Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Will Overstreet, CEO of Voices Heard Media (Part 5)

SM: You realize that this is tying, to some extent, into a world that came well before you guys and well before social media as the world where automated customer service based on natural language processing and automated email response systems?

WO: Yes. It wasn’t a bad idea. It’s how do you provide a high level of service without having to hire 1,000 people? How do you solve that? I guess, we’ve taken a little bit different approach around how we position it with our customers, how we position it for the user and trying a different approach about how we can make that experience better and provide better results. So, in some aspects, it is definitely the scaling of that customer interaction and communication.

SM: What I find interesting is we have a lot of these problems that you’re describing in our world, in One Million by One Million. We get hundreds of entrepreneurs coming and talking to our organization on a daily basis, and they have variations – they’re put differently, come out phrased differently – but there is, thematically, a set of probably 10 or 20 questions that come up over and over again. It would be wonderful to be able to respond to all of that through automated systems without making it sound automated, with some level of personalization but, more or less, automated.

WO: Exactly. There’s definitely a time and a place for what someone is doing, how much automation you want and then how much you just need to know what the top questions are, and I can put in my own response, my own words or put a video together that responds to those sets of questions.

SM: And we have all of those. We have templates of responses, videos, you know, video FAQs and all sorts of things, but they all have to be sent at the right time when the right questions come up. That is a manual process for us.

WO: Exactly.

SM: I know there are systems out there for responding … there are email automation systems in the customer service world, which have actually used natural language processing for a long time. So, there are customer response systems out there that do this.

WO: No doubt. There’s a lot of stuff out there. How we’re doing it, like I said, is sometimes, it’s around a data set that’s been asked and answered a lot of times before, like an FAQ. But you have to remember that with our customers as well, if they’re doing an interview, there is no data to go search for what was the answer last week. The news changed. There’s no database to go search.

SM: The kinds of use cases that you’re dealing with, like the interview questions and stuff like that, they’re more dynamic data sets.

WO: Exactly. So, you can’t use the rule of we know from past history that this is our answer. We have to build, on the fly, what are the questions so that someone can provide an answer.

SM: More dynamic, more current and more continuously changing than a customer service world’s problem.

WO: Exactly. It can be a better system for even customer service because in the customer service world, we always get these sets of questions, but we released a new product, or we have a new marketing campaign, and all of a sudden, we’re getting a whole new set of questions. But they might be the ones that are overwhelming us. So, now do we have to start all over and build out the system and database and a week from now or two weeks from now we’ve got something to handle it, but that issue’s died. Now, it’s moved on to something else. A lot more of our reaction has to be done in real time, and it’s a real-time understanding and a more real-time response.

SM: Very good. I find what you’re doing very interesting, and I find the overall trend of – there was a time when the best method for celebrities was to be scarce, to not be visible, not be accessible. That trend has completely changed. Today, celebrities are people who are trying to engage with an audience and actually make themselves as available as possible on Twitter and other social media and so forth. So, people become “friends” with their Facebook following and Twitter followers. It’s kind of a different mode of celebrity engagement.

WO: Yes, and that’s really like social media because the consumer, whether it’s with a business – Delta Airlines, Coke – or with an Ashton Kutcher or whoever the next star is. Because of social media, they expect, no matter if [someone’s] number 100,000, they have an expectation of being heard and of having that opportunity. So, the expectation on all of these groups of having to participate, as they’ve opened up that door, it also increased the level from I don’t want you to choose to do this to I expect you to do this now.

SM: Yes … absolutely. Well, keep up with what you’re doing; I wish you the best of luck. Very nice to meet you, Will. Thank you.

WO: Nice to meet you. Thank you very much for taking some time to talk with me.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Will Overstreet, CEO of Voices Heard Media
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