WIN at Scaling Your MSP with Matthew Pincus and Helpt

Why is Winning at Scale So Difficult?

Scaling a business comes with big challenges—hiring, retention, marketing, and making smart decisions that drive growth. 

In this episode of WIN, host Carrie Richardson sits down with Matthew Pincus, Founder & CEO of HELPT, to discuss the lessons learned from scaling a company, navigating the trade show circuit, and balancing speed with strategy. 

They dive into the realities of outsourcing, the importance of building trust, and why the right approach to hiring can make or break a business.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

✔️ The biggest challenges businesses face when scaling
✔️ How to hire and retain top talent without burnout
✔️ Outsourcing vs. in-house: When to delegate for growth
✔️ Trade show strategies—getting ROI without breaking the bank
✔️ The role of AI in customer support and business operations
✔️ Why brand reputation and community engagement matter

About Our Guest:

Matthew Pincus is the Founder & CEO of HELPT, an outsourced tech support company that helps businesses streamline customer service while maintaining quality and efficiency. With a background in operations, marketing, and sales, Matthew shares his insights on smart business growth and how to navigate the challenges of scaling.

Resources & Links:
🔗 Connect with Matthew Pincus & HELPT – GETHELPT.com
🔗 Follow Carrie Richardson & Fox and Crow – FoxCrowGroup.com

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Carrie Richardson and Ian Richardson host the WIN Podcast - What's Important Now?

Serial entrepreneurs, life partners and business partners, they have successfully exited from multiple businesses (IT, call center, real estate, marketing) and they help other business owners create their own versions of success.

Ian is certified in Eagle Center For Leadership Making A Difference, Paterson StratOp, and LifePlan.

Carrie has helped create and execute successful outbound sales strategies for over 1200 technology-focused businesses including MSPs, manufacturers, distributors and SaaS firms.

Learn more at www.foxcrowgroup.com

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Be a guest on WIN! We host successful entrepreneurs who share advice with other entrepreneurs on how to build, grow or sell a business using examples from their own experience.

Transcript

  📍  📍  📍  Hi, good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to WIN. My name is Carrie Richardson. I am a partner at Fox and Crow and your host today. With me today is Matthew Pincus, who is the founder and CEO of HELPT. How are you doing today, Matthew? 

I'm great, Carrie. How about you?

 I'm very well. Thank you. It's nice to have you here.

We've enjoyed seeing the different things that you've been doing on the trade show circuit this year. I thought the where's Waldo feature was a very fun.  

Hold on. I still have the hat right next to me. I have the glasses right next to me. So maybe I should be in costume now. 

It's a new year 2025. We're going to have to keep it fresh and do something new.

We can go ask ChatGPT for like seven different ideas that are similar, but not quite that one. 

So our, our marketing team, Anna Price, primarily leading it, is great at coming up with a host of ideas and understanding how they align with  what we're actually trying to communicate.

Like, it's cool to have an idea, like, where's Waldo? It was a fun idea. It's memorable. People recognize it. One of Anna's strengths is that she's really great at kind of connecting that. How do we do something fun and memorable but make it actually resonate with the message we're trying to convey. So I'm excited for what we're going to do in 2025. And I guess stay tuned for that. 

Ah, we're designing our trade show booth for 2025 right now. It'll be our first time  on the circuit for Fox and crow.  I don't remember it being this hard with managed sales pros.

We'd come up with an idea and three days later, it's finished. But Ian is very process oriented. So I have to like vet these ideas through him and like, I get challenged on, well, why would we do this? And what's this going to look like?

And how's that going to play? And how are we going to promote that in social? And he wants like a whole plan. There's a lot of things that I learned from my last business that I don't want to bring into this business.

it's not as it's not the Carrie show this time.  Ian is the managing partner. So I've had to really learn how to like acquiesce and compromise, which is not really my nature.

So I feel like the dynamic that you have with Ian is, is probably very similar to the dynamic that I have with my co founder, David. And I think David probably plays the Carrie role more and I play a little bit, the Ian role. But in my case, it's less needing to  learn how to step back and let someone take the responsibility,

and more that I am so glad to have somebody that innately brings the high energy because in my previous role, it had to be the Matt show and that just led to a lot of burnout.  It's a situation where  I'm happy to be asking those questions, make sure we're crossing the T's, dotting the I's, doing everything we can to grow the business, but there's just a certain level of energy that's required when you're  growing a small business.

And, you know, David brings that in spades. It's that drive, that energy to kind of keep things going forward that gives us a great yin yang dynamic. 

I think that's really important. I think visionaries can so Ian hates the visionary integrator, like he's always like, those aren't job descriptions. You're the CEO and you need to act like it. I don't care if you're a visionary or an integrator, you are still responsible for your entire organization.

And it can be very toxic to assign labels to like, well, all I do is sit around and come up with the ideas and then it's Ian's job to go do all the work. He's the one that has to figure it out, right? So we try to not use visionary integrator but people with like big ideas who like to move fast and who aren't necessarily detail oriented.

And like, that's me in a nutshell. Like I just want to get it done. I don't want to spend three months planning an email campaign. That's going to last a week. Like, no, let's just write them as we go. Who cares? Like they're emails. We're not making Casablanca here. Write the email and send it out.

 Having different modes when you know that this is something that is relatively low stakes because you're going to send out an email campaign now and if this one fails, whatever. You're sending another email campaign next month, then it is low stakes and you should move quickly with anything bogged down in the details.

It's when something's  higher impact on the organization, longer term impact that  I try to strike that balance. We recently launched an improved ticket management system where  we sent out an announcement to our team saying, Hey, we're going live on this day. And this has largely been David's baby.

He's pretty much built it from scratch. But there wasn't much QA testing that went into it prior to the scheduled launch date. We ended up not launching on that day. We pushed it back a couple weeks to make sure we actually had time to  do some of that T crossing I dotting. And even then, even once we launched, it was functional up front, but what we had not put any time into was the backend reporting element of it.

Our business is based on the time that we are able to bill clients for. If we were an MSP, we would essentially be the equivalent of break fix because we need to be tracking that time so that we can bill for it. And this system wasn't really set up that we could track that time. 

So it's day 1.

This  launches and we have live data and we are updating our reporting system using live data to incorporate it. And it's one of those things where I kind of wish we'd slowed down. We had somebody on staff, that advised us a year ago. Hey, you know, if we spin up something like a connectwise instance, it's going to take six months to do the full implementation and, you know, Dave and I both chafed at that David, especially six months.

Like, why should we take so much time? This is something we can spin up tomorrow, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. Maybe it shouldn't take six months. 

 The reason that it takes us a month or two instead of a day or two is because when it's really  mission critical like that, you have to do some of the testing or you're really going to set yourself back. In our early days, we did try to launch an ITSM kind of on the fly.

We didn't do any sort of implementation. You know, it's not a PSA. We're not an MSP. We didn't worry about the billing. Any of that. It really was just meant to be ticket management. And what it ultimately did is it created so much operational overhead for our team that they were slower.

You work a ticket.

It takes 8 minutes of work. And then with admin, it takes you 9 minutes. Now it was taking 11. And that was hugely costly to us. So we have the system  and then one day we decided, pull the plug, roll it back, forget this, go back to the old system.

Even though the old system had its warts and flaws, it was better than this system. So I think we've learned that lesson now. As we continue to improve, we want to move fast, we want to break things and we need to strike that balance of, Hey, we're going to send out an email campaign.

Maybe this one crosses the line a little bit, but it's a, it's a throwaway. If people don't like this one, people don't respond to it. Next time we'll do better. But when it's something that really is core to the business, we need to make sure we take a breath and get it right. 

Yeah, I can hear Ian  saying slow is smooth and smooth is fast .

You can't you can't just like, go, go, go, go and hope it works out anymore. We have larger things at stake now.  I mean, telemarketing is telemarketing and nobody wants to do it. So it's really easy to sell. There's always one coming in the door because nobody wants to do that job.

 But if you look at a software platform where you're competing with 12 other vendors for the same business,  you can cause some  massive damage, even with a badly worded email campaign. A little while ago, I guess somebody sent out an email that was supposed to be funny  and it didn't hit the high note  and Reddit went  mad, right?

Like they were just  wasn't the right vibe. From a public relations standpoint, what should have gotten this company, like, maybe a viral,  "This is so funny" impact moment got them  pilloried  on social media. 

Sales is evangelism. How is your product? How is your service different from the next guy? Different from the next a hundred guys doing the exact same thing. Ultimately it comes down to somebody vouching for one service or another.

We talked about hiring and how that's one of the hardest things imaginable to do.

If I have a choice between somebody who has the perfect resume, who I just found on LinkedIn, Indeed, whatever, or somebody that a peer, somebody I trust tells me will be good at the job, resume be damned, I'm going to go with the person somebody vouches for and you know, the reason that reddit is so powerful is that somebody goes on:

hey, i'm considering this that and the other what do you guys think and if the comments are all just ripping one of those? That's a lost opportunity. And so it's building evangelism, building that community. We don't go out of our way to be community builders per se.

There's lots of different groups that have their own Discord community. There are people that try to drive their own Reddit. We're not doing that sort of stuff. We're engaged in the MSP community. We're in those Discords. We're on the Reddits, the Slacks having those conversations. We're doing it because we are part of the community.

It's not just the shilling the advertising we're trying to do. When you see vendors that are on, you know, r/MSP shilling their service,  that's the biggest setback. You can't get past that reputation.  

We've actually landed several clients from posts that Ian makes on Reddit, but he doesn't just show up and say like, please do this thing.

He'll answer people's questions. He'll give thoughtful answers. He owned an MSP for 16 years. He got called he got called a scammer on Reddit a couple of days ago. And like all of the subreddit was like, F you guy. And that guy deleted his account. 

Oh, wow. I didn't notice that.

I saw when it happened. I think maybe he had put up a LinkedIn or something that led me to that thread. And I remember seeing that it was everyone else jumping in saying, oh, no, you don't know who this person is. Can't you Google? 

I've been writing for every publication in the industry for 10 years.

You couldn't Google my name? You can't really get all bent out of shape about what anonymous people are saying about you on the internet or you'll never get any work done. 

If you set out to make everyone happy,  you're going to fail.

You might make people unhappy. 

You might not leave any sort of an impact. 

You just have to find your niche and go after that niche. 

 The nature of our business, our clients need to trust us. We're talking to your clients. You wouldn't want someone you don't have faith in working on a ticket.  If the person on Reddit knows who I am, sees me offering valuable insights, they know that I'm a decent, insightful person.

And, you know, I probably hire decent people that will be able to then help the business. They're able to trust in me because they see who I am. And we just want to be Transparent like in who we are saying to your point go and go and Google me find out about me.

If you have that negative reputation, there probably is a way to be successful just in the short term, taking advantage of people. And then you've killed that reputation and you got to move on to the next thing, because you can't keep going back to that. 

Well, the channel has a short memory, Matthew. I, I have seen people  reinvent themselves 6, 7 times in the channel.

 People are still hiring them after heinous missteps or people are still giving them business after, like. articles saying that they had taken advantage of the entire industry.

Yeah, I guess, I guess I don't even understand it then. 

There's always new MSPs coming into the space. And so for every, you know, you get 10 that sell or retire and you get 10 guys that quit the MSP they're working for today, get themselves a coffee pot and start an MSP. 

That's true. And there is also so much pay to play that when somebody is starting their own MSP, they look to somebody for guidance and the person they look to could be one of those groups that is very driven by pay to play vendors.

And so they're just going to show that one person who maybe has a negative reputation, but is getting exposure to a new group at this point. 

Yeah, that's like a new thing for us this year. Managed sales pros never did the pay to play thing. We never paid for a sponsorship that included a speaking opportunity.

So if we were on stage, someone asked us to be there and I was always  fiercely against it. But whenever Ian speaks at an event people will come and kind of swarm him afterwards and I could see like, oh, well, maybe we should have done that back in the day. Maybe that should have been added to our marketing spend.

But, you know, as a small business, how much can you spend on these shows every year and keep your head above the water? I wish there was a less expensive way, but the minute the pandemic was over,  okay,  right back to the trade shows.  

There is, the less expensive way . you're doing it online. You're doing it with the calls, but what's going to get you the ROI. 

If you want to build a relationship with someone getting face to face and talking to them, even if it costs 10 times as much, you're going to have 10 times the result.

And that's why people keep going to these events. We were at an event last July, it wasn't an MSP event actually. We Ended up talking to the people who were doing all the setup and they were talking about the cost of all the setup. There were a couple vendors in the room that just had their signs hanging from the ceiling, no lights or anything.

 Just to have the sign hung up, not creating the sign, not transporting , just to have it hung up in that room cost over 12, 000.  

Yeah, I I feel that in my soul.  

It's just absurd to think, I mean, I'm sure it took heavy machinery to get it up that high.

It took the labor, but just the cost, like you're, you're right. It adds up the smallest booth at IT Nation this year is going to be. 35 40, 000 and there are tons of events. There's always new groups. I think people have realized that running an event can be profitable. You know, we've seen people in our space in our little corner of the world trying to start up their own, you know, groups, event circuits, et cetera, just because.

You can probably turn a good profit because you can gouge vendors. Vendors, especially larger vendors, have budgets they're required to spend. So if you can talk to that marketing person who's spending the budget with you, that you're going to give them good ROI, that you're going to let them touch a new group of users.

Like you said, you talk to the same people. If you can let them believe that they're actually going to touch on some new people, they'll just open up the checkbook and give you whatever you want. So now there's more and more events for small vendors to go to. 

There's sort of this

perception where you're conspicuous in your absence. If we're on the event circuit, and we're going to 12, 18 events in a year, then if next year we go, we cut down from 18 to 15, there's going to be some event we're not at. And someone's going to ask, why didn't you go to this event? And there's going to be some perception behind that.

As we grow, I remember when we, the first MSP event David and I went to, we we talked to Matthew Koenig at NodeWare.  Didn't know what NodeWare did. Had never met Matthew before. Nice guy, helpful guy, friendly guy. told us that he does something like 75 shows a year, which is absurd and good for NodeWare having the budget to do that.

 It becomes this thing where as you start to do it, you almost get trapped into continuing to do it. Maybe they realize they're having tremendous success in discord communities , with Google AdWords, Whatever it is, and it's just not worth the marketing budget. But how do you avoid people talking about your conspicuous absence after you've been doing 75 events a year for the last five years?

If we had a relationship and I'm used to seeing them at that event, if a company that has sponsored it nation eight years in a row, one year isn't there I would definitely wonder why they didn't show up this year.

But if they weren't at a handful of events out of the 15 that I attended last year, I don't know that I would notice, especially at the larger events where like, maybe I don't even get down to the end of the hallway. I'm working my booth. I don't got time to figure out who's here and why not.

For me, I think it's the anchor vendors that I noticed, especially at a larger event, you go to an IT nation or DattoCon.  Big room with lots of vendors in there. And one small vendor is not going to be missed. But if you go to one of the smaller sorts of events, the ASCIs, the channel pros, the sort of stuff where you're looking at a room of

a dozen, maybe 20, 25 vendors and you know, you're accustomed to seeing the connect wise. You're going to see some flavor of Kaseya there. Maybe going to see a halo and ninja. And if those guys are absent, then you start to wonder why. I'm with you. I don't know that I would notice the smaller ones, but I've, I've heard from multiple people that you can be conspicuous in, in your absence.

 So you want to do your best to pick the communities, the events you expect engagement from so that you can be consistent in attending those windows, but you're right. It gets so expensive. So quick. 

I mean, we just kind of roll in there half the time.

I'm going to bring a cigar humidor. We're going to sit on the patio and people can come talk to us if they want. As long as we're not being  jerks about it, right? Like, we're not going to go on the trade show floor and wear garish t shirts with our logos on them and try to pull business away from paying vendors But I do want to see The 15 clients I have that are attending that event  And if they're all going to be in one place at one time, Even if I don't want to sponsor the event, I probably do want to be around the event somehow in some capacity 

I I had to go and google wedding crashes to see what sort of garish outfits they wore because the way you describe that makes me think of the guys from Wedding Crashers, that movie, probably 20 years ago, because I'm old, I'm dating myself here.

But I'm thinking, like, that's kind of what you're doing, you're showing up to have a good time, and you're right, like, you're not gonna get kicked out just, just being in the lobby. And I think that is a great strategy in a lot of cases, just being present. You maybe do some event, you host some dinner, you take everyone to Topgolf or whatever it is, and it's gonna be a lot cheaper than, than getting that booth where, That booth gives you an hour of people walking around and they have an hour, maybe 90 minutes to talk to 20, 25 vendors, and there's a hundred of them.

How much time are you going to get with any individual there? You're a lot better off just being in the hallway grabbing people when they have time. 

Oh, yeah. If I look at my marketing budget and what we spent on events over 10 years, I could have flown to every city in North America and hosted my own lunch.

And we did that too. And it works out really well if you've got a great process for inviting people to events and you already have the list of MSPs and you already have all of the things that you go to an event to get, right? Most people are going to  IT Nation because they want the leads, right? We can talk another time about how insane it is that people will scan everything that moves at an event. People are like, oh, can we scan you? I'm like, I'm not an MSP. Oh, it doesn't matter. I get paid per scan. I'm not a prospect for you.

I'm the plus one of a guy that's speaking on stage and we're a two person business and we don't sell this. 

But you're not talking to the vendor that wants to scan you. You're talking to the person that's paid by the vendor. 

How is that a KPI that we're being measured against when it really is a nonsense KPI?

I talked to somebody from in the demand generation department at PAX 8  this week,  and it's the first vendor where I was like, Hallelujah,  they have a like what I would call a like a holding pen for dirty data. 

I've never seen another vendor that complied with something as aggressive outside of, of course, ourselves. It doesn't do us any good to send email to someone's Gmail account or to, you know, our company name at their domain name. we get those out of our system as quickly as possible.

Why are you investing time money, you know, like impressions, whatever, like whatever you're paying per of. I want a smaller, more qualified list than a larger  pile of junk.  

That's, that's probably the great debate. You know, would you rather have a hundred well targeted or a thousand less targeted, which is going to end up with, with higher ROI?

There's probably different contexts where one's going to be better than the other. I'm, I'm with you, especially with your CRM, garbage in, garbage out. You know, the data you have in your CRM, you're going to run a campaign today, but the value of that is going to be For the next year or two, as you are repeatedly touching that same prospect over and over again, because it's going to take you a dozen touches to close that deal.

If you're just feeding your CRM with garbage data, your sales guys start to see that the data in the CRM is garbage. It diminishes the value of using the CRM in the first place, and it just becomes a downward spiral.  

 Then they get frustrated, right? The leads are weak, you're weak, and you get that whole back and forth between demand gen and sales, like, well, this isn't qualified.

Yes, it is. 

Everybody should be on board with what qualified means. Qualified to me and qualified to you might be different. before I'm going to invest my time in it I want it qualified. 

I mean, I will have conversations with MSPs that have two employees that are new to sales and curious about what we do, because maybe one day, three years from now, they won't be a two person MSP anymore. So I'm never going to tell anybody to go pound sand.  But I'm also not going to invest like 90 minutes of discovery in an organization that I know, like, just realistically cannot afford to work with us.

It doesn't make sense.  

Yeah, as long as you leave them in good graces, then when they do grow, it's going to be valuable. You offer some of your time to just be generous and helpful to them, but You're absolutely right. Any sort of lead generation ultimately is a numbers game.

You need to hit that large number, whether they're targeted or not. You know, the more qualified leads that you're actually able to touch, the more you're able to close. So if you can disqualify someone and save your time and move on, just do it well, because again, you keep that data around. You never know when that might become valuable.

That person might leave, go to another company. Like you want to keep that reputation intact. 

Yeah, I'm not allowed to go on Reddit anymore for that exact reason.  

We didn't get around to talking about what HELPT does. We talked about marketing. You might assume that HELPT is a marketing company. They are not.

They are great marketers, but they are actually 

 Led by a guy with strong opinions about everything. So HELPT is  outsourced tech support. You have a couple of levels of service. We range from technical call answering. We have a team that can take the inbound calls and do triage and the like to make sure that we understand the issue.

And that when it gets the technician, the technician can knock it out of the park quickly all the way up to embedded technicians, where we are those technicians. We have a team that don't answer the phones. They're just handling the level 1 tickets on behalf of our client base. We've been around for 2. 5 years at this point. 

One of our first clients was an MSP, and it was an area where we moved into the MSP space just because there's such an obvious fit. MSPs are already outsourced tech support providers. We just allow for the subcontracting of that. You know, whether it is the triage, the dispatch, or the actual resolving of tickets, we can handle any or all of that on behalf of our clients.

And  the hardest thing is hiring and retaining talent. My co founder, David, actually, we worked at a fiber optic hardware manufacturer before this, but prior to that, he had a career in recruiting. And so he's familiar with the paces of of HR, basically, and he has a number of HR bigwigs in his family.

So as we needed consultants, as we were getting started, it was, do I call the one that worked at the large corporation that was the VP of HR or do I call the one that's been the VP at HR at a number of startups over the last couple of years? Because it's giving me a very different opinion on how to go about things with HR.

So we have a strong, polished HR process . We are able to take over. The most challenging component of staffing staffing, the most thankless position, the person who is that front line taking the call. It's kind of damned if you damned if you don't. There's no world in which that person makes everyone happy.

They're not getting to enough calls, they're not getting enough tickets. The person who called, gosh, the phone rang for 20 seconds before they answered, so the caller's upset that it took so long to answer the phone. There's just no making anyone happy, so it's thankless. Anyone gets into that job and within six months they want a big raise, they want to move up to the level two position, they want to move to, you know, some sort of, you know, off the phone ticket only type position.

How do you keep that person satisfied, engaged, reasonably well compensated? How do you encourage their growth? How are you a good boss? You don't want that person stuck in that level one position. There's just a lot of questions and challenges that  if you're an MSP that, you know, is smaller than a 20 person organization, that's a lot of mental bandwidth that's required of you to answer those questions.

And if you want to not deal with that, HELPT is here and our focus ultimately is not in making our customers happy, but in making their customers happy. We are able to deliver that client experience so that your customers know when they call, when they need assistance, when they need support They're gonna get somebody friendly helpful able to to do whatever it is that that needs to be done and in the process You're getting happier customers without needing to stress about HR side that probably isn't why you got into this business  

I think that's a great place to stop. 

Perfect.  

Thanks very much for joining us today. I really appreciate you sharing some information about how HELPT has managed to get their name out into the space  via different marketing channels and always enjoy a good chat about data integrity. And I know as somebody who hired over 300 people over the course of 10 years.

And only ever had 50 employees maximum at a time  that managing people, finding people, bringing them in, keeping them engaged. it is thankless work, especially when it's a job like where people are not going to be kind to you all day.  

Yeah. And I feel like this day and age, like if people don't, if they're not happy in a job, they're gone.

Yeah. They are happy in a job. They still want that 20, 000 raise in six months.  

So everybody be nice to your help desk techs and be nice to telemarketers. Otherwise, there won't be any left.  You'll have to fix your own computers, and you're going to have to do your own sales. 

Wait a second, though. You're threatening me with a good time here.

Because you're saying if I'm not nice to telemarketers, there's not going to be any more telemarketers.  That means there won't be any for you either, Matthew. You won't be able to hire any either. It's a double edged sword. Next time we talk, let's get into all the AI element of it. Because I think we're going to see a lot of 2025.

SDRs, especially it seems like inbound when a call comes in, you're going to have the robot voice talking to you.  I think inbound it's going to become ubiquitous relatively quickly. And I'm  kind of all for that.

I think what we've seen as we talk to clients about their needs is that there are lots of folks out there who just Missed calls because they're on the next call. And I think that applies for sales as well. If you have your, your human SDR making those calls,  they might leave a voicemail and sometimes those voicemails get calls back. 

 If you're spending all that money on SEO and all of the other ways that you can make your phone ring.

And then since you don't want to talk to telemarketers, you don't answer your phone, you're losing business every day. you're just burning your budget. 

But who does it? You hire the team of folks to be doing the outbound calls that hang up one call, pick up to make the next. Then the phone rings while they're on the phone.



You've got SDRs  and your BDRs. 

 I think that the AI SDRs will be the inbound folks that are basically hearing why someone is calling, why they're calling back who they want to talk to, who they want to set the appointment with.

It's going to do the appointment setting. 

 If NVIDIA is saying it's going to be 2029 before AI is capable of interacting with people in a realistic way, I kind of tend to believe that . At least, I hope so, because I don't really like the idea of a world where I have to talk to robots. 

I hate that delay.  Oh, hello. Thanks for calling whatever. Who am I speaking to? This is Matt.  Hi, Matt. Thanks for calling. Like, it's that delay that makes you know that it's a robot that drives me the craziest. And you're right. It'll probably be 2029 before it's more natural conversational. But the way that it will get there is because people will continue to use it as it gets better and better.

When that thing picks up, I'm like "chicken monkey typewriter."  we don't understand you. Let me get you to an agent that can help. And I'm like, yeah, no problem. 

We I've, I've heard that if you swear, or  if you pretend to be deaf,  it gets you to a person, which I don't necessarily understand.

What I'm hearing from connect wise is if I call my it provider, and I sound really angry, no matter what my problem is.

My email needs to be reset. My password isn't working.  It's nothing. It's not an emergent situation. It's only impacting me. It's only impacting one application, but I'm still going to get put to the top of the pile because I sound really angry. I can do that all day long. 

So we've, we've explored how to implement that ourselves.

We wouldn't do it that way. It wouldn't be prioritization by sentiment. You know, our, our agents are human. They can't always solve an issue immediately because there is no solution. And sometimes the callers are panicked, frustrated, stressed. We want our team to be handling it well. We train them on  diffusing situations.

We have a number of ex law enforcement officers who are very skilled and trained in deescalating situations. Obviously, this is a much less serious when somebody's printer is not working than when it's something a law enforcement officer is called for. But as much as that might be a strength for our team, there are some times when a caller just gets incredibly frustrated and has that, you know, let me talk to your manager moment.

And we're exploring how we might have sentiment analysis built in to, to try to preempt that, where maybe it pings the manager to listen in to be able to jump in automatically when the stress gets to that certain threshold. We actually have one client who does use AI as the, the first stop. When somebody calls in, you're, you're getting the AI bot, and  I would say at this point, 60% of the calls end up getting escalated to a human and we're we're that human.

I don't like that because I think you're, you're putting a bad taste in someone's mouth. You're only getting the escalation after they're already frustrated. Which means that our team then has to sort of become the whipping boy, so to speak, because we're dealing with the already frustrated caller.

That's, that's part of why I don't really like AI. But we see there are uses for that sentiment analysis. So maybe it's not just a prioritization. Maybe that's the way to get to a human. Maybe that's the way to have it taken off one person's plate and move to another. You know, every time you call some customer service, They say, Oh, you're going to get a survey.

Please give me at least a nine. If I get an eight, it's considered a failure. Well, the next time you're getting a four, right? The next time that you get that call where, you know, that person would be getting a four because things have gone off the rails. The caller is frustrated. If you can preempt that by having the manager swoop in because they're informed this call is going South here, listen in for 30 seconds.

Oh, I agree. I'm going to take over the call now. And you can turn that four back into a nine because the right person steps at the right time. 

AI is the tool. AI is not replacing the human because that creates a negative experience, but AI is the useful tool to make sure the right person is there when they need to be there. 

 I can't argue with that. I can rail against AI forever, but I mean, honestly, we're building  using AI as well. So I can be hypocritical and say, well, like, I don't want to deal with AI, but I do like the ability to scan  hundreds of data points.  That's amazing to me, having to talk to robots, not amazing to me.

 I want to talk to people, but that's been my whole career, the idea that all of a sudden that doesn't exist anymore. I go, okay, well, I'm retiring soon, so it's not going to be that big of a problem for me. But what does life look like when no one talks to no one?  

Well, and we'll see if it ever gets that, you know, a hammer is an amazing tool.

If I need to cut this piece of paper, if I need to crack these eggs, I'm not going to use a hammer.  If I need to get this nail on the wall, I'm, I'm gonna use a hammer right now.  We're trying to use the AI hammer. What can we use the AI hammer for? And plenty of people push back about the idea of, of talking to the robot.

If I'm okay talking to a robot, I'd rather just do it online. I'd rather just have a Google search.  If I'm gonna pick up the phone, I wanna talk to a human. That's my sense. We'll see if the community at large, if the general public agrees with that sentiment, and if that's the case, then we're going to stop using the AI hammer as the telephone operator.

The next time you need someone on the podcast and you want to just go for an hour of ranting, let's talk a lot more AI. 

Fantastic. I actually just finished my generative AI certification from Vanderbilt University because people kept saying, like, you just don't understand AI.

You need to understand it before you can start railing against it. I'm like, fine, I'll show you. And I went and took, like, a dozen different prompt engineering courses and AI strategy courses. And I'm fascinated by what it can do. I still don't want to do that for work.  

Totally reasonable. 

So mostly I use it to write emails to Ian about why we should get a pet pig.

And then it will automatically populate in my email . I'm going to write this in a chat GPT. I'll put in three bullet points. Write an email that tells Ian why we should get a pet pig and why they're so amazing. And then tell him all the things we'll do in bed.

If he gets a pet pig, 

wait, 

it came up with the worst ideas ever. we could cuddle. I'm like, he's not getting me a pig for that. No, no. Try again. Chat GPT.

I think it has to be that the teaser  

read carries emails. Well, thank you very much for joining us today.

It was a great having you on board. Are you going to be doing the ASCII circuit this year? 

Yes, we are doing the ASCII circuit.  My partner, David, is going to be at lots of events. We have a whole team that we're going to bring into a lot of our events as well.

ASCII doing a number of channel pros are doing a number of the one off ones, the, you know, the geek cons and the like. So you'll be able to find HELPT all over the place. If you're at an event, come, come look for us. G E T H E L P T.

com. It's helped not help T, but it's spelled with a T. 

But.  All right. I have other ideas, but they'll have to wait for another day. 

All right.  Yeah. Always, always happy to talk. Let me know when you want to do this again.  I'll catch you later.