Imperfect Marketing
Imperfect Marketing
Can an AI Receptionist Actually Build Customer Trust?
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Are missed phone calls quietly costing your business customers and trust?
In this episode of Imperfect Marketing, Kendra sits down with Laurent to talk about the rapidly evolving world of AI, specifically voice AI, and why it’s becoming one of the most important tools for small businesses.
Laurent shares his perspective after more than 20 years in digital marketing, SEO, e-commerce, and technology. Together, they explore how businesses are using AI to improve customer communication, create stronger trust, and avoid losing opportunities through missed calls and poor customer experiences.
This conversation goes beyond prompts and automation. It dives into the human side of AI, including emotional intelligence, customer trust, and why understanding your audience still matters more than any tool.
You’ll also hear:
- Why voice AI is making a comeback in business communication
- How AI receptionists can support local businesses
- The surprising SEO benefits of voice AI
- Why AI should enhance humans, not replace them
- Practical advice for business owners who feel overwhelmed by AI
Laurent also shares one of the best perspectives on AI adoption we’ve heard yet: if you missed one wave of technology, don’t worry, another train is always coming.
If you’ve been wondering how AI can actually help your business in a practical, customer-focused way, this episode is packed with insight.
About Our Guest
Laurent is an entrepreneur and AI innovator specializing in voice AI technology for local businesses. With more than two decades of experience in digital marketing, SEO, SEM, e-commerce, and web ventures, he now focuses on helping businesses improve customer trust and communication through AI-powered voice solutions.
Connect with Laurent
Laurent welcomes questions and conversations from listeners. Visit the website above to connect through their social channels.
🔗 Learn more at: https://getoblick.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurent-cohen-usa/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@GetOblic
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Welcome To Imperfect Marketing
SPEAKER_01Hi, I'm Kendrick Corman. If you're a coach, consultant, or marketer, you know marketing is far from a perfect science. And that's why this show is called Imperfect Marketing. Join me and my guests as we explore how to grow your business with marketing tips and, of course, lessons learned along the way. Hello and welcome back to another episode of Imperfect Marketing. I'm your host, Kendra Corbin, and today I am joined by Laurent, who is going to be talking with us about one of my favorite topics, which is AI. And he has a very unique take on it, especially when it comes to voice AI, which is what he does, right? Welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. And I'd love for you to tell me a little bit about how did you get here? How did you get where you're at right now?
SPEAKER_00First of all, thank you, Kendra. Thank you for having me. And thank you for everyone's listening to this wonderful podcast. Um, well, I I'm here because I believe, as everyone else, for the past uh 30 months, we've all been amazed by the AI and everything that it can do. And uh first of all, to anyone that's still thinking about deep diving into AI, I would say the rule of thumb,
Why AI Demands Curiosity
SPEAKER_00what you everyone needs to do, we just be a child. You know, you be you need to be amazed. You you you cannot just watch this generated video or audios or interactions or responding and think that it's uh it's there and it's nothing else than uh what the web was. It's 10 times, 100 times what the web was. And I can I can say that because I've been working for over uh 23 years uh in uh different ventures regarding uh web, e-commerce, and different all kinds of aspects, SEO, SEM, web marketing. And uh I I can say uh that uh we're living a wonderful time, wonderful time. Uh I'm not young anymore, uh, but the reason I have mentioning that is that six months back, I would have never dreamt of working as hard and learning as much as I'm learning every day out of passion and of discovery. And this is solely because of AI.
SPEAKER_01It is so interesting. It is just, I am amazed every day. I was actually, it's funny. So when I was driving to the office today to record this, I was actually thinking about I'm like, I don't even want to look at some of my old chats and the results that I got out of it, you know, with Chat GPT or even Claude from way back in the beginning. It is unbelievable how far it has come and how quickly I've changed what I give it, right? How it's changed what it gives me. And um, there's just so much out there, right? And you're dealing in the world of voice AI, right? Which is a whole nother level beyond just the writing piece, right?
SPEAKER_00I would say, and I was also like to put everything into perspective, Kendra, because um we have to think about AI, I think, uh, as a small player trying to do something. Uh, that we have those big, huge companies that are creating at a pace that has never seen be seen before. So um, and that's what I was really trying to tell everyone that uh I crossed by is that if you work into AI today, you will need to learn and understand what AI is. But at a certain point in time, when you build a company around AI, you realize that you are not building AI. You are using AI as a tool, you are using everything it provides, but very, very quickly along the way, you will understand that uh there's an all of the sets of priorities that get involved, and that much more related to what business has been forever. So
Prompting Isn’t The Real Work
SPEAKER_00this is you know, you you wake up in the morning and you say voice AI is fantastic, and when you voice AI and you start prompting, and you understand that at a certain point in time prompting is not enough. You need to have data, you need to understand who your customers are, and all those things have been in business for the past hundred years. So nothing changed, actually, you know.
SPEAKER_01I love that. I uh because yes, I tell that to people all the time. I'm like, you need to understand your customer first, you need to talk to your customer, right? You really need to understand who they are because no matter if it's AI or if it's you or it's an agency building content or building anything for you, if it's not thinking of the customer and putting them first and their needs and their questions, then it's no good at all.
SPEAKER_00This is why I deeply think that AI will not replace us. AI will enhance us for sure. We we sometimes feel like superhumans because we're achieving things at a pace and in a quality kind of quality that is unheard of, but it will not replace us. Um take, for instance, the product we're building right now. From a voice AI perspective and working into prompting, at a certain point in time we decided, okay, what's our mission? How are we bringing to the table? Are we bringing a fancy voice? Are we bringing uh a small latency voice? Well, everybody's and their grandmother are building voice AI today and trying to be uh the fanciest. But at the end of the day, we understood, and it took us five months to understand that we're building trust. Basically, take what a small business or local
The Mission Is Trust
SPEAKER_00business has been doing for the past 50 years. They've been engaging with their customers, they've been having uh appointments, cancel appointments, uh, the ability to respond quickly over the phones. And those things, if someone decides to use a voice AI, they need to be certain, 100% certain, that the voice AI will convey this trust. So our mission is to build trust. And now that you have that in mind, you understand that a prompt would not create trust. There are so many more levels that we create that trust. And when you think about it, you understand that you're surrounded with LLMs and agents that are helping you. But at the end of the day, that's understanding your customers, who they are, what they need, and building the trust for you to them, so that they let their customers using your solution. This is a whole ecosystem and you're interesting.
SPEAKER_01That trust piece is so important. I think that that's one of the biggest issues right now, facing a lot of people leveraging AI, right? Or leveraging it the wrong way, I'll say, right? You talked about data. It's more than just prompting, right? You're giving it information so that you can get the right outputs. You know, you talked a little bit about voice AI. For those of us in the audience, right, that are not necessarily well-versed in what voice AI is. Why don't you describe that to me? Like what would you say a product of voice AI is?
SPEAKER_00The first layer, obviously, is uh AI agent that can communicate with you through voice. But I would add, as today, and the way it's it's going is not only communicating with you, but emotions. Uh, as today, you have to understand, Kendra, that AI voice agents
What Voice AI Really Means
SPEAKER_00uh can perceive emotion through the phone. Let's put a very simple example. Uh, a customer is upset, he's not satisfied with the service, and he's calling and you're not responding. The voice AI can uh decide to uh uh put the pressure down, you know, be patient, be elegant in order to uh and engage with the customer in the best manner possible, which let's be fair, us as humans we don't do all the time. We we are subject to emotions and agents are not subject to emotions, so they convey emotions, but they're not subject to emotions. So this is uh this is beautiful, you know. You and also that's what I was trying to tell you earlier, Kendra, is that we as uh startup or bootstrappers, uh, we're building uh solutions using voice AI. But at the end of the day, uh the biggest, longest prompt is certainly not the most efficient way to build a company. So you have to be very lean and you have to trust the big players, you know, such as Google Gemini, uh, ChatGPT, and Tropic, they're building the tools that we are gonna use and give a service to businesses. So if anyone is listening today, I would say learn AI, learn to prompt. But uh as everything, when you go through a learning curve, you'll understand that the leaner it gets, the most elegant it becomes.
SPEAKER_01I love that. So let's talk a little bit about leveraging voice AI in a practical way. So I was actually looking into it not too long ago and thinking about because a friend of mine was asking that an actual receptionist was getting a little bit expensive because she's got, you know, four or five part-time team members. And so having somebody answer the phones all the time, she was having to set up accounts for all of them at a virtual office. It was just
Practical Wins For Local Businesses
SPEAKER_01getting cost prohibitive, right? As she was growing and expanding. And I was like, huh, I wonder if AI could do this for her. And so you could technically have an AI receptionist that would respond to voice like you're talking about, right?
SPEAKER_00First of all, you have the obvious. Uh, we're past the age of answering machine and chat bots. Uh, answering machine, well, no need to give more explanation, but chatbots do not convey the emotion I was talking to you about. Now, do not understand the emotion. So this is where uh voice AI comes into play. Now, the first obvious part is when you're not available. What's happening? You are breaking trust again, Kendra. You know, the someone wants to reach you, he needs you, you know. You are not there, and you have probably very good reason not to be here, you know. That's when voice AI has come into play. Now you also have all the period in time. Everyone has been going to the air salon, you know, and uh during a 45-minute session, the lady has to stop three times, you know, getting the phone, two of them are uh outbound call selling something. You know, she gets upset, no, she's getting late, and everything. Okay, those are the times that she solely should be focused on serving her customers. Okay, again, this is when voice eye comes into play. At the end of the day, you know, you you take a 24-day of work month, you add the number of minutes you've wasted on useless calls, you know, you you sum that up, you probably get you know around three, four hundred minutes per month that you're literally losing. Now the calculation is simple, whether your business is uh you're making 40, 60, 100 an hour, you know, you can see how it accumulates. And now investing in voice AI uh makes total sense. Knowing that the expansion of voice AI and the possibility you can do is endless. But I always suggest, like any new technology, you know, start with the obvious, you know, when you go see your family, you know, take a break, put on voice AI, spend good time with your family, relax. So next morning you'll be serving your customer in a better way. And you move on, and then you can start, you know, using it during the booking, canceling bookings, even upsells, which you can do beautiful things, it's so it's quite extensive.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I love how you were saying that if you're away from your desk and you don't answer, that you're losing trust. I think that that is something that is so overlooked. And I know I've talked about it on a few different episodes here, but there's a client that I work with that I will not set up Google ads. They actually went out and hired a new agency to set up Google ads for them, which I'm fine with because they weren't answering the phone. Like they didn't have someone picking up the phone. And so we set up a call
Missed Calls Cost More Than Money
SPEAKER_01recorder for all their Google ads. And so I got the recordings and they were all hangups because all they got thrown into was this like automated response circle, right? Not a real person. And during business hours, at least, you have to be able to pick up the phone, especially if you're sending there someone there from ads. They don't know what number to pick. They don't want to listen to the seven minutes that you guys have of all the extensions, right? They just want to go. And I think that that I think looking at it as trust is, I don't think it's a way that I've looked at it before. And I think that that is just so insightful and so powerful because you're going to lose that business if it's a prospect. Guaranteed, if you don't pick up the phone.
SPEAKER_00Kendra, uh, phone has been a forsaken channel. Let's put it this way, everybody hates phone, right? This is a crazy invention.
SPEAKER_01Send me an email. You want to get a hold of me? Send me an email.
SPEAKER_00Don't go away. When you think of when you think about it, you are paying for a service. Someone is giving you 10 digits, and from that moment on, anybody in the world can decide to annoy you, you know, at a moment in the day. You know, this is counterintuitive. So uh yes, everybody has the phone, you know. So what do you do? Well, you used to put on voicemail, you used to after as a chatbot on your computer. And there's also this big resurgence of voice itself. Okay. Remember when we were kids, our parents used to tell us, I you don't read anymore. You watch too much TV, right? And then the internet came and said, Oh, now we all read. We just don't talk anymore and we don't do anything. And then YouTube came, you know, and then oh, we talk again, you know, and we everything. So it's uh it's all about a pendulum. Now you have everyday people that pick up their phone and talk with Gemini and Chat GPT. 10 years from now, Elon's gonna have robots in the house, and believe me, we're gonna talk with them. We're not gonna type. So a voice is resurging as a channel of communication in a huge way. So there's absolutely no reason that this phone that we ate, but that is everywhere we all have a phone, should not be into the picture again, but used in a proper way with the right technology.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that is that is so important. And I mean, you've identified that local businesses have been losing business because of missed calls. And so having, you know, a voice AI receptionist, right? Answer the calls is is huge. But I guess my question for you is on a small business, how do we get, how do we set something like that up? Like, again, so that we don't lose trust because so many people are like anti-AI. This was written by a human. It's like, I don't, I don't really care if it was written by a human as long as it's good.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. But you you're putting exactly your finger what the problem is, and it's what we've been trying to solve from day one. Uh, again, this is all about data, the quality of the data. So basically, uh, as long as you can provide a plug-and-play feature, which doesn't mean any uh knowledge, technological knowledge, no technological or prompting knowledge, that you have the accurate data, that it can be deployed within minutes you're onto something. You know,
Plug And Play Setup With Better SEO
SPEAKER_00it has to be easy. It has to be, and again, the idea of trust, the way we did it in our company is we created this huge directory where we have, as today, 1.6 million uh business listings. And each of those listings have an AI on each page, which is up and running, which is already pre-trained with our data and already serving customers. So basically any business that's on our directory can access the voice AI without even paying it and just try it. And if you're not listed, you can open the listing within three minutes, and the AI will be deployed in seconds. So instead of convincing a business to trust us, we did another level where we create the AI, try it, and if you decide that you can trust us, just pay the subscription, and then you can take the code, the widget, and put it on the website, or we give you a virtual line where you can transfer your call at any time. And uh I would add, because that's very interesting, and I know you're into marketing, Kendra, that uh we discovered something uh very, very interesting about two months ago. For anyone that's familiar with SEO and Google Ranking, um, we know by now that the retention of a page is crucial to get results, right? So basically, when we deployed for our own sake our directory with all those millions of uh AI, the first thing that appears is that people, when they come to the page, start interacting with the voice AI, which turn the time spent on our website from seconds to minutes. And of course, Google loves it. And in return, index our page even higher and better. So this is also uh something that people did not notice is that uh if you have a voice AI on your website, you will serve your customers and you will improve your ranking. So this is all wonderful, and uh it can be quite helpful if you want to um have more business.
SPEAKER_01One of the things that I hear from a lot of people is that they're getting overwhelmed. There are so many different AI tools and AI ways that they can use it and AI agents that they can create. And they're uh they're not 100% trustworthy yet on a lot of the systems to give it access to
How To Start Using AI Safely
SPEAKER_01their systems. So, like I have not started using Claude's, I think it's cowork, because I don't want to give it access to everything. It makes me nervous, right? Um, so I guess my question for you is when people are looking to get started, where do you recommend that they start when it comes to AI? What either learning or deploying or working with?
SPEAKER_00First of all, I would tell anyone that is not into it yet to take a break. It is life. No, just take a leave of absence for a month and possibly three months, and just invest $100 to $200 a month, you know. You know, have a couple of those uh pros accounts. Chat GPT works well. If you're into coding, Cloud obviously is good, but a bit more expensive, Gemini is wonderful. Then you have also some video generation tool, you know, because it's fun and it's very good for marketing, you know, and just deep dive into it, you know, give it a try. We used to hear people saying, you know, be yourself, right? As far as a human and a business owner or whatever. I think that this is not the way to say it. I think know yourself. Know yourself is more important. And in order to know yourself, AI is wonderful, it pushes your limits, it questions you, it makes you uh go beyond anything you expected. Uh, I have to say that with the all the LLMs we're working with, we moved from a human to computer relationship. Now we got uh HR relationship. We're literally dealing because we are a small company as far as human, but as far as LLMs, we have 35 LLMs continuously working for us. And I mean it's sometimes you know you question ourselves on the way you talk with them because you talk with them like human. So, yes, I would suggest to your audience just deep dive into it. Don't be afraid, expand on any subject, any subject, because you know, you just pull it and you'll end up, at least if it's not about work, knowing a lot more about yourself.
SPEAKER_01Well, and I love that insight of knowing yourself, right? The more you know, the more you can teach, the more data, the more everything that you can give the system, the more it can challenge you. Like I don't think people give it enough credit for challenging and asking questions and pushing you to a place where you wouldn't have gotten to on your own. You can disagree with the AI results all day long, but you need to be using it. Yes, it can still reflect who you are, right? It can still be authentic. Um, and if you know yourself and you know your customer and you know your business, it just makes it so much easier to integrate it all together. This is amazing. I love your perspective on AI. I love your perspective on trust and knowing yourself. I think that that is just very differentiated right now and awesome. So I really appreciate that perspective, Laurent. But before I let you go and before we wrap up and tell people where they can get access to your voice AI, I do have to ask you the question that I ask all my guests. And that is that this show is called Imperfect Marketing because marketing is anything but a perfect science. What has been your biggest marketing lesson learned?
SPEAKER_00As far as the digital world, uh, I would say uh working in that field is like sitting at a train station. Uh, if you miss a train, do not worry, there's another one coming. Uh so um I hear a lot of people saying, Oh God, I missed the uh influencing part of it. The influencer, I'm not an influencer yet, or I was not good at SEO, I'm not good at SEA. I might say,
Marketing Lesson And Where To Find Laurent
SPEAKER_00Well, you know what? Just if you miss a train, to what Rumantramas, something is coming, and you'll get another chance. So it's never too late, whether it's your age or your energy or your life, what position in life you are, you know, your CER at the station, jump on the next train.
SPEAKER_01No, I love that. I love that. It's there's always something new coming. You didn't miss anything. Feel free. Start learning and absorbing and challenge yourself today, right? Just so much there. Um, now, if people are looking, we'll have note, we'll have a link in the show notes, but is it is it get oblique directory platform where they can search and claim their business?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, gethublick.com. They just visit a platform, they can create their listing, uh, search their listing. And uh I would add, Kendra, that uh if I can be myself of any help to your audience, you know, we have tons of social media on the footer of our listings. They can just message saying, hey Laurent, uh, I'd love to get your help on that aspect or this aspect, and you know, sharing is believing. So let's let's do it.
SPEAKER_01Let's awesome. Well, great. Thank you so much. We'll be sure to have all of that in the show notes and the video description if you're watching on YouTube. Thank you so much, Laurent, for your time, for your perspective. Um, I know I definitely learned some things from you today, and I love to learn. So I appreciate your time. Again, be sure to connect with him in the show notes. And until next time, have a great rest of your day.
