Whether it’s a personalized service or a busy local brunch spot, phone calls are an important way to serve people, create loyal customers, and build trust. Small businesses struggle to balance phone, email, and other forms of contact to keep operations running smoothly. Many opportunities fall flat when you’re a sole proprietor or have only a small staff, but GoodCall knows there’s a better way.
Bob Summers, founder and CEO of GoodCall, wants to expand the availability of conversational AI to small businesses struggling to balance their livelihoods and handling “partial tasks.” According to Summers, an average of 65% of calls go unanswered, and they are often customers who are on a buying journey and need answers to a few common questions first, then schedule an appointment, reserve a table, or purchase a product.
“What if we could adopt AI to solve this problem?” Summers initially had a hypothesis. “What small business owners really love is serving their customers, so it’s about automating some of the piecemeal tasks that every small business owner does.”
Their goal is to improve the customer service experience for businesses and callers by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to answer calls and understand callers’ questions to provide the best response. Maids, barbers, plumbers, real estate agents, lawyers and other local service personnel can benefit from increased productivity through Goodcall agents who understand and serve their customers’ needs.
GoodCall helps thousands of companies across America take care of their busy work and focus on making their customers happy. They understand the importance of humanizing the AI integration process, so the last thing you do is press 0 on your keypad.
Building in-house expertise for small and medium-sized businesses
Dealing with automated electronic customer support is an experience we are all familiar with. This quickly escalates into anger when the caller potentially has to press multiple buttons to get a response. Most people are quick to ask for a human proxy. Ensuring human-like conversation quality is GoodCall’s top priority. This means the solution must avoid AI hallucinations and produce smooth speech with virtually no latency. Knowing that your model’s responses have a real impact on the bottom line, especially for small businesses, comes down to keeping the facts clear by delivering the highest quality AI experience possible.
“Our internal goal is to never hallucinate,” Summers told Microsoft for Startups. “Someone could be harmed. You might even show up to an appointment when someone isn’t there. For example, these are things from the real world. When our bots talk to customers, real things happen in real business, so you can’t afford to have illusions about your product.”
Three AI models work together to create GoodCall (natural language process (NLP), speech-to-text, and text-to-speech). Together, these models contribute to the understanding of the basic model for natural conversational language for small and medium-sized businesses. Every interaction feeds back into your business’s own model, creating highly personalized agents who will become your in-house experts. Additionally, if you encounter a query that the model cannot answer, you also have the ability to ask the business owner or manager for help. This way, you can learn from feedback and improve your performance over time.
Built by coders for coders
Conversation quality, latency, and reliability were key benchmarks that GoodCall set to compare providers across the AI cloud market. Not only is Azure cost-effective, but programs like Founder’s Hub provide an environment for scalability with support, technical staff, and personalized support to ensure your teams have everything they need to do their best work creating innovative solutions and solving customer problems. do.
To handle the call volume that serves thousands of companies across the country, GoodCall needs a powerful, fast, and reliable platform that can support its AI systems and provide customers with a high-quality conversation experience.
“Microsoft was founded by coders for coders. “This is prevalent when working with the Azure AI stack,” Summers explained. “Once you get into the studio, you start selecting a model and receive an API key. Before you know it, you will be building a building. That’s really exciting for our team. This gives us the efficiency and speed to build high production quality products for our customers.”
Programs like Founder’s Hub and one-on-one support from Microsoft’s technical experts, startup mentors, and other subject matter experts give you the timely support you need to stay on track.
The golden age of AI innovation has arrived
It’s important to listen to your customers to ensure your product creates a solution for your target audience. So how can we do that in this day and age? Staying ahead of the curve is a challenge in itself, but in a market as fast growing as AI? Well, Summers encourages aspiring startups to get involved in these times.
“How can we keep up with it? Well, in some ways, no,” Summers said candidly. “But when we can, we talk to advisors. Some of these advisors are there to help you move in this direction at Microsoft, but the best part is talking to your peers and learning as they go. Because this is a golden age, a new age. There are no experts. “We are all trying to solve this problem together.”
Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub members receive Azure cloud credits to spend on a variety of Azure services, including the Azure OpenAI service, and expert advice from the Microsoft team to build and deploy solutions. Founders Hub is open to all startups and you can apply in just a few minutes. Register now.