohesive narrative.

Transcript

Shaun: 0:07

Good morning, good afternoon or good evening, and thanks for tuning in to the Dealer Insights podcast, where we go under the hood, bumper to bumper and just about everywhere in between, discussing topics important to dealers of all types and sizes. Your time is valuable, so thanks for riding along for this episode of Dealer Insights. Welcome back to Dealer Insights. Wow, we got a great one today. You guys are going to love this, because we are welcoming someone who has not been on the podcast yet, and that would be Thomas Howe, the CTO at Strollard. Welcome, Thomas, how are you?

Thomas: 0:43

I'm great Thanks for welcoming me. I'm happy to be here.

Shaun: 0:47

It's going to be a great episode. Vinny, how are you doing?

Vinnie: 0:50

Fantastic. Thank you, Sean.

Shaun: 0:52

I love you guys. It's enthusiasm. It's like you guys are sort of the othisile out there in Massachusetts or East Coast land, wherever you guys are today.

Thomas: 1:01

Reserve Reserve people.

Shaun: 1:03

Yeah Well, listen for the audience, whether you're listening, whether you're watching or both. Today we're going to actually start to uncork a little bit more of things that we've teased in previous months around artificial intelligence, ai as it relates to the automotive industry. But we are looking at it from a perspective that is really one that focuses on customer service, what happens within BDC, what happens within lead handling and how the human empathy side of what happens in these conversations is so critical that we want to try to help not only educate the audience, especially our dealer audience, but also help you kind of set your mind at ease on some things and feel a little bit more empowered and knowledgeable about where things are going and where things are even right now and maybe how you should approach it. So, as the industry continues and it will never stop just evolving at a super fast pace, technology usually is going so much faster than any of our abilities to actually have a working knowledge of it. That's why we do what we do.

Shaun: 2:12

We want to try to make some of those things more simplified so that our dealers and our dealer friends can continue to just stay focused on what they are best at. So thanks for tuning in. The first thing that I really want to talk about with you guys, in kind of this AI-human interaction thing, is just kind of help the audience understand the problem, and I guess that you know. Thomas, maybe I'll ask you first was your mind just kind of elaborating a bit on how this overly automated customer service sector has led to really customers being a lot more dissatisfied?

Thomas: 2:49

Yeah for sure. So let's just talk about a little bit of the history really quickly. So for a long time in industry we've understood that automations and efficiency make the business run better but don't necessarily make people happier. And the best example from our past is probably IVR and, if you remember, interactive voice response for those phone menus when you would call a long time ago, these were the very first times in a customer service aspect where we added an automation instead of a person to help you, you know, as a customer, but I don't think many customers felt helped. It really was a time where people felt like they were being shunted off and not respected.

Thomas: 3:38

Press one for sales, two for blank. And I think one of the lessons we've learned there and we continue to learn is that when you replace a human with something technical, you've made it less human, and I think that's fundamental of life. And I think at Strollard we really understand and know that. And I think that's where we're making the same mistake again, in that we're very focused in on maybe, what the bottom line needs, but we're not focusing in on what the customers need. And I think one of the things that I think is more extra is we do a really good job of making sure that we understand we have a human business and that human business needs humans.

Shaun: 4:29

Almost sounds like there's a little bit of a buried leader. Are you saying that happy customers, well cared for customers actually have something to do with the bottom line of a business?

Thomas: 4:39

I think it's really clear that relationships are the core of any business and our customers and our customers and their customers. So yeah, absolutely right. The more human it is, the more real it is, the more real it is to the relationship all the way through.

Shaun: 4:54

Yeah, yeah, I think that's a great point To that.

Vinnie: 4:58

You know, when I first got into the car business, there's no such thing as a CRM, for example, and we thought that this technology would change our lives and it did help right. But it also created different jobs and different work TDS, menial work, click in buttons and tasks and all this other stuff to keep things in order, which human beings are great at. What human beings are great at is and hopefully this stays this way forever is building relationships with people, listening, empathizing, understanding the emotion of a purchase, and that's all stuff, in my opinion, that a robot can't do. To Chalmers' point, IVRs have been. We have special ways at straw of setting up IVRs for dealers because they don't work very well and a lot of them decided that. One of our comments to dealers is the best way to handle this is have a receptionist, because she can understand that Joe is off today and the system. Someone has to actually go in and input that information into the system to know that Joe's not here today, you know, and that customer's frantically looking for Joe and a system keeps putting them into his voicemail Things like that that just disrupt the.

Vinnie: 6:17

There's thousands of those types of examples and with CRM, you know it's the old saying shit in, shit out, right? I hate to use that word, but that's. Everyone uses that when they talk about CRM data, Because the CRM data is not clean and so it's hard to get a read on exactly what's happening. And you rely on these KPIs to run your business, and if you're not running things consistently, then that data isn't really giving you a true picture of what it is that you're trying to manage, and so there's a lot of examples of that. And just one last thing there's also a lot of examples of different tech that keeps getting dumped on dealers, and we're very empathetic with our dealers. It started with CRM, and then it went to like SEO and SEM, and then it went to social media and then it went to, you know, database management and and data mining and things like that.

Vinnie: 7:10

And then, it went to digital retailing and then it went to, I mean, so many different things getting thrown at these dealers and now, all of a sudden, it's AI and we're hearing a lot, of, a lot of conversations from our dealers about, you know, should I use AI? And it's like most of them don't know the difference between automations and AI. Neither did I until I met Thomas, who has educated me quite a bit over the last couple of years. But an automation can, you know, cause problems, just like an IVR can. Yeah, you guys, I think is AI is really just an automation.

Shaun: 7:44

Yeah, yeah, good good points you guys are sharing as we get just the wheels rolling on this thing. It makes me kind of leads me to some thoughts around. You know AI. I think most people that have done even just a little bit of research off the surface realized that artificial intelligence from a business purpose is capable of bringing a lot of efficiency into businesses. With what Strahla does you know there's a lot of, there's a necessity on the human side of it, because there you just mentioned the word empathy, right, the human side is where it still understands the history of that business that you were kind of just talking about, vinnie, and how things have evolved. Question for you guys would be so how are you guys working now in the AI world relative to your services to kind of address that balance of efficiency from artificial intelligence with empathy, which is clearly necessary for the type of work that you guys do?

Thomas: 8:49

Yeah, yeah. So so I think there are two things here that I want to point that, and the first thing I'm going to point that is some, although I kind of understood it, I think Mark Castleman, the, an old friend and who's in charge of IntelliGNITE, gave Vinnie and I some really good insight to AI and its use, and Mark told us and I think this is absolutely true that the biggest thing about AI is is it makes people scalable in ways in which they weren't otherwise scalable. And so like, just as an old school idea of that, you know, I can't dig a cellar alone. I'm a I'm this one person small shovel, but if I get a backhoe, I can go dig a. I can dig a cellar, and the backhoe made me scalable. I can do things that I couldn't possibly do because it's bigger than I am and it can right. It made me scalable. Ai makes a person's people scalable because it can look at a lot more than you can. Like I can give a book to a chat GPT and say, hey, chat GPT, what did the book say? And I couldn't read that book in 10 hours, but chat GPT can do it in 10 minutes and it makes me very, very scalable, and so that's the first fundamental I want to point out, which is AI makes you be able to really go through a lot more information, a lot more quickly, and that's one thing.

Thomas: 10:17

The other thing I want to talk about is empathy, and I think the biggest thing about empathy is it lets you in emotions. In general is emotion is tell you what's important, and, and so empathy allows you to understand what's important to your customer, important to your business, and that empathy, that understanding of what's important is, is really what the relationship is about. I know it's important to you, I can understand it, and so I'm going to and that's important to me, and that and so that empathy allows me to make the best choices for our customers, and those fast. The other part, empathy is a way of understanding what's important, but when I put these two ideas together scalable and important I think it really starts to understand how we use AI.

Thomas: 11:00

At straw it, and that is by using AI to see all of our customer conversations and all of our interactions, we can see problems that impact our customers lives, we can tell what's important, we can see a lot more things, and by able to by us being able to see a lot more things we're able to understand. Okay, what are the really important things that are making our customers lives harder, our dealers lives harder, so we can apply empathy at scale. The AI allows us to see a lot more. Therefore, we can attend to what needs to be important that empathy part. So, instead of using AI to not worry about it, we use AI to look at a lot more things so we can worry about more things. That makes sense.

Vinnie: 11:45

Yeah, and things that would be otherwise not examined right and otherwise forgotten and lost. Thomas shared a stat with me 10% of what happens in every business is actually written down. That means 90% of what happens in a business isn't written down. Well, ai can write it all down for you. You know, with our business it was a conversations and for years everybody was trying to buy call recording software and all that. And there's a lot of them and they're all doing different things now and experiment with AI as well, and some of them are good and so forth, but it's only one. You know how many people do you? We have 150,000 conversations coming through here a month. How can a woman be agreed through all of that that AI can't? Yeah, we also dump all of our dealers inventory into our system so we can look at all that. We get emails, we get texts, we get calls, and that's kind of what's unique about the software, I mean the technology that we've developed. Who's given us the ability to see all that? Yeah, that's right.

Shaun: 12:49

Were those some of the things that inspired or were there other things that inspired your decision to kind of work towards this integration with AI and humans? I mean, everybody that you know consumes this information and is interested in automotive BDC knows that people are the and have been the biggest thing that powers that. Right, you have to have them trained right, but it's a very people centric, heavy business and you know you guys are really the at the front and center of all of that thought leadership galore, really kind of out of straw it. What really was the inspiration? To say, you know what we can blend AI with what we're doing, versus just completely replacing people. Because you know, all of us have probably heard things like that even in recent years in our industry, where people like we've got a thing and now you won't have to worry about people. You guys are taking a different approach. What inspired it?

Thomas: 13:49

So I think Vinny and I have a great story. So I came to Strong about three years ago and this is my first role in an automotive company. My career has been a network of design and research. I'm a communications engineer and I design phone systems and radars and crap like that and when I came, I met Vinny before I came to straw it and we talked about joining and we talked about what made straw special.

Thomas: 14:13

What was the important part about straw it and it was just super clear was the people. It was the people we have and the people that that our customers have and the conversations between them, and we knew that the things that were not, you know, optional were our people, were sales organization, and so the relationship was not something we couldn't change. And what was so. What was interesting about our story was we didn't start with AI. When I got here, it was like the most important thing we have about the conversations with our customers, and so I dove in okay, that's a great idea, let's dive into that and start exploring that idea.

Thomas: 14:56

And what had happened just after a little bit of time looking at the problem was we had understood that the conversations that we had with our customers were all the real insight about what was the customer need, what, how the business was running, just the amount of data that was available to us to understand things was incredible, and that's when we started running into hey, you know what? This would be a really good thing to feed to a robot, and that's why we started calling it robot food. If we could give this to a robot and say, hey, robot, what does this mean? We could do these. We can understand its scale instead of understanding you know, just one by one. And so our decision to integrate AI with human agents actually was the human agents weren't optional, and so the AI for us was a way for us to help our customers, help our agents do a better job, and so the AI was more optional. The conversations and the customers were not optional.

Vinnie: 15:55

And if you look at like a script Sean we've talked about this in past episodes where there are people out there oh you know, I see people posting, oh, you don't want your people to be scripted. Well, the reason for scripts isn't to tell them what to say, it's to give them a guideline, a framework, an outline of how a call should go. But listening to hundreds of thousands of calls, probably at this point in my career, they don't always go right. So what do we need to train our people on and what do we train in our people on? At Strollard, we start with customer service and empathy.

Vinnie: 16:36

Customers and being can't possibly know what the wheelbase is on a Toyota Camry or a Toyota Tundra, like on every single model and if you do, you're spending way too much time studying all the specs and all that stuff can get put in a brochure, online on a magazine and things like that. What I want to hear from my people is a genuine interest in the customer and their willingness to help that customer with whatever challenges that they have. And now we can focus on that, as you know more with AI, and so we pick up sentiment and I'm proud to say 95% of the calls that I see in our sentiment channel say that our agents were helpful in trying to help the customer. You know, maybe even 98%. I mean, it's very rare that we have somebody that the customer is frustrated with. A lot of times the customer is frustrated with things like well, your price is wrong on the website compared to what it is on this other website, or you know that doesn't have photos, or it's not available. We have to break the news to them, things like that, and the dealer is going to get to see that work with us.

Vinnie: 17:38

But at the end of the day, the sentiment is really what I've always been after in terms of it's the core of what the future holds for human beings. If you lack that ability to communicate with people and customers, the AI can pick up on menial tasks and all the buttons and all the you know, tedious work. What it can't pick up on is that human to human interaction. I mean, at least if it does, I don't. You know it's scary really, to be honest with you. Yeah.

Shaun: 18:09

Well, just you know, listening to you guys share makes me almost think of my own journey on the digital side of this industry. I mean, I got into it when it was barely a stream, not a raging river. So from the digital side, my first entry point was 1999. You mentioned it, vinny, and I was there too. When the first CRM kind of hits the market or vertical, I understood like, okay, this is important because we had a new digital customer, a new internet customer. But fast forward to where we are today, or even fast forward to where, vinny, when you were like, hey, I built this company. You know, I'm doing my own thing now.

Shaun: 18:51

What Strollett is doing is so connected to the communication. Right, it is the communication back and forth between the dealership and the customer, and there's a lot of different ways. I mean we have buzzwords like Omni Channel, because there are so many different opportunities or communication channels to where you could find your way to a dealership. But what's fascinating to me and I think really, really smart I mean astute on your part, is that artificial intelligence for a while, but now it is at a level where you can greatly like, dramatically improve what is going on within these communication dynamics and nuances to be able to not just summarize what's being talked about. But, as you guys are talking about identifying sentiment and I don't want to, you know, let any lightening out of bottles as we work through this episode. But from my perspective of knowing the industry and knowing the challenge that dealers have had getting their arms around technology when it's like, can you simplify how we land a customer schedule and appointment with them and then let us work through the process of selling them a vehicle, selling them service you guys are now at a point where you can help the dealership by simplifying all of that, but it also is going to provide a better experience for their customers, which is great.

Shaun: 20:21

It's an interesting piece that I think that dealers really need to kind of focus in on that bottleneck that happens in the communication and, vinnie, both of you have probably heard me say this before there are probably more dealers that don't have marketing problems, although they keep saying, well, I need another lead provider or I need a better paid search provider, or I need a better SEO provider, and the reality is no, they just need better processes and what you guys literally have already been working on.

Shaun: 20:54

But now, as you go into this combination of efficiency, empathy, humans, ai you guys are going to blow you're already starting to, but you're going to blow the doors off of that. And if I'm a dealer, I'm like how can I not be listening to what you guys are doing? So that kind of leads me into kind of the next area where I want to talk about, where you guys see the collaboration of people, humans and AI working together. Kind of what are you guys already in that channel where there are some ways that you guys are starting, and could you share on some of that, maybe specific to how it will enhance the experience for the dealership's customers, or their experiences at least, with the dealership?

Thomas: 21:35

Yeah, let me take that one first. So I think the biggest change, the biggest thing that we're doing in that area and it's sort of shocking that it's so simple, yet it's so important and rare is what we're understanding is that if you want to have a relationship with somebody, in general you'll simply remember what they said last time. And so by having the conversations that we have with our customers and having them at our disposal the next time we talk to customers, the next time we interact with customers, we haven't forgotten what they said. And so in the short term it might be we were talking to a customer and we made them a promise, and so we can keep track of the promises, so we know we did it. But it's also the next time. The third or fourth time we talk with a customer, we might remember what they said the first, second and third time.

Thomas: 22:41

Now, at the shorthand we have in our engineering department is imagine going on a third date with a girl but not having any idea of what you said on the first two dates. Now that's awkward, and isn't calling a company after you've emailed them or texted them or talked to them last month and them having no idea what you said the last time. Isn't that roughly equivalent? Haven't you been forgotten as a person if they don't remember what they said to you last time? And I think we take these things as being as a granted, but we remind you of what Vinny said earlier in this podcast Only 10% of what happens in a business is written down. 90% is not, so how could you possibly have remembered what they said last time? They may not have talked to you, or maybe they didn't put the notes in right. There's all kinds of reasons why you couldn't remember. Ai allows us to really have a long term memory about what people said to us and what they care about, what we promised them and what happened, and that is fundamentally supportive of a relationship.

Vinnie: 23:43

Yeah, let me go back to what I said about scripting. Right, what is the problem with scripting? It's not personalized to that customer. And that's what a lot of people have a problem with. They think it's canned, and so I've always defended it and said well, no, you can add your own personality and you can be happy and you can make jokes and you can joke around with the customer, make them feel comfortable, make them feel warm and fuzzy.

Vinnie: 24:06

What this allows us to do, especially into the future, as we get more and more of our data into the conservative VKons, is personalized these conversations with the script in mind. So we have the structure. Now how do we personalize and say hey, sean, looks like you called us last week and you weren't able to come in. We able to come in this week, and that, to me, is the ultimate in combining a structured process and script with a personalization of the conversation. Now you have to hope you hire the right people that have empathy right, because unfortunately not everybody does, and we do an incredible job at recruiting, training. Sometimes we have to go through hundreds of people before we hire somebody here, because we want to make sure that they're people, friendly first. They're people, that's right. That's right.

Shaun: 25:04

Yeah, I mean, again, these are great, great points for our audience. And I just listening, I'm thinking not only is that instant on demand recall of the conversation they were talking about, thomas, they think super critical, but and again I'm not going to get the cart before the horse but I also know that you guys have mentioned a little bit on the sentiment. How awesome, just for anybody listening, that's on the dealer side, on the retail side. How awesome to think, okay, can we simplify and make it easier to have complete, immediate on demand recall of what we last said, not just what you ever said with them, because it's one thing to know hey, they did some business with us and we know when their birthday is or their wedding anniversary or whatever A lot of this important but often not well utilized information that gets collected on customers. But the last thing that they said with you could have been completely lost in the sauce, right? Not only can you guys have that available, you know the sentiment, right.

Shaun: 26:14

So it's I think it was Zig Ziglar that said you know he used the sentence. I did not say that he hit his wife and he said it's kind of not just what you're saying, but how you say it and sentiment analysis inside of the business that you guys offer dealers is massively important because just that sentence that I was giving as the example of Zig Ziglar, I did not say that he hit his wife, just the voice inflection, word by word. I did not say that he hit his wife, right, when you break down the complexity of you know sentiment. We've wanted that through social media for many years and then Hootsuite and some others started to play around with that, but it is at a different level now. So it's cool to hear that you guys are incorporating that into how you guys are collaborating these two worlds.

Vinnie: 27:05

I think it's important. Can I just mention one thing before you, thomas? On that I want to just be sure I'm clear on what I was saying. A lot of dealers are probably sitting there thinking well, I got a CRM that captures all this information. However, we have CRMs too, and it doesn't capture all the information. I can promise you that number one.

Vinnie: 27:25

Number two our ability to feed Thomas's tech that he developed the Vicon or Strahls tech, I should say too but feed that information directly to our agents when they're taking a phone call or making a phone call. Having it right at their fingertips is called what we're calling now co-pilot for our agents, like they have someone next to them feeding them, and that would be the AI right Feeding them the information. And that's something that's very clunky within a CRM because you got to go keep scrolling down, scrolling down, scrolling down, looking for all the conversations and a lot of left messages and all that kind of stuff, and we can hone in on what's actually being said and what the customer wants Promises and commitments. We've made right Sentiment. Maybe last time they spoke to us actually spoke to us, not just voicemails and emails that went back and forth, that never had any engagement and we can really get a good picture of what that conversation was all about prior to taking that call or text or email. Yeah, one second, yeah.

Vinnie: 28:32

The other thing just to point out too is one of the things that makes us really unique is that we're capturing. We now have integrations. While CRMs, dmss, phone systems, chat systems obviously leads in an outbound email and text replies. So a lot of systems out there that are doing reviews of calls and transcriptions, they're only doing it through one channel of communication, and what we know at Strollet is customers communicate in multiple channels. So we're able to now plug all those channels into the server and, because they're all captured in a V-con in one place, we can see all that data from that one customer and then treat it to the systems. It's really complex, but it's actually exciting. I'm excited that we're in front of all this at the moment. We're not experts yet.

Shaun: 29:32

We have a ways to go, but yeah, you're definitely logging more miles on the road, at least in this specific part of the vertical, than anybody else I know, which is, I think, really great.

Shaun: 29:45

A little bit of a piggyback there on some of the CRM-related information that you were sharing, vinny, and this is just a question for either or both of you, because my understanding has been that an automotive CRM, that all the attempts at artificial intelligence at least up until now and I don't know what any or all of them are doing right now, but I know that there have been a lot of, there's been a lot of effort around, well, and I think some of them call it AI, but there's always been this desire to have a heavy list of automation rules, as much sophistication as you can put within automation, which is not artificial intelligence.

Shaun: 30:28

And we've talked to Vinny you and I, after we did a whole episode on automation versus AI. But the traditional automotive CRMs have played around with some of that and still do have all kinds of different automated rules that you can set up, but are any of them to your knowledge? Are they doing these things around the AI side? Because, vinny, you said it like dealers might say well, I have a CRM, it does all these things, but not really. It does some things, but there's a big difference.

Vinnie: 30:54

I'll give you one example and then I'll let Thomas answer the rest of this. One example is we take a call Sean, right, yeah, and we're done with the call. Our system will allow our agents to take that conversation, or our system will take that conversation, transcribe it, summarize it and put it into the CRM so that the dealer can read the conversation in the CRM, because in every dealer will understand this, right now you have to rely on someone to type that information in and you're going to miss information in that in those notes, or they're going to be too brief or maybe too long. Like these are very concise summarizations that you can read, and then you'll also be able to not just read it, click on it and go listen to the call if you want to, which is really exciting.

Shaun: 31:40

Will it also assign any, like if there are action related items that belong to either the customer or the dealership, like hey, you also need to do these, because that's always a big thing for the dealers is, oh, I was supposed to do this, but we wrote down 10% and not 90%, like lots of businesses do that. So yeah, yeah.

Thomas: 32:00

You know, I think for me and this is me coming into the automotive market I'd say what we're seeing around today CRM's and the automations or AI that it seems really parallels what we've seen in the technology market time and time again. And I'll just use email for a second. So when we were coming up, email was something that you could get from AOL and you could send email to other people in AOL. But there was a time where you couldn't. All you could do is AOL. As the internet became more pervasive, you were able to send emails not only in your own team and company but between companies, and that was a big deal.

Thomas: 32:51

And the same sort of thing happened in the transportation market with container transport that in the 40s and 50s we had trucks and the trucks were just their own little truck and you can move the truck around, but you couldn't take the top of the truck and put it on the train and put that to the. That couldn't get to the coast and you couldn't put that container onto a ship and you couldn't go across the ocean. It wasn't interoperable. It was every little thing with its own little island, own little silo, own little stuff to do and the things that I really see which is different in the automotive market in terms of AI and automations, and how is this different?

Thomas: 33:27

And what's going on is this is a much more open, connected networking experience. So, for instance, something that we're able to do at Strollard and is common now in AI, but not necessarily automotive, is that if I wanted to summarize a conversation with AI and a modern view of it, I could pick any engine to do it. I could pick Google, I could pick open AI, I could pick my own to do it and I could send it to them saying please summarize it and give it back to me. It allows me to leverage what's happening in those industries without having to do it myself, and that living in the ecosystem of AI is something which is very unique to us. Living AI for your own little world is kind of the standard right now. In automotive. It's not necessarily how do I interoperate my automotive technology with everything else in AI, and that's really really what we're working on here.

Shaun: 34:31

Yeah, I love it. I know this because of conversations outside of the podcast that you guys are working on a lot of stuff, some of which we'll talk about today. Are you guys okay with talking about the dialer, so using an AI based dialer? So yeah, I'd love to know a little bit more. I think the audience would love to know how does that dialer prepare your reps, your agents, for calls? What kind of information does it provide? Share a little bit of that. I think the audience would love to hear about that.

Thomas: 35:03

Oh yeah, I got a lot of passion for it. We're in the design right now. So this is something our engineering team is working on and we're working hard on it and it's great. So the dialer that we have if you just step back for a second, we're a BDC. We make a lot of calls inbound, outbound. Our people sit in front of phones and do work. So just imagine the case where we have an inbound call, someone's calling us and we had no opportunity to prepare for who that person was. We don't know. The phone starts ringing.

Thomas: 35:35

So what we do at the dialer is, when the call starts or previous to the call, we take all the conversations we've had with that customer in the past. We take the information from the lead if it was around the lead we take the information from the dealership it was around the dealership and we basically give it to ChatGPT or some sort of generative AI and we say, okay, we're about to have this conversation. What do we need to know? I want to know who this person is, what we promised them. Is there anything that happened last time? Are there any specials at the store? Are they calling about a car that's not there? Is there something you need to know about that car. All those things can be done really almost instantaneously by a robot if they had the information.

Thomas: 36:22

So the first part of our work is now that we have the information. Can we arrange it, give it to the robot and say I'm about to have the conversation, help me. And that's the first part. And the second part up around the dialer, which is also very exciting is, instead of thinking of it in just like straw lids terms like our dialer, the information that the robots give us back we can then put in the dialer. Of course, we can also put it in other places in the system, so it's not very connected to the dialer. We could have had it on our mobile phone, on our Slack app. We can put that information into a CRM, we can put that information someplace different, and that's a great example of us working in the ecosystem, not just for ourselves. So that IQ about what I need to know to make a great conversation with the customer I could then express not only into our own systems but our dealer's systems as well.

Vinnie: 37:17

Just having, since COVID, you know, lots of change. We've had a lot of that. We had to adapt quite a bit and the dealers had to adapt quite a bit, and inventory changes and remote work and you know all this kind of crazy stuff that we've been exposed to, that we didn't four years ago, if you can believe that everything was going pretty smooth, and then all of a sudden, boom, our agents now have to have to have rules that they didn't have before, and prior to all this it was schedule and appointment, I believe. That car is available, when would you like to drive it? And now it's like, oh, don't schedule on this car because we won't have it for eight months, and all this other kind of stuff and all that kind of. All those rules and all that information is now being fed to our agents.

Vinnie: 38:08

When someone calls for one of our dealers to include things like how to pronounce the dealer's name, all right, I know that's not right, but the Kipsey isn't easy to pronounce. We have a dealer that wants ours to pronounce his name differently than what you would have. You know, imagine so. And then because people in that market know it that way, so it's like, if you don't, so just all kinds of crazy rules. Like, no one ever thinks about all this stuff, and the reason they don't think about it is because there's too much to think about the scalability part of AI, the scalability part of it. Yeah, it's amazing, right? Exactly.

Thomas: 38:48

If you're from Rhode Island and someone calls it Paw Tucket, you know they're not from Rhode Island.

Shaun: 38:55

Yeah, that's funny. The Northeast and the Northwest have some fun city and town names Right. Like you know, being a Northwest guy, you know when people are like have you ever been to Kwanalt or Kwanalti or Puyallup or Humphrey?

Thomas: 39:16

Right, yeah, it's so funny. So if you ever find yourself in a little state of Rhode Island, we call it Paw Tucket, there's a spit.

Shaun: 39:23

Paw Tucket. There you go, audience, Remember if you're in Rhode.

Thomas: 39:27

Island, you'll be able to be a native.

Vinnie: 39:31

There's a ton of them in Massachusetts. Hey roll is Haverhill, peabody is Peabody. You know what Chester or was Worcester Like it's just you would never, you couldn't, I mean yeah.

Thomas: 39:45

But it matters to the community, it matters to the relationship. You know, yeah, I'm in town. I'm actually someone who's, you know, connected to your community and that's important. That's an important part, because buying a car is a local issue.

Vinnie: 39:58

Not only is it important, but it's there's so much detail to improve on that experience for the customer and that personalization that it's really hard to train all that, even if you have, you know, people internally that you know not using any, you know outsource PC, there's just too much little detail that goes. You know, I always used to say with the car business like you, survive in the car business if you're a survivor, if you're able to deal with lots and lots of adversity and be able to handle it and overcome it. And I would say you know a majority of people in the world. They get frustrated in businesses like the car business because it's there's no consistency, there's no like simple route to doing the job and you know you got to learn on the fly and all that. And so AI helps with a lot of that.

Thomas: 40:48

They're natural entrepreneurs, which I love.

Shaun: 40:53

Yeah, there's the car businesses. I mean, it's a pillar of the economy, certainly in this country, and that puts a lot of pressure on those business leaders right to constantly be like innovating, staying on the bleeding edge, and sometimes you should, you know just what this geek learned was before he came in the car business, I didn't know exactly who in this town would be the entrepreneur.

Thomas: 41:18

Now I know they're probably running a car store.

Shaun: 41:23

It's wonderful, it's great, it's great stuff, yeah, so this is just.

Vinnie: 41:28

They got five businesses. They're running under one rooftop, and or four or five, yeah you're right and I had a respect for that for a long time, and it's hard right. So one of their taglines, sean, is how do we, how do we? You know Strolitz here to make your life easier, right.

Shaun: 41:46

Strong process, solid results, baby, I love that tagline.

Vinnie: 41:50

Strolitz. Sean came up with that tagline. That's what you love.

Shaun: 41:54

So this is a good segue, though right where we're at is for my next question for you guys. So what elements of customer service are you guys seeing that are most positively impacted by this human AI synergy?

Thomas: 42:14

So again, from my perspective and I'll let you know, Vinny, fill in I think the customer rescue, I think just the attuning yourself to the emotions and needs and wants of the customer are really the big things, because that really, I think makes a difference in our rates, our closing rates, our ability to help people get what they need, is the fact that we can, we're now really attuned to their anxieties, to their anger, to their excitement, to their. We see it all and just seeing people as emotional people instead of just people, I think is a huge thing, you get in sync with them substantially faster than before.

Thomas: 43:06

You don't trust people who feel differently than you. I mean, it's just a fundamental of the world. If you're really happy, you're really angry and the person next to you is really happy, you're like what's wrong with you? What, Right, I'm really afraid, but you're not. What's going on? We like to be very much in tune with people who understand and share our emotions.

Vinnie: 43:25

Yeah, and I would add to that, so it's 100% true. My whole career has been built around since the dawn of the internet. How do we bridge the gap between the customer online and at home to the dealer in a way, in a required process, right? So strong process, solid results. And so we pull that off and we are working hard to improve and enhance the customer experience. But we're also able now to provide the dealer with a lot of insights into what's actually happening in their business that they don't know.

Vinnie: 44:00

Yes, they can't listen to every single phone call or they're relying on one person. So if we're just showing them, just upset customers and let me just use an example the same problem keeps coming up five, six, seven, eight times in a row that maybe they wouldn't have seen without having a sentiment channel. Or we're doing inventory analysis with this, based on the demand, on the calls and leads we get. How many calls and leads are coming in for specific vehicles? Back in 2008, when we had the crash and in gas prices with the $5 a gallon, I used to tell third party leads providers don't give me any previous leads, I don't need them. But you know, dealer will look at like a 500 leads. How can we only schedule the 100 appointments? Well, 150 of them are for Prius and you don't have any as an example, and so data is in there to be able to tell our dealers hey, we want to help consult with you too, not just be. You know that. You know customer facing company that helps you with the customer experience. We also want to share data with you to help you run your business, because we know you Thomas just said it they're entrepreneurs.

Vinnie: 45:09

Their job is hard. We're trying to provide them with a level of support that they can go wow, this company is really, really helping me run my operation, and that's what I've always tried to do, and it was hard to do without the, with the limited technology when I worked for that big dealer group I used to work for Because they wouldn't invest in technology, but I knew the data was always there. So when Thomas and I had that conversation, when he came, it was yes, all that information is in the conversation. It did not only help the dealer, but to help the customer 100%.

Shaun: 45:41

Yeah, yeah. Have you guys come across challenges, as you've been encountering this? Well, really embarking on this integration of AI and the human side of things, are there challenges that have come up? Are you working through any of them? Anything that you could share there?

Thomas: 46:00

Yeah, yeah. So so I'm proud of Strollard, I'm proud of, I'm proud of how we do business, I'm proud of our customers and I'm proud of my engineering department, where you know we're we're, we're doing a great job. But the biggest challenge that we had to surmount, I think might be hidden from a lot, but it's why I'm most proud of so the what we're working on, and I said at the beginning I'm a network researcher. Part of my research is on how we take human conversations and give them to AI, which is inherently a dangerous process. It's inherently dangerous and there's all kinds of concern and rightly so of the interaction between AI and people, and they got the robots going to take over, et cetera, and so that particular challenge has been the thing that we've worked on the hardest at Strollard, and so one of the things you may or may not know about Strollard is we are the authors of a upcoming Internet standard.

Thomas: 47:07

If you've heard of RFCs, those are the things that determine how the Internet works, and if you've ever used email or the web or a domain name, all those things are are are Internet standards, and the Internet standard that we've developed was to protect and control the information that you give to AI, and so the biggest challenge that we've addressed is how do we, in a compliant, legally compliant way, take these customer conversations and then analyze them in a way in which it's safe and, again, compliant to the local laws? And so that is what we've worked on the hardest, and that name of the standard is called the B-Con. It stands for virtual conversation and it addresses things like deep fakes. It addresses things like customer privacy and data minimization and redaction. All of those, all of those things are the things that we had to surmount at Strollard so that we could use AI in a way in which was ethical and safe.

Vinnie: 48:16

Yeah, and I wouldn't you know if the dealers that are listed I would say listen to this podcast. I would say that that sounds really, you know, geeky and high tech. And maybe I try to simplify it because Thomas has been talking to me about this for three years and it took me a little while to really understand the importance of data security. And now we're seeing it in automotive. But the GDPR in Europe is, if a customer over in Europe calls and says I want you to destroy all my data, the company has to, and for that your data isn't just sitting in one place anymore. The B-Con gives it the option to have it all in one place, so it's easy to find and get rid of. That's just one big big thing. That's bigger and probably different verticals than it is in automotive at the moment. But automotive dealers, I think, are very sensitive to all this new privacy stuff. So I just want to I wanted to point that out.

Vinnie: 49:13

The reason we came up with this is because we have a patent on another product that we came up with first, and then Thomas realized that won't work unless there's a standard for conversational data. So he so Charlotte, you know helped fund it and support Thomas throughout all of it going to all these meetings in Europe and San Francisco and Philly and all that and now it's going to become a standard, which I know kind of sounds crazy coming from our little company, but it's pretty exciting. And that stand that B-Con, became okay. Now we need a place to store it. So Thomas and our unbelievable engineering team created the conserver to store it. Now we have all the data in one place. Then we had to get the API integrations with all the CRMs. We got that in place. We have the phone system connected into it and now we're able to pump that into transcription model software and sentiment software and then get all this data to come out into channels. Now we have all the data in one place and that's really the key to ever to reporting right.

Vinnie: 50:18

Anyone who runs a report and says, oh, this report doesn't look right, it's because it's bad data. But you know what this hit me like a year and a half ago, sean, our data isn't bad, it's real. It's what happened. You can't mess with it, that's right. You can't say it's the end of it, you don't. We're not relying on a person to type it in. Sure, now eventually, hopefully, we'll be able to get to the point where we don't need a person to actually press a button and click and wait for a task to come. It'll tell us when to call the customer. Yeah, it's based on the conversation, which is really, really. I know I'm going far out there, but you have to have all the data in one place first, and then it's going to be, I think, pretty game-changing and amazing what this is going to do for our business.

Shaun: 51:05

Okay, so you guys just I mean you littered the soil with amazing seeds here. So I want to dig in a little bit with this because, audience-wise, this V-Con, this is huge. Now I get this because I've been in this industry and I've been on the technical side, the internet side of it, for a long time. The Gramleach, bliley, the I mean Ringless Voice Mail was so cool but it also had infringement upon things. Dealers paid big fines. I mean I won't name dealer groups, but all of us would probably have recall of some dealers that have paid huge fines because of things that were not handled properly. There was no internet standard for them. So I know for some on the retail side it's like, oh, this is kind of technical geeky, but this is technical geeky on your behalf.

Shaun: 51:59

To take complex regulation, complex rules, the way that you have to handle information and making it easier, simplifying it for you in a way that's embedded in what I believe is probably one of the most important parts of the dealer business and that is how you're communicating with the customers by way of sentiment, of course, important collecting, having immediate on-demand recall of that.

Shaun: 52:26

But now what you're talking about, internet standards, this is huge for you guys, it's really, really big. No one's talking about this kind of thing. So I want to unpack that a little bit and probably even force you guys to be a bit redundant, because I think in an episode like this I have, I can already tell you I'm going to want to have you guys talk about this on upcoming episodes so we can unpack more, but during this episode I just want to go back again and have you guys kind of help us understand, let the audience understand and V-Con technology is an internet standard, this virtual conversation. This is and is going to play a big role, right, and how you guys enhance the way that customers are communicating. Just take me through that again on just how do you guys see it playing that role relative to that customer communication piece?

Thomas: 53:23

Well Vinny.

Vinnie: 53:24

Vinny. The thought I had, sean, when you were asking that question I'm sorry I was on mute was this we started our customer life cycle. I almost loved it because it was all the conversations, not just the BDC conversations. And I loved it because that's what a BDC was supposed to be in the first place is communicating and driving business into the dealership, whether it be from fresh leads or past customers, and reengaging at the right times and all that kind of stuff. But it all started, I used to say it all starts with a lead. It really all starts with your marketing or your past experience with the customer. That cycle where do you enter and exit that cycle is really really an interesting thought. Right, we could discuss that a long time, but let's just say it starts with a lead. That lead now isn't just a walk-in customer, like it was 30 years ago, or a phone up. They're sending in lead forms, they're chatting, they're texting and we're able to capture all of that information now in a Vicon. So most people know that a customer sends in a lead, we call it, we text it, we email it. Maybe they text us back, maybe they have a couple of text conversations. They say you know what can we talk? And then we get on a phone and we talk.

Vinnie: 54:43

All that is really really important information leading up to the sale. And I'm like, inherently a sales guy. You know my dad's a great sales person. I think some of it rubbed off he's much better than I am, but to me I always wanted to know all that information. I used to have a saying, like 20 years ago I wish a customer would walk into the showroom and give me a manual and say this is how you sell me a car. So back then you had to like kind of figure it all out and understand the customer and ask questions and listen and all that.

Vinnie: 55:12

And before you could kind of put it all together. And all that information that you're gathering throughout that whole process is critical to actually giving the customer the experience they deserve and need. And you can't do that if the BDC is handling and the customer comes in. No one's looking at that information, and so that's where the strong process comes in. But it starts with a lead. This is really what's in. That lead is, hopefully, conversation. There's a lot of leads, by the way, that we have no conversations with. That dealer should know about. Yeah, that we try and call, we try and call, we try to email, we try to text. But the ones we do have conversations on, I think every dealer should be paying attention to those.

Shaun: 55:54

Would I be oversimplifying to say that the V-Con is going to be a like, a connector between the actions of the humans and the ability for AI to analyze and log in?

Thomas: 56:10

Yeah, that's a good idea. In fact. Let me just give you another way of thinking about V-Cons, and maybe something that you already do today. So today, you know what a Word file is. We all use them, right, and so the Word file allows you to create a document, save it, bring it back and send it Right, so it allows you to.

Thomas: 56:34

That wasn't always true, by the way. The first word processors were big machines made by Wang Corporation and they were like this they're so to to lawyer companies. And you didn't. Once you wrote your legal brief, you didn't send it anywhere, and that's what Microsoft Word did was enable that. So the V-Con is often called a PDF for conversations. It's a file format.

Thomas: 56:56

Here is my conversation, I can use it, and that enables that exact sharing, and so, for instance, I can take a conversation and give it to a chat bot and say please write me a thank you letter based on this conversation, and that interaction allows us to leverage the AI ecosystem in a way which doesn't depend upon anyone else to do that.

Thomas: 57:21

So just imagine how much Getting back to the Word thing for a second when Google Docs made their system, they didn't have to spend any time trying to figure out how people should put their own documents in it. Just upload your Word document. It was already there. In the same way, the V-Con will enable a company to say I can do a marketing segmentation of your customers. Just give me your conversations and I've eliminated focus groups, I've eliminated all that expense simply by taking all your conversations and say I can now tell you what your customers are and what they care about because I have the conversations and it's the V-Con that allows me to take that and give it to a company that has that functionality without having to do it myself.

Shaun: 58:08

Yeah, that's very, very powerful. Okay, I got another question because you guys mentioned a few minutes back a conserver. I'd never heard of a conserver, so tell the audience a little bit about the conserver, how that system works in conjunction with the V-Con tech.

Thomas: 58:31

So the conserver is an application, it's a framework. It's a lot like a database for conversations, and so, just like you have a database for all the other data in your life, a conserver is a database for the conversations you had. And you might ask okay, why do you need a different kind of database? Won't my database work? And the answer for that is human conversations are a special form of data. They tend to be very difficult to work with. They can be very large. They're saved in analog form, that digital form, and so to be able to work with the video and audio requires a different level of technology than working with just text.

Thomas: 59:14

So that's one of the reasons why it has to be a separate thing. And so the conserver's job is simply to attach to all of our phone systems, all of our email systems, and then to create V-Cons from it every time a conversation happens. And then we take those conversations and then we either redact them, manage them, tag them, summarize them, transcribe them, and then, finally, the last step is we put them into existing data sources so we can use them with our existing tools. So all the things that we use to manage our conversations aren't specialized pieces of software, they're normal pieces of software. So when we want to bring a conversation to one of our agents, we use Slack. Slack did nothing to do with the conversation, but it's there we can use. We can leverage Slack without having to call Slack up and say, hey, support V-Cons. They don't have to do that, they already did it.

Vinnie: 1:00:09

Yeah, and Slack's an interesting. You know, thomas mentioned to me a couple of years ago that we were going to our agents. He envisioned that our agents would just work on a Slack. And I'm thinking, well, we got to be in the CRMs and I don't know how he's going to do that. But I get excited. I've always gotten excited at new ideas that push the limits to what I think is possible. And I hate being around people who tell me things aren't possible. You know, that's one of the great things about my relationship with Thomas is he tells me things are possible and I'm like, yes, let's go figure it out. You know, because one of the challenges where our businesses you know there's a lot of BDCs out there that work outside of the dealer CRM and I'm thinking, well, I was a GM of a store before. I wouldn't want that. I want it in front of me, where I can see it, and so we're now integrated with all these CRMs.

Vinnie: 1:01:04

And Slack gives our people the ability eventually that when that follow up call needs to be done, it can go right to their Slack channel and then feed right into the CRM and they can work out of one interface instead of others. And slack is a great communication channel. We have one on our service side for all our service dealers. We have we still have our sales. We don't have our sales deals dealers on it yet, but we have sentiment channels built in there. We have all kinds of great Communications coming in the night. It's all organized and I mean I have too many slack channels, but I'm obviously I just maybe I think there's a lot I don't need to begin.

Thomas: 1:01:44

Yeah, maybe she give it to your bottom. Tell you, yeah, he's.

Vinnie: 1:01:49

We also have a to channel that I forgot to mention. We have a reply channel. So it's a to channel and a reply channel. Our to channel is when a customer gets to the point where we can't answer their questions and we send it over to the dealer that we can examine all of those, because those are really hot customers, in my opinion. They want to buy something, they want more info, and then we have the reply channel, which is back and forth communication via email and text. That's all being fed into the conserver point of econ, which goes to the conserver, which goes to Little trivia conserver is the French verb to keep.

Vinnie: 1:02:25

I Thought it just my conversational server, thomas it does mean that too, but you know.

Shaun: 1:02:34

Then you just mentioned something I think is really critical and really important is, you know, I think, for dealers who are trying to figure out hey, you know, is a stroller right?

Shaun: 1:02:42

Is that a right service for us? I think a big point of concern I know because I've talked to dealers about this were Well, how could I trust that there'd be a communication channel to where, when they really need us right, they get nervous that well, can we really outsource this part of the business and you just, I don't want again, I don't want to bury really important leads. You Not only have a Process for that. You have now and you're building and expanding upon Technology to ensure that that isn't a point of concern for a dealer, like because for years that would be a point of concern for a dealer. I don't know if I can do that, and what you're basically saying is we already have solved that and we continue to evolve, making that a point when we don't ever want the dealer to worry about. Do we have a way to be in contact with you immediately, because we, you, you're the only one that's gonna be able to answer the question will really understand what you're doing.

Vinnie: 1:03:39

The car people really understand what you're saying and and it's why we built what we built. I, we are we lying to you if I told you every single one of our dealers response back to us quickly? But the ones that kick butt, they, they like, got it his info quick back, you know, and we're getting back the customer rapidly and it's like a great exchange and it's Josh and Josh's team's job to make sure, because I'm a hawk on the to channel, I go in there all the time and if this stuff sitting for an hour or two that we sent to the dealer and they're gonna pick up the phone and call Me that customers way, yeah, you know what I mean. Yeah, like that's all, that's all really important parts of the technology that. You're right, we built that without the V con consumer in mind, but it's now gonna take that to the net, to the next level.

Shaun: 1:04:28

That's right in reality at the dealer level, if, if you've communicated and you need us and it's like urgent, right, it's the bat phone, it's the, you know it's, it's the urgent communication channel and the dealership One wanted that. That was a point of concern and so that's being fulfilled. But they're the ones on their side. What dealer well, dealer principal, or what general manager who that was a point of concern brings you in and then they're not doing their side. They're gonna crack the whip and fix that process on their side really quick because they want to. They wouldn't even have the visibility that maybe their side might be broken or not. It's imperfect.

Thomas: 1:05:08

Yeah, yeah, and that's what I want to jump in on, because, you know, what we've also come to understand is by looking at all these conversations and reading them and understanding them. Oh, my god, there's so much more that that you're not seeing in your business. There's just so much to see that you never had a chance to see, and I would suspect that there would be a time where dealers would say I just can't afford not to see that, and just as much as they're afraid to not be able to get in communication with us, I'm telling you yours a lot of communication that you guys have messed up. It is insane and I think at some point I'm given the, the sensitivity of the data, because this, you know, the customer conversations are really, you know, and given the amount of insight and visibility and observability gives to your business, you just are gonna have to be driven into two things. One is that you're either gonna listen to your customers and pay attention or you not Mm-hmm, yeah, and everyone's gonna know which one.

Shaun: 1:06:07

You are right, it's really obvious, yeah information overload locks people up, locks businesses up, locks business Leaders up, where they're all of a sudden paralyzed and decisions aren't being made and they don't know what to do because there's too much information.

Vinnie: 1:06:24

You guys are basically it's not like much information. Sean is the trust of the information and that's why they like the. What we're doing is it's real information. It's what actually happened on the conversation. It's not made up.

Shaun: 1:06:38

It's not some well, the conversations and all the communication Create so much information, right, and you guys are literally making. Our next thing I wanted to ask about is because I'm guessing that Transcription around all of this conversational data is part of what you're doing, and I'm guessing that can be in multiple formats. This, you guys essentially you can boil it down to this is this as things get more complex, this very vital part of a dealer's business, you guys are simplifying, you are Making it secure, you are building things that will also protect them With all the sensitivity of this type of information. I mean, these are huge things, but Tell me a little bit about what is going on around the transcription of all that different formats relative to, kind of.

Vinnie: 1:07:29

V cons. And let me just touch on the trust of the data really quick though, because I've been around CRM a long time and pay plans are poison and some managers and general sales managers manage To a KPI and their people know it. So there are people fight to get there and sometimes cheat to get there. I hate to say it. Logging phone ups is a problem in car dealerships. 20% of car car dealerships log phone ups. We probably log 90%, but we're not perfect. Some people just won't give you their information on a phone call to log it, but the V con logs it.

Vinnie: 1:08:09

Right, it happened, whether you want to say it or not. The lead came in, it happened. The email went out or it didn't go out. The email came in or it didn't come in. And that's what I love about it, because that I can trust it now and I can make real decisions, not gut decisions. Nothing frustrates me more when one of my managers or directors or VPs even said to me I believe, I think, I feel I'm like guys, we have all this data, you don't need to think any, you don't need to believe. You need to feel like those. Those never turn out right when you're feeling or thinking or believing in what you think is going to happen, like digital, real retailing. Everyone thought it was gonna change the game and everyone was gonna buy cars online. It didn't, and I know that there were dealer groups out there had a fudge in those numbers. For Wall Street, for example, it's saying you know, 15 to 30 percent of our cars are being bought digitally. Not happening.

Shaun: 1:09:07

It's not. Corporations don't fudge numbers for Wall Street, do they say it is no?

Vinnie: 1:09:12

putting thrown anyone under the bus. I'm just saying that the reality of it is. You really want to know what's happening or do you want to pretend what's happening? Yeah?

Vinnie: 1:09:20

yeah and we've always been real about what we do. We can't possibly fake numbers. We get caught, man, our businesses junk, you know, our reputation is shot and sometimes I work against bad numbers. We're going to a dealer that they got these great numbers and we come in and we show them real numbers and they're like, oh, my old Guys were doing it better. It's like, oh, really, maybe they were.

Thomas: 1:09:44

Yeah like, yeah, and to jump it on the transcription stuff. Um, because I think that's a really important point and I touched on it before, I want to say it again. The thing that I think is really interesting about the approach that we're taking is, as an open thing in an open network and the, it makes a difference here, when we program the conserver to make the cons, we can choose which transcription engine we use. It's part of what we're able to do with the V comic and say we'd like to use open AI's. We have to use deep grams or you can choose which engine you want, and that's actually on every single kind of functionality. I could choose that guy's sentiment engine. I can use that guys Text-to-speech engine, I can use that guy's Transcription, and the ability to pick and choose the functionality that you apply to a V con Then makes you Make that V con way more valuable.

Thomas: 1:10:48

So, instead of just living in our system and living in strawwood, once the V con is created, you can give it to any AI and have it do stuff and stuff we even thought I get. Please make me a video of this conversation and and it's something that could be done yeah, and then make it as a training video.

Vinnie: 1:11:10

Yeah, that's where my head gets all messed up with all this. There's so many ideas Like what do you do first? That's why I'm not afraid of it. I don't think it's gonna take jobs, because someone has to give it the ideas and someone has to feed it the ideas and someone has to, you know, deal with the ups and downs, whether it worked or not, and all that kind of stuff.

Thomas: 1:11:29

So, yeah, our, our real innovation at strawwood wasn't in making new robots, but feeding robots the right kind of food, and the food was the conversations that we generate. That is really, at the end of the day, the thing that we did. That was kind of unique in the world, like we decided that that was really great food for the robots and we found a way of doing it.

Vinnie: 1:11:51

Yeah, we're kind of glad we didn't build robots, because now they're becoming cheap and free. I mean just PPT recently just came out with you can build your own virtual like receptionist to answer a phone call for you and Already got appointments and all this other stuff or chatbots and stuff like that. And there are companies out there that have a lot of money riding in their robot and it's like okay, you're gonna compete with these big giant companies, good luck. And I wouldn't. I'm not putting them down. I know it's probably hard work and they do do really good work, but like we decided, you know it's like the CRM, sean, we're not gonna build the CRM. It's a lot of work to build the CRM. We can just plug into them and like and it's locked in any of them, not just one of them. So that's kind of our approach.

Thomas: 1:12:40

Yeah, okay okay, it worked out like you work on this for two years. You're like, oh, the robots are coming. And then, when the robots came, yeah, they came. Whoa chat, gpt was a mind-blowing experience. Yeah, like I knew he was coming that quick.

Vinnie: 1:12:54

Oh yeah, thomas was talking about robot food for two years and I'm like, oh, I just don't get it.

Shaun: 1:12:59

And then all of a sudden chat GPT came up Like oh, yeah, I'm surprised we got this far on the episode and we are just Talking about chat GPT, which everyone's talking about chat GPT like crazy.

Shaun: 1:13:10

My guess is, and just in the interest of time, is Because I know you guys are integrating With. You know you're not using like a free version, right, you guys are actually integrated and kind of that, that partner level with chat GPT for analysis. So you know the the Vekon data, right is something that when you guys Integrate with a chat GPT, the analysis there is going to take you guys to this, what we've been talking about, like the depth of what's happening in the interaction with the customer and extracting all the really the most valuable insights, prioritized to bring efficiency, also remembering that these humans are keeping it empathetic on behalf of the dealership, right, which is huge. I Don't know if, because you guys are the experts here, if you guys want to share a little bit around, you know, in the integration of that, you know the conversational data, you know maybe even some of the feedback on the analysis of kind of what you're doing. They're kind of takeaways there.

Vinnie: 1:14:14

That's for me may want to save that for another episode, sean, because deeper Okay, we've been already an hour and 15 minutes, but I think that's a great segue, because that's what we're really trying to get our head around right now. Right, thomas, is like if we got all the data here, like how do we present this two ways to our agents and to our dealers, but not overload them with another dashboard or more things to do? It's really important information and you know, thomas also taught me about the difference between stagnant and real-time Dashboards and stagnant dashboards. We don't need any more of them. What's happening right now that I can see? That's what we're going after, so let's do this.

Shaun: 1:15:00

Let's let's land this episode. Let's just find it's a good parking spot. We're right up front, close to the building, so I say we do that because we can come back. I really want to dig in with you guys again on the next episode, because there's more to talk about around Continuous feedback loop. I'm sure you guys are thinking about the training aspect of this. Obviously, let's unpack around conversational data. I think that will be really beneficial for dealers, but you guys are going to continue down that road of standardization and how you future-proof the dealership and, I think, robot food. As you guys end this year and start into 2024, I think that will become something that people are also talking about and understanding the context.

Shaun: 1:15:47

Ai is a huge topic. The audience knows this. Everyone's either maybe a little scared of it or intimidated, and you know dealers, you know history sometimes repeats itself and maybe it doesn't have to. In this case, where maybe you were a late adopter to all things internet, we didn't quite understand how some of this digital transformation affected your advertising and marketing strategies and then ultimately, that's a huge impact on your process, which is exactly where Strollard. You know that's. That's the world you guys live in. That's the ocean that you guys are those Thomas.

Vinnie: 1:16:21

Thomas has told me recently you don't necessarily want to be the first, first Netscape or a well, and I agree with this is a lot more learning to do, you know. So the dealers out there that I mean they get worried about AI is just going to continue to evolve and get better.

Shaun: 1:16:39

Yeah, that's a good reminder Google not the first search engine, facebook not the first social network. Yeah, you guys jumping on my space later today.

Thomas: 1:16:48

Well, you know what? Yeah, yeah, all to this says down, it was like us. Yeah, and just for my, for my final words, uh, vinny's, quite completely right. And you know, I'd be in communications engineer. I was in the market before the internet and we built the internet's what we do for a living. And One of the things that I remember definitely saying to a friend of mine is my mom does not want to be on the internet. Why does she ever want to do that? And it was 93. Right, there was no web. There was, we hadn't gotten there yet, and so this is a very long market, like, just like you said, sean, the history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. And there's there's a lot, there's a lot to to to be done here. A lot of opportunities, a Lot of new world, a lot of blue water, yeah for sure.

Shaun: 1:17:40

Yeah, vinny. Any final thoughts before we?

Vinnie: 1:17:44

Shut it down. No, I agree with Thomas. I think, um, you know, I'm Totally Excited about the future instead of worried about it. I think it's just a matter of I enjoy Distimulation of change and new things and finding new ways to compete, get better and things like that, and so this is right up my alley. I know Thomas is excited about our whole team's excited about it. Our whole team now finally understands it. Um, because when Thomas was ripping the phone system out of the out of the place and putting a new one in there, they weren't too happy with them.

Shaun: 1:18:22

Well, I think you we've we've uncorked a great new series of conversations for the podcast and I'm really glad For that. I think it's really, really helpful for dealers to have Companies like yours that are actually putting this information out, dispelling rumors, but also your solutions, right? You're not just like, well, what's the problem? You guys are actively Working on, but utilizing solutions and you have a plan and I I love that. I think it's extremely helpful and I love your attitude and disposition about the whole thing.

Shaun: 1:18:56

So I will say this we've found the perfect place to park the episode, so we'll park it here. Regarding this episode and all information that you see from our episodes If you like it, you love it or none of the above, we'd still love to hear from you. The dealer insights podcast gets better with your comments, questions, feedback, recommendations yes, the ones that come from you. So if it's this episode or any others, feel free to drop in the comments section. If you're watching on YouTube, you can also send information directly to info at Stroll it comm, and that's spelled s? T? R o l I d E straw lid comm. Until next game time stays strong and solid. All right, guys. Thanks again. B always good form.

Thomas: 1:19:39

AL you.