What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Conversive AI: Revolutionizing Customer Communication Across Channels
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Remember when business communication meant just phone calls and plain text messages? Those days are rapidly disappearing as customers expect seamless conversations across multiple channels at any hour of the day or night.
Nitin from Conversive AI takes us through the fascinating evolution of customer communication technology, from their beginnings as an SMS-focused company fifteen years ago to today's AI-powered omnichannel platform. What stands out isn't just their ability to handle WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, and emerging channels like RCS, but how they orchestrate these touchpoints into coherent customer journeys through deep CRM integration.
The most compelling insights come when Nitin explains how AI agents are transforming after-hours customer engagement. For healthcare providers, injury lawyers, mortgage brokers, and university recruitment teams, customer inquiries don't stop at 5pm. AI can now handle these initial interactions—answering questions, capturing information, qualifying leads—all while maintaining proper data handling protocols. This capability enables smaller teams to provide 24/7 service without expanding headcount, a game-changer for service-oriented businesses.
What's your communication strategy for after-hours customer engagement? Does your business leverage AI to ensure no opportunity is missed while maintaining appropriate data handling? Listen to learn how the most innovative companies are addressing these challenges and preparing for the rich media capabilities of RCS messaging. The future of customer conversations is happening now.
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Hey everybody, fascinating discussion today as we dive into a number of topics, including enhancing customer communications through advanced messaging and AI, with a true innovator, thought leader in the space at Conversive AI, nitin. How are you?
Speaker 2:Thanks Ivan, I'm good. How are you? Thanks Ivan, I'm good. How are you?
Speaker 1:I'm doing well, thanks. Really intrigued by what you guys are doing as a longtime fan and user of messaging and so much happening in the space these days. As you know, advanced messaging, like RCS, interfaces with AI. But before all that, maybe introduce yourself as co-founder and your vision and mission at Conversive.
Speaker 2:Thanks, ivan, thanks for having me so very happy to kind of talk about what we do as a company and kind of share our insights and knowledge to the general community. So we have been a messaging company all through. We are focused on driving these messaging conversations from the CRM, so CRM being the data kind of source of truth for kind of who is your customer, who is your lead, who is where. So that gives us the right insight to kind of start a conversation, start messaging and then people reply and it becomes a conversation. So that's what we have done for about 15 years now as a company, and now what we are seeing is that conversations are happening across all channels. So you are conversing on your website, people are calling your contact center, people are kind of making visits to your retail store and if you are a professional, then you have people visiting your for appointments. So all these are conversations.
Speaker 2:But how do you make sure that you are doing the right conversations and you are delivering a good customer experience, a good, good customer experience? So that's when we started creating conversive ai, which is not just about okay, send messages, receive messages, but orchestrating the conversation across the customer life cycle for better customer experience and delivering the business outcomes. I'll give you just one example. So you may have a kind of recruitment team who's kind of calling candidates, and then you have candidates also coming through your website. So how do you uh make the two talk to each other? So that's where we create a conversation view across, uh, the life cycle that you will have candidate. You reached out to candidate, then he came to your website and so and so. So that's what Conversive is about. It is still we are offering it to our current customers and it is not just a messaging channel but web chat channel and also voice bots and voice agents is what we are doing.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. So when you started I guess you said 15 years ago, it was all about SMS and we learned to love SMS. Your website's even called SMS Magic, so that gives a peek in behind the curtain there. But now we're Omnichannel and everyone is, you know, using WhatsApp and Facebook and iMessage and all of these other channels Facebook and iMessage and all of these other channels how do you see the world diverging?
Speaker 2:And how can you support so many different channels across different platforms these days? Absolutely so. Every demographic, every audience has a channel of their own, so it is not just these channels. There are kind of things like vchat and line and kind of all those channels.
Speaker 2:Messaging is a complicated affair these days, so so many a times our customers have already vendors for these channels, so they may have somebody they have kind of for whatsapp, somebody they have for email, they may be use a marketing automation platform. So what we do is we help them orchestrate these channels by bringing the data in and giving them the action. Okay, so you sent an email, now sent a whatsapp message, or you made a phone call, now kind of send them a message. So this is done by conversive APIs which help kind of orchestrate the conversation, which is action, intent, based on sentiment and what kind of use case is it. So that's what we do. So we orchestrate the channels, knowing that customers will have different methods and means of their own. That's what we do. So we orchestrate the channels, knowing that the customers will have different methods and means of their own.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great. And how does integration work exactly? You mentioned CRM platforms like Salesforce, zoho great products. How easy is it to integrate and what's required for the customer in terms of that integration?
Speaker 2:which is basically very surface level integration, where you get in the contacts and all. But the integration can be much deeper. So what we do is we do workflow level integration. Something's happened on the crm database. You are able to strike a conversation, something happens on your conversation and you are able to update the system of record. So that's a two way. So, for example, there's a WhatsApp bot sitting on your website or a CTA on your billboard WhatsApp me on this number for anything. So there are going to be leads created and you need to give those leads to the CRM. So that kind of different integration is there. Plus, the conversation need to have a reference in the system of record. I have this lead so I need to see, okay, what message I did, what calling I did. So it needs to go to that level. So we do a deeper integration with the CRM. But what we do essentially is build out those use cases and orchestrate the channels.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. So now enter AI, gen, ai, intelligent bots into the mix, and what opportunities does that open up exactly for your customers?
Speaker 2:So one of the use cases we have heard often is that our customers who are professionals and institute, like healthcare companies or mortgage mortgage inquiry management teams or education recruitment teams at universities or at tech companies they don't have people beyond office hours, but typically in healthcare companies a patient will call anytime they need it. Right. A student typically calls after hours. That's the behavior we see these days. A candidate would also call anytime. They would call weekend and all so common use cases. Nobody is available to take those messages, take those phone calls. So you have AI agents taking those phone calls and messages and they can solve up to a point, capture their interest or capture who it is and set up a callback. So that's a very popular use case and AI agents are good enough for that. In fact, we have seen AI agents can do more than that. Ai agents can do pre-qualification, lead validation, capture the interest. If you are calling for a mortgage to a broker, then they can ask you who you are, what kind of house you need, which location you are looking for, what kind of a mortgage are you looking, how you're self-financing and some details about your income and all now a while. Ai agents can do this, courtesy the llms and all the voice technologies that are kind of getting built right now, uh, but uh, there is a kind of another layer to it, which is the right guardrails.
Speaker 2:What information can be shared? What information can be showed? Is it sensitive health information? Is it personal financial information? Uh, how do you make sure agents only get handled? The real human agents? Live agents are able to get their hands only on the data they are required to, and not the sensitive information. How do you make sure your CRM is not open and kind of the AI agent is just kind of puking data out of CRM to people. So all that, what we call guardrails, is important. Plus, also, we have to fine tune the LLMs for those use cases and also kind of customize them based on what outcome you want. So those are things that we do.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. That's really powerful and we've seen the new RCS standard really get traction, opening up new opportunities globally. Sms, as you know, has been traditionally pretty dumb as a channel, but RCS is really cool. If you've ever gotten an RCS message, you can format it in colors and images. That must be opening up a lot of new opportunities for you.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. We are already implementing it for a couple of customers in India and in the US, so it opens up a whole new dimension. Sms is kind of very black and white, if you call it. Rcs is more built for conversations with rich videos, multiple people on the conversation, so it's a lot more. But the carriers are kind of launching it step by step. That is one thing, and also kind of adoption among the consumers may take a little bit of time. So we see a few years horizon but yeah, it's the next thing and we see all the kind of ingredients for a very good channel in the future for business conversations.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. And, of course, the power is all this on the go. Power is all this on the go. Tell us about how you can empower sales and support teams who are mobile, maybe engaging on their phones, not just at the back office head office. How does the mobile app or mobile environment sort of work?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, yeah. So mobile environment is very important because in the industries we work in there is sensitive data, there is a lot of kind of considered decision making. The user will ask a lot of questions before choosing a treatment, a clinic, or before looking at what mortgage they want or buying a house. So, uh, so agents live. Agents can't use their own cell phones. It is kind of as simple as that. So that's why they need a mobile app to kind of communicate, uh, in a way that data is recorded, save it as the right privacy guardrails and the right permission mechanism.
Speaker 1:They are not kind of messaging or calling people who have opted out and so on. Yeah, that's pretty powerful, and so you know large enterprises can be tough to work with. It's not just the CRM integration. You have all kinds of analytics and reporting and security rules. You know how difficult is it to get an end-to-end service up and running. Is it days, weeks, months to kind of get going?
Speaker 2:For a large enterprise who is kind of deploying, say, across multiple use cases, across, say, a couple of departments, it can easily go two months. Uh, for a mid-market company, it's two to three weeks. Uh, basically, uh, we fine-tune their workflows, create conversational uh, ai kind of question answer, intent, action, uh, train their live agents on our interface. Okay, this is how our message pops in, this is where you see all the conversations, this is how you take over the conversation and their business managers on the analytics and all. So this does take a little bit of time in some cases.
Speaker 2:We have seen that companies also need to transform them a little bit so they they may not be used to a live back and forth channel which is working all the time. Right, they may not be answering so many questions on text messages. Somebody may feel, okay, say, an old school doctor or an old school lawyer or old school, why should I give away all that information over text messages? We have seen that also. There are some people who say, oh, I just want to send messages I don't want to receive. So we say to them no, no, you can't do that in today's world because privacy is not going to allow for it. You're going to run into legal trouble, then consumers will not like it at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it really depends. I mean, I think most of the Gen Z folks, kids I know my kids and others they don't even want to make phone calls, it's all messaging. So it is very much a demographic shift. And where's your fastest growing market or segment? Is it in India, in the us? Are there certain places where you're getting really great traction?
Speaker 2:so we are getting good traction from wellness and health care companies in the us. Uh, the second is uh injury lawyers in the us who are kind of because again they have people who are injured and calling them, which can be any time of the day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they put their phone numbers on the ads, the billboards.
Speaker 2:And injury can happen anytime. People can call anytime and usually they may not have extensive staff, so they have contact center one, two, three, just to make sure they are attending calls by a live person. So we are trying to upgrade them and they also go through a bit of a kind of transformation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's nothing worse than calling an answering machine or a voicemail box, and just leaving a message. That's a loose proposition. So what's next for you over the next few weeks and months? Do you have any events or news or announcements coming up? Maybe any travel? What's on your radar?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we are going to be market launching some of conversive offerings in the market in one and a half to two months, uh, which is going to? So, whatever I spoke about these use cases, they'll be published. We'll be publishing some success stories, um, and talking about it, giving an experience on the website say, uh, god forbid, if you need a treatment, so like as a simulation, just go to our website, try calling a doctor and see how it responds Basically a voice bot. Or try talking to a doctor's office over a chat and see how it performs. Does it answer your question? So there'll be a good experience and, more than that, the experience. We'll publish out the use case so that our market and our potential customers can see this is what it is, this is how it works. Interesting In the process, evangelize the best practices and evangelize what we do.
Speaker 1:Well, congratulations, sounds like you're really on to an amazing opportunity and good luck onwards and upwards. Thank you so much. All right, thanks everyone for listening, watching and sharing. Take care.