SPEAKER_01 0:00

The wildest thing that has ever happened in our business is that Covoso is an outbound sales platform that insurance agencies use. But earlier in our days, we had Postmates as a client, and Postmates was using our software for its people to call the restaurant and to place orders on behalf of the customer when you're pressing, you know, the order on your app. And so it was a wild use case for us that wasn't really fitting for what we wanted to do, but they wanted to use our software application to do that. And long story short, it only lasted for a short bit of time given that it wasn't a real fit, but it was always wild to me to see how a business like that operated in its early days from really being manual when you thought it's really so automated and streamlined. And so my name is Nima Haikimi. I am with Convulsa, CEO and co-founder. We're based out of Los Angeles, California. And I am an insurance dude.

SPEAKER_02 0:51

Boom! We die, we quote, we got the fluff. No suits, no script, just real world stuff. Laugh a little, sell a lot the insurance dudes. That's it.

SPEAKER_04 1:11

That was awesome.

SPEAKER_03 1:13

Good postmates, huh?

SPEAKER_01 1:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:16

That's crazy. Yeah. That reminds me of when Yahoo first started. Somebody would type in the query and then they'd go look at the encyclopedia or whatever to figure out the answer and then type it back.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

It's wild. I I you figure, I guess back then you had the tablets, but some restaurants didn't have them per se, right? So when the order would come in, they would just pick up the phone and call. And I guess through a streamlined approach with us, through an API, it would just send the call out. And then as soon as the call would connect, they would just place the order. And then it was a connection back to their app in a way to make sure that the order was put through. And so that was just happening on a regular basis. But uh earlier on the product wasn't so stable, so there would be outages from time to time. And and guess what? If that happened, right, they the order wasn't placed or there was a delay. And as you can imagine, being the consumer placing an order, I want it delivered.

SPEAKER_03 2:08

Right.

SPEAKER_01 2:09

That happened a few times. And it wasn't directly through Prosmates, it was a BPO, an outsourcing company that they had hired. But I'll never forget that it happened a few times and eventually got a call from the CEO and he said, listen, Anima, we're going to have to part ways. You know, it we just can't have outages. And I said, Listen, I hear you. I just, is there any way we can do anything because I'm gonna have to let some people go? It was one of our biggest accounts. Back then, this was many, many years ago, and it represented a sizable amount of revenue. And I'll never forget what he said. He said, Nima, if I if we lose this account, we're gonna have to let 500 people go. And I and I understood. And I was like, okay, yeah, got it. Fair enough. Couldn't really say much.

SPEAKER_04 2:48

You know, you know what I love about that story? How many times we try to wait until things are perfect to to do something? And I think a lot of people in your position would maybe be nervous, oh, the the platform's not stable enough, but you're you're pushing through, you're you're making it work no matter what.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

Yeah. I mean, it took us, you know, in a 20-year, we've been around for about 20 years now, and it took us about 10 years to get to a point of some level of stability. And and and and the funny thing is when you say about things being perfect, we didn't really even exhibit or put our name out there for the first seven or eight years because I felt like, oh, the product isn't good enough, right? But the but the real the reality is it was an illusion because you're never gonna, your product is never gonna be, it's always gonna be evolving and changing and improving. And the moment we put ourselves out there, and so that one thing I would, you gotta just put yourself out there and show up and and network and and learn. It's really to me the biggest takeaway was learning about the the insurance industry, right? Connecting with different businesses and and talking to them, understanding their pain points and how what are the words that they're using and things like that. So it really helped us and helped me get up to speed. And like you said, you'll never be ready. I am a perfectionist. I try to get things to a certain place, and there's just you got to get to 80% and get and launch and let's go.

SPEAKER_04 4:04

Yeah, it's kind of like having a kid, right? Couples wait until they're ready, and it's like you're never ready. And then you get, I'll never forget what I'm saying. Per 100. Yeah. I I brought home my child, I put her, put her on the couch, and I was like, I can't believe they let us come home with that. It's it's crazy. You know? It's crazy. But like you just go, here you go, no instructions, have fun. But no one is ever ready. And the and what is it, luck? What is it? Luck. So opportunity when opportun uh uh like encounter serves the brave or something like that. Oh, I didn't hear that. It's like it's like if you put yourself out to your point, the only way to learn all the the the parts of the system that needed to be helped and stuff like that was from your customers while doing it.

SPEAKER_03 4:47

So it's a good thing that I think what our biggest one of the biggest objections with when our sales guys are talking about the lead callers for uh for an agent, for an insurance agent, is well, you know what? I it's not the right time right now. I want to wait until things get a little bit better, probably be a month or two down the road. And it's like, dude, if things aren't good now, they're not improving, right? They're not gonna just magically get better.

SPEAKER_01 5:12

Right.

unknown 5:13

Right.

SPEAKER_04 5:14

Well, I was gonna say, since you have so much expertise in the last 20 years of phone systems, and and I mean, the the amount of calls that have come through Conboso is incredible. We'd love to ask you from a perspective from your perspective some questions on what can help insurance agencies. So, like our our primary listener is like an agent at a captive agency or an independent agency. And uh, I think that they can get a lot of insight from you.

SPEAKER_01 5:45

Look, I I think outreach and you know, engaging with the consumer and getting them on the phone has changed quite a bit. It is still ultimately what you need to do to proceed with a transaction, a sale or something. And there that there's a lot of automation that's happening, but that's still something that the consumer wants. They're gonna want to talk to a human, and and and when it comes to certain decisions they're gonna want to make, that's still important. I believe what's changed is that having consent to call someone is no longer enough. You have to do it in a responsible way, in a strategic way, a little bit more thought out, and you can't, you have to yet you have to be persistent. And that is if there is a balance in how you do that. Because if you're too passive, you don't, you know, you don't convert, you don't get them on the phone, and then you're like, you're not just bringing in sales. If you're too aggressive, the consumer doesn't like it. They they block you, the telco carriers block, they block you, right? Your numbers get flagged, a scam and spam. And so you really just have to find that right balance. And that that means looking at your data and looking at what works. Now, if you're a small operation, I mean, these days with AI, you can get the data that you're looking for. You there's no excuse anymore for not having the data. So you have to make decisions, data-driven decisions, and find out what is it that you did that has worked and what have you done that hasn't worked? Are you making too many attempts, too little attempts? Is there a text message that you should be sending? Is it a call? How many calls? You know, we've heard stories where people want to dial the person 40, 50, 60 times. Stop. Stop for the love of God. Do not do that. It's just what happens is you're going to call those people and you're gonna hurt and impact all the other leads that you're bringing in because carriers just look at that. They have patterns and they and they flag every single call. So now, guess what? You have a fresh lead coming in, you want to work that lead. And now you have your older ones that you're just pounding. They're looking at that. And guess what? That consumer is getting called by others too. You're not the only person calling them.

SPEAKER_03 7:48

Right.

SPEAKER_01 7:49

If it's a shared lead versus exclusive, whole different ballgame, right? Quality over quantity. I mean, I can go on and on. I guess it depends on where you guys want to take this, but quality over quantity would would be better. And higher intent is someone really looking for insurance. The lower intent depends on, again, if it's an older lead, how do you work those leads? The strategies behind those are very different. Every every one of them have a place, but you can't mix and mash. And everybody just tries to just get more get more leads. Everybody's addicted to getting more leads, right? I don't think and in sales, you always want more. Yeah. You have to know like what is the capacity and how much can we handle and what do we really need, and look at the data to give you those answers. And I don't think many business owners, especially when you're small, you're really thinking about that.

SPEAKER_04 8:38

Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. Well, let's start with this. So I would say most agents are buying shared leads uh that we talk to. You know, you have your Ever quotes, your quote wizards, your all web leads. So most of the leads that are bought are shared leads. So, what are some nuances to those and and how to help get those over to the agents?

SPEAKER_01 9:01

Yeah, if you're doing shared, it's still it's also good to know how many are getting that lead. First few days, right? The speed to lead is certainly very important. How good is the technology using at detecting a human versus a voicemail? So there's a lot of stuff people don't understand that most systems out there do not detect a human from a voicemail very correctly. They actually misclassify humans as voicemail. So if you're using automated technologies, it really depends. Are you using predictive dialing, click to call, really all depends in terms of technology that you're using? So there is that aspect of it. You want to make sure that if you're using automated dialing, that the voicemail detection works correctly, and most don't even know if it's working correctly or not, it's much of a black box. But if you're getting a lot of calls connecting to you, there are voicemails, the the answering machine detection is not working really well. So there's a little bit of that where what Cromboso has done is we have 99% accuracy in knowing whether a call is a voicemail versus a human. And on the flip side, we're not misclassifying them really when it's a human and making sure that's connected. But if you're doing shared leads, you look, it's hard, like texting should definitely be some part of it, but you're competing with I try to compete with fewer, fewer, fewer people. So like if it find out how many that others are getting that lead. And then yeah, the first day is very important. First, first second, as soon as the lead comes in, you gotta get them on the phone. If you're a small operation and you're and you wait at hours, yeah. I mean, I don't know if you're ever gonna get a person on the phone, especially if it's been sold to what five people, five different businesses. Is that the number? I don't know if it's three, four, five, six, five or five, six, seven.

SPEAKER_03 10:34

It just depends.

SPEAKER_01 10:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 10:36

And that's what they're saying.

SPEAKER_01 10:37

And yeah, you gotta try over a week to two week period, 10, 15 attempts, maybe 20, you know, but you gotta look at the sources that you're using, which ones are converting better versus others. I think that's I don't know how many are looking at that, right? Are you looking at at that data and or just saying it doesn't work and I just stop? Like, what are you guys hearing?

SPEAKER_03 10:57

Most of them make a couple calls and then stop and say the leads don't work. And that's we built our agencies by calling leads. I mean a lot of leads.

SPEAKER_04 11:07

And it's always so many leads. And it's always like we we've noticed with if you don't have some sort of sequence, follow-up sequence, and you leave it in the hands of an agent, they always think that they made more dials than they made. They always think that they've gotten to it quick enough, which they don't. And uh most of the time when I looked into it, it was like, yeah, we called that lead six times. And it's like they called them two to three times. They just don't, you know, it makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 11:37

And then with without a good sophisticated technology, you're not gonna do it. It doesn't, it's not, it's not possible, right? And I think I think most everyday agent doesn't have that. You gotta have, like you said, the the sequences, the cadences that over a period of time and in an automated way that figures out how when do you call, how many times, do you incorporate a text message, maybe an email, and when you stop. And then you can look, you can re-engage possibly if it didn't turn, maybe in 30, 60, 90 days, try a few more times. It's you should not necessarily completely stop over that period of time, but don't go like the consistent, I'm gonna keep calling every day three, four, five, six times. It just it's it doesn't work. And I think that's the big bigger thing is like if you have an actual team and an operation and everything, you gotta just space it out over a period of time and then know when to stop, know when your point of diminishing return, when have people stop answering after how many attempts and then just stop? And I would partner with yeah, an organization like yours and others that help you do that. Because if you're a single operation doing that all yourself, it's just you you can't. You don't have the the capacity to do it all. Technology is very there's a lot of good sophisticated technology out there, but to be able to do it with a small operation, it's just not you're not gonna be set up for success. 100%.

SPEAKER_04 12:47

What what are the biggest mistakes insurance agents make when they're trying to get prospects on the phone?

SPEAKER_01 12:52

Biggest mistake. Um, let's see, you're I would say that like I said, that over dialing aspect of it is is big. You're not incorporating different channels of communication, like emails and text. You just you don't have good sequences in place. Call ID reputation number management. Like, how do you do that? This is more on the technology side of it, like how you manage the reputation and being on top of that. What else?

SPEAKER_04 13:16

We see that a lot with with our clients too. It's it's the phone numbers are a big deal. And it's like the last thing that they're looking at, but it's like, dude, if you're not looking at the numbers, if your contact rate drops significantly, you could still be making hundreds, maybe thousands of dials, but that means they're barely gonna talk to anyone.

SPEAKER_01 13:35

Yeah. Number management, the term number management, number reputation management has become a thing. Like you, there there is a reputation behind your numbers. And you have to know what your practices, no matter what system or solution you have in place, your practices a lot of times will, there's a cause and effect, right? The more you dial, the effective it is, your numbers get flagged. Now, you do want to have the cadence that's responsible in place, and then have a system that manages it so that when a number gets flagged, it will deprioritize the use of that and use one of the other numbers that are performing. But what you don't want to do is swap out numbers. That's a bad practice. You know, there's an NPRM out there, and they're looking at number recycling and swapping and all of that. You're basically trying to hide and and game the system. That's not how it works. You need to can maintain your numbers. You need to use the same set of numbers, have technology in place again that you know with with Convoso, we help you with our Ignite product where it stops using them and it doesn't stop completely, but brings it down the use of them, reprioritizes another number, and then you can get them remediated, which there's nothing that's perfect. There's no preferred solution, but get those numbers remediated so that they're clean again. And that's an ever ongoing cycle, which which I don't think will stop until there's some good practice in place around how many times can you attempt a a lead over what period of time or something that there's a standard of these.

SPEAKER_03 15:00

Like and not to cut, I'm sorry, I cut you off, but you keep going.

SPEAKER_01 15:03

No, no, I'm curious what what do you guys see around that, right? When it comes to that, the attempts, the calling, when do you when is when is too much, when is too little?

SPEAKER_03 15:11

Well, I I'm curious what your thoughts are on that whole that whole world where it's like, okay, so there's there's some there's some numbers, fuzzy numbers, but you shouldn't call more than some people say 25 on one line, right? 25 times a day, 50 times a day, 100 times a day. I we're doing 25 a day now.

SPEAKER_00 15:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 15:30

Because we just don't want to it doesn't we it's not worth it, right? It's like I'll pay three bucks extra per line. Yeah, for for each phone number, right?

SPEAKER_01 15:40

It's honestly it's not like it nobody's that simple. I don't know if it's that simple. It's like why like obviously overdialing on a single number isn't is is not a good practice. You know, unfortunately the analytics engines and the carriers are are are not helping in terms of how they're going about it. You shouldn't have to have all these different numbers, but every carrier is different. So while doing less dials on one single phone number is maybe a good practice, different carriers have different reasons why they flag something. Are your call durations very short? Are people hanging up on you? Sure, right. Right? Like that matters. Are you leaving messages? They want to see behavior that's a behavior of a person that's making calls. There are people that want to hear from you that are responsible calling. You don't hear, you don't see somebody on a regular basis just calling other people hanging up. That's not that's not normal behavior.

SPEAKER_03 16:27

Right.

SPEAKER_01 16:27

So they look at those signals. So even if you use 25, 10, or what it's not the be-all end-all aspect of it. Are you letting the call ring before you stop, before you hang up? Or are you letting, you know, there's a lot of dials that you just hang up, you you let the call ring for a certain number of seconds and then you hang up. You should let it ring enough times to give it the opportunity for the person to pick up. And then when it goes to voicemail, do you have the ability to leave smart voicemails? Where maybe after the first attempt, you leave a message, assuming you have consent, you want to leave a pre-recorded message on the maybe the first attempt, second attempt, or third attempt if it goes to voicemail. Maybe you don't, maybe the fifth, sixth time attempt, you want to leave a message and maybe you have like two or three messages, like a final attempt. That shows that you're trying to engage the person, you're trying to do things the right way. And they and those signals all matter, matter. And it's not just one thing that you're gonna do, but it's the combination of having the consent, not overdialing, leaving messages, not hanging up, texting. And when you do it all, it will work. But it's not easy to do that. And most people are too lazy. I feel like they're just they're used to just the old ways, which is I'm gonna pound and I'm gonna call and call, and it doesn't work anymore. Nope.

SPEAKER_03 17:36

It just doesn't work. You can't brute force it anymore.

SPEAKER_01 17:39

No.

SPEAKER_03 17:39

And and it's it's that that's what's interesting is the the legitimate businesses, and especially in insurance where there's no lobby, lobbying the FCC for all this stuff, and or whoever it is, the different, all the different the carriers, everybody involved, is there's just no rubric on how to how to effectively do business to reach customers that you've paid, right? You know, you've paid money to reach. They've they've asked to be reached, yet you could get flagged. And I'll I'll share a quick story because I think it's it's interesting. I'm sure I know you're familiar with the do not call list and the do not call.gov. You have to so we go in there, all the legitimate businesses go and register their numbers and put in their little carrier number and all that. Well, their system has a two-factor authentication that calls you, right? It doesn't have where they text, they just call you. Well, I went and did it because my my office manager was out, so I I had to go do it. So I went in there, did it, get the ring back from the do not call, and guess what it said on the phone, on my phone. But then just spam? Yes. It said scam likely from the do not call from the government. Yeah, right. I mean, so it just goes to show even the people behind it aren't able, and I know it's it's the carriers and all that, but but still, it's they're all part of the same, they're all working together, right? Yeah. So it's like, do you see any headway being made on potentially having a better system that isn't punitive when you haven't done anything wrong yet? You know, like I mean, we're here try just to operate.

SPEAKER_01 19:08

I look, I think the the the shared approach has challenges. It has a there's a reason why there is a shared lead. Why, right? The consumer has options, they want to have options to figure out which one do I want to go with, which is a good good thing. So I don't I don't know how you solve that problem because on one hand, you're helping the consumer by giving them options so they can figure out which quote is best for them. They want to shop. On the other hand of it, that's now giving the permission to five different businesses to reach out to you. And if they all have their own practices, if there was one universal system that everyone used and it somehow gives you a priority, it's I don't have the answer to it. I just know that higher intent is better, these practices are better. There is the, you know, the reassigned number database. If you're calling someone whose lead, that that that phone number no longer belongs to them, where somebody has a prepaid phone, they fill out your phone, you're you're you fill out a form, and maybe in a month from now they that number doesn't belong, they change their number, and you're calling that person, even that like honey pots, right? Which could turn into a honeypot. So I don't know if everybody knows what a honeypot, you guys might know, but a honeypot essentially is a phone number that somebody, like carriers have, and others have just taken these phone numbers for the purposes of just waiting to get calls to those numbers and seeing if anybody's calling them, because nobody should be calling those numbers. And it's like a trap, but in a way, it's supposed to help people understand stop calling this this uh this lead if it's no longer assigned to them. And so what you have to do is you have to actually scrub your records against the V Assigned number database. And and it helps, again, as well, not hitting numbers that are on the honeypot, it's another signal, right? Because those that information gets also routed back to the traceback group in this traceback group, which is an association where all the major telco carriers are on there, and there's a responsibility by them through the traced act, right? Where the ITG has to report up that information about who has been hitting these honey pods and who are who's who are making calls and not supposed to, to the FCC, which then comes back also to the state regulators, which can then come back to the businesses. So in 2026 and thereafter, you have compliance. I have said it before, is a moat. It really is. You gotta do things the right way, and you'll have a better result and outcome. Will it still be a challenge? Yes, but which business, your business is always gonna have challenges. And I think it's a matter of just accepting that, embracing it and being proactive around how you solve problems and not getting frustrated by it. Because there's always gonna be something, right? Any business will have it. Otherwise, we wouldn't be in business if there weren't challenges. It's just the way it goes. We're here to be problem solvers and provide a solution for our customers, and it just requires you to be very thoughtful and proactive and strategic around it.

SPEAKER_03 21:52

Do you think that the honey badger is more likely to call a honeypot?

SPEAKER_04 21:56

So most agents, we got it, we got some, we're buying leads and then we We also have old leads in the system. How would you recommend handling older leads in the system?

SPEAKER_01 22:04

Yeah. Different cadences for sure, different campaigns. I wouldn't mix them all together. You know, your agents should be able to log into both campaigns at the same time, but the cadence and the different sets of numbers for your aged, right? Through through like you should have the ability to automatically move them to a different campaign. And that campaign has its own numbers and its own cadence that's not as I'm going to say aggressive, but the dialing of it happens at a later time. Or, you know, you can do something where it tapers off on a campaign. So with Cravosa's platform, there's a workflow dialing where you can literally, from attempt to attempt, based on the number of attempts you've made, you can set a different uh timeline of when you want to call that deed back again. So I would have the sequence be drawn out further out in terms of when you try them again. But yeah, separate campaign, most likely, from your aged versus your real-time, you know, fresher ones, different sets of numbers. Probably would not be doing text messaging because people just get annoyed from uh get receiving a text message if they're not expecting one from you. And then you need to look at the data to see how many, you know, attempts. Did you like was it worth it? Was it worth it to call that person again? Because there is a cost, whether it's your the the people cost, technology costs, and then what nobody knows about is your your call at your number and reputation. Are you getting flagged because you're calling someone when they don't haven't expected it? The fresher their lead, the more the person is more likely to pick up. When they don't pick up, you gotta see, okay, did I ever get any sales? How many did I get? Is it worth it? How what what is the value in and and redialing that that lead? We've we we have now looked at our system where at Cromboso we have a back-end system that now hooks up to our customer's account and and we look at the number of attempts, and you'll be surprised. It's just so often there's not much, there's not that many sales that happen after a certain number of attempts. And even though you might get some, what you're in return, there's a cost, whether it's your technology, the minutes, the dialer, however, depending on how it's done, it's the person, the labor cost, and then your number reputation. So you just gotta weigh all of that and see where's that point of diminishing returns where we should just stop. 100%.

SPEAKER_03 24:15

21st dial.

SPEAKER_01 24:16

Is that what it is for you guys?

SPEAKER_03 24:18

Right around there. Yeah, right around there.

SPEAKER_01 24:20

Yeah. Well, it's good that you mean the fact that most it's it's bananas to me how yeah, how much people want to dial when we just tell them the reasons of why you shouldn't. And and that's what we do with our customers. We, you know, we provide them with that proactive feedback around.

SPEAKER_04 24:34

Yeah, I think one of the like you you brought up AI at the beginning, and I I know what agents are thinking. How am I gonna use AI in my agency? A lot of agents are looking at it like, you know, you using AI, it's like I'm gonna use it to respond to an email. Like, you know what I mean? Like the most basic way to use it. But I think when it comes to phone systems, especially, like throwing it in there and and getting your numbers right, doing all the things that we couldn't do, it would used to take us so long to go through phone data before to find the commonalities of uh how many, to your point, how many dials, like at what point is is there diminishing returns? Just like when you see responses and everything. And now it's like, dude, I mean, you can just hook AI into the back end of your system and like get what used to take us hours and seconds.

SPEAKER_01 25:30

Yeah, yeah. If you're not embracing the AI and all these technologies, people are afraid that their jobs, are there gonna be any jobs? And what I always say is is if you're proactive around learning it, there will be a job for you, there will be a future for you, there'll be a business for you, but you really have to just go all in on it. And you're just scratching the surface when you do that. There's so much you can do with it. So there's no more excuses around not having data and not knowing what works and doesn't and not being able to do something nowadays. It's just a matter of the prompt and what you're asking and asking the right questions to be able to get those answers. Yeah. Craig and I just started deploying AI throughout the case. Yeah. Well, how do you guys how have you guys used in your and then what what have you seen be very powerful?

SPEAKER_03 26:13

I've been I've been elbows deep since 3.5 came out.

SPEAKER_01 26:17

And uh, any specific kind of use cases that are like things that are very powerful that you're like a complete game changers.

SPEAKER_04 26:24

I think this. I think as a manager, what used to, you used to have to log into what, five to ten systems per company, right? All the different whatever you're using for your CRM, whatever you're using for different, as simple as what you're using to log in and track time for your employees, like anything that you're logging into, it's like you can just put, you can just hook it to Claude or chat or whatever on the back end, yeah, and then deploy it to your team. And they don't they don't ever have to log into anything. They just ask to get it.

SPEAKER_03 26:57

Or yeah, AI agents and Slack. And like Yeah, every night, every night it listens to all the calls and grades them, and then my my agency manager gets a gets his meeting notes to talk about all the call. Like what how it went yesterday. Yeah, here's what the here's what the teleteam did, here's all their numbers, here's you know, it's just a nice little PDF that that has like so-and-so said this. You may want to consider saying it this way, you know, and being have you guys seen freaking wild adapting our sales script every every day. It it's like, okay, let's tweak it here and change it, but it's all proactive now.

SPEAKER_01 27:34

Yeah, it just does it. And have you seen no, you know, what everyone's asking is, hey, is it making a difference, right? Like your bottom line, everybody's always wondering, hey, we're using all these tools. We're how how are you guys look seeing that or the impact of it?

SPEAKER_04 27:48

Well, that's where Craig and I were talking about. There is two sides to this, right? It's the time waster side of this or the moneymaker side of this. I think to the use cases that we were just bringing up, being able to coach people in real time on their calls, being able to look at the the data in real time, being able to detect pattern recognition for today's activity, I think that does make a massive difference. Because if an agent doesn't know what they're saying and we don't know what they're saying, let's be honest, doing call reviews every single day is so cumbersome. And so, like being able to just even just offload that, find the pattern, deploy the solution, like that 100% helps the bottom line because it's so quick. So it's really a speed factor, but or you can just play with the tools because you can do anything with them now. And then you can waste the whole day playing with it. That's amazing. So that's kind of how I look at it.

SPEAKER_01 28:46

And challenges that you guys are seeing as of as at this present time, not to say limited to AI, but when it comes to what you guys are doing, how you're doing it, where where do you guys see things uh on the insurance side? I think it's harder to get a hold of people.

SPEAKER_03 28:58

Yeah. It's harder to get a hold of people, even though the tools are better to get a hold of them with, right? The I think that it's just it's so easy to to attempt to get a hold of people that now people are just inundated and overwhelmed with all the crap. I just went through my phone to to I hate flagging people, right? Because I don't want to be flagged. But I get these these loan companies that call that call at least five messages a day. I mean, it's insane. So I have to flag them, flag them, flag them, but then I don't get any calls for a couple weeks, and then it just starts back up again.

SPEAKER_01 29:30

So yeah, getting the attention of the pr of the people.

SPEAKER_03 29:33

I mean, yeah, it's it's it's like what you said earlier, it's a balance, right? You there has to you have to call enough that you get through, but you also can't call too much, or you know, they're they're gonna hit flagged. It's so easy now, right? It's so easy for somebody to just block. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:52

Look, it's it is certainly the number one pain point we see, and and you gotta do 10 things probably, if I have to list them right, between what I said for it to really work, and and we've seen we've seen that difference, but it has to be all of them being done. And uh the the consumer wants to be respected too. So, like you said, like that fine balance of like imagine like you're getting that call. How do you want to do it? And you gotta think about okay, how am I gonna approach it a little bit differently than maybe others that are calling this, you know, this lead so that there's some differentiation there or a different approach there or something that allows you to be st to stand out. I think that helps. I think when it comes to technology, also what we're seeing is you can always, you know, cheaper isn't always better. And I always say this, and I, you know, it's how much are you spending on your leads? Your labor depends on where it is, but that's also a certain amount. And then when it comes to the technology, there's always this desire to spend as little as possible. And so I would say that can bite you in the butt if you're not really thinking through all the reasons why the technology needs to be very strong when it comes to making sure your operation is running, getting and converting those leads. I mean, every little percentage point on a contact rate makes a considerable difference on the bottom line. It just something around what we recently looked at is when we looked at our answering machine detection, you know, using a predictive dialogue. I don't I don't know if you guys are uh do you guys use anything automated? Or what's the what's the calling? Is it is it more clicking click to call?

SPEAKER_03 31:24

Yeah, right? It's uh it's not predictive.

SPEAKER_01 31:27

It's not predictive.

SPEAKER_03 31:28

Yeah, it's it's uh one to one deposition of the theory. One to one?

SPEAKER_01 31:33

Is it one-to-one calling? Yeah, one-to-one. Oh, interesting. Yeah, more so from an automated place. If you're using that, you know, when the voicemail detection is set up uh and functioning correctly, there's most systems will transfer 40, 50 of the calls to to the rep and it's a voicemail because it didn't classify correctly. But we brought that down to about like 15 to 17 percent, and that difference made a difference of 20% increase in your conversions. So those are the numbers that people don't really look at. They're just like, hey, let me get a system out there that will call them and as cheap as possible, you know, and then the other part of it is the speed to connect, where if you're using, if you're not using automated technology, most systems there's a delay, one, two, three second delay where you're like, hello, hello. Why is that? Because the system needs to have a little bit of time to figure out is that a human or is it a voicemail? We brought that down to about 200 milliseconds to the point where you almost hear the hello versus saying hello while it connects it to the rep. And that's the reason why I guess maybe some people don't use automated technology like that. But technology has advanced so much where that that's a difference. And it's it's it's really those little things that if you're doing it correctly, along with your cadences, omni-channel, the number of attempts, the number of times you let it ring, leaving, you know, voicemails, certain strategic voicemails, you should see a considerable uplift in your contact rate, along with remediation, number management. But what happens is businesses will do like two or three of these and they're busy doing other things. And so, you know, we try to be very proactive in working with our customers to help them figure that out. But some of them are also like, listen, like I know how to do it, I've done it this way. And that's the challenge that we run into because people have just been used to, and this, I don't blame them. They've been used to doing it a certain kind of way. So they want to continue doing it that way, but you don't know and realize that it's just not the formula has changed.

SPEAKER_04 33:22

Yeah. Well, I think that's what the the like probably the biggest challenge now. So the question earlier was like, what have we all seen? And like is this actually helpful with AI and everything? And I think it's like, you know, look 20 years ago, 30 years ago, you could actually use a yellow page or white pages and just call numbers with your rotary dial phone and get through. And as tools come out, you know, like it's easier to make outbound calls now, but because it's easier, now we're starting to get flagged and stuff like that. Creating other problems from things becoming if you're doing it the way it was done five years ago and you haven't changed the little practices, then yeah, you're gonna get flagged. I mean, you're not gonna reach as many people. But if you use the tools available, go a little deeper, tweak some of your processes, you can get back to where you were five, six years ago. But it does take that level of like a little bit of a deeper, just looking deeper into these things, which isn't that hard anymore with the tools that we have.

SPEAKER_01 34:26

Yeah, you gotta just step back. I think maybe the challenge could be like, listen, you're always on the go. What's we gotta do this, we gotta do that, prioritizing things. And sometimes with this aspect of it, it's like, do we take a step back, think it through, and re-implement? I I find that challenge myself sometimes, right? We're doing certain things in our business a certain kind of way that we've all we've always been doing it, and it's not necessarily broken, but is that the best way to do it today in this day and age with what what with how things are? So maybe reflecting back as I'm saying this out loud and looking at, okay, here are the things that are we doing most common, most repetitively or most often in our business. Are these still the same processes that we should be following or should we be making changes? Um I think as business owners, we can be stuck in just, hey, we've got 10 problems and these three things here have been running. Let's let it be. When reality, maybe the the the the breakthrough is going back to those things that we think are working and changing them, which can then impact the 10 other things that problems that we have. That's a great point.

SPEAKER_04 35:23

Yeah, I always tell my my kids and stuff, it's like, what what is the job place gonna look like in 10, 15 years? And I just think I'm like, though, just get really good at critical thinking and pivoting. There's not a set and forget it like there used to be. It's not like you become an insurance agent, that's the last thing you're gonna be. It's like get used to it, get used to like changing. Adapt or die is what I say. 100%.

SPEAKER_01 35:48

Adapt or die is the name of the game, and that's just what it is being a business. You gotta have to constantly adapt, learn, change, grow. And I think that's the the the cycle of life.

SPEAKER_04 35:57

Yeah. And it's faster than ever now. I'm sure you've seen it with the phone system. I mean, you probably couldn't even imagine where Kimboso is now to compare like what 10 years ago, you'd have been like, there's no way.

SPEAKER_01 36:08

No, I mean a year ago. It's always evolving, changing, regulations, carriers. Carriers were not, was not a thing 10 years ago or five, seven, six years ago. It was like you got a good relationship, it works, great. Now, no, you need to be proactive. We need to have really strong relationships with our carriers. They give us feedback, we go back to the customers, we go back to our product and incorporate all of those changes. So it's evolving. I'm excited, just more so from a place of I like the challenge. I like the fact that when there are problems and you spend your time earning the solve of that problem, and that's where the fulfillment comes in. Um, even though in the moment sometimes it doesn't feel great. But I've learned in my life that that's where really the growth happens and that's gives us meaning of being able to solve problems. So much fun.

SPEAKER_04 36:55

It's actually fun to solve problems.

SPEAKER_01 36:57

Some of us create problems just to solve them. We do. Human beings are known. When we don't have problems, we look for problems, which means we create problems. That's for sure.

SPEAKER_04 37:06

Yeah, a hundred percent. Well, let me ask you a question. If you owned an insurance agency today and wanted to double your new business without doubling the payroll, what would you do first?

SPEAKER_01 37:17

Without doubling your payroll, certainly look at efficiencies around how to leverage. Listen, everybody's talking about it, but utilize AI and your operations. Where can you streamline things? Find a way to streamline the operations of your business because there's a lot of efficiencies you could find and maybe pick two, three, two things and just get those right. Start there as a foundation because businesses are no longer gonna be run the way the way before with 100 people, 500 people, whatever it is, you really got to set the foundation and I would set that as a starting point.

SPEAKER_04 37:47

I love it. Cool. Well, what what numbers I was gonna have that as the last question, but I'd like I'd love to know what numbers would you say like an agency owner should track in their phone system?

SPEAKER_01 37:58

Yeah, in their phone system, depending on again what dialing volume you do, but everybody looks at potentially at contact rate, and I will tell you that contact rate is uh is a metric that I'm not looking at as as closely as I used to for customers, meaning it's important. But if you're doing high volume dialing for a good amount of leads, you want to look at your sales conversions per hour per day. What does the average come out to be? Because that's really what matters at the end of the day, right? All the dialing that you do, along with your CPA, what does it take to acquire a customer between the cost of your leads, your technology, your people? Those are the two. The contact rate could be a leading indicator, but system from system to system tracks contact rate differently incorrectly. You don't really know what your true contact rate is. Again, if you're using technology where the voicemail detection is not accurate, your agents are getting those voicemails connected and they're just positioning it as something random. Now your contact rate is skewed. You'll never truly know your contact rate. But what you will know and what influences a good technology, good leads will be your conversions, whatever you do deem as a conversion on an hourly or or or full day or over a month, whatever you can average out to be, and driving that number up through good practices from number management, from your call cadences, omni-channel to the intent of the lead, you know, all of that combination will impact that and ultimately also bring down your uh CPA. Love it.

SPEAKER_03 39:24

Last thing, how do you see AI coming into the telephony world? And like what kind of effect could it have with you? Like could I mean phone systems could become obsolete, right? Or no. Yeah. Hopefully.

SPEAKER_01 39:37

We just launched our voice AI agents where frozen.

SPEAKER_03 39:41

Well, the AI took a hold of that one, huh?

SPEAKER_04 39:44

I I think Nima they took him out.

SPEAKER_03 39:48

Claude, I'm sorry. Is it because I yelled at you earlier in all caps? Which is funny. I know, I know how you talk. And there he goes. And there he goes. Well that was Nima from the CEO of Nima Hakini, the CEO of Convosa, and the AI took him out as soon as he started talking about them. More of that to come.

SPEAKER_04 40:10

It's so funny. You know how you I I I know the type of words that you the the way you talk to AI.

SPEAKER_03 40:17

I'm sorry, why don't you tell me how I talk to AI? What are those words?

SPEAKER_04 40:21

You turn into like an 80s rap video. Well, I get a little angry sometimes at these things. Yeah, but the what's funny is it's not just you. Like I hear it all the time from other people.

SPEAKER_03 40:33

I've been told by the I've been told by the therapist that it's okay to yell at the AI. In fact, it's healthy because it's not hurting anybody.

SPEAKER_01 40:41

Well, sorry about that. I don't know what happened to you.

SPEAKER_04 40:43

Well, we were making a joke because the way Craig talks to his AI, it's gotta keep him in shape. It's yeah, there's a lot of choice words used. And so is it effective? Is it effective? Listen, you MFer. I've heard other people do that. But as soon as you started talking about AI, you they booted you from the the podcast. Uh well, they got my back.

SPEAKER_01 41:05

The AI gods.

SPEAKER_03 41:08

Well, Whisper says that my number one used word is M effer.

SPEAKER_01 41:12

Oh man, Whisper, what a game changer, right? Right. It's the oh my god. Pretty soon our fingers won't work.

SPEAKER_04 41:20

It's and it's see, it's like we've had voice to text for years, but that voice to text a whole different ballgame. A different ball game, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:31

It's it's great.

SPEAKER_04 41:32

If you're not using Whisper out there, do yourself a favor.

SPEAKER_01 41:34

Oh my god, do it game changer. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 41:36

And so I love the little report that tells me actually the last time it I wasn't M Effer anymore. I must have cooled off. Yeah, we lost you. I don't know where it was.

SPEAKER_01 41:47

We were talking about how telephony is gonna um yeah, I think the vision of what's gonna change and and how we're thinking about it is giving more controls to the end user of the product to be able to do things with our application, kind of like you're doing, you know, you'll be using Claude to give it direction and certain things, but I I don't want to open it up too much in terms of what we're doing. But voice AI, it has a place. It does one way or another, whether you like it or not, it is. We did something years ago, actually, that was more of a rule-based, and we called it in the conversational AI agent. This was five, six years ago, I would say, but it was really just listening to we pre-recorded the message of what you, you know, the the the the talk track with the objections, rebuttals, and it would just know through speech recognition how to say what to say. Um, and it was working to pre-qualify the lead and do that, but it wasn't scalable. So, like we've done this before, and now as technology has advanced, as you guys know, you can now see, you can now have uh a voice that sounds pretty natural and like a human to where uh that conversation can flow a lot better. And so we've built it inside of the platform. We're launching it here uh come uh November 1st, and we have our custom, some of our customers using it where it does have the ability to carry the conversation, it does have the ability to respond pretty quickly within 600 milliseconds, so it sounds pretty natural. And we're looking to make that take that through an omni-channel experience. So it could be WhatsApp, texting, calling, and through whichever channels you want. And I believe it has to be part of your strategy besides humans. Now, how far it goes, it's really, I think some of it is a choice. Some people feel more comfortable, some people feel less comfortable. It's a matter, and in my mind, you have to try and test and really figure out what works, but you gotta give it a shot because if you're not doing it, your competitors are doing it, and that gives them an edge. So to me, it's about being proactive and trying things out before you decide one way or the other.

SPEAKER_03 43:31

The labor cost of an AI agent is ridiculously less, right? Right.

SPEAKER_01 43:36

And they actually listen. And you train them and you train them on how you there's consistent consistency scaling, as you guys know, scaling is it's hard. Hiring is is is hard, right? Getting the right people is challenging. Now, I believe a combination of both would be good. Um but there's certainly a lot of value in and automating it.

SPEAKER_04 43:55

Yeah. Definitely. I I think right now the that is the magic, is the combination of both. Keep you out of this TCPA jail.

SPEAKER_03 44:03

Yeah, I think the outbound's a little might be a little too gnarly.

unknown 44:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:09

I mean, you gotta know, you gotta have the like consent, the language in there. Certainly, yeah. I would say it's outbound makes it more challenging. You just have to know what you need to do there and and talk to your attorney, get legal advice. And I do believe it's it's it's something you can do. It just again, you gotta you gotta follow the rules. And there's a time there's a place for it as well. And technology has advanced to where now doing outbound and before our focus has been is do you really make making shit as natural as it can be while ensuring that you're not trying to do something that's not legal. That's where the compliance guardrails have to come in place and your dial has to have that built inside as well. And that's been our focus as well, to make sure you have the combination in there to ensure that you're doing it the right way.

SPEAKER_03 44:50

Yeah. It can go it can go bad very quickly if if something goes wrong.

SPEAKER_01 44:55

Right. Right. 100%.

SPEAKER_03 44:57

I mean, obviously I didn't have anything like that happen to be, but I know about somebody that that it has.

SPEAKER_01 45:03

What what what went what what went wrong on there?

SPEAKER_03 45:07

As as this person tells me, it it just kept looping and you know on one person.

SPEAKER_01 45:12

Repeating itself?

SPEAKER_03 45:13

Calling, calling, calling, calling, calling, calling.

SPEAKER_01 45:16

The same person again.

SPEAKER_03 45:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:18

Interesting. Yeah, no, you should have you should have the.

SPEAKER_03 45:23

I know that that he didn't meet for that to happen, and it was an accident. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 45:29

This is awesome. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for I think it's a lot of insight too for for agents. Maybe some things that they haven't thought about before. But it's really cool seeing what you're doing with the platform and everything. And yeah, I'd love to do that.

SPEAKER_01 45:44

I appreciate you guys having me on. Uh this was great. Made it fun, and yeah, hopefully I you know came away with here with sharing some value.

SPEAKER_04 45:51

Yeah. And and we'll we'll we'll check up on you. We'd love to see how everything progresses. I mean, everything's moving so fast. Sounds like you got a lot coming out, and uh we'd love to hear about it. Sounds good.

SPEAKER_03 46:03

They could hit they could check out convoso, convoso.com, right? You got it. Yeah. And uh and if you happen to be at LeedsCon, go say hi to Nima.

SPEAKER_01 46:12

You got it.

SPEAKER_03 46:12

And uh that's that's a wrap. Thanks for going the distance, man.

SPEAKER_01 46:16

Yeah, thank you for having me on.

SPEAKER_03 46:18

Awesome.