When did you say ”THAT’S IT! I’VE HAD IT!”? Time to Disrupt and Interrupt with host Karla Jo. Every week KJ interviews professionals who are disrupting their industries and altering economic networks that have been antiquated with bull-headed predecessors holding up the progress. KJ delves into uncovering more from industry rebels and innovators that you didn’t know you needed in your life.
Episodes
Thursday Jul 14, 2022
Thursday Jul 14, 2022
Today's guest has been disrupting markets as a serial entrepreneur and marketing leader for decades. From holding the position of CEO of a cloud contact center for the SMB market to co-founding a marketing agency dedicated to helping B2B SaaS companies accelerate growth, Stijn Hendrikse is a born disruptor. Today, Hendriske is focused on helping small business owners better manage resources, improve customer service, and save money.
How's he doing it?
Through the creation of Amy — an AI-powered conversation platform for small businesses. Amy is a unique chatbot solution as it was designed specifically for small businesses. Similar to a pile of Legos, Amy lets small business owners use templates to build incredibly powerful customer service workflows. From answering common questions around the clock to scheduling services seamlessly, Amy's goal is to disrupt the way customer service works.
Key Takeaways
- Hendrikse is a believer in starting things rather than waiting around for the perfect time to attempt a new idea. His modus operandi is to get going and build it, which has helped him as a disruptor. While sometimes the things built don't get as much traction as you originally hoped for, in the end, a lot of things stick.
- It has become especially important for small businesses to hyper-focus on their customer service in the last couple of years. Customer service is the new sales. For those who run a business, big or small, it is far more critical today to please an existing customer base than to attempt to capture new customers. The key is to make customers extremely happy, which will create engaged advocates and, in turn, earn those new customers.
- In the last two years, with the great resignation, small businesses have been left struggling with hiring, training, and retaining people. This has left small business owners facing a difficult struggle to provide a great customer service experience. This is where Hendriske believes the innovation of his technology solution can help bridge the gap — Amy.us.
- AI is a popular buzzword that gets thrown around a lot when discussing the technology behind chatbots. However, in order for AI to be effective, the training models behind the AI have to be optimized in a precise way. This is where Hendrikse is using his chatbot technology to change customer service for small businesses, such as locksmiths, breweries, funeral operators, churches, and more. Hendrikse is doing this through a process of templating questions to match these companies' unique needs — something previously not accomplished through enterprise chatbot solutions.
- To launch Amy, Hendrikse and his team took the time to interview and research hundreds of small businesses to figure out what the majority of questions being asked by customers were. This led to the creation of the templates that power the Amy chatbot.
- What drove Hendrikse to focus his life work on small businesses? In his words, it's the place where the path from problem to solution is the shortest. With small businesses, there's not a lot of overhead, not a lot of complexity, and not a lot of processes to get in the way. Hendriske loves working amidst that simplicity, where he can immediately see if something's working or not, where he can see if someone's happy, and where it is easy to measure whether or not a customer is coming back.
Quote of the show:
3:07 "I start things. I don't wait too long when I have an idea. I like to just get going and build it. And I don't worry about the right timing too much. Don't wait around. And that has helped me a lot. And sometimes you, you build things that don't get maybe as much traction as you originally hoped for. But in the end, a lot of things stick."
Links:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stijnhendrikse/
- Company Website: kalungi.com/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/stijnh1
Ways to Tune In:
- Amazon Music - https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/eccda84d-4d5b-4c52-ba54-7fd8af3cbe87/disruption-interruption
- Apple Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disruption-interruption/id1581985755
- Google Play - https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZGlzcnVwdGlvbmludGVycnVwdGlvbi5jb20vZmVlZC54bWw
- Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6yGSwcSp8J354awJkCmJlD
- Stitcher - https://www.stitcher.com/show/disruption-interruption
- YouTube - https://youtu.be/pbP9a8YYHJ4
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