Episode 102
Your Customer Sent a Robot to Shop You. Did You Pass?
Somewhere this week a machine picked up a phone and called a business. It asked if they were open. It asked what something costs. It made a decision on behalf of the person who sent it, and then it hung up. There was no missed…
Episode notes
What this conversation covers
Somewhere this week a machine picked up a phone and called a business. It asked if they were open. It asked what something costs. It made a decision on behalf of the person who sent it, and then it hung up. There was no missed call. There was no voicemail. There was no angry review. Just a customer they will never meet.
Google has started rolling out consumer assistants that callbusinesses, check inventory, compare options and complete purchases. For a hundred and one episodes this show has asked which agents you should deploy.
This is the first one about the agent pointed back at you.
Hal thinks this is the best news in years, and his argumentis a good one. He ran a service drive. His worst problem was never competition, it was reach, and a buyer that never sleeps and never gets annoyed is the best customer he has ever heard of. Kim does not disagree. Her problem is narrower:the machine is going to hear something when it calls, and somebody has to decide what.
Then Kim reads her own number out loud. She built a smalltool that does what a customer's assistant would do and scores a business out of a hundred, and she ran it on Lewis Howard Insurance Group. Sixty-one. A C.Hours, zero out of twelve. And a robots.txt file on their own website telling every machine on earth not to read it, which nobody chose and nothing flagged.Then she ran two other agencies in the same city. They are not named. One scored a sixteen. The other returned an error and scored a zero.
Lewis Howard won the block with a C. That is the frighteningpart, and it is also the opportunity, because the whole fix is publishing what is already true. Three steps, one afternoon, zero dollars. You are not late. You are early.
In this Episode
- The call that never called back, and why nobody at that business will ever know it happened.
- Hal's case, at full strength: reach was always the problem, and this is a bigger market with a faster buyer.
- It is not the interview. It is the resume screen. Why relationship businesses are not exempt.
- Why hours are the number one failure, and why call us for availability reads as unknown.
- The eleven byte file that quietly shadowed the file that runs this entire show, and the research feed that succeeded and never arrived.
- THE PEAK. Sixty-one out of a hundred, hours at zero, and a robots.txt nobody chose.
- Sixteen and zero. What it looks like when a real business is not there to evaluate at all.
- Both ends of the same phone call, from an agency that lives on phone and quote.
- The three step fix, and why the price of being first is one afternoon.
Ready to Take Action
- Watch an AI-native agency do this in real time:https://AskLewisHoward.com
- Small Business Big AI:https://smallbusinessbigai.com/
- Kim Lewis Howard on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kim-lewis-howard/
- Hal Howard on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/halhoward/
MUSIC & SOUND CREDITS
Music: "I Am with You" by Dream Cave; Epidemic Sound via iStock.com
Sound Effects: https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/