#136 - Frank Schneider, CEO at Speakeasy AI - On why understanding intent unlocks real customer value

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to give everyone of us a better understanding of what our customers really want. My guest is Frank Schneider, CEO at Speakeasy AI.

Frank consulted and led teams providing various SaaS and AI solutions for contact centers and B2B. He’s a former officer and VP of Sales, Marketing and Customer Success at Creative Virtual USA. During his tenure, Creative Virtual USA grew revenue over 300% and became the leader in Fortune 500 enterprise virtual assistant deployments.

Today, he’s the CEO at Speakeasy AI. He and his team are on a mission to make it easier for businesses to understand and respond to their customers’ needs in voice with the help of AI. This put them on the pioneers’ path to provide in-the-moment insights into understanding customers'​ intents, needs and outcomes.

And this resonated with me, and hence I invited Frank to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in today's chatbot-driven economy – and how this leads to more automation, but not to better customer value and relationships. We also address the dilemmas customer have with a ‘rip and replace’ strategy vs one where they can evolve their investments. Last but not least, we discuss some critical ingredients to building a remarkable software business.

Here are some of his quotes:

In any organizational structure, it's servant leadership that allows for success to be possible when you can put the needs of others in front of yourself.

The aha moment that we found is that customers, when they come and try to interact with a brand, they want information or help easily. They want it to be sort of done in a way that doesn't take much effort for them. And they want it done quickly and whenever they want it. And those are the issues that have gone on in servicing customers, for long before AI was in place.

We want to start with listening to your customers. And the piece of technology that we have a patent pending for is called speech to intent. In order to understand a customer and also leverage your other investments, we need intelligence on the line at the moment you say hello.

As soon as you start speaking to us, we're not listening to just transcribe and send somewhere. We're listening to start to derive what that intent is from the beginning, and then send the intent to a place to fulfil the need.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why the essence of turning customers into fans is not so much in listening to what they say they need, but understanding intent, i.e., what they really want
2. How embracing and leveraging ‘what’s there’ – be the orchestrator - can accelerate your growth and stickiness, i.e., enabling your customer to leap without having to reinvent everything
3. How defensible differentiation can be created by not betting on a technology difference, but on a methodology difference.
4. That the trick to getting customers to actually use your solution and increase the ‘love curve’ is in earning their trust, and creating wins