24. "LET ME CHECK THE OTHER APP" IS NOT A BUSINESS MODEL.

[00:00:00] Speaker A: You're listening to the AI Edge, the show that makes AI simple, easy, and practical. From chaos to clarity. AI Made easy. Let's cut the chaos. [00:00:10] Speaker B: Let me check the other app. [00:00:13] Speaker A: Oh, we're opening with the crime scene today. [00:00:16] Speaker B: We're opening with the crime scene because if you've ever said that sentence to a customer. Let me check the other app. Hold on. I think that one came through. On the other thing. Let me see if that hit my email. Sit up straight. This whole episode is about you. [00:00:30] Speaker A: And you've said it, everybody's said it. And every time you say it, the customer on the other end quietly loses a little bit of faith in you. [00:00:39] Speaker B: Because here's what let me check the other app actually sounds like to a customer. It sounds like, I have no idea where your information is. I am not organized, and I'm about to make you wait while I dig through six inboxes for a message you already sent me. [00:00:54] Speaker A: And they're too polite to say it out loud, but they're thinking, why am I explaining this twice? I already told you people. [00:01:01] Speaker B: So today we're talking about the quiet chaos costing you customers every single day. Not a lack of leads, not a lack of talent. The fact that your customer conversations are scattered across a dozen disconnected places and nobody has the full picture. [00:01:16] Speaker A: Let's paint what most small businesses actually look like under the hood. From the outside, it looks like a business on the inside. [00:01:24] Speaker B: On the inside, it's a phone that rings to the office, a cell phone that gets the text, a Facebook page with unread messages, an Instagram account with DMs stacking up, a website form that dumps into an email and a voicemail box nobody has opened since flip phones were cool. [00:01:42] Speaker A: Six front doors, no lobby. Customers are walking into all six at once. And there is no single place where anybody can see them all together. [00:01:51] Speaker B: So a customer messages you on Instagram Monday, calls Wednesday, and has to start the entire conversation over because whoever answered the phone has no idea the Instagram conversation ever happened. [00:02:03] Speaker A: And the customer's sitting there like, I sent you photos on Monday. And your team goes, can you resend those? And a little piece of that sale dies right there on the phone numbers time. [00:02:16] Speaker B: Because this isn't just a vibe, the average business is now juggling north of 10 different apps just to operate. Some small teams bounce between a dozen or more tools a day. [00:02:26] Speaker A: A dozen. For a business with five employees, you've got more apps than people. Your tech stack has a bigger headcount than your actual company. [00:02:35] Speaker B: And here's the cost. Research shows employees lose between 20 and 30% of their workday just switching between apps and hunting for information. Toggling, searching, going, wait, which app was that in? [00:02:49] Speaker A: Translate that you're paying a full time person and one full day of their week is spent not doing their job. It's spent playing hide and seek with your own customer information. [00:03:00] Speaker B: One day a week gone. That's not an employee. That's a highly paid professional app checker with benefits and a parking spot. [00:03:08] Speaker A: And owners look at that and go, I think we need another tool to help manage all our tools. [00:03:14] Speaker B: No, no. You do not fix too many disconnected apps by buying a 13th app. That's like fixing a leak by drilling a second hole so the water has somewhere else to go. [00:03:25] Speaker A: Let me download one more thing to organize the 11 things. Sir, you don't have an app shortage. You have 11 apps that refuse to speak to each other like coworkers after a bad breakup. [00:03:37] Speaker B: And that's the real killer. It's not the number of apps, it's that they're disconnected. Everyone is its own little island. Your Facebook messages don't know your phone calls exist. Your website form has never once met your text messages. They each hold one piece of the customer and share with nobody. [00:03:55] Speaker A: So the only thing connecting all six front doors is a human being's memory. Usually one specific human. And we did a whole episode on what happens when that person takes a vacation. [00:04:08] Speaker B: Shout out to Jessica, still holding your entire company together with her brain and a sticky note she's terrified to lose. [00:04:15] Speaker A: Call to action number one, and it's free this week. Do the audit. List every single way a customer can reach your business. Office line. Sell Facebook, Instagram, DMs, website form, email, Google messages, all of them. [00:04:31] Speaker B: Then ask one brutal question about each. Who is watching this and how fast? If the honest answer for any of them is nobody, really? Congratulations. You just found the door your customers are quietly walking out of. [00:04:46] Speaker A: You can't fix what you won't count. Count your doors this week. It's more than you think. [00:04:52] Speaker B: Let me make it real. Plumbing, home service. This one's for you again. [00:04:56] Speaker A: Picture a plumbing company, good company, great plumbers, four trucks. Here's a normal Tuesday customer with a [00:05:04] Speaker B: burst pipe calls the office voicemail because the office person's on the other line. Same customer panicking, texts the number off the truck. That hits a plumber's personal cell and he's under a sink. Won't see it for three hours. Same customer hits the Facebook page. Hello, Is anyone there? Water everywhere. [00:05:23] Speaker A: Three channels. Same customer, same emergency. Three. Three separate silences. [00:05:29] Speaker B: Every message went to a different place, seen by a different person at a different time. If it got seen at all. Nobody at that company knows this is the same desperate human with the same flooded kitchen. [00:05:41] Speaker A: So what does the customer do? Calls the next plumber who picks up on the first ring books that afternoon. And your company never even knew it was in the running. [00:05:51] Speaker B: You didn't lose that job because your plumbing's bad. Your plumbing's excellent. You lost it because that customer's cry for help got scattered across three of your inboxes and drowned in all three. [00:06:02] Speaker A: And the owner ends the day going slow, weak. It was not slow. You had a flooded kitchen customer begging to give you money on three platforms. And your business left them unread across the board. [00:06:15] Speaker B: Now flip it completely. Medspas. [00:06:18] Speaker A: Yes. Totally different world. Exact same disease. Bed, spas, salons, aesthetics. You live and die on the DM bed. [00:06:26] Speaker B: Spa customers do not call. Let's be honest. They slide into the Instagram DMs. Hey, how much is Botox? They message Facebook, any openings Friday, they text the front desk, can I move my appointment? They use the booking app sometimes. All four for one appointment. [00:06:42] Speaker A: And here's the MedSpa special client DMs Instagram about pricing Monday, one staffer answers, same client texts Thursday to book. A third staffer handles it, has zero clue about the Instagram convo and quotes a totally different price. [00:06:58] Speaker B: So now you look this organized and like you invent prices on the spot. Clients going Monday, you said 150. Now it's 200. Trust gone over a Botox quote because two employees were living in two different apps like they worked for two different businesses. [00:07:16] Speaker A: And in beauty, trust is the entire product. That client was about to become an every six weeks regular worth thousands a year. You lost her over a $50 miscommunication between two apps. That should have been one conversation. [00:07:31] Speaker B: Meanwhile, the med spa down the street, every DM text, Facebook message and booking flows into one place. So whoever answers sees the whole history. Hey, girl. Saw you asked about Botox Monday. Yep. Still 150. Want me to lock Friday at 2. [00:07:46] Speaker A: And that client feels seen because the business remembered her one conversation instead of four disconnected ones. Same service, same price. One remembered her, one made her repeat herself like she was calling a utility company. [00:08:01] Speaker B: Customers forgive a lot. They do not forgive repeating themselves four times. Fastest way to make someone feel like a ticket number instead of a person. [00:08:12] Speaker A: Now let's talk about the Elephant. Because somebody in the audience is tensing up. We keep saying AI, agent, automation and half of you just clutched your phone like we're gonna take your job. [00:08:23] Speaker B: Here it comes. [00:08:25] Speaker A: AI is gonna replace people. AI is gonna take jobs. This is how it starts. [00:08:31] Speaker B: Okay, let's be honest adult about this because we're not gonna lie to you. Is AI going to replace some work? Yes, absolutely. We're not going to sit here and [00:08:41] Speaker A: pretend it won't, but hear what it's replacing. It's replacing the manual, mind numbing, soul draining work no human should be doing in the first place. Copying a phone number from an email into a spreadsheet. Retyping the same customer info into four screens, manually checking six inboxes. That's the work that's going away and good ridden. [00:09:05] Speaker B: Nobody grew up dreaming one day I'll copy paste addresses between apps for eight hours. That's not a job, that's a punishment. AI is here to take the manual work off humans so humans can do the part that actually needs a human. [00:09:20] Speaker A: And here's the part the scared crowd gets completely backwards. The businesses adopting AI aren't shrinking their teams into oblivion. A lot of them are hiring because now they've got the capacity to actually grow. [00:09:34] Speaker B: Real pattern and studies back this up. Companies implementing AI and automation are creating whole new roles to run it. People to manage the systems, handle the extra volume, serve the customers the automation is now capturing. One widely cited World Economic Forum report projected that while automation displaces a chunk of tasks, it creates more new roles than it eliminates. Tens of millions of net new jobs on the horizon as businesses adapt. [00:10:04] Speaker A: Quick case study. Think about warehouses and companies like the big shipping and e commerce operations. Everybody screamed the robots will replace all the workers. What actually happened? They added robots to handle the manual hauling and repetitive picking and kept hiring hundreds of thousands of humans to run, maintain and work alongside those systems. The robots took the backbreaking manual part. The humans moved up to the roles that needed a brain. [00:10:32] Speaker B: The work didn't vanish, it leveled up. That's the whole story of every technology ever. [00:10:39] Speaker A: Because we've seen this exact movie before. Every time people panicked about the Internet. I'm not putting my business on a website. That's a fad. That fad is now where 100% of your customers find you. [00:10:54] Speaker B: People panicked about email. I'll just fax it. Where's your fax machine now? In a landfill. Been there 20 years. Nobody's holding a candlelight vigil for the fax machine. [00:11:06] Speaker A: People swore they'd never put a card number into the computer. Now you buy a furnace part off your phone while sitting on the couch in your underwear. Don't lie. We all do it. [00:11:17] Speaker B: People said social media was for teenagers. Now there's 65 year old plumbers going viral, showing up before and after drain cleaning to 2 million people. [00:11:26] Speaker A: Technology always feels insane right before it becomes normal. First you laugh at it, then you argue about it. Then you literally cannot remember how you ran your business without it. [00:11:37] Speaker B: And here's the line I want every owner to tattoo on their AI is faster. That's it. That's the whole thing. And nobody, nobody wants slow. Your customer doesn't want slow. Your customer wants an answer now. [00:11:55] Speaker A: So the businesses that adapt, they get faster, they capture more, they grow. They hire the businesses that dig their heels in and go, we've always done it this way. They're not staying the same. They're falling behind slowly, then all at once. [00:12:10] Speaker B: Because your competitor is adapting. While you're arguing with us in a head about robots, they're setting up a system that answers every customer instantly. They're not going to beat you because they're smarter. They're going to beat you because they're faster and you refuse to be. [00:12:26] Speaker A: We've always done it this way is the most expensive sentence in business. It's four words that quietly cost you everything. [00:12:35] Speaker B: And the ones who don't change, I'm not going to sugarcoat it, they're in trouble. Not dramatic trouble. Quiet trouble. The kind where you look up in three years and wonder where all your customers went. They went to the faster guy. [00:12:49] Speaker A: Call to action number two. If the scary part is just not knowing what this actually is, go remove the mystery. Go to thehellolc.IO and talk to Izzy. Izzy's our AI agent. [00:13:02] Speaker B: Message her like a customer with a busted water heater. Watch what she does not do. She does not say, let me check the other app. She does not make you repeat yourself. She's got the whole conversation, one place, instant. That's the experience your customers should be getting. And it's the experience your competitor is already building. [00:13:22] Speaker A: Go be a fake customer. Go bother our robot at midnight. Watch her answer like it's nine on a Monday. That's what fast feels like. That's what your voicemail will never be. [00:13:33] Speaker B: Now the fix. Because this isn't. Try harder. You cannot try harder. Your way out of a structural problem. Six inboxes and a good memory isn't a system. It's a magic trick that works until [00:13:46] Speaker A: it Doesn't a real system means every front door, calls, texts, Facebook, Instagram, website, form, email, all flow into one place. One inbox, one conversation history per customer. Everybody on your team looking at the same complete picture. [00:14:04] Speaker B: So when a customer reaches out, no matter which door they walk through, anyone on your team sees everything. Every message, every call, every appointment. The whole story. One thread. [00:14:16] Speaker A: No more. Lemme check the other app. No more making customers repeat themselves. No more messages dying in an inbox. Nobody watches. No more one human being, the only person who knows what's happening. [00:14:29] Speaker B: That's what we build inside. Hello, nexus. Not a 12th app for your pile. The one place all of them finally connect with the AI agent from last week answering first so nothing sits unread to begin with. [00:14:42] Speaker A: That's the foundation. Answer first last week. Never lose the conversation again. This week together. A business that stops leaking customers out the back while the owner's upfront wondering why it's slow. [00:14:55] Speaker B: Gut check. If a customer messaged your business on three platforms this week, would anyone on your team know it was the same person? Or would they get three half answers from three people and quietly go somewhere else? [00:15:07] Speaker A: If you're not sure, that's not a you problem. That's a nobody's connected the doors yet problem. Completely fixable. [00:15:15] Speaker B: Which brings the big one. If this episode described your business a little too well, if you wince that, let me check the other app. Book a discovery call. [00:15:25] Speaker A: This is the discovery meeting. A real conversation, not a 50 slide pitch. We map every way customers reach you, show you exactly where messages slip through, and show you what it looks like to pull all six front doors into one lobby. [00:15:40] Speaker B: Bumming H Vac Med, Spa, Salon, Whatever you run, we build it to fit how your customers actually reach out. No jargon, no pressure, just a clear look at what scattered communication is costing you and what fixing it looks like. [00:15:56] Speaker A: Homework in order. One, audit your doors this week. Two, Talk to Izzy thehellolc IO and feel one connected conversation. Three, Book the discovery call and let us show you where you're leaking. [00:16:10] Speaker B: Count it, feel it, then fix it. In that order. [00:16:14] Speaker A: Because customers don't care how many apps you have. They care whether you remember them. And if you're spread across six front doors, you don't remember them. You just hope you trip over their message before they give up on you. [00:16:29] Speaker B: Your competitor isn't better than you. We covered that last week. But this week, your competitor is also organized and faster. Every conversation in one place while you're still going. Hang on, let me check the other app. [00:16:44] Speaker A: And that sentence is not a business model. It's a warning sign. Go connect your doors before the faster guy connects with your customers. [00:16:54] Speaker B: This is the AI edge. Keep pushing the envelope. Drop how many apps your customers use to reach you in the comments. Be honest. We won't judge, but we'll see you [00:17:05] Speaker A: next Tuesday, same time, same mission. From chaos to clarity. [00:17:10] Speaker B: Catch you next week.