Smarter Connections: How AI and Loyalty Power Modern Retention

Welcome to Back for More, the show where we explore how businesses keep customers coming back again and again.

At Cinch, we have always believed that marketing automations should feel human.

This quarter, our product team has rolled out some of the smartest, most intuitive features yet.

Tools that help you understand, engage and delight your customers at every step of their journey.

Today, we're pulling back the curtain on those innovations.

Sentiment analysis, loyalty rewards, voice, AI and scheduler.

Joining me to break it all down are Andrew Perry, our VP of Products, and JP Scoville, our VP of customer success.

So let's dive in and see how these updates are helping businesses stay connected and keep customers coming back for more.

Hi, guys.

Thanks for being here.

Thanks.

It's a pretty exciting time at Cinch right now.

I think we've launched more super exciting features in the last of weeks, couple, couple months.

Then in the last couple of years, we've been cranking out a lot of stuff.

So a question that I've gotten from a lot of people inside the company and outside the company is, why now?

What is spurring the innovation that's been happening a lot here at Cinch with the features that we're releasing?

I think it's getting tough for a lot of our customers, but really just in general, how does a business retain their customers?

How do they get repeat customers, repeat transactions?

Like, how do they do that?

And it's getting tougher and tougher competition.

So the approach we took was, well, how do we help our customers accomplish those two goals and observe, like, where are those places where we can still fit in from a marketing standpoint and identify the needs that are still missing?

Right.

And so if we think about really at the beginning of the experience from a scheduling, scheduling appointments, booking with us, you know, with your, with your services, and really that first interaction is often a phone call, like, how do we help automate that?

How do we improve that and tie that into the Cinch platform in a way that it can be meaningful not just in that moment, but really throughout the lifecycle of that customer with you.

Yeah.

Something I think is interesting is that as a platform integrates with data sources, we're pulling in data all the time.

And more and more tools are being created, which means we have more and more data points that are coming in and, and if you're just using all these tools on their own, you just have all this siloed data and without organization, it's just more noise for your business and probably makes you even less efficient.

So the thing that I'm super excited about with loyalty, with the scheduler, with the Voice AI, with the AI features we have coming up loyalty rewards program is that it's just bringing it all first party into our system so then you can action on it.

And to your point, fear competition is getting more and more fierce.

So I think this goes back to the, the, the founder's vision here at Cinch as well.

Right.

We've built the platform with a foundation for data specifically, but so that it could be leveraged by AI.

And so as we've gone deeper on the AI front and tried to understand how we can do more with the generative AI tools that have been developed over the last 18, 24 months, it's really enabled us to build Voice AI to build a scheduler that, that marries data well with that, that allows Voice AI to schedule for us and then layering loyalty rewards on top of that, it just is another, another channel that we can use to help drive our marketing programs forward.

It's the X and the.

In the cdxp.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think it's important to note particularly on AI and I know everyone's talking about that and wants to have it as part of their daily experience or in the tools that they're using.

But what we, the approach we have taken is actually let's find where AI makes it easier or improves the service, not just have AI for AI sake, but you know, how do I utilize AI to make me more efficient or quicker at my job from a marketing standpoint, how do I create more intelligent journeys for my customers to get more multichannel, more multi touch about how I'm interacting with my customers?

And that's really the key thing that we have thought about is really focusing on, we call them an AI agent.

It's someone who helps you.

It's someone there's in those steps to improve what you're already doing.

Right.

Like that's the, that's what we want to do is help improve what you're already about.

Something that I found when I first started at Cinch.

So three years ago, almost three years ago, when I was asking everybody what is Cinch and what makes Cinch different?

I got a lot of different comments.

Of course there's lots of things that make Cinch different, but a lot of the things that people were talking about was the way that we organize our data, the way that we clean our data so that we're laying this foundation.

And as I was looking at the marketing materials we had in the early days, there was a lot of data science and Machine learning verbiage.

So I said, can I just say AI?

I mean, I was just starting to use ChatGPT at the time, so AI was relatively new to me.

I was like, we need to just say AI.

And I was told, no, no.

What we're not trying to do right now is make more problems.

So you have these tools that are coming out and they're saying AI and everybody's intrigued by this.

But when it's not done deliberately with a foundation that's solid, that has a, you know, they're prioritizing the structure of the data and the cleanliness of the data, AI is only as good as the data that you're giving it, as we all know from poorly prompted ChatGPT props.

And so I think now that we're starting to build these tools, they're by default more effective and more helpful because we've done it intentionally and they're not just adding more chaos and more noise to business operations that are already complex.

Are you hearing anything specific from customers about the way that their businesses are running that you feel like have inspired what we're building right now?

From customers?

Yes, we are hearing from customers.

A lot of the, A lot of this conversation started when we had a user group in house and we were talking specifically about tools that they were looking at that they were trialing, that they were trying to leverage and the use case and the why behind those tools.

And so, yeah, specifically to that group, they were, they were all very interested in how AI could augment what they were doing to streamline effectiveness of, of some of their, their channels.

Like Voice.

Right, specifically Voice.

So how can I get Voice to work for me out of hours without increasing my labor costs?

How can I get Voice to answer calls when my technicians are busy?

And how can I get Voice to.

To respond to customers with a consistent customer experience?

Right, Because a lot of these retail shops have more junior employees that are used to looking at their phone and texting rather than talking to people in real time.

And so they want to make sure that the voice that's on the other end of that call is consistently delivering good, solid, and accurate responses, but also in a way that communicates a high level of customer service and a great customer experience, rather than the high schooler that's just starting their first job.

And I'd add to that, really, how do I use this as an opportunity to track that engagement?

I feel like that's the wrong word.

But very often you call, you have that conversation and it's over.

Why not actually Learn something from that conversation and save it in a way that can be meaningful.

In the next time I interact with that customer or when they come in for their next appointment, I know something from that phone call.

It's hard to rely that high schooler or that fresh high schooler making a note other than, yeah, I answered a phone call here today at 4 o'.

Clock.

Right.

So it's also an opportunity to just know a little bit more so you can personalize that, interact those future interactions with your customers.

Yeah.

And with it wrapped into the cdp, it allows us to leverage the data associated with that customer on those calls.

So when they're scheduling an appointment through voice AI, it's really easy for us to pre populate some of the things that they need to be thinking about.

Is it your Audi or your Toyota that's going to be coming into the shop?

And we can pull that from the database associated with the customer.

So it's really easy for the customer to have a great experience, which really.

Ties really well back in with what you were saying initially, which is that it's all about customer retention.

We have all these cool things, but at the end of the day, the goal is that we're making it easier for you to delight your customers, make them come back and ideally spend more.

So let's talk about sentiment analysis, which, which is a really cool feature that we have launched.

So Andrew, tell us a little bit from your perspective.

How does it work?

What does it do?

Yeah, simply put, we look at every review that comes in for the customer for their business and we automatically analyze them based on a set of themes.

So it isn't just we're looking at like the star rating and kind of scoring these.

Like I think we've learned over the last year or so the effect that Uber and other platforms have had on the stock Star system.

Star rating system.

Tell me more about that.

Yeah, so very often you will get a review that comes in that says five stars.

But then if you analyze that text and what they wrote, it is not a five star review.

Right.

It is a one or a two.

And so very often a lot of systems just rate things by the stars and move on.

And maybe if you have someone who is really focused on this, they'll go and read through every one of those reviews.

But why not do some analysis using AI and score them in a different way, which can actually lead to directed kind of a course of action or a plan for someone.

Notify them that actually I had a five star review come in, but it is not, you know, there's some urgency here that we need to get back to them immediately, which we may not have seen when it was rated a 5.

So what the tool does, what sentiment does, is look at that review, look at the open text response from the customer and, and rates it on are they emotional, are they talking about a service, which service was it, are they, what's their mood and is there urgency to that?

And a few others.

And with that you can now start to understand, like we can actually group these responses in a much better, more directive way to take action.

In fact, you can click on, you know, there's a button at the top where you can just say I need to know my most immediate concerns.

And it'll filter automatically to, you know, those that really are a one or a two star in what they've written so that someone can immediately reach out, talk to them, respond, and hopefully turn that situation around.

Because that's the goal of what you want with the review, with a bad review, is to turn that relationship around.

What about businesses that have multiple locations can.

Do you see it being super helpful for managers to be able to look at different aspects of their business, different employees who are managing different pieces.

How do you see it impacting the way managers can handle the way that they, the way that they're providing the experience for their customers across departments or across roles.

I would speak more specifically about cross location in our platform.

So one of the things that we've built is a nice dashboard that highlights the service categories that we're looking at and understanding how customers are reacting to the service levels associated, associated with those.

So specifically you've got the ability to go in and look at specific locations.

Say you've got a 50 location environment.

We've got a dashboard that shows you a list of say 10 different service aspects is what we call them.

And then we grade or create a sentiment score associated with each one of those service aspects.

So you've got price as one of those or the cleanliness of the shop, the customer service.

All those would be different service aspects that we're looking at.

And, and we score each one of those and then we put a nice heat map or a heat chart associated with those scores against each one of those locations.

So it's really easy for you to go in and look at this dashboard and say, okay, location one is awesome at everything except for price.

They've got a problem with price or communication.

Right.

Location 2 is awesome at everything except for quality of service.

Right.

Customer service or parts something along Those.

And so it's really easy for you to go in and start to think about how you want to talk to your, your teams at each one of these stores and then train them on how to improve in those specific categories across location.

You can also start to see trends.

So if you've got a specific problem with price, that's a common one that we see where all locations are seeing a little bit of orange or a little bit of red on the price category.

You know, you need to either talk to them about how to position price and value associated with price, or how do you make sure that they're communicating effectively around price to those customers.

And so it's really easy for that dashboard to be able to understand exactly what the customer expects experience is within those different service aspects and then leverage those dashboards to train your teams to make sure that they're lifting their game in association with those different categories or service aspects.

Would you say that that's the most immediate benefit that a business that starts to implement sentiment analysis would see?

What's the first value they would see as they start to use it?

Or is it different?

There's probably a couple of ties in there, right?

So I think that's one of the really huge values.

But what Andrew talked about earlier around urgency is another really big win, right?

With that being able to go into the inbox and hit one button that says here are all your urgent reviews that you need to react to immediately.

That's, that's really powerful because the faster you react to a negative review, the faster you can solve the problem and get that customer back on the right track and then clean up that review with, with a, with a good reaction.

So I'd say those two are both parallel from, from a value perspective.

You know, what I've seen as a consumer is I look at reviews a lot, I do a lot of online shopping and often I'll see clearly canned responses, which is fine.

We want to automate responses.

That's part of what we need to be doing.

But it'll be a review that specifically says they're unhappy about some things.

But because it's a four star review, the response is like, thanks, we're so glad you had such a great experience.

But if you actually read the review, there's multiple things that were not a great experience.

And I know that responses are often automated.

I'm a marketer.

But it still is a little bit of a turnoff to say, oh, clearly they're not even paying attention to the feedback that's being Given.

And then since with the sentiment analysis and how it's tied into the journeys that you have, where we do have automated responses, you can actually say, hey, based on these sentiment scores, we're actually going to judge that not just the stars on there.

Right.

Like you're not going to automatically say thanks so much.

That was such a great experience.

You right when they came in hot and fiery about something, you know, in the service that they, they had.

Yeah.

As I was thinking about what the use cases were and I think somebody talked about it, maybe it was you.

You have a lot of good ideas.

You were.

Somebody was saying that if it's below a certain score with the sentiment, regardless of the star rating, don't auto respond.

Instead send a notification to the manager or the marketer, whoever's handling the responses because this requires a delicate response response.

Let's do this thoughtfully rather than just putting it into a negative.

We're sorry you had a bad experience, somebody will reach out to you.

Instead it's notifying the manager.

Again, speaking to the urgency point, I guess.

And, and you can leverage with sentiment analysis now all those different service aspects that we talk.

Talked about, we can build a communication path associated with different elements within.

So if it's a price problem like we talked about earlier or a customer service problem, we can have a specific set of responses that are being used for that.

So we can get really granular in how we want to create these auto response journeys.

And so they're really, really personalized.

So cool.

It's just something I haven't seen in any other review tool is the ability to not just identify the sentiment, but action on the sentiment.

Really ties back into our whole point of customer retention, I guess, huh?

Let's talk about the loyalty rewards program, which is something that I'm super excited about maybe just because, because I do some shopping as I mentioned, and I like to be rewarded for my loyalty.

I get angry when I'm not.

I want early access to sales.

I want to know things like that.

So let's just talk about the program that we have created.

I think maybe some of our customers already know that once upon a time we had an OG loyalty program, but it has been completely rebuilt and it is bigger and better than ever.

So let's talk about what makes it unique.

Andrew.

I think what makes it unique is really what makes sense unique in and of itself.

It's this, this customer data platform.

Right.

That everything that is done is tied into that.

So from a loyalty standpoint, like if I go into a restaurant.

Very often it's, I put in my, if I've paid with a known credit card or maybe I input my phone number, that's all they know.

And they know that I spent, you know, $10 at the burrito shop, nothing more.

Like, what can I do with that?

Well, I can know that they were a repeat customer and I can reward them certainly with points or dollars off.

But what can I do beyond that in a different channel when they're not in the store other than just rewarding them?

How can I communicate with them differently?

How can I manage coupons to offer them in a way that it isn't just a one size fits all coupon, but that I can actually now look at not just their loyalty, but I can see what they've done in the past and do some really unique and interesting ways to communicate and offers for them based on not just their spend but on their total interactions with me.

So what do you think are the early benefits for our customers?

I think it's a really nice augmentation of the marketing channels that we already have.

I mean, we've had loyalty as a standalone product for a long, long time, but it wasn't built into the CDP where they could see all the interactions.

And the 360, it didn't augment the 360 view of what the customer timeline looked like within singe.

And so layering loyalty in gives us full visibility into that new layer, a new channel that we can communicate on.

And it gives us the ability to leverage points and create this loyal customer within our customer base to really make them want to, to interact with us, to engage with us.

Right.

One of the things that we talked about early on was the ability to have loyalty help us collect good, accurate contact information for customers.

So if you're, if you're a loyalty customer, you want to give them a good email address so that you get reminded when you, when you need that early bird access.

Right.

A good phone number, all those things are really valuable assets to be added into the customer drawer.

And loyalty provides a really solid reward system for the customer to, to give us those details.

Yeah, yeah.

It's like the carrot.

If somebody, if I'm checking out and somebody asks me for my phone number and my email address, no, I'm either going to give you a fake one or I'm just going to say, no, thanks, that's fine.

But if you're telling me I'm going to get something that's, I'm much more likely to give you a phone Number that doesn't end with the wrong number at the end.

Okay, now it's time to talk about the one that I'm the most excited about.

Probably just because we just launched it at one of our biggest shows and it's received so much positive feedback.

I'm really excited about it.

And that is Voice AI.

So rather than me explaining it, why don't you go ahead, tell us what it is?

How does it work?

How's it work?

You call in and someone answers the phone.

It's not.

I mean, it is that, but really, this is.

How do we help our customers engage more?

Right.

I think earlier JP was saying that, you know, we want to look at Voice AI as.

As an opportunity to capture those interactions when someone may not be around.

Like, if we're, you know, the store is closed, the shop is closed, no one's around, someone's calling in.

How do we capture that in a way that's not too expensive?

Right.

We're not going to have someone answering the phones for 24 hours.

But also, how do we make that a meaningful interaction?

I think people get nervous and think about, well, do I want to talk to a robot?

And we very often might say, start hitting zero or yelling, agent, agent, agent.

Right?

That's not what we want, and that's not what we've built.

This is, you know, it's a very unique interaction.

It is.

I mean, you could have a pirate answer the phone on, you know, on Halloween, or we've had Dracula like we have with AI.

The opportunity to create experiences, really, with these phone calls.

If you really want to have Santa Claus answer the phone on the week of Christmas, awesome.

But those are niche and kind of fun.

But really what you want is to be able to help that customer in that moment.

You may not have someone available to answer the phone, whether they're busy in the shop or they're helping another customer.

Can we answer questions for you really quickly?

Can we?

Because we're tied in to the full platform, we can talk about, here are our store hours, here's the services we offer, the pricing with answer those types of questions.

But also with Scheduler, we can schedule an appointment with you right there with that agent on the line.

And if there are questions that come up that are just too hard to answer or they're really in depth, we'll pass that call directly back to the store and someone can answer and talk to them.

But what that will do is one highlight which customer this is in cinch, so they can quickly pull that up and See, oh, this is John and he has this auto with us and he's had these services with us.

Now that person has some upfront information about who this person is.

We're also passing through there some of the key things they've already discussed with that AI agent to help make that even more meaningful.

So it is meant to augment.

It is not meant to replace that interaction, but it really does improve it.

Eventually.

We're.

We're close to.

But you'll actually be able to text to that same number if you want and it'll answer in the text and not, not necessarily be just.

Just voice AI.

Cool.

Cool.

Something that I heard people were really excited about was the ability for the voice AI to understand the sentiment of the people that they're talking to.

Yeah, that.

That one is.

It's really interesting, you know, and that will come into play one.

Just from a tracking standpoint, it'll become part of their customer profile.

But again, back to what I was saying and handing off that call.

If maybe somebody's upset.

Yeah, that or they.

They came in because they're calling for a complaint.

They do not want to talk.

Right.

To an AI agent.

And they'll catch that.

They'll be able to hand that off to that customer before.

To that person in the shop before they speak to that customer.

So they can kind of have some prep like, okay, someone's coming in hot.

Yeah, gird yourself.

Be ready, be patient.

Yeah, yeah.

I think the fact that it's tied to the cdp, I mean, you get so much more data.

You know how many people are asking the exact same question?

How many people are.

You know, something is not clear.

And so you can solve that because now you have not only this thing that's saving you time and not to mention giving you a happy voice instead of maybe the dis.

The grumpy had a bad day at school, teenager you have answering the phone or whatever you have happening, but now you have all this data that allows you to make better decisions about your business, better position, answer more questions on your website because people are all having the same problem.

Just the idea of collecting even more data and saving you time and capturing calls that you might have missed.

I can't remember.

Somebody here told me a number the other day that phone calls are still the number one source of leads.

So if you're missing any phone calls, your business is just going to voicemail.

And guess what?

They're not going to call you back later.

They're just going to call the next shop and the list and the Google Maps list that comes up.

Yeah.

And in that interaction, they'll follow up, of course, they'll ask for.

They'll have the phone number that came in on, and the system will actually automatically look back into Cinch and say, do we know this phone number at this location?

And.

And be able to feed that back to the agent for that conversation.

Right.

So our.

Something else that I have heard about our agent is that it does a lot better with weird scenarios.

I was talking to one of the sales guys the other day, and he said that he was demoing the voice AI on a demo, and intentionally, he kept interrupting it and saying, no, no, no, that's not what I meant, and kind of giving the voice AI a hard time.

And he said, outside of one time when it kind of paused for a second, like I was trying to understand what it was saying, it solved the problems pretty effortlessly.

And as we've been building this, I know we've called a lot of other types of AI agents, and I was on some of those calls, and they were great.

And ours is super.

How have customers been reacting?

Really, really well.

You.

You glossed over the.

The pirate answering the.

The phone call.

Yeah.

So there are some funny incidents that we can bring up that are awesome.

But one of the cool things about that is it highlights the value of being able to create your own brand and your own voice within the AI agent.

And that's.

That is clutch.

Right.

One of the things that we want to do is make sure you can maintain your own brand as you're using all these different tools.

And so this is one other path for that.

Right.

As we've talked, we've had a couple of scenarios where customers have been really focused on language as well in the mix.

And so we've got one customer that has a location that was purchased from some Chinese immigrants, and the Chinese local population is very heavily Chinese dominant.

And so they wanted to leverage a Chinese AI agent as part of the answering service.

And so that's.

That's one of the things that we can do with our aig.

You can pick a different voice for the Chinese version or for the Spanish version to make sure that the accent is good and clean and sounds.

Sounds like you want it to.

But lots of power within the.

The platform that we can leverage as we're trying to make sure we maintain brand standards and a brand voice.

Yeah.

Another aspect for voice AI is its ability to not just converse in the moment and record that and do all that analysis and the other things that we've discussed.

But also the fact that they can go through and identify is there a coupon that this customer qualifies for?

Or if the customer actually asks, I mean, who calls up their pizza joint for a takeout?

And they say, well, what coupons do you have on offer?

Right.

I think we're all trained to do that.

Well, what coupons are available to this caller?

And they can pull that from the Cinch platform and immediately text that out to them as part of that phone call.

Right.

And initiate any other kind of email or other things that someone might think of in a journey that they want to have with their customer as part of that phone call.

Yeah.

Cool.

We did a contest and so people had to call in to the agent and we just told them the tell the agent to add you to the contest.

So they said, please add me to the contest.

And the agent said, okay, which show are you at?

And they said.

And then it just popped them into a journey that Cinch is so famous for.

And they started to get texts.

They got notified if they won the contest, if they didn't win the contest.

I mean, the ability to answer, solve so many problems, capture leads.

And now I can also act on this stuff that's coming in.

I'm going to add one more layer to this.

We can also validate data in association with this.

So when we have a contest like that and they give you a phone number, it's going to repeat back that phone number and if it's different than what you have on file for that customer record, it will update that number.

Same with an email address.

It's really great at listening and understanding email addresses.

And so you can just read off your email address.

Jpscovilleinch IO I'm gonna, we're gonna edit that out.

You can add your email address into the mix and it will understand that email address and then repeat it back letter by letter to make sure that it got it correctly and will then update it in the system as well.

So very intelligent and capable of helping you get better and more accurate information.

That goes back to your earlier comment about the phone is still a primary source for getting leads.

Right.

So let's make sure that that lead information that we're getting is verified.

Yeah, yeah.

Captures it automatically.

Somebody from support was telling me the other day that one of the biggest problems our customers are dealing with is data capture.

Getting their employees to collect the data.

Guess what?

The AI will, it's not going to fight back when you tell it to collect the data.

It's just going to do what you tell it to do and it's automatically tracking all that information that you want your employees to capture anyway.

All right.

The other really exciting one that we also just launched is the Scheduler.

Why don't you tell us about that?

What is Scheduler?

It is the opportunity for our customers to ensure that they're capturing all of the data and a little bit more when it comes to setting up appointments or booking appointments with them.

Right.

So it's a typical scheduling tool, but because it is tied into Cinch, that information is actually tied to our voice AI.

So you can schedule there or you can schedule online.

And this is something that we've thought carefully about earlier.

JP talked about using your brand when it came to the voice AI.

Similar with the Scheduler, you want to customize that so it has your branding on that as well.

This comes from you.

It may be driven by Cinch.

You're offering that service and so we want to make sure it, it fits for you.

You can customize that to location by location or set it up for the information within that scheduler across all locations at once and maybe and that is the hours that you're open, how much of your percentage of your day you actually want to have scheduled.

Sometimes you want to have a buffer and you might say, I want to schedule no more than 50% of our hours open to appointments and the rest for walk up business.

You can man, you can adjust for that.

You can set the services that you'll offer and in the example of like a quick lube establishment, you can actually set schedules for each of the bays that you have.

Right.

And one bay may do quick lube, you know, do an oil change, entire rotation, but the one next to it is emissions tests only.

And you can set that up so that the, you know, you are planning to the minute and to the resource.

Exactly what's happening with that schedule, which is great for a planning, you know, your daily planning session with your, with your team or throughout the week.

Right.

There's lots of other things that you can do with that.

We can track when you didn't complete a schedule and we can follow up with you.

Oh, did you.

It's lead capture.

Yeah, yes, absolutely, lead capture.

Or we actually also track that.

You didn't, you had a no show for an appointment.

So what journeys would you put in?

Would you create to follow up with them?

Right.

And you can automate that because it is part of a journey at that point.

So lots of opportunity there.

It's not just scheduling, it is really helping you to customize and start that engagement well with your customer.

Yeah, yeah.

Are you seeing what's the early sentiment from our customers about it?

I think it goes back to the customer data platform for customers.

They love the ability to be able to manage schedules services in one spot and not have to worry about updating another tool anytime there's a change.

So if it's Veterans Day, we just recently had Veterans Day.

If it's Veterans Day and you're closed on that day, you can go and update it on the locations page in Cinch and voice AI and the scheduler will update as well.

So it's really easy for us to be able to manage that information in one spot.

And that gives customers a lot of power.

Right.

They don't have to constantly be thinking in the back of their mind what other resources are out there that are going to tell my customers that I'm really open and I'm not.

And so there's a lot of value associated with that.

So just being able to layer all that data into the CDP and then leverage that both in the scheduler and the voice agent is.

Or voice AI is awesome.

Yeah.

I'm constantly coming back to the single source of truth because in the email that you send out, maybe you send a broadcast about some sale you're going to have for Veterans Day and then the email, if it says schedule now and it's a button and it takes you somewhere where that data is not integrated with your platform, your cdp, your CRM, your cdxp, whatever you're using, you can't action off of that now.

I mean, now that data lives over here in the scheduler.

What good is that to you outside of now you have something booked on your calendar.

Cinch is just, it's just really rolls back into that just general idea that you have a single source of truth so you can do so many more powerful things to retain your customers.

That's exciting.

Yeah.

I can tell you're excited.

I am.

So.

Of course I am.

All these amazing things that have launched.

Since you got here, it's all because of a huge team.

Okay, so final question.

What's the biggest impact on a day to day basis for our customers that these features that we're releasing is going to have?

It's layering all this CDP data into these tools.

That's the biggest impact that these have.

We have, we have competitors out there that have these tools, but they're standalone solutions.

They don't interact with the, the customer data.

We can't Pull them into the marketing funnel or the marketing journeys because it's outside of our system and so it's really, really hard for them or us to be able to leverage those tools.

Which is one of the reasons we wanted to build these is so that we could have all the different touch points associated with, with a scheduler when they're scheduling, when they don't complete that schedule, when they don't show all.

Once that's layered into our data, we can then build journeys and campaigns associated with those.

Same thing with the voice agent or voice AI.

It's really important for us to be able to see what happens on this call.

Did that, did we solve the customer problem on that call or not?

Was it after hours?

Did they schedule something?

If yes, great.

If they didn't schedule something, can we follow up the next day and make sure we do schedule with an email or a call from a from the shop to make sure we close out that business?

So it's really being able to layer all these different tools into one place so that we can build campaigns and optionality for our customers as we as they try to gain business.

Okay, so let me just drill in to that.

Thanks.

What's the.

You're welcome.

What is the day to day change in what they're actually doing day to day?

All of those things are amazing.

So are they saving them time, giving him more peace of mind?

Yeah, sure.

All of those fit saving time.

I mean, if you think about voice, voice AI, right, you've got the ability to answer 10 calls at once.

If you get that many that come through, you've got the ability to answer after hours.

All those things are capturing the call, capturing the lead without any new resource associated on the.

On the new human resource associated on the customer side.

Scheduler, same thing, right?

It's the ability to have a lot of different places where a customer can schedule.

It's all consolidated to one calendar.

So we know that we're not overlapping in specific bays.

We're using our resources correctly to be able to get customers in and have a great experience.

We all know that meaningful interactions lead to happy customers and who want to come back and stay with us.

Right.

Retention, they want to engage with us again from a purchasing standpoint.

So I see this, all of these changes, these updates and releases that we've been doing as a way to create more of those meaningful interactions, but also do it in a way that is easier.

Right.

Because more interactions, someone might think that's how much more of my day do I have to spend Setting that up or doing that?

No, the idea is that we can create those more meaningful interactions in a way that's easy.

Right to the point of the Cinch platform.

All of that data in one place.

Because of that, I can find the journeys, the campaigns that will lead to those meaningful interactions with, automate them and make quick updates on a day to day basis if I need to.

But it's just I haven't really increased the work potentially from that marketer, but I've increased their opportunity for those interactions.

Not that this isn't enough to be excited about.

No.

Yeah.

No, I mean, I would say that from a product standpoint, what we're thinking about is how do we make that easier and to increase those.

The right interactions at the right time, not a ton of interactions, but having the right one.

And so what we're thinking about from an AI standpoint is how do we improve that?

How can AI actually make it easier to use this platform?

How can we think about getting people to learn about marketing automation and the use.

Using Cinch to improve their, their marketing in, in a way that they can come to that on their own.

Right.

And, and so AI will help us there.

There'll be lots of other things that we'll be thinking about that we're currently thinking about is, is really getting back to the.

Make it easy for me to have those interactions.

But for sure we'll have a lot more to say and think about when it comes to AI.

AI that is done in a meaningful and a tactical way, not just AI for AI sake.

We're being very careful about that.

But it has an incredible amount of power AI does in terms of improving how our tool works and how our, how our customers, our users interact with it.

Yeah.

If I've learned anything as I've been implementing AI across my workflows, that it does not always make things easy.

And that's what I really love about.

Coming back to what I said in the beginning, the foundation that we've laid, the intentional, the intentionality with the way that we built the platform and now the way that you and your team are moving forward with how we're implementing AI.

The goal is actually to make people more effective and faster.

All right, thanks for being here, guys.

It was amazing to be able to get two bigwigs in the room at the same time.

So three bigwigs in the room.

Just to recap here's what's new.

Sentiment analysis to understand how customers feel.

Loyalty rewards to incentivize them.

Voice AI to keep you connected 247 and the scheduler to make booking effortless.

All deeply integrated with cinch data, your single source of truth.

These updates are all about one thing, helping your business build lasting relationships.

I'm Amy.

Thanks for watching.

Back for more.

We'll see you next time.