038: Jon Hall – Your Business Needs To Be Using Mobile Messaging Now

Title: Jon Hall – Your Business Needs To Be Using Mobile Messaging Now

Guest: Jon Hall

Jon Hall: There is what I think is an existential demand for businesses to get their arms around messaging. Why are more businesses not adopting it? Like adoption of text messaging as a channel among business owners remains.

Peter Wilson: Welcome. to the biz and life done well podcast where we explore what it means and what it takes to do business and life. I’m your host, Peter Wilson. If you’re like me, you’re intrigued by stories of common people who have achieved uncommon success in business and life. Join me. As I interviewed fascinating people about how they got started, their successes and failures.

Their habits and routines and what inspires them. Today, my guest is John Hall. He is the founder and CEO of switch bird, which is a mobile and business messaging platform. John and I met four or five years ago, I guess in internet years, it’s like decades when he was the founder. The CEO of a company called great us.

That is a reviews platform. That company was sold. John is not with that company. He moved on to this new company. I consider him to be this serial entrepreneur. And the thing that I really love about John is he really gets the business problem. He understands what the real business problem is.

And focuses on solving that and not putting a bunch of fluff on top of it. And that’s really what I just really enjoy about John has probably why we’ve enjoyed interacting with each other so much. John how are you doing today? Good, Peter.

Jon Hall: Thanks for that intro. I

Peter Wilson: appreciate it. So you’ve got this platform, switch bird.

This mobile messaging business messaging platform. So before we go into the details of that, what I wanted to ask you is, what, why is mobile so important for businesses? Sure,

Jon Hall: sure. As marketers, we tend to gravitate towards. The stats that we’re comfortable with.

So you compare text messaging to email, for example, and you start talking about a near a hundred percent open rates and, 90% of messages are read within three minutes of receipt and you start to get the sense of oh, okay. This is a powerful communication channel for sure.

Communication with consumers. But I really think that following on to that, you would think, okay, this is a very powerful channel. Why are more businesses not adopting it? Like adoption of text messaging as a channel among business owners remains very low. And that was the. The original opportunity we saw in text messaging in particular, but we started this work on this platform in early 2020.

And as there was some big events in the news in 2020. Yeah. That affected small and local businesses. We started to see this accelerating, digital transformation of business, where consumers increasingly now want to be able to reach out to a business and get stuff done without necessarily coming to your place of business without necessarily, calling you while you’re open During business hours, cause we’re all juggling, our jobs are kids, et cetera.

And so really now aside side of the opportunity that opening up this powerful channel presents, there really is what I think is an existential demand for businesses. To get their arms around messaging, whether that’s, it’s and we can talk about, text messaging versus the proliferation of PR proprietary, big tech messaging channels, like Facebook messenger, Google my business messaging, business chat from apple, et cetera.

You

Peter Wilson: think about it? I do I go to my dentist, we work with a lot of dentists and it’s almost really expected now that you’re going to get a. And appointment reminder from your free health and wellness provider. In fact in some respects it’s for a while, I think it was a bit of a nuisance for people in terms of getting, oh, I’m getting all these messages, but I’ve been speaking with my wife who works at a dental practice and she said, it’s just people would just expect it at this time.

Jon Hall: Yeah. I think with the intelligent and constrained adoption of the channel as opposed to I think what we saw in the early days of text message marketing was the folks who saw those great stats about, open rates and engagement rates and texts, and were like, great.

Let’s send these mass text messages to our customers once a week and, we’ll just keep hammering them because they’re going to keep opening them. And that, of course, stripped. Text messaging of some of its power in those early days. But I think what we’re seeing with the kind of use cases like you mentioned, and is that smart adoption, that really is a win-win right.

So appointment reminders are like a total no-brainer and dentists and actually the the sort of. Tech industry around dentistry, like all the various CRMs have been ahead on this, some of the other health and wellness categories, not so much but appointment reminders are just like a no-brainer win-win right.

The patient doesn’t want to miss an appointment, wants to, B wants to be assured that they still have their appointment. And if they’re going to forget about it, they don’t want to forget about it, and from a, a practice management standpoint to, reduce those no shows to not having to, to not have to potentially, charge a patient because they didn’t show up.

And now you’ve got a patient who’s unhappy, it’s

Peter Wilson: yeah. And you’ve got an empty. Your

Jon Hall: practice exactly. Is that the cost of a no-show is ridiculous. So yeah, man. Yeah. And so there are more, I think a no brainer value Laden use cases like that really across the spectrum of different business verticals.

And that’s really what we’re trying to tap into.

Peter Wilson: So one of the ones that we’ve seen and We were working with a particular client that did not have mobile messaging or text messaging enabled. We went into one of the platforms that we use for a few specific clients and turned it on.

And we discovered that people had been assuming. That, that business was texting and there were messages waiting in their inbox. They didn’t even know they had it. We didn’t even have it turned on. We weren’t even aware of it. We, when we turned it on, we immediately saw 10% of the inbound lead activity for the business was directly from text messaging just because we said.

Call or text us right today. It’s getting close to 20% and we track this through several platforms and including Google analytics. So specifically if somebody is visiting your website now and they see an opportunity to text you or fill out a form or call you we’re seeing more and more people are taking them.

That text route. Because it’s so much easier to do. And it’s just, it just works,

Jon Hall: yeah. There’s, there’s efficiency gains on both sides and you can see this as a consumer yourself, and you can imagine it as a business owner, if you haven’t taken on this channel already, but like all of the research from, the big firms like Forrester and Gartner and whatever, we’ll look at, how efficiencies that a brand will achieve by deflecting. Like live calls to text messaging instead. And those efficiency gains are significant.

In the hundreds of percent it costs a fifth of what it would cost. It costs a text conversation, costs a fifth of what a live conversation costs from a like customer service sales standpoint. And That holds true, I think on the consumer side too. And that’s why we’re seeing, preferences and expectations move in the direction that you’re saying.

I’m like, if I, now I’m working from home, I’m on a zoom call, but I also want to get something scheduled with the tire place. And it’s it’s not my turn to speak in the work meeting. I just want quickly. Go and set the, set, the wheels in motion.

I want to text that business and set it in motion and what’s what makes it an efficient channel is really, I think that sort of asynchronous nature of it, we don’t have to be there and present. And it, this is the same truth. This holds true for the business as well. They think about, oh, if I.

The flood gates of text messaging than I have to staff that well. Yeah. Yes. But it’s easier to staff than your phones because you not only can you take advantage of the asynchronous nature of a text conversation, but you can also take advantage of things like automation and AI. Where a solution like switchboard comes in where we take all of those common cases and make sure that your business is set up to be responsive to inbound texts, to get inbound leads to where they need to go, whether that’s booking an appointment or getting pricing information or what, whatever the direction is that you want to funnel them.

We funnel. And, from a staffing standpoint, the burden of handling those inbound inquiries and leads goes down significantly and therefore the value goes up.

Peter Wilson: So switch bird is a cloud based service. So I used it in a web browser, the way you described it.

Yes. So it’s any web browser that you, a desktop will have browser, which is great right away, because I’m doing mobile messaging and I don’t need to have a phone dedicated to

Jon Hall: messaging. Exactly. Yeah. It opens it up. Opens up a few advantages from a, just a business management perspective. You can think of it as like a g-mail inbox for your text message, your business text messages, and that Gmail inbox or that inbox yeah. We call them inboxes at switchboard is then shareable with your team. So if you are a business owner and you have a couple of staff people, or even, contractors. For birth assistant even you can share access to that inbox with your team and, get those text conversations off of your, your personal phone, where you become the bottleneck to all of them.

Let’s yeah.

Peter Wilson: Quick sidebar here. I can’t tell you how many business owners I’ve talked to, who, when they got started. Said I’ll just use my phone for my phone number. Cause I’m just, it’s just like a couple of us here and that’ll be it. And then the business grows and then a year later they’re like, wow, that was,

Jon Hall: yes. Yeah. No. Absolutely. Yeah, that’s just, a built in benefit of, just using this kind of this kind of approach. And then of course we can we can build on that and use, all kinds of things like, multiple numbers funneling into the inbox for tracking different channels and all that kind of stuff.

But I think from a business owner perspective, as opposed to a pure marketer perspective. Yeah. The marketers love the text tracking stuff and all that, their data and whatnot, but from a, from a management conversation management perspective or, customer management perspective.

You’re funneling those texts into this shared inbox that lives, lives on the web. I mean you can access it via your phone, so it’s not like strictly like web, desktop, web it’s it’s a very usable platform from any device. But then, we’ve tried to.

Array tools around this inbox that make common business problems much easier to surmount. So so in that example where I said, okay you’re a solo business owner, but you’ve got, a handful of contractors or VAs working with you. You want to maintain. The integrity of your messaging back with customers.

And that’s going to maybe involve training and whatnot, but with, a tool like switchboard, you can array around your inbox, template, response, camp, canned responses to frequently asked questions and, up. Yeah the appointment reminder sequences for, if it’s a home visit or an appointment at a practice requesting a review after, a service interaction, all of that stuff can be prebuilt and template it.

And your, your, you or your staff can easily just go in and select the right template at the right time and trigger it to go off. And then we do a lot of automatic stuff too, because I think one of the. One of the challenges at this point in history is, we spent time talking about I guess I’m probably an extremist in my views calling adoption of text messaging, like an existential demand for business owners.

But I do believe that but anyway w what the counterbalance to that is a lot of business owners are hesitant to take up another tool, right? So we have to figure out ways of helping business owners get the benefit of opening up the channel without necessarily having to learn or adopt another.

Tool and that’s where the automation and stuff comes into play. Yeah,

Peter Wilson: that’s true. Why don’t we talk about a few real-world examples just in terms of what I could talk about a few, but I’d love to. Here. What your seeing in terms of a type of business and how they’re applying switch bird and what you all do and really reaping some, massive

Jon Hall: benefits, an example would be okay, we’re working well.

This is through an agency partner who has a. A home contractor, who home contractor or the client who gets trickle of inbound leads through Google my business through referrals, through his website, but is terrible about picking up the phone, responding to those leads, doing any kind of.

Follow up to, to fill up his pipeline. And so what we did with switchboard was to put a switch bird number in front of his number on his website, his Google, my business listing, et cetera, but, switch bird onto his Google, my business listing for Google messaging, which is a new sort of emergent messaging channel that’s that Google is starting to roll out.

So the idea is that. Any of these new inquiries. Now, whether they’re a phone call, a text message or a message through Google is going to go into his switchboard inbox. And now what we do with that is we. A lot of our automated behaviors focus really on the on the value capture, right?

So there’s been a whole decade of of chat bot solutions out there, which Is that, is a bad word in our office. Because chat bot implies, a lists, conversation with a bot, which doesn’t really, it’s just

Peter Wilson: going to ask you a million questions.

Jon Hall: Yeah. Nobody wants that.

That’s that’s just your

Peter Wilson: name and number. We’ll get back to you.

Jon Hall: We’ve adopted the language of messaging funnels. And so on those three channels, we mentioned for this contractor, we put together a messaging funnel that does a couple of things. So a, if you can imagine I’m waving my hands, but I know this.

Yeah. A call comes in midday. The contractors on the job site, this inbound lead gets a text back engaging them in this conversation. Or they send a text after hours. They get a text back, engaging them in the conversation, or they, Google this Google this this contractor or somehow.

Is local listing. They click chat the Google listing and get into this conversation. So what happens in this conversation? The first thing w we feel the needs do is you want to engage the lead before they move on to a competitor, right? You’ve described the scenario where, you call a place, you get a voice, get the voicemail, and you don’t even bother.

It’s like next, cause you want some kind of, you want to get the wheels in motion for the stuff you’re trying to get done in your life. You don’t want to spend hours playing phone tag. So we engage them right away. Let them know, something about the business, right?

The key things to do, I think for for the value capture. Top of the funnel side of messaging is capture lead information. A lot of that we do automatically when someone calls or texts, we can do a reverse phone lookup on their phone number and automatically know, who they are.

The name. From caller ID, but we’ll get a good consumer address cause we use a proprietary database for that consumer data. So already we’ve got lead capture in place when they call, we know who call we usually ask an initial, like lead. Confirmation question. So if this is someone reaching out to our contractor and our contractor is a home remodeler, he’s not going to paint the interior of your closet, but he is going to do additions outdoor living areas, new new home, full home renovations.

We’ll set that expectation in the initial message. We’ll say, Hey, ABC contractor specializes in. Outdoor living areas for home renovations and additions, which one of these are you looking to have done? And that qualifies the lead right there. And then we can, go on and in, in this case that have in mind as we, we further that funnel, we went from lead capture to lead qualification to then doing some lead nurture where we could automatically then push to that lead.

Some, pictures of recent projects, if they said. We’re looking to do an outdoor living area. Great. Here are some pictures from recent projects we did in your area of outdoor living areas. And it said, that’s where you start to get in the lead nurture component. And really in those three steps, which are, natural to automate, they aren’t.

It’s not really interacting with the chatbots, because that’s got, this kind of directional simplicity to it. That’s okay, we know you’re interested in this. Here’s how we do it. Here’s some of the information and that we find is enough to really engage those leads before they, move on to a competitor.

And that’s. 90% of the battle for some of these guys, because if their work is good, now we’ve taken out the component where they’re just bad at communication essentially. And solve that. Yeah.

Peter Wilson: That, yeah, that makes a ton of sense. So the scenario that I hinted at earlier or talked about, or.

Was just using the text as a straight up alternative channel. The scenario you talked about is, like you’re actually, every single call is potentially getting funneled into the switchboard platform. That call does. Forwarded the, the caller doesn’t even know.

So it does get answered the scenario that I’m looking at so far with some of the businesses we work, I’ve got an auto repair shop that I work with and they have a main number. That’s a very distinctive number. They didn’t want to change the number. So we just added on their website, call this number, text that number, which is.

Very it’s not very, my designer doesn’t like it because it doesn’t look very elegant. But it works and they are so happy because they’ve got all these people, initial leads coming in through text messaging, but then what they’re using it for is they if you get your car repaired, A lot of times, they’ve got to give you an estimate, cause they’ve got to go price out the parts.

And then they’ve got to find the parts. And throughout the day, they’re spending a lot of time interacting with their suppliers, just trying to find stuff and get prices and all this stuff. So when they finally get it, they’re using the text messaging to send the client, the estimate, and then they’re using that as the, when they reply, then they.

Th not, wasn’t just a phone call it, they actually have a record of that conversation with the price as well. It serves two purposes, right? It’s absolutely. It’s not just communication. It’s also making sure we document it in some form or fashion and right. Could be a couple of thousand dollars or more and it, they avoid that.

You said it was going to be that much and it was this much or something like that. Cause I’ve got it there. And then the other thing they really like is when the car is completed, they text the client, Hey, your car’s ready. The final bill was dah. And then a lot of times they’ll have people text them back.

Great. Just put it on my card. You have it on file or something like that. Yeah. And I know your platform actually can, there’s a way that we can generate a, is it an invoice or so then people can actually pay directly through the platform too. Is that right?

Jon Hall: Yeah. That’s Kind of a feature that, that held us up from launching because when when the pandemic started, we wanted to go to market with something that was like really clearly solving a current problem because otherwise it felt strange to be, out there selling something that was.

Like a nice to have. And so we added a payments feature, which yet allows you to essentially, click, in, in the context of your text conversation, click request a payment, put in what the, the the amount of the payment is and what it’s for.

You can even. Include a payload to get sent upon payment. So that’s for cases where we’ve got educators using a switchboard for managing their like yoga classes and Pilates classes and that kind of thing. And when they’re doing When they’re doing those classes.

Especially during the pandemic, doing them virtually, a lot of them have continued to do them virtually. You would send, as soon as the customer pays, it sends them the zoom link or the, the video link for the class. So it cuts down. Yeah. The labor required to fulfill orders.

But yeah, the the idea of just, request a payment, put in an amount, this is what it’s for. And now the customer gets a, via text message. They get A mobile friendly little invoice that pops up from a link. And it’s, secure payment plan. We use Stripe as our partner for that.

It’s like a branded invoice that says, ABC automotive or whatever it is, the customer can just plunk down their credit card and expiration date and boom. It’s paid.

Peter Wilson: So that’s, so there, we’re not actually paying you. I’m not actually texting you my card number. Your S your there’s a individualized link that I get.

That is just for my payment, just for me on a secure. Landing page that I hit put it in the information it’s already coded with the invoice and everything. So I’m not hunting around trying to log in to something. Exactly. It’s just a one-click and then fill out the information and that’s it. So that really, and I think that one click or that, that frictionless or, reduced friction, it’s probably not a hundred percent frictionless, but reduce friction.

It’s something that was nice to have earlier, but I think through pandemic through what we just went through, I think a lot of us are now just spending that.

Jon Hall: Yeah. And, it becomes a matter of of, What your competitors are doing, right? What wins customer loyalty?

What makes it easy for the customer? A lot of cases where, you know it was, easy to poopoo some of these nice to haves, like you said in the past it’s okay now you’re losing business to a competitor up the street who is just making it so easy to do business with them.

Exactly. It’s just a, no brainer for the customer. So

Peter Wilson: yeah, that’s true. That that really is true. Are there any particular features about switch bird or, business messaging? That we haven’t covered yet. I know you briefly message mentioned Google my business messaging.

If I’m a business owner, is that something that I need to be concerned? Yeah.

Jon Hall: Yeah. So we’re pretty bullish on the future of what we call GMB messaging. And that’s really because of a couple of factors and Google has tried some messaging products in the past. But yeah.

Two years ago, starting in 2019 they started taking away SMS features. So you could all of a sudden, no longer have an SMS number on your GMB listing. You could no longer eventually put a text us call to action and a Google ad and. During that time, that two years they started building out a product, they call Google business messages.

And that’s what we call GMB messaging because the primary surface area for that for. Consumers as when I Google your business or I Google plumber near me. And I see a bunch of listings. Some of those listings will, typically I see, directions that you see a call us call to action.

We’ll increasingly you’re going to see a chat call to action as businesses enable GMB messaging. And, w we believe because Google dominance in search this matters more than other messaging, pro products like Facebook messenger, or even apple business chat. Because This is going to become a differentiator for local businesses.

If I can chat with this guy, but can’t chat with this guy right now, I’m going to, I’m going to click chat.

Peter Wilson: So on my phone and it’s 70 to 80% of the people that come to consumer websites are on their phones.

Jon Hall: Yeah, yes. Yeah, no. And I, I think that phenomenon that you described seeing, just by putting a text us a call to action on your client’s website and all of a sudden, you’re seeing, 10%, 20%, an increasing number of.

Inquiries come through there. I think that’s, it’s a real trend. We, some of the anecdotes are actually funny cause it, you would think something like we, we have this one client works with lawyers and we were just laughing the other day because they have, the lawyer handles like DUIs and like emergency cases and whatnot, and as someone in that situation, you would want to get on the phone and talk to a lawyer right away, but they’re always coming through chat or, sending a message or filling out a form instead, because there’s just the sort of reluctance to jump on a voice call bay.

Anyway, I digress that’s a real phenomenon and we think it will impact, have a big impact with Google my business messaging because it’s like such a stark contrast right there. There’s high intent to from the searcher to engage a business. If I’m Googling plumber near me, presumably I have a plumbing issue that I need to address.

Okay. Who am I going to choose? And so we’ve taking the time, become a Google messaging partner and have now incorporated Google my business messaging going into what we do for the same kinds of use cases like I described with the contractor. So we’re going to capture all of those inbound inquiries handle them efficiently with automations and also make them Put them right in an easy to use inbox to to respond.

Peter Wilson: I think what you’re talking about is before we started this, I said, I see you as a serial entrepreneur and you said really, I’m a software developer. You want to expound on that a little bit. So you were sure a software developer and

Jon Hall: that’s true. Got it. And I went to college and studied dead languages and comparative religions.

I really didn’t equip, not surprised. But on the job I starting in the arts, I I, became a software developer out of necessity, first doing some light web development and then again, any more serious about it and did a lot of self-education and a little bit of coursework and what.

And yeah, I’ve been opportunistic in building products because I love the creative aspect of it. And so now I’ve sold two of them which was healthtech.com was acquired in 2012 as a platform for health and wellness practices actually to to build and manage.

High SEO value websites and that kind of thing. That was more of a, it was like a hobby project and was acquired in an Aqua hire deal. And then then came along with with greatest, which, as, really targeting a very acute pain point for business owners, which was the emergence of online reviews is such a powerful.

Influence in getting people to buy or not buy from them. And that wasn’t in 2013 teamed up with with a college friend at first to build the the first iteration of greatness. And and now, and and that was acquired in 2012 by a private equity firm out in San Francisco.

And both of those exits were not really intentional. That’s why, I don’t really think of myself as a serial entrepreneur. In fact, I don’t really want to exit again cause I, after selling the business, especially this last time, I was, I was like, I just want to get back to work.

I want to do something. And now I have, I have nobody to work with. I have to start from scratch. So this switch bird and we’ve actually have some other products in mind for down the road, but what were my, my team, which is me and some other software developers and one more business minded sales guy we’re looking at this as like a lifestyle business, right?

Like w we can do what we love, which is building products and, trying to solve problems out there for, for business owners on this, ever evolving horizon of new technology and new consumer preferences and all that.

Peter Wilson: That’s great. I wish you the very best.

And of course we are a reseller of switchboard bird and we’ve have firsthand knowledge of the Of the platform. So if anybody is listening, you can just go to switch bird.com and check it out. Or, if you like what you can contact us biz marketing.com and we can hook you up with the appropriate level of service that’s right for you.

Right now we’ve got a health and wellness provider using it just, you couldn’t tear it away from them. It’s like after one week the office manager was like, yeah, don’t touch it. I called them. I said, is it working for you? And she says, oh yeah don’t touch it. And then the auto repair garage, and we’ve got a couple other folks too that are using it.

And I’m typically very skeptical of new software for business. I’ve tried a bunch of platforms. I tried a bunch before you came out with a switchboard. Didn’t like any of them, because they were so focused just on that marketing, spray and pray model, not your model. Same thing with reviews.

We resell we’ve got reviews of us which is our our review platform as well. I had gone through a bunch of other ones and until we landed on that and I think you’ve got a real knack for understanding the problem. And we just want to keep working with you and see you thrive.

And so anybody that wants to check them out, go to switchboard.com and and yeah, so we hope to have another conversation at some point about what’s next and maybe what we could do probably not today. Cause I’m out of time is we’ll do a a video down. And put it up on our YouTube channel.

Okay. Quick, a quick YouTube channel. John, thanks a lot.

Jon Hall: Absolutely. Peter, thanks for having me on. Oh, and one thing I should just mention the pertinent to the last thing you said is, because switchboard, we really. Focus on customers that are volume customers like agencies and franchise awards.

And so that’s, it’s it’s great to check us out and come to us, but like most of our actual users come through providers like, like biz marketing, where we get the benefit of. Our software and the marketing expertise, business expertise that consultants like yourself offer.

So you bet.

Peter Wilson: Thanks again, John. Look forward to our next conversation. Thank you, Peter.

Jon Hall: Appreciate it. Me too.

Peter Wilson: Thanks for listening to this episode of busy in life. Done well with Peter Wilson, you can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms. Please tell your friends about us and leave us review.

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