Defend the Frontier featuring John Walter

Transcript

Rob Dwyer (00:01.74)
We are back, another episode of Next in Queue today, friend of the show, John Walter. Welcome John, how are you?

John (00:09.46)
Awesome, thrilled to be here. Very excited to be here, Rob. Always enjoy talking with you.

Rob Dwyer (00:14.7)
John, can you give us just a quick intro?

John (00:34.894)
I'll keep it super concise so we can get to more interesting topics. Lawyer by trade, practiced law for almost a decade.

John (01:03.262)
One of my clients was in the BPO industry and I started to work internally for that client about two years ago, around the time ChatGPT came out. And that led me just to be educating myself on the topic of the intersection of AI, customer support, customer experience and outsourcing. And I was just kind of sharing content about what I was learning and having a lot of conversations with customer support leaders who...

We're just feeling a combination of overwhelmed by the amount of information that was flying at them and cold outreach from AI vendors that was flying at them and not having enough, I guess, nerdy education. There's a lot of education in the industry, a lot of events, but a lot of them are very entertainment focused. And then they have sponsors that come and fund the operations and the sponsors kind of get the show. They get to kind of guide the...

curriculum in many instances. And just coming from the legal background, I am accustomed to going to a conference that costs almost nothing to attend and having a tax lawyer standing at a podium in a coat and tie and talking for an hour about a new regulation in the tax code. Right? So extremely dry, nerdy content that's like, you know, drinking from a fire hose.

Rob Dwyer (02:20.984)
you

John (02:25.018)
and, with almost no education and almost no vendor presence, it might be like a, like, one of those people who are the stenographers, I guess, who like type in the courtroom, there might be like a stenographer like company, like in the lobby. I went from that to coming into the contact center industry where it's like a fortune for somebody who's not a buyer to go to one of these events. And, and then they have like.

Rob Dwyer (02:34.092)
Yeah.

John (02:51.48)
Pitbull as the keynote speaker. I'm like, what is this? Like, this is like hilarious. It's cool. Like entertainment's awesome. I love fun. I'm a fun person. But it's like, we're at a time in the industry where there is just rapid change. Companies are getting sued left and right for using brand name AI technology and their customer support operations. And no one seems to know what's going on.

And, and meanwhile, all these leaders, I just feel like they'd need to be bolstering their career, like in their resumes for, okay, how can I be ahead of the curve for five years from now to make sure that I'm equipped to maintain good jobs? And so all of that led to the creation of this association. It's, just a, it's a nonprofit organization, 501 C three with a charitable purpose of education. And it's our, our goal is to make it entirely run and led by.

CX and contact center operators like in-house. what I mean by that is not the AI vendors or the BPO vendors, but the individuals at the big brand who's being tasked with the decision of choosing the BPO and the AI vendor, that is the target beneficiary. And so we've just kind of set up this structure. We have around 20, maybe around 20 to 25.

prominent CX leaders that now just are volunteering actively in the association and are meeting on a monthly basis to make the decisions to guide the org. And I'm really just kind of like an administrator. My title as president, I don't get any compensation from it. The benefit I derive is I see it, I'm relatively new to the industry. the thing I crave the most is just building new relationships. And so that's kind of the main thing I get out of it.

is building new and deepening of existing relationships. And it's been phenomenal for that. And so I guess that's what that association does. And to learn more, go to ccaia.org. There's a lot of room for people of interest to just get involved. It's a very open society. Then we have the ProxyLink is a company I started working on full time in June, which is about a...

John (05:09.454)
When this, when chat GPT hit the market, almost two years, a little over two years ago, maybe now, around two years ago, there's, I started trying to think what's the ultimate conclusion of this development? Where is this heading? And, and my conclusion was that consumers are going to be able to interact with brands in a whole new way, where it's consumers talking with the internet in a conversational tone.

as they would with a friend and the internet kind of talking back to it. It's very frictionless. But I'm using my phone, I'm using my iPhone. I know what I want to do as a user. I feel like swiping through the apps and navigating and going to the... I feel like I'm walking through...

Rob Dwyer (05:50.924)
Huh?

John (06:02.284)
I'm trying to buy milk at Walmart and I'm having to walk past all the promotional aisles just to navigate the phone that I control the apps for in my pocket. I'm just imagining a future where it's like, okay, consumers are, this is like two years ago, was like, what's going to happen is consumers are going to be able just to tell their AI assistant what they want done and their AI assistant will be able to accomplish this task on their behalf.

Rob Dwyer (06:08.034)
Thank

John (06:30.112)
And so brand, so it's almost like peeling back the internet to a time before the graphical user interface, which is extremely interesting. so right, right now, and we'll talk about it, we'll dive into this because right, right now, a lot of people are trying to like, you know, build bots that will like log into accounts on behalf of consumers and like click around on websites on behalf of consumers or use chat bots or phone. I've seen the company send a AI bots to send a fax message.

Rob Dwyer (06:36.536)
Mm.

John (06:59.212)
I personally think the future, like the future we all should want and that I personally want and I'm striving for is one where the AI assistant is able just to communicate directly with the company. And it's going to be granted certain authorizations to do things that customers frequently want to do. it's just, so it's a simple API connection. like, so really where it's going to be occurring is like the AI, the true like generative AI that you see is really just on the, on the front end of

the consumer's experience with their own AI assistant. And then once the AI assistant is able to discern the intent and to sufficiently authenticate the user, then at that point, it's just like API calls to the respective brands. think that's the future we should all strive for. Cause I think if we have that future, we're going to have extremely magical customer experiences. beyond like, I mean, imagine you move to a new address and you're like, Hey, update my mailing address with these five companies.

Rob Dwyer (07:40.918)
Mm-hmm.

John (07:57.418)
And it is just like done immediately. That's the future that we can enable. If this occurs. So anyways, my brain was like ruminating on these thoughts, you know, almost like an outsider's perspective, like lawyer transplanted into the industry, Chetjiputri explodes. I'm like, whoa, where's this going? And I'm like, I think this is it. And about a year passed as I was like ruminating on these thoughts and, I came across a major streaming service.

Rob Dwyer (07:59.544)
Yeah.

John (08:25.262)
I was having a meeting with an individual in New York City and he just told me about this problem they were having with a large volume of, I call them consumer proxies, contacting their call center to cancel subscriptions, large volume. And he was explaining how much of a thorn in it, he described it as a major nuisance to them. And so I saw that as an early manifestation.

of where I think the overall industry is going to go. I'm admittedly early on this trend. so the sole ticket type I'm focused on right now is subscription management. But my sole focus in life right now other than eating, breathing, sleeping, loving my family and keeping sanity is to try to crack the code on how can you help contact centers.

when you receive a call from your consumer's AI assistant? Like, what does that mean? Like, what is the legal, like, and when you dive into it more, I'll because I've been rambling a bit, but there's a lot, depending on the ticket type, there's like a lot of legal rights are implicated when, when, when a consumer contacts a company, especially if it's something like subscription management, which is heavily regulated. And what does that dynamic look like?

Rob Dwyer (09:37.238)
Mm-hmm.

John (09:48.238)
in an environment where a consumer has delegated that task to a third party.

Rob Dwyer (09:54.466)
So I want to just tell you about a video that I just watched last night. And it's a relatively new video. I think it got posted on the 13th by a product owner for a company called Sea Salt AI. And he, aside from his day job, owns a rental property, apparently. And every year, he shops for new homeowners insurance. It's rental homeowners insurance.

John (09:59.565)
Okay.

Rob Dwyer (10:24.112)
So it's a little bit more expensive. And so he shops and he actually had programmed their own products, which has a bot, a voice chat bot. make these calls to 11 different insurance companies, not only to get a quote, but to negotiate the pricing. And, then he went through the results. So he only got one quote out of

John (10:39.81)
I love it.

Rob Dwyer (10:51.736)
the 11 because there are some different things that you got to go through, right? But the bot was able to provide the property, the owner information, the year the property was built, the roof type that was on it. They talked about different coverage differences because literally at one point, finally, a human agent on the other end,

John (10:55.724)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rob Dwyer (11:17.782)
Provided a quote and then the bot was like, well, I'm trying to get lower than

John (11:23.318)
Wow, I want watch the video. Did the bot disclose that it's a bot or? Okay.

Rob Dwyer (11:29.112)
It yeah. It discloses it's a bot and it's pretty obvious that it's a bot still. Like it's good. And I think we're seeing that performance on the voice side get better and better, less latency. What was interesting though was that there were moments. So the voice on this particular one, it was pretty obviously a bot, even though it's a humanoid voice, I think I want to say.

John (11:58.349)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (11:59.32)
And there were some issues of over-talk where the bot would respond a little too quickly, where a human would probably know that more is coming from the other human that they're talking to. But it really was a fascinating use case along the lines of exactly what you're talking about. And there are other companies out there who specialize in doing exactly what you're talking about, which is

John (12:05.891)
Mm-hmm.

Rob Dwyer (12:30.136)
monitoring subscriptions and reaching out and canceling subscriptions. Yeah. We're also seeing other use cases, right? Tracking lost luggage, canceling a flight when maybe you're in the, I'm going to have to pay for this cancellation period as opposed to I get to cancel this and not have to actually pay for the flight. So there are a lot of different things going.

John (12:33.998)
Correct, there's a handful. There's a large volume of that.

Rob Dwyer (12:59.72)
on out there. I'm curious, you mentioned already some of the legal concerns. So let's start there. In your mind, and you are a lawyer, you have practiced law, so you have a lot of expertise in this area. What are some of the things that companies need to be thinking about when they either know or suspect that the

the voice on the other end of a call or a request on the other end, because it could be a chat request, is not a human, but is instead a proxy.

John (13:42.198)
Yeah, most companies have a policy of not dealing with proxies. They want to talk to the customer, which is reasonable for security and fraud purposes. But when you're dealing with subscription management, the Federal Trade Commission in various states will come down with a hammer if you make it more difficult to cancel a subscription than it is to subscribe. And so what happens is the consumers are actually entering into agency agreements with companies like Billshark, Rocket Money, Experian, and a few others.

which makes the consumer a principal and these companies the agent. It's in the terms of service. This is how they set it up. So the legal rights, the state law, the state and federal legal rights that your consumer has, and the terms and conditions that you've entered into with your consumers that, so it's the contractual rights that your customer has, they are bestowed upon this agent so that the agent becomes an extension of the consumer. And so if you say no, my, my, my,

understanding of this. This hasn't been tested by the courts yet. This is a very novel issue. But the way I interpret the regulations and how things have unfolded so far and cases that deal with making subscription unnecessarily difficult, when you deny a proxy, it's tantamount to denying a consumer their request to cancel.

And if you're large brand that is doing this at scale, it can become problematic. The, another interesting angle that we should talk about is that a lot of companies don't know they're dealing with proxies. I've talked, cause I've been, cause cause what I'm building is kind of like a network effect where I need to have call centers on one side that are aware of this problem and want to take proactive measures to just have best practices and have efficiency and transparency in their operations.

But there's also on the proxy side, I've been building relationships. they kind of like, you know, raise the curtain, raise the veil a little bit. And there are some of them that are actively impersonating consumers. so, and this happens most for companies that are receiving all types of requests, not just cancellation, but receiving requests by email. There are certain apps now that kind of like hijack the user's email and

John (16:07.572)
And then they send messages to companies from the customer's email address. That's very interesting. There's other instances. If you allow cancellation to occur through a chat bot, then we're just providing basic information. know one company that they allow cancellations through a chat bot and the only authenticating credential they require is their customer's email, which I find very intriguing.

If you allow cancellations through chatbots, you're getting cancellation requests from these proxies on behalf of your customers through your chatbot. And it even happens over the phone too. Even sometimes it's humans calling. So some of these proxies, if they're unable to find a more efficient method, they have their own call centers, which will call you and will in some cases impersonate your customers. In other cases, if it's a large volume,

They'll say, hey, I'm so and so from this company and I've got 350 people to cancel today. And the agent on the other side is like, oh my gosh, that happens. It That goes to handle time. It happens for some large companies that have a high customer churn and where this is a big issue. But what's interesting is through all of history, companies and consumers have had bilateral communication. so that the customer states their intent.

Rob Dwyer (17:06.552)
There goes my handle time

John (17:29.902)
But the company has an opportunity to of create, curate that experience and communicate back to the customer. But in this environment where a consumer is delegating a task to a third party, whether it's AI or human, and the company doesn't know that it's a proxy communicating with them, the company has effectively lost control of the customer experience. And I think that's a big deal personally. Personally, that's a very big deal.

especially when it comes to something like save offers. Like if you're trying to retain your customers, is it the same if you have a customer who's calling in trying to cancel as compared to a consumer who's just like going through an app and going click, click, click, click, click, like five different subscriptions all at once just because they're trying to meet their budgeting goals on a FinTech app. There's a lot that's lost when a company is just allowing

you know, anybody who has the authenticating information to, to process cancellations. And so, so what, what we do is provide a secure channel where we help the contact centers help set up healthy boundaries with the proxies. So, so we help equip them say, here's the kind of the legal landscape you're in, you know, when you receive these requests and here are some proactive measures you can take just by some simple modifications to your terms of service.

to kind of clean up shop and make sure that you're like well protected in this new environment. It allows you to set healthy boundaries with proxies. And then once you do this, you let the proxies know, hey, we have an approved channel for receiving these requests. And ProxyLink, which is the company I've set up, aims to be just extremely efficient and fair and enjoyable.

to everyone involved in this transaction. So we just want to make it easy for the proxy to upload requests by hitting an API rather than having to make a phone call. And then we make it easy for the call center for at no cost, totally free, can just use our manual tools, which is just a dashboard we can log into and manually resolve these requests or where we're working on a premium version to fully integrate and automate.

John (19:53.208)
these for contact centers.

Rob Dwyer (19:56.674)
So something you touched on that I just want to echo because I read it in Rocket Money's terms last night, is you actually are, I did, you are agreeing to allow them to represent themselves as you if they have to actually make a phone call and talk to a particular company on your behalf. So like they,

John (20:05.92)
Mmm, you did prepare.

John (20:15.885)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (20:24.658)
Literally have that written out into their their terms That if they call and they're calling on behalf of me, they're gonna say they're me and they will authenticate as if they are me That's a little scary for me as far as I'm concerned about giving another company the Authorization to do that, but it does seem like this is from a consumer

John (20:34.252)
Fascinating.

Rob Dwyer (20:53.72)
I just want to get this off my plate standpoint. It sounds like this is something I wrote about a long time ago when we talk about average handle time. And one of the things that I always tell people is it doesn't matter how good your agents are or how good your experience is with a call center. 99 % of people are not calling call centers because they want to.

John (20:56.45)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (21:22.744)
They're calling it because they want to get a particular task accomplished. have a goal and they want to reach that goal and they have to go through the contact center sometimes to get there. But then they're not calling because they want to hear your silky smooth voice or they want to chat you up. Like that's not the case. It does happen with some lonely older folks sometimes that just want someone to talk to. But most people are not doing that. And so this idea of a

John (21:27.918)
Mm-hmm.

Rob Dwyer (21:52.28)
Proxy acting on your behalf is really just another just like any other service right there. You know, I'm a relatively recent homeowner there are things that I can DIY and there are other things where I'm like hmm Is that really worth my time and effort or should I just pay someone to do that for me? And that that is a balancing act, right? There are some things I go Well, I want to do that and I'll I'll invest the time and effort to do it

John (22:13.282)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (22:21.802)
and maybe the frustration that comes with it. And there are other things I just go, mm, nah, I think I'll, I'll call a professional on that. And this is very much like that, where you can just have someone do negotiation on your behalf or cancel stuff on your behalf. And I think, and I see it, we have a younger generation that has

a hesitancy to actually make phone calls to talk with companies about anything. Like they don't want to call to get an insurance quote. They don't want to call to cancel. don't want to like, that's a thing. And this is a solution to that problem.

John (23:12.046)
That's very interesting. Yeah, there's clear consumer demand for this. Clear consumer demand. When I say this, mean this, I consider it a new channel of customer support. It's effectively a new channel. And there's a very high consumer demand for this, to the extent where there's one company in particular that charges $5 per cancellation, and for that they perform on your behalf.

Rob Dwyer (23:26.648)
Hmm.

John (23:41.822)
And so consumers are willing to pay $5 to not, know, in cancellation, in many cases, you can actually don't have to talk with a human. You just have to like log into a website and, and you can navigate and figure that out in a few minutes. And, and so, so consumers always crave the most frictionless experience. And, and this is the most frictionless experience if, but we still need the industry still needs some basic infrastructure to facilitate it. Cause right now.

It's being facilitated through channels of support that were designed for humans. Right. In the past, you got a phone call from somebody and they had your customers authenticating information. You knew it was your customer because robots couldn't call you and have like intelligent conversations. But here we are. like, you know, it kind of makes you question, you know, that channel of support at all. kind of, have you ever wondered? Like I'll be calling the health insurance company. My wife's like the policy holder and they're like, Hey, I need to get your wife's approval.

Rob Dwyer (24:15.768)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (24:27.469)
we are.

John (24:41.228)
And I was like, okay. I walk over to my wife, like, Hey, they need your approval. And she's like, what? yeah. Health insurance. Like, yes, I approve. I'm like, okay, we can proceed now. You know, like it's very, it seems like error. Yeah. So we're at a junction when you bring up a great point when it comes to the consumer privacy, consumer rights. you have these, your customers of every company want more frictionless experiences with you. And, and

Rob Dwyer (24:52.152)
That seems secure.

John (25:09.76)
Right now, a portion of them are turning to companies that are being forced by your policies of saying, we only talk with the customer. We only talk with the customer to resort to deceit and manipulation in order to accomplish your customer's goals with your company. that's a great point you pointed out about the, you know, those interesting terms of services where a company has the right

to be able and impersonate you. I was reading through the terms of service for one of these companies that actually kind of like takes over the Gmail account or your Outlook account. And so you kind of give them your login credentials to your email and they do some tasks for you. And that include doing one specific customer support function.

Rob Dwyer (25:53.687)
Hmm.

John (26:06.478)
And I was reading the terms of service and it was saying that, you you you grant us at you, grant access for AI and then in parentheses and possibly humans to read your email inbox. Right. We are in the wild west. We are in the wild, wild west. And I, I, and I was, I wanted to test the service. I wanted to try it out. And so I was like, I'm kind of curious about this. I was reading the terms of service and I was like, no, thank you.

Rob Dwyer (26:20.898)
No thanks. No thanks.

John (26:33.922)
I'm not going to step that far. What we're striving for, so today what proxies use when they're authenticating your customers are your customers authenticating information. And so this is so interesting. These proxies are in essence becoming repositories of all of your customers that use our services and they're authenticating information. Yes, maybe you don't want, maybe you consider,

Rob Dwyer (26:34.273)
Mm-hmm.

John (27:04.758)
the subscription cancellation as low fraud risk. But are you sure that this, that these, this, this handful of proxies that are many of them are startups that are being found like first time, we've been talking about first time founders. Are they SOC 2 compliant? No. Are they, are they maintaining high levels of security? No. Maybe I don't want to like, I know they're not SOC 2 compliant. won't, I won't, I won't impugn there because I'm friends with everybody on both sides of this. I'm trying to be a bridge.

Rob Dwyer (27:07.916)
Mm-hmm.

John (27:33.76)
an intermediary. But what we're striving for is as an intermediary is to only require multi-factor authenticated email. so because we go through the due diligence of making sure that this proxy is legitimate, we don't let anybody onto our platform. We evaluate the companies, make sure it's not a fly by night company. They have to, you

agree to indemnify everyone upstream if anything fishy happens. If we're able to streamline this authentication process, so all it requires is multifactor authenticated email, and then we just create a much more secure, much more efficient process for everybody involved. And so it's a very interesting space.

Rob Dwyer (28:24.728)
So since you brought it up, I just want to say a shout out to my company, happy to, SOC 2 compliant, has received our type 1 certification. we don't do this kind of thing, by the way. yeah, it is a lot to make sure that you've got all of your docs in a row from a security standpoint. And you're right, most startups are not

John (28:32.685)
Yeah.

John (28:36.652)
It is a beast.

Rob Dwyer (28:54.36)
ready for that for a variety of reasons. Part of it, it's expensive and it's time consuming and you may not have all of the security protocols in place. So that's potentially problematic for these companies. wonder, so you bring up, right? Repository for credentials. It just sounds like

John (28:57.294)
It's awful, it's expensive, and it's time consuming. Yeah.

John (29:08.856)
Yeah.

John (29:12.405)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (29:23.954)
A HACKERS WENT DREAMING TO...

John (29:26.254)
It is. Yeah, it is. It is. you consider it, you might consider subscription cancellation as low risk, but imagine if, you know, someone's able to access that authenticating information from outside of the proxy, then it's, yeah, yeah, it's not good.

Rob Dwyer (29:45.814)
Yeah, we see more and more. part of this is about a consolidation of our data. Part of it is there are so much of our data has already been exposed in one way or another that it's all about putting the pieces of the puzzle together where you may have someone's data. And I've got

10 % of the data that I want over here. And then I find another 7 % that I can buy over here. And just putting all that together, if I can then use a bot to act on someone's behalf, there is certainly, it's a scary proposition to think about the kinds of fraud that can be.

Committed using someone's identity that had no idea things were happening

John (30:44.086)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There are, you know, scary stories in different contexts. I have a family friend who I went to school with and her dad received a phone call from an alleged kidnapper that was claiming to have kidnapped her. And they somehow had these, some hackers or some cyber criminals somehow had a recording of her voice. I suspect.

Do you ever get phone calls and nothing's on the other side? You say, hello, hello, and nothing's there. I suspect that might be what's going on in some of these cases where they're literally just getting voice samples from people. I know, know, talking about rabbit trails. Is it true? I can send you the news story where my friend, my...

Rob Dwyer (31:32.152)
John, stop fueling my nightmares. Stop it. Stop it.

John (31:41.278)
family friend is talking about because he went on local news to talk about it. but they had these kidnappers are saying, hey, we're having a drug deal. Your daughter was riding a bicycle by, she saw us with guns out. And we grabbed her and we're only, the drug deal went south because of your daughter. And we're not going to let her go unless you pay us like $5,000 or something like that. And they actually had her, they like, the phone to the daughter.

And the daughter was like, dad, I'm so scared, but I'm safe. They tell me everything's going to be okay. And, and he paid them the $5,000. And, then was, was, I forget if he either paid or he was like, he ended up, I forget, actually, I forget the entire chronology, but he's either, either paid or, and then was about to pay more or, or, or was about to pay when he discovered that it was all a fraud.

And which is horrible, which is absolutely horrible. And with this, if a man can be deceived with the voice of his own daughter, and here's what's really scary is that the call came in from his daughter's cell phone number. I don't know how they do that. So on his phone, it had his daughter's name when he answered it. cyber criminals can deceive.

Rob Dwyer (32:42.615)
Mm-hmm.

Rob Dwyer (32:58.561)
No

John (33:08.75)
a man in regards to the voice of his own daughter, I don't know how much we can kind of trust traditional authenticating methods over the phone with customers.

Rob Dwyer (33:20.226)
Yeah, I I did an episode with Luke Jamison not all that long ago where we both used technology to spoof our own voices to begin the episode. And it's pretty crazy how good that technology is. It doesn't need a lot of data to then turn around and you can just type out a script and make tweaks to it, right? Do I want to add certain emotion?

John (33:35.062)
wow.

Rob Dwyer (33:50.34)
to a particular moment within that, like that technology is definitely out there and, there are some, some ethical concerns that come along with that, that, you know, we explored a little bit in that episode, but I think we only scratched the surface because there are so many concerns that go along with it. I do want to talk a little bit about.

This not the customer experience piece, or I should say the loss of a certain experience and maybe what companies should do to go after things. So let's talk about cancellations for a moment. You mentioned cancel save much earlier. And this really hits home with me because when I first got into the contact center business, I supported one of the big three wireless.

for their retention department. That was what I did. I took those phone calls of people wanting to cancel all day long. But part of what I did was solve problems, right? So maybe it was a coverage issue or maybe they broke their phone. This is when, you know, people were still under contracts and maybe I could, you know, find ways to help them along those lines or just explain all of the options that were available to them outside of just

John (34:52.654)
Mmm.

Rob Dwyer (35:20.448)
a cancellation because there were situations where it made sense to do other things like a suspension, right? There was like a military suspension. So if someone was being deployed, you didn't have to cancel their number. And there was a benefit because they got to keep their phone number when they came back. You didn't have to get a phone number, right? So I do think there is value in those types of departments to help consumers understand what all the options are.

John (35:37.016)
Mm-hmm.

Rob Dwyer (35:49.816)
so that they can make an informed decision. But if my proxy is acting on my behalf to do those things, how do I as a brand then change the way I operate to help my customers know all of the things that are available to them that maybe they don't know about?

John (36:17.162)
Yeah, yeah, that's a big challenge today. That's a big challenge today.

You know, it's right now where, where we are focused is just on the save offer and kind of requiring the save offer process. so the first proxies have to disclose themselves. You know, we have to know it's a proxy involved and not the customer contacting customer support. And then we have just baked into the process. And it was, it was interesting as I can't talk about like what the industry at large is doing because.

It's like, it's such like a new thing. Like it's, like, have proxies, you have us, you have proxy link, and then you have companies receiving these things, right? Like I'm early on this and it's like painfully early. Like right now, this is just a problem that plagues large subscription based companies. It's not a, it's not a big market. I, my expectation is it's going to become a big market over time. And that's why I'm being aggressive and building the solution and.

gone through the SOC 2 compliance and as a startup, which is awful. And I've been really just trying to do this as a grownup way. But yeah, right now, I would love, I would love, you know, right now, all we have is save offers. So companies can create their own save offers and kind of bake it in. it gets sent, know, that the proxy is contractually obligated to send these communications back to the consumer and

present the safe offers and they can be either accepted or declined. but ultimately where I want to see this go is, know, if a consumer prefers to deal with a brand through an AI assistant, like right now we're talking about Rock and Money, Bill Shark and all these guys. I'm envisioning a future where consumers just will just have AI, a general purpose AI assistant of their choice. And they'll want it to do a variety of different tasks.

John (38:22.654)
And if they have resorted to delegating a task to their AI assistant and it gets routed to a certain brand because it's on our platform, then that kind of opens the channel for the company to communicate back to the AI assistant through the platform. Because there's really the symbiotic relationship between the proxy and the company. Because the more friendly the company is with the proxy, the more useful the proxy is to the consumer.

Rob Dwyer (38:45.88)
Hmm.

John (38:52.99)
And so imagine if you had an AI assistant that you relied on to establish relationships with five different brands. like whether it's your car insurance, your home insurance, because it's shopped around, you're not using one carrier, right? You've got like three different insurance providers and you've got your cell phone carrier. And then you've got your power company, like all these brands that the AI assistant has helped you interact with at some time in the past.

Rob Dwyer (39:06.264)
you

John (39:21.132)
And then that channel just kind of stays open, not in the sense of like you're consenting to receive an email. And so you're getting these like random emails all the time, but you're going have an AI assistant that's generally aware of what's important to you at this season of life. What you're doing, are you moving right now? Are you not moving? you, it's just going to be just generally aware and almost like a gatekeeper will be able to say,

Like companies can be saying to the proxy network, through ProxyLink, and I'm forecasting way in the future. My mentors and investors hate when I do this because I'm like, John, you need to focus on the present. But this is what inspires me into this is like trying to build this future. And if anyone's listening to this and you are like, hey, that's what we're building. That's what I want to do. Call me. I'm not your competitor. I'm looking for friends who are passionate about building this future. And so,

Rob Dwyer (39:58.924)
Ha ha ha ha.

John (40:18.04)
I forgot where I was going. yeah. So imagine if the AI assistant as a gatekeeper is able to, so the companies can say, Hey, here's our new service offerings right now. Here's our, the big push we're making this spring, or here's our discounts. Here's what's on sale. If it's relevant, if the gatekeeper deems it as relevant, and then the gatekeeper can present it to the consumer at the opportune time, at the time that's

you know, where the consumers not, you know, stressed out and, and, like trying to a deadline at work, but rather when the consumers, you know, on the drive home, I don't know about you, but I frequently max out chat GPT voice mode. I just talked to the thing like so much. And, I, especially when I'm driving and commuting and I would love for it to be like, I'm just like talking to it. I'm like, Hey, like, let's talk about the history of, like, I talked recently about like, what's the

Like in the South, the South was led by Democrats in the past and like George Wallace was a Democrat. Explain this to me. Explain this to me, Chad, to me too. Why, why, what's this political shift that occurred like, like not too long ago? And, and I would love for it to be like, oh yeah, here's da da da da. Here's the history of it. Um, but, but, but by the way, Hey, you know, you're here in traffic, I just want to let you know, I know your wife's birthday is coming up soon and.

Rob Dwyer (41:23.68)
Thank

John (41:43.598)
And REI is having a sale on boots that are her size. can have us a great brand that's in your size. I'm like, dude, thank you. Like, yeah, dude, like buy it. I don't have to look at it. Like, don't even show me the picture. Like I'll return it, you know, like, like, like it's highly rated and it's through a brand that's already. That's what we need. That is the future customer experience and it's going to happen. But here's the thing. Here's the sad thing, Rob. Here's what one reason I'm so fired up about this. It's not just the coffee. I don't think Apple's going to do it.

Rob Dwyer (41:51.756)
me.

John (42:12.632)
I don't think Google's going to do it. I don't think, don't, it's not going to happen passively. It's like, it's not going to happen. Alexa, I think is trying to harass me because it's like, it's a running joke in my home. can't get it to like, to like, it's like, it's like yellow spinning light. I'm like, Alexa play notification. Hello today, Alexa stop playing the notification. Like I have no other way to like control its behavior.

Rob Dwyer (42:14.04)
Mm.

Rob Dwyer (42:38.336)
You have, you know what, you just hit on something. I recently just did a series of short video content for Luke Jameson and Michael Mattson. do this great series called 2020-ish, right? so, yeah, great. So season two is coming out. One of the questions on that, not to spoil your content guys, sorry about this, but.

John (42:57.132)
Yeah, you know, never met Luke. Michael's one of my favorite people on Northfella.

Rob Dwyer (43:06.264)
One of the questions was about a CX challenge for companies in the coming year. And what I said was,

being personal without being creepy. And you've actually presented not only a solution to that, but also a solution to some of the privacy concerns that I think more of us as consumers should have about brands knowing everything about this and the data that they can collect about

John (43:24.973)
you

John (43:36.109)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (43:49.704)
Us about our habits about what we like about what we don't like and that is to have that AI assistant wall that gatekeeper as you said who does know They they know me they know Rob, right? They know about the things that I like the things that I might be interested in and the brands can just pepper that AI assistant and say hey

John (44:00.566)
Yes. Yes.

Yes.

John (44:16.31)
Exactly. Exactly.

Rob Dwyer (44:19.672)
We think maybe Rob might be interested in this stuff and the AI assistant can go no no no no no no no no no no that's not getting through wait, but this yes absolutely, and I know just the time to present it to him because It's it's going to matter right and that may be a gift idea as as you put out there or maybe Right some new thing that I've been waiting to come on to the market that

I've been exciting about whatever the case may be, but then all those preferences stay mine. They're held in my hands. Yeah.

John (44:50.028)
Yeah. Yeah.

John (44:57.294)
probably running entirely locally on your device. I imagine if it's just like entirely local.

Rob Dwyer (45:02.774)
Yeah, I think in a perfect world, which I don't think we'll be in, fortunately, that seems like a really great way to allow brands to cater to your preferences without bothering you. But us as consumers not committing the trade off that we commit today, which is

Here I'm going to give you all my data so that you can personalize offers for me because that's where we are today.

John (45:36.226)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, correct. Correct. Yeah, it's very, very, very upsetting to me personally. Maybe a very, very, very is a lot of very. So maybe it's not that it'd have to something very extreme to make me that upset. I'm a pretty even keel guy, but I'm bothered that Google and Meta have become the gatekeepers to the public for small to medium sized businesses. If you want to sell to consumers,

Rob Dwyer (45:49.069)
You

Rob Dwyer (46:02.487)
Yeah.

John (46:04.524)
You have to pay the dues, have to pay the taxes to appear before the consumers. These platforms are presenting to their users content that serves their own purposes, the platform's purposes. so, so as a user of Google, for instance, you have to, your search results are going to be the result of either paid ads or they're going to be the result of fluffy SEO generated.

you know, blog posts, and then they'll be buried in there a few like highly relevant links. Yeah, hopefully they're doing better. I think they're doing better than that. But it's like, it's like, it can be very challenging. It's not really designed. So the content being created for these platforms, especially like for Google is being designed for web crawlers. It's like, it's not optimized for actually solving the problem that the consumer has. And then like social media platforms, for instance.

Rob Dwyer (46:39.442)
three.

John (47:04.052)
They are showing the content to the consumers that's just simply most engaging. They're looking just to increase engagement and utilization of their platform. the entertainment level of social media content, the amount you pay in ads and the quality of your SEO optimization outfit that you're working with, none of that has anything to do with the long tail of customer experience that we all go through.

What I really, really, really want to see is in addition to what we've already talked about, like a consumer acting as a gatekeeper, the additional data points of that, even ones that are used in the call center for tracking, you know, the quality of a customer experience on the phone, like service level, something as simple as service level to start guiding search. imagine I compare

the current ways that consumers find information on the internet to the way that consumers find property in most cases, which is through a real estate agent. That real estate agent is taking the consumer to properties that serve the agent's own purposes. Most realtors, not all of them, will not show you the house that is for sale by owner and they haven't signed into the multiple listing service agreement. And so then, and they're stubborn. They're I'm not paying no realtor, no commission.

Rob Dwyer (48:31.458)
Ha ha ha.

John (48:31.606)
That house, it could be the perfect house, but it's not going to reach the consumer. It's similar with online and internet search today. And I'm not hopeful. I'm striving for a future where the consumer AI assistant, when it comes to search, because this has occurred because in the past Meta and Google have been the gatekeepers and they've had the monopoly on these platforms. But today we have startups providing better search results than Google.

Rob Dwyer (48:55.096)
Yeah.

John (49:01.336)
You have perplexity and open AI outperforming in quality of search with Google. So, so the actual function of finding things on the internet is being distributed widely among a bunch of small companies. And my, my dream is for these small companies to take a different approach, to not say, we're not going to, we're not going to be successful.

Rob Dwyer (49:14.306)
Mm-hmm.

John (49:30.222)
financially through paid ads. We're going to be successful financially because our consumers are going to be willing to pay to use our search. Our consumer is the client. It might be a dollar a month. It might not be this $20 a month thing you see now, but the consumer is hiring almost a fiduciary, almost like a lawyer. So you're going from having a realtor represent you to having like an old small town, you know, jack of all trades lawyer who's a family friend who's going to make, who's

great friends with your papa and says, I'm going to take good care of you and no matter what. And that's the person that's going to be guiding you to brands. this AI assistant is going to not be influenced by paid ads, will not be influenced by SEO, will not be influenced by social media content. And it will be influenced by the actual metrics of customer success that companies are willing to expose to it. So that's my dream. That's my dream.

Rob Dwyer (50:29.176)
I think you and I have come up with an amazing future world that I don't, I will say like, sure, startups are doing cool things in search. I did just read that Google's overall market share dipped below 90 % for a quarter to only 89 and change.

John (50:33.9)
Yes, it's wonderful to live there.

John (50:48.174)
low 90.

John (50:52.788)
And, and, and in perplexity is a reportedly exploring advertising on their platform. Yep.

Rob Dwyer (50:58.368)
Right. do think here's what I think will be the challenge and it's on us. And I don't mean you and I personally, mean consumers. Consumers have gotten into the habit of allowing themselves and their data to be productized so that they don't have to pay for things that they want. And in order for

this fantastic dream that you've got, it requires a mindset shift on the behalf of the consumer to understand that on platforms like Google and Meta, you're the product. And if you don't want to be the product, then you have to pay for it.

John (51:47.982)
Mm-hmm.

Rob Dwyer (51:54.68)
It can't be developed just for free. That's not the way the world works, right? So you're either going to pay for it or you are going to exchange your personal data. And when you exchange your personal data to your point that they're not acting on your behalf in your best interests, they're acting in their own best interests. And that's, that's the difference that a fiduciary

John (51:58.2)
Mm-hmm.

Rob Dwyer (52:22.54)
present you have to pay for it, but it'll act in your own best interest. So here's let's let's raise a coffee. Cheers to this future.

John (52:33.894)
And I want to give a shout out. This is my friend started this company, Inmediate, it's a local Birmingham, Alabama company. I'm going to give it, they're sponsoring me by letting me, by leaving their coffee mug in the coworking space that I'm working out of. Yeah. So, Inmediate's a cool company. But, but yeah, man, thank you so much for taking the time to talk. It's been very therapeutic because I hang out with chat GPT and toddlers all day. And so, so this is great to talk.

Rob Dwyer (52:46.433)
you

Rob Dwyer (53:01.208)
John, I don't want to pass judgment on you talking to chat GPT as much as you do, but I do think that maybe some actual live person for you to bounce ideas off of a little more often might be a good idea in your case. I'm just putting it out there.

John (53:19.648)
Yep, yep. I appreciate it. That's why you might get my phone call sometime soon, right? On my commute home.

Rob Dwyer (53:23.992)
Well, hey, you guys know the drill. Go down to the show notes. If you aren't already connected with John on LinkedIn, do so. He puts out really incredibly interesting content and it's important stuff to be aware of if you're at all involved in contact centers or AI and you want to stay on top of what's happening.

legal perspective, you can absolutely find links to ProxyLink and also to the Contact Center AI Association. And I'll even put maybe a special link to a video that I referenced earlier because it actually really is fascinating. if you're interested, just go down into the show notes, check out those links. And John.

Thanks so much for joining me on Next In Queue. I appreciate it.

John (54:25.422)
Thank you, Rob. We'll talk soon.