Robocallers of the AI Kind, Payment Automation, and WhatsApp

**[00:00:00]** Welcome the this live stream. We're going to be talking about a few things that happened today and multiple calls with clients. So, they're all interesting just because they are related to small businesses, things that can happen in a small business and that that are relevant to people in small businesses, I guess. So, we're talking about payments integrations with different systems. We're talking about robocallers, which I'm getting a ton of, and we're talking about WhatsApp as well. So, welcome. This is the web talk show and this was actually an idea because I was about to set up some screenshots for the most recent web talk show episode and then I was opening Riverside to get everything ready and get those screenshots and then I got a call and it nothing happened on the call and during the day I just in general got a lot of calls and recently I've been getting a lot of calls and and Some just don't have anything and some are robocallers like usual and some are actually using some of these AI uh agents for calls which I mean they're at least entertaining in some scenarios. So you sort of start telling which ones are those versus uh just like a press one to whatever. And and you can build those by the way you can build your own. You can use it for outbound you can use it for inbound. It's really useful in my opinion for inbound especially because let's say you have a clinic, a dental office, a whatever, a car shop, anything. And you you want people to book appointments. So you detail cars and you want people to book appointments. So yeah, they could go online, etc. But sometimes they call in and if they **[00:02:00]** call in then you have staff that can take those calls and so that can get expensive and maybe they call at odd hours and so it's not practical. So in that scenario I feel that inbound AI agents are great because they will talk to people. They're pretty natural sounding sounding. There's there's a ton of different voices and accents and just the speed variability of a lot of other things and I can show you some if you want. It's it's very interesting where we've gotten to with the technology because they work. They're they're fun to talk to in some cases depending on how the prompt was generated. And so again, for inbound at the very least, I think it's really nice because I prefer personally to call some place and just get that. And I know it's not a human, but I don't care. I can book an appointment very fast or I can order something or I can get support very quickly without having to wait for someone on the line. a thousand times. It's better to to just get something or someone in this case, it's something on the line and and have that conversation because these AI agents can be used for anything. You could just dump your whole knowledge base. You could have it where I could ask like I'm trying to use this uh baby monitor. I'm not sure how I should change the language on it. I have no idea. And so maybe I just call in and this thing answers and it will guide It'll say, "Oh, so turn it on, press menu, tap tap tap to the bottom, swipe right, or whatever, and it'll give me the instructions, and I didn't have to wait for someone to get **[00:04:00]** on the light." And so, there's these wonderful companies out there that have fantastic support. I mean, especially for the kids stuff like the Guardian bikes or like Radio Flyer, they have fantastic support. You can call, somebody answers, they're very helpful. But not every company can have a huge staff on call with all the knowledge and have them all be happy and generous and and helpful. That just isn't viable for a lot of small businesses especially. So I think using these agents is a great idea. And I'm talking about this because we were discussing this with a client this morning. We were looking at what can be done and how these agents have been evolving. So take these tools like Vappy if you never heard of it. Vapy is a is a nice little tool that allows you as a whoever person, business owner, whatever you want to generate your own voice AI agents. And so if you're curious, let me actually see if I can share my screen here. And for those that are just listening, apologize, but I'm just just showing just the homepage of vap.ai. So if I if I do screen share here, I'm going to do this. And let's hope that it works. All right. So, you see this very nice little landing page and you can where it says talk to Vappy, you can click it. There's a big button. It says talk to By Give it a try and you can actually start talking with it and it's really interesting because it's just it's like a conversation. You find yourself just talking to it and it can give you the breath of knowledge of uh different things and it'll help you um understand the platform, use cases, stuff like **[00:06:00]** that. And it's really neat. one can create an account and go in and just start creating things which is very nice. So let me start sharing the other tab and again for those who are just listening I'm just sharing sort of the dashboard and so I'm going to open like this is just an empty account but I want to show you what it looks like if if you're doing something here. So let's see if it loads share this type instead. So basically you get this screen and and then you can say something like I don't know whatever you create an assistant and you can say customer support specialist create assistant and his name is going to be Alex and so here hi there this is Alex from tech solutions customer support how can I help you right and you can have that sort of as a first message and then you can have a system prompt for it and the system prompt will say things like oh you're Alex a customer service assistant for tech solutions blah blah blah and you can tell it what the personality is, this the speech characteristics, the conversation flow, etc., and how to identify issues, troubleshooting. You can just have this big prompt and tell it how it's supposed to work and it works. They're really nice. So, I recommend if you're curious, just go in. If you have the time, you might not even need to hire someone to build something for this, but of course, someone can help you. Like, we can help you, but it's simple enough to get started if you want to just play with it. So you go in, you tell it everything you want it to do and you can even add **[00:08:00]** files. So you can say use these documents as your knowledge base so that it knows how to interact with your customers, with your visitors or whoever. So it's really nice. The voices are fantastic. You go to voice configuration and and there's you can use the Vappy voices. They have a bunch of them. And you can see it's 22year-old male with a deeper tone. It's Harry with a energetic Spencer, Kylie, Savannah, Paige, right? And so you can get a lot of options. You could use Labs, which is a great company for voices, but there's also Cartisia, there's Element, there's Deepgram. There's a bunch of different choices or providers for those voices. So, you can choose one and then you can even tweak them. And of course, if you get deep into it, you can go into something like 11 Labs and actually clone a voice, your voice or someone else's voice and use that if that's what you want to do. So, very practical for again for inbound calls. I think customer support scheduling, that sort of thing is really nice. And you can just create a prompt and then you can add tools to it. And the tools are really nice because you can have it check your cal.com account or your Google calendar and it can check if there's availability, what slots are available. and then based on that allow people to book appointment and actually book the appointment or it could write to your Google sheet. It could do many things. So it's great. That's sort of the initial version of of some of these tools just have a one main prompt that's handling everything. But then there's also the workflows aspect. And the workflows are really nice because there are also templates. **[00:10:00]** And workflows are relatively new in Vapy. You can create a workflow and you can say I want to do a lead qualification agent right and then call it whatever you want and again for those who are just listening I'm just showing the screen of of what a workflow and it's just like a chart of steps and within those steps you can say hey this is Morgan from growth partners and uh we help businesses improve their operational efficiency through custom software solutions you have a minute to talk about blah blah blah and so this looks like an outbound one right and so they can say they're too busy or they agree to chat and So you start the conversation and you tell what steps to do. But the great thing is all of these steps are sort of individual LLM steps in which you can choose a different model. So you don't you're not tied to an open AI or an anthropic or a Google. You can decide for one step I want to use Lama or Gemini or in another step I want to use Claude or Chad GPT. And then in each step, it can also grab variables like you want the customer's name, email, phone number, and it can expand on that in the conversation. So, it's very interesting that you can do things like these just by opening an account and you can start for free. You can just start testing it and click call and you can see how it works. So, it's really nice. Very I I don't know. I find it very interesting that we can do that sort of thing so easily, especially if you're a small business. And then the way it works, they they bill you **[00:12:00]** per like a per minute thing. It could be a few cents per minute, things like that. And and the great thing specifically about Vappy is that it'll tell you based on your choices, the configuration that you chose, how much it's going to be per minute. Let's you choose a higherend model, then it'll show you how much you're paying for it. If it's a faster model, maybe a lower-end model, whatever, it'll it'll show that change. And it'll also show how much latency each of these configurations introduce. So latency is just how long it takes, right, to to to get back to you. And so if you make it very fast, you'll see it's like talking with Vapia on the homepage. It feels really natural because it's very fast at answering. It's not like when you say something to the robo caller and it just weird because it just takes a long time before it tells you something or it sort of understood. And so it's nice. So these are these are voice agents. There's many tools out there. You can you can use voice flow as well which if you're thinking of doing live chat on your website for example voice flow is a great choice and you can use voice flow for live chat and also voice and also text and also some other things. So we'll I'll discuss a little bit more about that in a little bit. So yeah that's what we were talking about this morning and the possibilities of some of these and how we can implement them into businesses for scheduling for customer support and and that sort of thing. Then the second thing I want to talk about is payments. So payments when you use multiple systems in your **[00:14:00]** flow like your e-commerce flow or any other type of business flow there's the issue of how the data is moved around and where you get the data at the end and where's your source of truth and many other things. So, we'll have a much better conversation about data and everything tomorrow on the podcast. But one of the big things that we've seen is let's say you have a WooCommerce store or Shopify or anything like that. Typically, you also have an accounting platform like Quickbooks or Freshbooks, whatever. And you typically want to be able to move information from point A to point B. So let's say you have your e-commerce platform and you want those payments to be generated as invoices or sales receipts on your accounting software. So the conversation we're having today this morning was how do we move transactions from something like WooCommerce to QuickBooks such that every time an order is placed that order goes into QuickBooks automatically and that way our customers don't have to go in and every month do an export and a bulk import and all that messy stuff. So there are many tools to do this. One very well-known one in the space is called my works and they do a sync between Woo Commerce and QuickBooks and I've used it for many years with different customers and it works for many scenarios. So if it's a regular store and it has the SKS and then the SKs are also in QuickBooks, you can map them and it'll even show you or sync inventory between them, things like that. So, it's nearly nice, especially if you're doing multi- store setups. So, it's good in that sense. However, some things won't necessarily work out of the box depending **[00:16:00]** on how you have your store set up. So, with my client today, what was happening was they need to have partial payments, so deposits, for example. So, it's a custombuilt product and so they need an upfront payment and then the balance is paid later on. So, what happens is WooCommerce does not support partial payments out of the box. It's either paid or it's not paid basically. And so, yeah, you can use plugins to add deposit functionality, and there are some out there that work nicely, and they will give the customer the option to choose to pay in full upfront or to pay a deposit and then pay the balance later. And it handles it really nicely in the sense that it will show whatever that deposit amount is. Let's say it's 50% and the person can pay with any supported payment method via Stripe or AC, Direct, whatever you want. And then it creates that sort of virtual order for that second payment or the balance which is really nice as well because they can track it in their own account. They can go in, they can pay. It just it works. So the one we're using works. The problem is since it's not a native feature, there's no way for a company like my works to know about all plugins that exist. And so there's no way for them to consider the possibility that maybe the customer needs these partially paid payments to go over to QuickBooks. And so yes, they've integrated with some because somebody maybe have has asked them for it and it made sense and there's a user base and whatever and so the resources to be allocated makes sense. In some scenarios it won't and that's okay and I hope **[00:18:00]** they add we've talked to them and maybe they'll add support for the particular one we're using and that would be swell but I mean there's there's quality control there's testing there's a lot of things involved for them to just add support for a third party plugin that maybe no one else would use. I'm sure most I mean many other people will use it but that that's where you are. So you have to allocate resources in an intelligent way. So what are you left with? So our conversation this morning was how can we automate the payments such that they can go to QuickBooks without having to modify my works in this case and maybe we still want some of the functionality that my works is giving us but we maybe just use the order to invoice thing but we we do not transfer the payments over. How do we do that? So there's multiple things you could do. And so we were exploring the different tools and I've talked about some of these tools before like make.com, napier. These automation tools allow you again as a business owner or a developer or anyone in the company to connect different tools. So make.com for example, you can connect it to Stripe, you can connect directly to Google Commerce, you can connect it to QuickBooks, and then you can have things happen when whenever there's a trigger or something in one place, then an action can happen in another place. So it's good. Now, there are differences between how some of these tools handle things. And that's that's the interesting part. It's figuring out which features or actions each of these different tools will have such that they match what you need done. And I wanted to talk **[00:20:00]** about this because you might shy away from an automation if you don't try everything before knowing that it will actually work. And I'll explain what I mean. Let's say you decide, oh, maybe I want to use make.com because make.com is really nice. It has a lot of integrations and it has a lot of features and it's very easy to use. And so I might decide to go with it. And so I go in and I connect my WooCommerce and I connect my Stripe and okay, perfect. I'm getting a new payment coming in. I can move it over to QuickBooks. I can see that I can generate a payment on QuickBooks and I can also update invoices and I can do a lot of things. But you then might run into the fact that there's no way or not visibly easy way to create a payment on QuickBooks that is linked to an existing invoice, which does not make sense. But anyway, that's not there. And so you might think then we cannot automate it this way. We'll have to go custom code, which is going to be expensive and it's going to take time, etc., etc. So some people might just at that point say, "Oh, if make.com doesn't have it, nobody else will. I mean, it's just a QuickBooks thing. It won't work. That's it. That's we're not going to go that route." And you might be wrong. And so that's why I wanted to bring this up because in our exploration today, we actually started testing in different tools. And that again it's worth it in my opinion while you're scoping a project while you're scoping something with a client or even if you are the client and someone is telling you hey **[00:22:00]** we we're going to use this tool or we don't know if this tool will work well during the scoping process you are allowed just go and create a free account on each of these services and just see which actions are there because a lot of it's not documented and so if you do that then you might be surprised with what you learn. In this case, what we learned was that make.com did not have that particular thing that we needed, but Zapier did. And sometimes we think make.com is better than Zapier because it's so visual and it's newer, but there are some things that it doesn't do, and that's understandable as well. So, what we learned was that Zapier does have the create a payment action conditionally adding it to an invoice. That's part of the step. And so, it's great. So, we're going to use Saber. So, this is just to tell you that sometimes it's worth it to go in and just do a quick test of what each tool can do before doing the full thing or scoping out the full thing because you might learn that it's better to use one tool versus another and you're going to end up saving a little more time down the road. So, that's the second conversation that we had today. So, a few different calls this morning. And now the third conversation is all around WhatsApp. And this this one is I don't know why it works this way. There there's there might be a technical limitation or it might be something to do with the encryption. I'm not really sure why this is set up this way, but as many of you know, you can use WhatsApp business to have a WhatsApp phone number **[00:24:00]** that customers can interact with and you can talk to them via WhatsApp and you can send out messages and you can have groups and all that good stuff. And WhatsApp is widely used around the world. Maybe not as much in the US but in many countries it's extremely used and even more than text messaging is and so WhatsApp becomes an interesting topic in countries like India where this particular client is based and they need to be able to communicate with their customers via the WhatsApp platform but also via the system and be able to if they start a conversation on their website move that conversation over to WhatsApp for example. or if they ask for support be able to continue that conversation. So we were talking about voice agents at the beginning and there's also text agents like voice flow chat or intercom or many chat or many other live chat. There's many platforms for this and they're all really good for live chat and then some of them have very good bulk messaging where you want to send a broadcast to a lot of people. Well, some of them support WhatsApp. And the issue with WhatsApp and something if you're a business owner that you should know if you're planning on implementing WhatsApp is that WhatsApp has very specific rules. Meta has very specific rules for WhatsApp to keep the ecosystem clean. And that is that there's only a 24-hour window for starting like just random conversation with someone. So if someone reaches reaches out to you, you can text back, you can talk to them from a business integration, but if 24 hours elapse, then you can no longer continue that conversation. It's it's over. You can't send any more messages to the **[00:26:00]** person. It's not like, oh, they're going to mark me as spam. No, you just just can't. The platform won't let you. And so the only way you can send those messages if is if you use approved an approved templated message. So you can create these templated messages in Meta and they get approved. Then once they get approved, you can use those to send a message to someone outside that window. So it's it's it's gets interesting because you might say that it's okay. So so I'll just I'll just yeah, I'll connect it to my website and we'll do the interaction. So the problem is if you connect it to one tool, it's sort of connected to that tool and that's it. it be it becomes a big issue because maybe you have it on a phone and you want to interact with them and you don't have the problem because it's real like you're actually just chatting with them if you have it on a phone but as soon as you connect it to an application then all that sort of goes out the window and now you you have to be within that 24-hour period that's one thing and the other thing is you can no longer communicate with them via the phone if you connect it to your website to your CRM or whatever if your CRM does not support live interactions, then it will only be able to send out those messages, but you won't be able to communicate with that person if they reply. That's something very important that a lot of people don't know. The way the platform is set up, it's sort of count and the API requests and everything just go through it. And this might be a little **[00:28:00]** technical, but that's what happens. And so if you plan on using WhatsApp within your business messaging in an automated fashion or based on workflows or triggers, then it's important to consider the point where you actually connect WhatsApp. So let's say you use voice flow for all your automations and AI agents and all that good stuff. Well, when you actually integrate with WhatsApp, yes, you could create your own codebased integration, but you're going to lose access to to actually communicating with them manually. So maybe it might be a better idea to use something like intercom or even now we learned that Soho CRM if you're using Soho CRM software they have the messaging capability as well many chat as well. So there are some of these platforms that have live conversation features with WhatsApp. So if you connect your business WhatsApp to that, then you can have a conversation with people there, but then you can use that connected to voice flow or whatever other agent tool you're using to to create those triggers, those flows and and other things. It's just there's so many tools out there nowadays and and everything looks so simple to connect. Just sometimes we learn that there are some tools, some platforms that have very specific rules and we just have to be careful not to lose out on very important features like being able to get back to a customer like you're used to on a phone um just because you decided to use an integration from your website. So that's all I have for you today. I wanted to talk about those three things. If you have any ideas on conversation topics that you need answered, questions you need answered, I'll be happy to bring them up on **[00:30:00]** another episode. And it was a pleasure talking with everyone today and I'll see