When you’re an entrepreneur or small business owner, customer service can feel like a never-ending to-do list. You’re juggling everything—marketing, sales, fulfillment—and on top of that, responding to emails, handling support questions, and making sure every client feels taken care of.
And if you’ve ever thought, “I don’t need to worry about scaling customer service yet—it’s just me,” I totally get it.
But here’s the truth: customer service isn’t just about solving problems—it’s about creating an experience that builds loyalty, trust, and repeat business. And as your business grows, so will the demands on your time.
That’s why AI is such a game-changer. It allows you to automate repetitive tasks, respond faster, and serve more customers without feeling overwhelmed – but it’s not about replacing the personal touch—it’s about giving you back time while making your customer experience even better.
So today, I’m sitting down with my friend and AI expert Piyush Parikh to break down how entrepreneurs—yes, even those running solo—can use AI to scale customer support, streamline communication, and keep customers feeling valued.
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Website: www.equinoxagents.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/piyushparikh/
- Podcast Page: https://www.pioneersofprogress.com/
Tools mentioned:
Watch The Live Call
Full Transcript
Misty Kortes (00:03.54)
All right, hello, hello and welcome. So when you’re an entrepreneur or small business owner, customer service can feel like a never ending to-do list. You’re juggling everything, you’re doing marketing, you’re doing sales, you’re doing fulfillment. And on top of that, you have to respond to all the emails, handle support questions and making sure that every one of your clients feel taken care of. And if you’ve ever thought as a solopreneur or entrepreneur,
need to worry about scaling customer service yet because it’s just me. I totally get it. But here’s the thing. Customer service isn’t just about solving problems. It’s about creating an experience that builds loyalty, trust, and repeat business with your current customer base. And as your business grows, so will the demand of your time. And that’s why AI is such a game changer.
It allows you to automate repetitive tasks, respond faster, serve more customers without feeling overwhelmed. But it’s not about replacing the personal touch because I know that’s a big concern. It’s about giving you back time while making your customer experience even better. So today we’re sitting down with my friend and AI expert, Piyush. And he is going to break down
how all of the things that you need to do so that you can leverage AI to scale your customer support, streamline communication, and keep your customers feeling valued. So Piyush, welcome to the show.
Piyush Parikh (01:42.413)
Alright, very nice to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
Misty Kortes (01:45.43)
Yeah, I am so excited to have you. I know that you have been doing this for quite some time. I mean, we go back about, I think about 10 years and it’s been forever since we’ve had a chance to talk.
Piyush Parikh (01:54.429)
That’s right.
Piyush Parikh (01:58.014)
Yes, it has. know we met a long time ago and that’s what we were just talking about that before this. was we need to catch up on so many things that have happened, especially in the AI front, right? It’s been crazy. yeah, a lot. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, lots of things happening now. Yeah.
Misty Kortes (02:08.91)
Absolutely. And I know, absolutely. And I know that you have been scaling your businesses for as long as I’ve known you. And now with tools like AI, I know that you’re leveraging them. That’s why I wanted to have you on today. So I’m going to start us off. You know, I tend to work with a lot of entrepreneurs and solopreneurs and a lot of them think, well, I don’t really need to worry about scaling customer service.
So let’s start off kind of addressing that before we dive into the real goods, right? So what would you say to them?
Piyush Parikh (02:42.542)
Yeah. No, yeah, I agree. I’m an entrepreneur as well. And so are you, obviously. And we feel the same thing, which is, all right, I’ve got to go sell. I got to go and get the next client. That’s what’s going to keep us, keep the light on, and just make sure that we keep getting revenue from them. But customer support, there’s different words, first of all. There’s customer support. There’s another word term used in the industry called customer success.
There are these different, you know words that have been used to describe the same thing Which is once you sell something to someone you need to get them on boarded You need to get them in of learning what you’re trying to accomplish what they need to accomplish with your service or your tools or whatever you’re building and How do they get most value out of them? Right. So that’s that’s the whole stream of it and the more value they get out of you and your services and your products
Misty Kortes (03:29.922)
Yes.
Piyush Parikh (03:36.734)
the more likely it is that they will stick with you. And it’s not just about getting them and moving them down the, you know, just get sell, sell, sell. That’s what a lot of, we do that entrepreneurs, we need to do that. But the real goal, the real value, and we learned that when we were at Keep, it’s in the follow-up, it’s in the onboarding, it’s on the upsells, it’s on all of that piece that really adds credibility to your company, adds more kind of sustainability to make sure you get, the clients that you have and grow. And so,
Misty Kortes (03:39.842)
Yes.
Piyush Parikh (04:06.705)
You know, you will, you’re always going to be doing customer support, customer success. That is part of what you do after you sell something. You get to a point that this is where I fell short initially and I can see a lot of my clients at a certain point and it’s very quick. You think, yeah, it’s coming. know, maybe once I have 50 customers, I’ll need it. After five or six, it’s really hard to maintain the relationships.
It’s really hard to take on that sixth customer and give them the same benefits and give them the same kind of focus and attention that you did to the first five. And so you will hit this point if you haven’t already, you will hit it pretty quick if you’re a solopreneur. Now as an entrepreneur, you have a few folks working with you, for you, and you kind of put that burden on them. It’s like, all right, I’ve sold, I got to go sell more. Go make sure these clients are happy.
They’re wearing multiple hats and so on. So, you know, there will be a point for you or your team to feel the pain of trying to maintain the customers. And so, you know, that’s kind of what I’ve been working on for the last, like you had said, about eight, seven or eight years. We met about, I think a decade ago, like we said, and, I was doing a lot of custom work for clients, just like you were for, for Keap. And we had customers and we would bring them on, we would service them.
Misty Kortes (05:13.624)
Mm-hmm.
Piyush Parikh (05:32.798)
And then I would go sell, sell, sell. And then for the next two months, would service, service, service. And I just couldn’t keep up because I had to like, you know, make sure that they were doing well and I forgot to sell again. And, you know, and so now I’m going through this up and down, you know, kind of motion where it’s some months are great, some months are not so good. And, you know, I’m just kind of feeling the pain of the ride, the entrepreneur ride that we all have.
Misty Kortes (06:02.114)
Yeah, it’s the roller coaster ride, right? we sell, sell, sell, sell, to the peak and then we’ve got the clients and now we have to service and now we’re on the the down. Absolutely.
Piyush Parikh (06:02.821)
And so it’s the, yeah.
Misty Kortes (06:16.322)
Did I lose you?
Misty Kortes (06:21.336)
think I lost your audio for a quick sec. There, I can hear you now. Yeah. So no, you’re so right. We all experienced that, especially in the early stages of being an entrepreneur, is those ups and downs. The entrepreneurial roller coaster is what I like to call it. so, you know, why is customer service such a critical part of our business? so you, well, let me ask you this.
Piyush Parikh (06:23.442)
did you, can you still hear me now? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So.
Misty Kortes (06:48.886)
You talked about customer support and customer success. So are those words interchangeable or are they is one like customer success? I kind of relates customer success to the onboarding experience and customer support is after the onboarding. Is that how that works or?
Piyush Parikh (07:04.573)
Yeah, no. Perfect, yeah. it’s been used, it’s been in the industry for the last, it’s come about in the last decade or so in terms of these two different groups. What companies found is one is more reactive, one is proactive. And so in the world of customer support, we are more reactive in that we look for, and I’ve been in the customer support now for about, like I said, seven, eight years.
Misty Kortes (07:15.192)
Mm-hmm.
Piyush Parikh (07:31.966)
It is where you get questions from your customer and you answer them. So that’s the reactive piece. They’re asking you questions and so on. Customer success is proactive. I am going out and finding out, first of all, the onboarding. That has to be proactive. Hey, customer, come on board. Let me show you how this works. But it’s following up with them and saying, hey, we know that at this point in your journey, people have customer journeys. And so in this part of the journey, you will be facing this issue. Let me make sure that you hit it before you face it.
And so you’re reaching out to the customer. it’s kind of like a customer success reps is what they are. And they are basically people who go out and make sure that their clients are getting the value from their product. And so initially, you’re doing that as an entrepreneur. You’re always reaching out to your customers saying, how’s it going? Hey, you’re not showing up for this meeting. Hey, you need to be doing this more. Whatever it is that you do, that’s customer success. Customer support is when they come to you and say, I did everything you told me to and nothing worked.
Misty Kortes (08:15.458)
it.
Piyush Parikh (08:30.91)
or only partially this worked, this is the worst thing I’ve ever bought or I’m canceling. That’s way down the line and you’re trying to like now react to getting them some value out of your business. So we have both of those functions and you will initially, like you said, you’re wearing all those hats. You’re wearing a entrepreneur hat, you’re wearing the marketing hat, the sales hat. Then after the sales, you’re wearing the onboarding hat and then you wear the customer success hat and then you will wear the customer support hat.
Misty Kortes (08:31.406)
Piyush Parikh (08:59.004)
And so you’re wearing all of these hats yourself. As your business will grow, you will need these different people kind of catering to these different functions in your business. so the piece that we Equinox, I’m part of, I have a company called Equinox Agents, the one that we’ve been most focused on has been on the support side. So it’s really the reactive, you know, getting questions and so on. And we’ve slowly moved into the customer success side as well because of our clients needing that.
So we started with Keep. That’s where we did all of the customer support for them. And we had people on our team that managed their support, incoming queries and so on. And then we started working with their sales team. Customer success kind of falls more on the sales side. It’s kind of a hybrid between the sales and the operation side. But we started working with their sales team to help them with following up with customers at the right time, just so that…
we know that they will need this help right then. So we’ve been working on both sides of it. But really, as entrepreneurs or as people who have smaller companies and are doing multiple things, you will face this sooner than you think. And one of the things I like to help entrepreneurs with is setting up the processes first, the tools. What tools can we have? And we use a lot of ticketing tools, which has been one of the best ways to get going in
Misty Kortes (10:19.374)
Mmm.
Piyush Parikh (10:23.975)
quickly in the early stages. Find a good ticketing tool that will allow you to take tickets. All of these questions are tickets. And get used to the fact of logging onto a ticketing tool, seeing the questions that come in, let people, people are used to that. They’d actually think that’s pretty cool. Wow, you have a ticketing tool. It’s like, all right, I’ll, most people will text you, right? And they’ll just say, help me, or they’ll send you an email. And it’s like, okay, after 20 emails, it’s like, man, I can’t keep up with this thing.
Misty Kortes (10:32.108)
Yes.
Piyush Parikh (10:54.182)
So then you could, yeah, so anyway, that’s where I’m at. Yeah, yeah.
Misty Kortes (10:54.222)
Okay, yeah, hold on. Let me pause for a second, because you have, you’ve mentioned so many things and I think we’re kind of breezing over them. So first of all, there’s kind of like four steps in the process. So correct me if I’m wrong. So first of all, you’ve got to map out a customer journey. That’s how do you acquire the customer? That’s the journey before they become a customer. Then you have your onboarding journey or onboarding process, right? And then from there,
you have your success system and then you have mapped out. So you have all of this mapped out and then you institute a support system. Is that correct? Is that kind of like the evolution of it?
Piyush Parikh (11:34.526)
That’s it. That’s great. That’s it. That’s perfect. And we call it these maps and systems. They don’t need to be that complicated initially. You just need to identify them and know that they exist. And you need to know what stage they’re in. So when you’re doing sales, we have sales pipelines. So you look at, OK, they’re in this stage and this stage. And you’re doing some mapping. But least we know where they are in the stage. So it’s the same thing here. After the sales, we know that they’re in the onboarding phase.
Misty Kortes (11:43.758)
Exactly.
Piyush Parikh (12:03.963)
And so you have that, know, but we need to know when they move to the success stage. And so it’d be good to know that, okay, they finished that. And when they do these four things, they are now good. So let them get success. So initially the onboarding is not just here’s your login, here’s read these articles or whatever, it’s go get some value. So the initial piece, the onboarding is go get some value. That’s the onboarding process. So we go, we get them onboarded.
Misty Kortes (12:09.026)
Yes.
Piyush Parikh (12:32.85)
They get a login, let’s say if it’s a software kind of product, they get a login and then they get some contacts in there and then they create a, in Keep, they create a workflow, like their first one. That’s the first, that’s onboarding. But now I’ve got some value and I can say, okay, I see this. But now they move to the success phase, which is I need to keep on it. I need to make sure that I log in all the time. I need to make sure that I’m doing the work that I’ve been told to do after the onboarding. And so that’s success.
And then.
Misty Kortes (13:02.71)
And we, as entrepreneurs and business owners, we need to make sure that we map out how frequently they should be doing these things so that we’re not putting the responsibility just on our customer to say, hey, you know what you need to do, just do it. And that’s not good enough. Because I think sometimes a lot of us do that.
Piyush Parikh (13:08.082)
Yes.
Piyush Parikh (13:16.473)
Exactly. No, it is. And it’s just like here, I’ve given you all the things. Just go do it. That’s what we kind of do is like, I’m moving on to the next thing. You should be able to do this by yourself. One of the things that has helped is creating moments of truth or understanding moments of truth is what we call it. So it’s at what points you have this whole, let’s say you have a five part program or a 10 part program. At which part do they really get the aha moment?
Misty Kortes (13:24.215)
Yeah.
Piyush Parikh (13:44.862)
And if you know that, then you should try to find that. It’s like, which one of those six parts or 10 parts, which one of those really gives them the value that they say, oh my god, this is it. It could be part three, it could be part four, it could be part six. But if you know that, that’s your flow, that’s your path. So it’s like, when someone hits part three, call them and say, did you get it? Or did you even do it? Because that’s when you’ll feel it. Or track it.
Misty Kortes (13:56.909)
Yeah.
Misty Kortes (14:11.534)
Or track it if you have a way to track it. Yeah for sure
Piyush Parikh (14:14.907)
Right. And so the moments of truth, whether it’s in onboarding or it’s in the customer success piece, that’s the mapping. It’s like just make sure that you follow up with them at a certain time. And it could be as simple as the automation is as simple as create a trigger that says this person’s reached the stage, so someone call them. Yeah.
Misty Kortes (14:34.488)
So two things I would plug in here. Number one is once they get through the success process, whatever you call it, that would be a great time to ask, like do a temperature check and do a little survey with them to see how their experience has been so far. And that’s a great time to ask for an online review because chances are it’s kind of like dating. They’re like in that honeymoon phase of…
Piyush Parikh (14:51.186)
Yes.
Piyush Parikh (15:02.041)
Right? Yeah.
Misty Kortes (15:02.594)
the new relationship. And so they’re more likely to give you a positive review and positive feedback if you’ve done your job and you’ve done it well. Now, the second piece of it, I think segues into where we want to go today, which is the customer support. And let me ask you this, if you’ve done your customer journey, customer onboarding and customer success, well, does that help you not get as much support? Questions?
Piyush Parikh (15:18.492)
Yes.
Piyush Parikh (15:30.624)
Yes, no, that’s great. That’s a good question. so here’s this piece on support. I’ve been in support now for, like I said, seven years, Equinox agents. We grew by being a support team for Keep. since then, we work with a of software companies. And so we’ve then grown with other SaaS products and SaaS companies in the Valley and in other parts of the country. What we’re seeing is, so we deal with a lot of support. That’s kind of our bread and butter.
And one of the things that we have noticed in support is there are different layers, tiers of support. So there’s typically three tiers of support. The first tier of support is the basic questions of like tier one stuff is, hey, I can’t log in. Hey, I can’t get access to something. Hey, I don’t know where to find this link. Hey, I don’t know, know, just basic stuff, right? Really simple tier one stuff. Tier two is I found the link and I found the information.
Misty Kortes (16:04.781)
okay.
Piyush Parikh (16:27.835)
and I tried what it said, but it didn’t work. And there’s something wrong. I don’t know if I didn’t set it up right or not. The third tier is I tried everything. I called support. I did everything. They tried all of this, and there is a bug. There’s an issue. And it’s just not something you can solve, not something I can solve. It needs to go to the developer. So that’s the third tier. Now, you need to find out what your tiers are in whatever service or product you’re doing. And so the first tier would be
Hey, I can log into the Kajabi portal or whatever you’re using for whatever your product is. So those are tier one things. What we found is onboarding and good customer success reduces tier one significantly because you’ve got it in your process. That’s proactive. I’ve told you where the login is. If you haven’t found the login yet, you need to tell me now.
Misty Kortes (17:10.37)
Yes. Okay.
Piyush Parikh (17:22.685)
Those are kinds of things. Or if you haven’t finished module one, or if you have a question on module one, ask me now, I’m right here. The tier two tends to remain there. And that’s where we play. So the AI piece, we’ll come to that or we’re gonna talk about it. But part of AI is to help you solve tier one. Most of the stuff that we’ve been working on with all of our clients has been to take away all of those tier one things.
Misty Kortes (17:38.744)
Yeah.
Piyush Parikh (17:49.276)
Whether you do it with customer success, whether the product is good enough, whatever it is, or the bot takes care of those. All my clients are looking for AI to do that. And that’s what we’ve been successful at. So anytime.
Misty Kortes (18:02.456)
So talk about that. Let’s drill down on that a little bit so we can give them something tangible to walk away with.
Piyush Parikh (18:07.259)
Yeah, yeah, no, that’s great. you know, all of our clients come to us with the basic need of I’ve got too many tickets. I’ve got too many people asking questions. My team can’t handle it. I’m getting burnt out. My team’s getting burnt out. And I don’t want to add more headcount. I mean, it’s just, you know, I can’t hire someone. I mean, that’s expensive. So how can you help? And what we provide or what we like to do is do a combination of human plus boss.
That’s our service. so let’s get the bot to answer as much as we can or set up the bots. And then whatever the bots can answer, we still need the humans to do. And so what we try to work our clients is let’s look at how many questions are you got. So we segment all the questions, like I just said, tier one, tier two, tier three. We look at their history and say, you know all these tier one things that your humans are answering, bots can answer this. And they’re like, really, how? And so that’s where
we look at tools like Zendesk or Freshdesk or some of these tools that are ticketing tools, they all have the AI capability and they all come with basic tier one stuff. Now, the piece that you need to work on there is to train those bots that it comes with. So, you we have, we’ve chat GPT and all of those, those are large models, large language models that have been trained on all kinds of crazy data, like all the data, but we need to get very specific on the data that we have that we need
train the bots on. so these Zendesk and these other tools, they have their own bots that belong to you. I mean, once you get an account, they’re your own bots. You have to train them with the data and with articles that allow the bot to learn and solve tier one questions, mostly. Now, tier two, it’s not as great yet. have to tell you that. The data shows that we’re still at about, for tier one, we can handle about 80%, 80 to 90%.
Misty Kortes (19:37.538)
Yes.
Piyush Parikh (20:06.183)
For tier two, we’re at like 25%. Okay, so we call it deflection rate. how many of these, what everybody wants is deflect these to someone else. Don’t give me these questions, let it get deflected, but in a good way. So deflect it to a bot, deflect it to a self-serve, whatever it is. But we look at deflection rates as one of our metrics for our clients and say, how do we set up these bots to make sure the deflection rate increases? And we start with tier one. So that’s what I would…
Misty Kortes (20:21.09)
Yeah, yeah.
Piyush Parikh (20:35.848)
tell folks, don’t get too overwhelmed with some of these, all the terms and all that. You have these bots, they’re trying to serve up the questions on your website with articles when someone has a question. Or it’s in an email. Zendesk has an email bot option. So someone questions, sends an email to an email address. It goes to Zendesk. Zendesk bot takes it and sends back saying, we think this is your answer. Try these two links if you still don’t get it.
We are waiting right here to answer a live human is waiting. And so, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Misty Kortes (21:09.378)
Nice. I love that. So can I interject here just for a quick second? Because again, I’m dealing with, know, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, which I am myself, you know, I’ve had an agency and we were larger at one point, but now I’ve kind of scaled back my business and repositioned it. So I want to speak to them for a second because I remember in the, in the early days of starting my business as an, as a solopreneur and I knew I wanted to grow, but
I was in my head, I was thinking like, it’s not that big a deal. I only have a handful of clients right now and I can, I mean, I can just handle answering their questions, right? And here’s what I want to speak to in that, that I didn’t realize was happening subconsciously is because I didn’t set up systems right away. It actually took me three years to set the systems up and I had hundreds of clients by then and it was a nightmare. So don’t wait till it gets ugly first of all. But secondly,
Piyush Parikh (22:02.759)
Yeah, yeah.
Misty Kortes (22:08.014)
I just didn’t want to take the time to document a process. have a, the funny thing is, is we all have processes. We just don’t document them. We keep them in our head and we’re the only one that knows them. And then we want to bring team members on and we want team members to know what’s in our head, but isn’t documented. And that’s, that’s a problem, right? But when you don’t think about scaling your business, even as a solopreneur, you hesitate in wanting to grow. And I don’t know that you always,
Piyush Parikh (22:19.174)
Right. Right.
Misty Kortes (22:37.518)
subconsciously know that’s there, but it’s subconsciously holding you back because in your mind you’re thinking, I already am too, I have too much on my plate. I’m too overwhelmed. And here’s the test that you know that you’re already there is when you go around telling everybody, I’m so busy, I’m so busy, you sound like a robot, right? And we all know those people. I was one of them. Yeah, go ahead.
Piyush Parikh (22:56.836)
Right. And, and no, it is.
Misty Kortes (23:04.925)
I think I’m losing your audio again.
Piyush Parikh (23:05.789)
Yeah, the audio seems to have caught up. Can you hear me again? Yeah, okay. Yeah, so no, that’s exactly right in that people wait and we’ve all done that. And there’s the reason we do that. We are not sure where this is headed, right? When you start the company, you don’t know where it’s going and you don’t know that it’s gonna work. You don’t know whether this is the right product for that service. I mean, for that client. Here’s my test for it.
Misty Kortes (23:10.828)
I can, can, yep.
Misty Kortes (23:22.029)
Yes!
Piyush Parikh (23:32.42)
If you’ve got a product or service that sells to eight customers, eight to 10 customers, when you have a product, when you sold up to eight, then you know you have something. So eight customers of the same type. that what I mean? Like six to eight customers is my kind of threshold. So when, that came to me from Clayt, Clayt Mask. When I went to him early on in the business world,
Misty Kortes (23:40.568)
Mm-hmm.
Misty Kortes (23:50.776)
Yeah, that totally makes sense.
Piyush Parikh (24:02.449)
my business venture. He was like, I said, Clay, you know, what am I, I’ve got this thing I’m doing for KEEP and all that, you what should I be working on? How do I scale something? How do I build something that’s actually worth something and scalable? He’s like, look, you’re creating these custom solutions, which is fine. This is good. But if you have a solution that you can then sell to the same type of customer, eight, seven to eight times, he picked the number seven to eight. So I stuck in my head. But if you pick that solution and sell it to seven to eight customers,
you have something that can scale. that’s what I use to say, OK, now I’m going to create the process and systems. I never felt that I needed, unless like you, I don’t think I needed anything until the first five or six or seven. I was able to manage, get it done, do the work. But once I got to the seven or eight, man, that quickly got out of hand.
Misty Kortes (24:36.002)
Nice.
Piyush Parikh (24:56.858)
And then I lost many. mean, I just couldn’t keep up with them. Someone was like, man, is this a service type you provide? Like, how do you even sell anything to anyone,
Misty Kortes (24:57.25)
Yeah.
Misty Kortes (25:05.408)
And a lot of people, yeah, they’re not gonna tell you that you’re falling short. And here’s the other thing, subconsciously, for your customer, and I’ll tell you, I think like this. This is me. So if you ever wanna do business with Misty, don’t fall short on these things. Because I think if you can’t handle the small things, I can’t trust you to do the big things. So if you can’t respond to me within 24 business hours on an email I sent to you, I
Piyush Parikh (25:09.617)
Yeah. Yeah.
Piyush Parikh (25:24.647)
Yeah. No, exactly.
Misty Kortes (25:34.636)
trust you to handle my project, right? It costs them new clients and you don’t even know. You think it’s the economy, it’s this, it’s that. You’re going to blame all those other things. No, no, it’s your customer service, your lack of ability to stay. And listen, we’re not judging you because you can’t stay on top of all of these things. That’s what we’re saying. You’ve got to put AI into place so that you can scale it. I know we throw this word scaling around in our industry. You and I talk about it all the time. Our people talk about it, but the average entrepreneur,
Piyush Parikh (25:36.797)
Absolutely,
Piyush Parikh (25:43.312)
No.
Piyush Parikh (25:59.654)
Yeah. Yeah.
Misty Kortes (26:04.77)
I think they think scaling is for big corporations, people who have, you know, multiple people they’re managing and lots and lots of clients. No, scaling is even for the little guys like us. yeah. Yeah, there you go.
Piyush Parikh (26:14.951)
yeah, I mean going from 10 to 20 is scaling. That’s doubling, right? You’re doubling. So, you know, here are a couple of things you mentioned that are really key. One of them is, you know, when you have, when your customers won’t tell you how you’re doing, they won’t willingly. So in customer support, we have a customer satisfaction score that we send out. It’s every conversation that we have with them, say, how did we do? And, you know, it’s just like your reviews, right?
Misty Kortes (26:31.31)
Mm-hmm.
Piyush Parikh (26:43.398)
You say, hey, I’ll get a review from you at the end of onboarding. It’s no, I want a feedback from you every month. Like, how did we do? How did we do? I know, and especially if you’re charging them monthly, I send it at the invoice and say, I’m charging you. Please pay me $500, but only pay me if you think I’m doing good. Tell me how I did.
Misty Kortes (26:51.448)
love that. Yeah.
Misty Kortes (26:59.288)
Mm.
Misty Kortes (27:06.882)
You know, we need to talk about that for a second because you know, here’s what popped into my head. I’m afraid to ask.
Piyush Parikh (27:15.453)
Okay?
Misty Kortes (27:16.396)
Right?
afraid to ask because if I ask, doesn’t that jeopardize, like, doesn’t that risk me maybe losing a customer because I’m trying to pull out the problems?
Piyush Parikh (27:25.639)
What if they tell you something you don’t want to hear? And know that you will be surprised how much they’ll love you for what you’re doing if you ask them. Here’s the second piece that I want to share. The bar is really low in being successful right now because nobody’s doing the support follow-up.
Misty Kortes (27:29.902)
That’s right!
Misty Kortes (27:35.278)
Misty Kortes (27:42.958)
Mm-hmm.
Misty Kortes (27:47.47)
Wait a minute high five. We got a high five each other now and you’re so right. No
Piyush Parikh (27:49.386)
Okay All you’ve got to do all you’ve got to do really all you and we talk about AI and tools and all that You need some of that But really you can set up some simple follow-up and simple reminders and it could be AI based or not But simple reminders just to follow up and touch base and ask your clients how it’s going and then when you get some feedback Don’t take it personally just improve. I mean the one the feedback you got from one Maybe because they don’t like you and you lost them
but all the learnings you did will keep the next eight happier. Okay.
Misty Kortes (28:22.71)
Yes, it’s so true. Just this week, I, so I’ve been walking more, I’ve been walking for a while, but I’ve been walking more and now I want to gamify walking because I need something to challenge me. You know what I mean? And so I, I’ve been seeing this walking app on social media and I signed up for it. It’s a, it’s a glorified tracker. I, my phone already has the same tracker on it for free and I paid for this thing, right? And I contacted their customer support. It, that was Friday.
Piyush Parikh (28:37.842)
Okay.
Piyush Parikh (28:43.697)
Okay. Okay.
Misty Kortes (28:51.522)
Today is Wednesday. I have not heard anything back. Seriously, when he says that no one’s doing it, it’s no joke. No one is doing it.
Piyush Parikh (28:53.657)
Wow! Yeah, see?
Piyush Parikh (29:00.35)
Look, here are some interesting stats. Here are some interesting stats. They’ve surveyed, I mean, this was, I think it’s all customers of different industries and so on. They surveyed like thousands of companies, of customers, and they’re like, hey, would you pay more for getting better customer support? And 75 % of them said yes. They would pay more to get, incrementally more, to get better customer support. We all know that.
Misty Kortes (29:19.672)
Yeah.
Piyush Parikh (29:29.457)
They surveyed the same companies and said, do you know this? Yes. Only 40 % of them are actually improving their customer support.
Misty Kortes (29:37.272)
Hmm. See? Yup. Absolutely.
Piyush Parikh (29:38.83)
even though we all know this. And not because it’s just like when we first started this conversation, it’s a secondary thought. It’s like, whatever, I don’t think I need that yet until I get big enough. You need customer support from day one, really. And so you don’t need it in the rigorous format that you would little later on. But it’s like follow up for lead gen.
Misty Kortes (29:56.568)
Yep, absolutely.
Piyush Parikh (30:05.809)
You don’t need a CRM marketing automation tool when you have two leads, right? But you’re doing the same thing. You’re following up. And imagine you have just one customer, right? Keap has told us, imagine you treat every customer like they were the only one. Imagine that you only have that lead. What would you do? Well, I’d just camp outside their home and say, you know, don’t you want my service? Don’t you want my service? Right? That’s what you would do. And so that’s the same thing on support. Imagine you have the only, that’s your only customer. Treat everyone as if they’re the only customer. And you know,
Misty Kortes (30:18.232)
That’s so good.
Misty Kortes (30:32.461)
Yeah.
and map out your process as if they’re your only customers. So when you’re answering questions, like what I did in the early stages, when I finally did, it did take me three years, I’m not gonna lie. And it was a cluster, so I don’t recommend it. Don’t do what I did. But when I did finally start documenting my process, first of all, I hired my son to sit next to me, literally. He goes, what’s my job? You know, cause he comes from the job world. And I’m like, sit next to me and write down everything I do.
Piyush Parikh (30:38.342)
Yes!
Piyush Parikh (30:48.197)
Okay.
Piyush Parikh (30:55.197)
Hmm.
Piyush Parikh (31:00.295)
Okay?
Misty Kortes (31:03.17)
Just document it, right? And so every time I got an email, I would like forward it to him and I’d say, hey, I got this email. Because every time you get a question, that becomes part of your process. Because if one person asks it, chances are you can either built it into your system to not get that question again, build what Piyush is saying, build an AI system that answers that question automatically. And that’s how you build out your system slowly but surely. You don’t know all the questions that are gonna be asked.
Piyush Parikh (31:03.194)
Misty Kortes (31:32.674)
but just start paying attention to what is being asked. Right?
Piyush Parikh (31:35.26)
No, absolutely, absolutely. I said, AI, you can use it or not. But look, nowadays, AI is there. It’s all in. one of the things that you can easily do, and you said, hey, you brought your son and sat next to him and said, here’s what I do. You can actually have an AI agent sitting next to you and following you and seeing what you do. And they will create the process for you. OK, you can do that. You can have an AI agent take all of your conversations and
Misty Kortes (31:55.48)
Awesome.
Piyush Parikh (32:03.677)
emails that you have for a customer and create an article for you that you can post on the website. you can take this You can have yeah, no you can get an AI agent that will create training materials for you You can have an AI agent that will do all the quality checks for you So we didn’t talk about quality, but you have conversations that you have now You’re having them with you know currently by yourself with the customer so you know what’s happening But imagine you hire someone how do you know they’re having the right conversations, right? How do you know the quality is good?
Misty Kortes (32:10.607)
What tool do you use to do this? You know everybody wants the tool.
Piyush Parikh (32:33.234)
And so a big piece of customer support that we do is we have the agents who do the conversations, not AI agents, but human agents that are doing the chats. And then we have a full team that is the agent, the trainer, you have a quality person, and the team leader. So that makes up the team. And you don’t need to have that from day one, but you will be, again, wearing all these hats. But you can have AI help you with all of these.
And so you can feed it all the conversations and say, hey, how are these conversations? How’s the quality of it? How can we improve? Write me an article on it. And these are tools like ChatGPD. So you’ve heard of agents now. Have you heard of AI agents? OK, if you haven’t looked it up, again, ChatGPD should be the starting point. It’s like Google when you do search.
Misty Kortes (33:11.683)
Yeah.
Misty Kortes (33:19.982)
I have not.
Piyush Parikh (33:27.547)
You go to chat GPT for and I go to check it’s charging bees open right now for here. We have we have 140 agents on our team. I’ve asked every single one of them to have chat GPT open on the side, so it’s always open. So whatever they type, whatever email they’re sending to clients, it goes through that filter. that’s chat GPT is always there, but we’ve created agents now. So there’s something called AI agent, which is a specialized version of chat GPT. So you can create an agent that will be.
Misty Kortes (33:54.062)
Piyush Parikh (33:57.49)
for creating processes. So this is a process agent. And I have an AI agent that will do quality. I have an AI agent that will create maps for me. So you can have these specialized agents. And the specialized agents are essentially chat GPT that has been given very specific instructions. And so that’s the new thing in AI, which is we’re creating all these agents that will work with each other.
Misty Kortes (34:07.31)
Nice.
Misty Kortes (34:21.944)
So essentially, let’s give them a tangible example of this. You get an email in your inbox that’s tagged as one of your clients and the AI agent says, Mr. Got an email. And so then it can automatically, it can read the email and then respond back. Cause that’s what I’ve heard it can do. Now I don’t know that I’m gonna trust it yet to do that, but that’s an example.
Piyush Parikh (34:41.415)
Well, yes.
Piyush Parikh (34:46.526)
So there are tools like that. So that’d be like built into your email that’ll do that. What I was referring to is creating a whole list. Like your email has a whole history, right? Every email that you write has all the history. It’s taking that history and putting it into a chat GPT and saying, here is the entire history of all our conversations I’ve had with this customer and this customer and this customer and this customer.
export it into a text file or whatever. So I can have all those 10 text files combined into one, upload it, and say, hey, these are prompts on Chai GPT. I’ve got all of these emails. You talk to it like a human, like an expert. have all these emails that came in from my customers. They’re all asking similar questions. Can you tell me how I can take all of this information, put it on my website as articles that they can consume?
If you just take that, it’ll do it for you. It’s shockingly awesome, but it’s unreal.
Misty Kortes (35:47.128)
That’s awesome.
Yes, and I want to point out here because this is where people are like, okay, I’m on board. I get it. I love the idea of AI, but I need it to sound like me. So tackle that because I know that’s a concern.
Piyush Parikh (36:00.53)
Yes, this is it. This is it. So that’s exactly what you saw the prompt. So AI, at least in these chat GPT, these large language model things, it’s all about the prompt. Prompt is how do you ask it the question? Not a one line question, say, write me a poem about something. It’s a detailed outline of what I want you to do AI, AI what? And how do I want you to analyze this information? It’s called the prompt. There’s a whole industry called prompt engineering.
Misty Kortes (36:12.323)
Yes.
Piyush Parikh (36:30.277)
And so if you want to get into that, can. I’ve watched many videos, learned all that. But it’s the co-
Misty Kortes (36:34.978)
Here’s how I prompt chat GPT. I’m like, here’s all the information. Pay attention to my tone of voice. I just say, you do the work G. I call them G because I can’t, I talk too fast. So I, yeah, I spit and whatever. But anyways, I say G pay attention to my tone of voice. So when you write my re my blogs, when you write my responses, right? Make sure that you’re doing it in the same tone of voice that I usually talk in. Just, I mean, that’s, that’s my engineering of my chat.
Piyush Parikh (36:41.733)
Yes! Yes!
Piyush Parikh (36:49.383)
Yeah, okay.
Piyush Parikh (37:00.722)
Yes.
Misty Kortes (37:04.11)
I know there’s a whole thing and you can get way better results really understanding how to create those, but it’s not as complicated as it sounds, I think.
Piyush Parikh (37:04.242)
That’s it!
Piyush Parikh (37:13.957)
No, no. And there’s one piece that we have to be wary of. There’s a term in AI called hallucinating. it’s, yeah, so the AI, the robot, like chat GPT will start, they call it hallucinating. That’s actually a technical term, but it will truly start hallucinating. If it can’t figure it out, it’ll make stuff up. Okay, so it’ll say, so we’ve done that. I’ve, initially it was like, here are 10 chats. Tell me what are the top drivers and write me some articles.
Misty Kortes (37:21.247)
I’ve never heard that.
Misty Kortes (37:34.67)
I’ll fit the money.
Piyush Parikh (37:43.582)
And it wrote stuff like, what is this? Changing the tire? I was like, where is this from? He just picked random stuff and started putting in this. And so you have to give it, we call it guardrails. So it’s like, right, ChadGBT, here are your guardrails. Do not make stuff up. Only use information I’ve sent you. Stuff like you do have to tell it. So that’s part of the prompt. Yeah, so that’s part of the prompt. So I use a tool called TypeMind. So it’s typemind.ai and typing mind. Sorry, typing mind.
Misty Kortes (38:01.858)
Yeah, that’s kind of important. That’s probably kind of important.
Piyush Parikh (38:13.249)
And it’s kind of an interface like chat GPT, but it’s got agents in there. And so you’re creating agents inside. And there, if you go to type my typing mind.com, you’ll see, you’ll see there’s an agent for marketing. There’s an agent for process creation. There’s an agent for customer support. We’ve created agents in there for our team. Every one of our clients has a different agent in there.
Misty Kortes (38:19.147)
Go!
Piyush Parikh (38:39.194)
Agent to client, now we have only about 40 clients or so because we’re doing support for larger corporations. But you don’t have to do that. But in our case, I have an agent for Keep in there and says, here’s how Keep clients work. Here’s how Keep questions are. So this agent is designed and specific, created for Keep articles. It knows what the format is of the articles. It knows how questions are and so on.
So we have these agents that we’ve created. all of this coming back to how do we make our team more efficient at answering the questions in a way that works. And we have a saying at Equinox, which is it needs to be fast, friendly, and accurate. So as long as you’re fast, not waiting, keeping them waiting, and like you said, till Wednesday, that’s just not acceptable. So as long as you’re fast, as long as it’s friendly, so that’s the tone.
and you’re accurate, like you don’t give them answers that are not right. So as long as you’re fast, friendly, and accurate, we’re good. We’ll get a good customer satisfaction score, all of that stuff, everything plays out. But to get fast, friendly, accurate, our agents need to have fast, so you need to have the AI. We call them co-pilots, you’ve heard of that, but it’s basically agents that sit next to them. all of these typing-main agents are sitting next to my agents, live human agents. And the agent types in the question or looks at it,
puts it into Typing Mind, tries to find out what it could be the answer, and then types it back in here with their own voice. And so you asked about how do I sound the same as me? Now, the bot will give you a little bit of that, but we add our own piece to it into the actual response. And then we feed that back to the Typing Mind bot and say, this is how I actually answered it. So next time, can you please use this? And before ChatGBT, OpenAI, all of that came out,
Misty Kortes (40:26.888)
Mm. Yes.
Piyush Parikh (40:34.59)
We had to do that through code. We had to do all this through natural language processing. That was a different way of doing AI. But that was through code, through Python. We had to write all these scripts and then feedback. And our coders used to take a week or two weeks to figure it out. Now it’s instant. With typing mind, or you can use any other tool. Look at AI agents. But any of these tools, you just feed the information back and talk to it like a human.
Misty Kortes (40:37.186)
Right.
Misty Kortes (41:05.006)
Well, in the beginning, you have defeated the information, but over time, it just learns the information. Exactly.
Piyush Parikh (41:10.959)
It learns it, but you kind of point it out. You’ll say it. there’s in typing mind again, it may be a different, but in typing man, they have resource documents like, and so I would feed it this like some of my responses. Hey, this was great, but here’s the new, you know, learn with this. And so you just keep feeding it back in a certain way and it learns exactly like you said, and it just keeps improving.
Misty Kortes (41:18.904)
Yes.
Misty Kortes (41:26.178)
Yes.
Misty Kortes (41:30.764)
It’s like, it’s the employee or the entrepreneurs best employee. Because here’s the thing, I did this in the early stages of hiring. I, again, I had nothing documented. Everything’s in my brain and you know, I want everybody just to know what I want. It’s, it’s kind of like marriage. It’s a lot like marriage actually. Why, I mean, after being together 30 years, how do you just, why do
Piyush Parikh (41:37.935)
It is.
Piyush Parikh (41:56.369)
I should create a document.
Misty Kortes (41:58.592)
you know what I want for dinner tonight, right?
Piyush Parikh (42:00.626)
You know, would be cool on that thought we should have a marriage document SOP. Okay. Anyway, yeah, keep going. Okay.
Misty Kortes (42:04.334)
Ooh, yeah, there you go. That would save a lot of marriages. You know, as an entrepreneur, we hire people and we don’t have systems and processes and we don’t recognize that until we already have someone on board who comes to us every day and says, what do you want from me? What do you want me to do? What can I do? How can I help? And you’re like, leave me alone for two seconds first of all. And that’s not their fault. They’re eager to help, right? ChatDBT and these AI tools, they’re the perfect employee because they’re just learning by watching you.
Piyush Parikh (42:16.187)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Misty Kortes (42:34.225)
You don’t actually even have to tell them or teach them or document it too much, at least in, you know, after a while. So it’s kind of cool.
Piyush Parikh (42:34.347)
It is.
Piyush Parikh (42:37.882)
It is, is. Yeah. No, no, it is true. And look, I would say I would use that. I would ask entrepreneurs to use that for anything, any question. You know what we’ve done now, we’ve gone even we’ve said we are co-founders of a company. I mean, me and my business partner, we are co-founders of Equinox Agents. Here’s what we do. We need to get more customers like you. And then we tell it you are we have to you know, these are prompts, part of prompt. You are a customer, you know, a marketing
consulting expert or whatever. And so for whatever target audience, now give me the steps of how to do it. Now they have the new thing coming out, which came out last week is operators. I don’t know if you saw that, but it is, yeah, so take a look on OpenAI operators and those things will actually do it. So you tell it and say, I want all of these things and give me the steps and it gives you the steps. And I was like, great, go ahead and do it.
Misty Kortes (43:10.67)
for whatever target audience, yeah?
Misty Kortes (43:21.858)
not.
Piyush Parikh (43:37.854)
That is crazy. you know, I think it’s getting there. You know, I think we’re it’s not quite there yet. It’s still kind of in research and so on. But if you look at if you just right now to get that, you have to, you know, pay the two hundred a month just to really figure, you know, play with it. But twenty a month is still good to try it out and you can cancel it. But
Misty Kortes (43:38.094)
Wow! Okay, operators, I gotta write that down.
Misty Kortes (44:06.35)
Absolutely.
Piyush Parikh (44:06.905)
Right now, the operator can go on any website and run the site like a human. And so you can tell it, I like to eat this for dinner. Here’s what I want. And can you go find the recipe, put it all into the cart, order it, and then have it shipped to me?
Misty Kortes (44:30.862)
Insane. Insane. You know, I think, you know.
Piyush Parikh (44:31.569)
and it goes and does it. It’s insane. This was a year or two or years away, but it’s here.
Misty Kortes (44:40.748)
It’s here, it’s not great, it’s not perfect, but I honestly, the speed to which these tools are advancing, you go from, okay, well, I’ll wait a few weeks, I’ll wait a few months to kind of check it out. And by then it’s already like amazing and so many people are leveraging it. So it’s almost feels, it feels like sometimes you got to jump right in, right away and start utilizing these tools because six months from now,
Piyush Parikh (44:44.135)
No!
Piyush Parikh (45:07.26)
Yes.
Misty Kortes (45:08.822)
It’s going to be a completely different tool, more advanced, more skilled, less errors, all that stuff because of how quickly they learn.
Piyush Parikh (45:19.067)
Yeah, and you know, think it’s OK. Here’s the piece that sticks, though, which has been fun. These prompts that we talked about, the prompt and prompt engineering, what’s improving are the models to give you the results. But the prompts stay the same. And so just start with the prompts now. And if you don’t do anything else, learn how to create and write prompts so you can see some of the results. And then if you don’t like it right now, it’s fine. The model’s not quite there. Or your prompt just needs a little bit more work.
Misty Kortes (45:31.501)
Yes.
and
Piyush Parikh (45:48.838)
But I would say the idea of just like you’re saying, jump in, learn how the prompts work. That’s the core foundation for all of this. And then as the tools improve, you’re there. It’s not like people are way ahead of you in all of this. We are all in the same spot. It’s just like some people have just used it for two more weeks than you. No. And it’s not like we are so far ahead that we have all this secret stuff. It’s nothing. Yesterday I went to see a guy who was
Misty Kortes (46:06.958)
Exactly. It’s definitely not years. It’s not that absolutely.
Piyush Parikh (46:18.705)
creating a new tool for AI. And I’m looking at it as like, this thing can be done with these two prompts. And he’s like, I just spent the last six months creating all of this. You can, but right now it’s getting easier for us who are not programmers, AI experts to go in and become and use these AI tools. And I would, if nothing else,
Misty Kortes (46:41.549)
Absolutely.
Piyush Parikh (46:44.199)
Go to ChatGPD, create prompts, have it do things. And people have done that. But just get a little more refined on the prompts. I think that would be a big thing to do. Even if it’s on customer support, ask it, what are some things I need to do for customer support?
Misty Kortes (46:58.146)
That’s it. That’s a great prompt to saying, hey, G, this is what I want to do. How do I do it? What do need from me to do that? Right? You don’t need to know the prompts always. You can just ask G, what do need from me?
Piyush Parikh (47:03.451)
Yeah, that’s it. That’s it. Exactly. No. Here’s the other thing. You can ask it, can you write me a nice prompt?
Misty Kortes (47:15.657)
yes.
Piyush Parikh (47:16.475)
That’ll be better for you to give me better answers. And we’ve done that. Write me a prompt, that’ll be a little better. And it’ll show you the prompt that you should write. That’s crazy.
Misty Kortes (47:20.32)
Yes. Yep.
Misty Kortes (47:25.792)
It’s amazing. We’re in such a place right now where we’re going to see everybody shifting from the Google, you know, from the Google over to AI tools. Like I’m calling it Web 3.0, but I think they’re utilizing that term in some other capacity in terms of crypto and all that too, which whatever. But
Piyush Parikh (47:36.007)
Yeah. Yeah.
Piyush Parikh (47:45.487)
Okay. Okay.
Misty Kortes (47:48.64)
I think it’s the new web 3.0 in terms of how we search, how we research, how we gather information. It’s the new way. So the sooner you get on board with this, the faster you can move your business, the more you can scale your business. And I’ve been saying this because this is like the second or third conversation I’ve had just this since the beginning of this year, we’re only a month in. AI tools, because I implemented them last year in my business,
Piyush Parikh (48:05.563)
Yes.
Misty Kortes (48:16.842)
allowed me to completely shift my business model. And I planted a garden. I created space for myself for things that I kept saying when I have more time. And time never seems to be enough. I never seem to have enough time. These tools allow us to be able to actually get back to the roots of what we really love to do, whether it be in a pastime hobby or
Piyush Parikh (48:45.883)
Sure.
Misty Kortes (48:45.902)
you know, the ability to grow and scale your business at, you know, quickly, whatever, whatever your goals are. But for me, I want less time behind the computer. Like I turned 50 at the end of last year. I don’t want to be sitting behind the computer 10, 12 hours a day. I want to be out trying to grow tomatoes in a desert. Yeah. Exactly.
Piyush Parikh (48:54.801)
Yeah, no.
that’s right.
There you go. Brilliant. All of us do. All of us do. Absolutely. I’m a big cycling person. I’d rather be cycling is what’s on my bumper of the car. And it’s just, it’s what I would want to do. But two parts to that. And we originally met coming all the way back from Keap at Infusionsoft. It was all about automation, follow up, and how do you create these tools so we free up our time? How do we use these tools and these processes? Similar kind of thing here.
Misty Kortes (49:24.141)
Yes.
Piyush Parikh (49:32.638)
with the idea of can we be doing other things that are either more in line with what our purposes, our values, and all of that, while this is still happening? The important stuff still needs to happen, right? And that’s the only way we can sustain ourselves. I always look at there are two ways to do that. One is through tools, through automation, through AI, all of that. The other is to other humans. And there’s a combination of humans and tools. Tools will take you so far.
Misty Kortes (49:55.116)
Yes.
Piyush Parikh (50:01.246)
you always have to have someone overseeing those tools. you always, especially with marketing, things just keep changing. If I just had this tool set up to do this kind of follow up constantly, it’s not going to go too far. It’ll only be, I have to tweak it. I have to change the word, have to look at data, I have to adjust it, all of that. Same thing with my customers. They’re changing. Our customers need AI. And so I have to give them AI. So for that, I need to learn AI. But how much time do I have to learn that?
Misty Kortes (50:04.397)
Yes.
Misty Kortes (50:24.119)
Mm-hmm.
Piyush Parikh (50:30.107)
What I’ve done is form teams that not only does it get stuff away from my plate, but I have them use AI. And so how do I get them to do the work and do it in a way that is not overwhelming them, but it’s being done by someone else. I call that automation too. If I’m not doing it, it’s automated. That’s it. Bodies are bodies, right? So I think…
Misty Kortes (50:51.7)
Absolutely. You can automate with bots, you can automate with people.
Piyush Parikh (50:58.383)
I think that’s the key here would be finding the balance of first you doing it and balancing that out. then the scaling part is not necessarily scaled by growth even, just even scaled by your team. Like how do I scale horizontally in terms of me and then other people and other bots and other things handling it? And that’s kind of what we have tried to help entrepreneurs with Equinauts agents. And even we help entrepreneurs, we help larger companies as well.
Misty Kortes (51:17.752)
Nice. Yeah.
Piyush Parikh (51:27.601)
We call them augmenting your team. How do we augment your current team, if it’s you or your team, to be able to take advantage of AI and humans? And all of our team, there’s cost arbitrage. We have people in India, Philippines, other countries that have a lower cost of living. And so, fine, this doesn’t have to be as expensive as here. We still need some people here, but they could be overseeing other people elsewhere. And so you can talk about
Misty Kortes (51:29.71)
Mmm.
Misty Kortes (51:36.888)
Yes.
Misty Kortes (51:54.872)
Absolutely.
Piyush Parikh (51:56.222)
creating hybrid teams. That’s I do a lot of presentations on creating automation through hybrid teams and through AI.
Misty Kortes (52:03.982)
I love it. love it. We talked about it so much. So many nuggets here. I know we’re kind of like a little bit all over, but all of it, these conversations here are not designed to have you come and go, okay, give me the tool, tell me exactly what to do. How do I build it? How do I this? It’s to open your mind up to the tools that are available to you so that you know what you’re able, what you’re capable, what…
what is out there for you to be able to build the business that you really want. And for me, I wanted to step away from managing a team, managing people. And so I’m leveraging AI to help me do that. And now I have a smaller team. I still have a little bit of a team, but I have a smaller team. And now I’m utilizing AI to give myself more freedom and flexibility while still serving my customers in a really great
a better way than I could even before AI was here. So I just love conversations like this. So thank you so much for sharing everything. Do you have any last takeaways before we kind of wrap up?
Piyush Parikh (53:02.129)
Yes.
Piyush Parikh (53:09.885)
You know, I think we covered, like you said, we covered a lot of different topics. We had many things to look at. I would just say for folks listening, you may find nuggets within each of these, like which apply to you, and that’s why we talk about so many different things. Some people may relate more to give me just a tool. Some people say, I need a process for customer success. What is that? Some people may say, people and humans and bots. So I think it’s pick one or two things that apply to you at this current moment.
Misty Kortes (53:21.72)
Yes.
Piyush Parikh (53:38.862)
And just use it, but I would say if you know as we’ve all we said this throughout this conversation Go out there keep chat GPD open ask it questions use it more I think that’s the only way to learn how to get really good at some of this and ask it What in ask it anything like ask it? How do I do this better? I don’t understand. How do I do this better? I don’t understand and have it be like like an expert that’s sitting right next to you
Misty Kortes (53:59.234)
Yes.
Piyush Parikh (54:06.781)
And that’s transformational. I completely agree. It’s been great for me, for my company, all of our people. We have leaders as well. And I don’t do as much now in the company. I’m having them do a lot of it. they’re using the AI. And I’m playing around with these AI tools just to see what we should do next. And that’s been the fun part. But it really is. There’s lots more coming. I think it can be overwhelming. But I think it’s a great time to really have a business, grow it.
Misty Kortes (54:20.579)
Yes.
Piyush Parikh (54:36.761)
and use folks like yourself and others who are out there promoting this. It’s such a good thing you’re doing.
Misty Kortes (54:43.796)
Thank you so much. appreciate that. Well, and if you’re listening in and you need help putting these things into place, Piyush is your guy. So how can they find you?
Piyush Parikh (54:52.968)
Yeah, so you can look me up on LinkedIn is where I’m pretty active. So you can, there’s a link we can share with on the LinkedIn, just search for my name and then Equinox agents, Equinox, E-Q-U-I-N-O-X agents.com. That’s our company. That’s what we’ve been doing for the last eight years. And, you know, we work with any size, most any size business. So if there’s any questions, happy to help share tools. There’s so much more in this field, but.
Happy to help wherever needed.
Misty Kortes (55:23.63)
I love that and so I’ll make sure that I link to all the tools that he mentioned here today and how you can find Piyush on LinkedIn and as well on his website so Piyush it has been an amazing conversation. Thank you so much for sharing.
Piyush Parikh (55:38.833)
Yeah, thanks so much. Yeah, thanks so much. I know we had some glitches with audio. Hopefully the AI on this tool will clear all that up and get us a clean version of this. But thanks so much for having me.
Misty Kortes (55:50.082)
Well, if you’re listening to this live right now, you know that there was audio issues. Well, by the time you get the podcast, those will be cut out. We’ll fix it. So, yeah, thank you. And thank you everyone for tuning in and being here with us. I can’t wait to see you again next week for another great conversation.
Piyush Parikh (55:57.955)
It’ll be kind of… No, nice. Yeah, apologize for that, but thanks for having me, Misty. This has been amazing.