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all right so um first and foremost i want to introduce myself my name is ron l richards i am a serial tech entrepreneur business coach and the host of business and bourbon and i will be serving as your host this this afternoon however i've got some stars we got some stars for you guys today some folks that are really i've got two ladies that are powerful i know them both very well and they're going to bring some tremendous knowledge first and foremost before we get this thing started i want everyone to know that this is always about you so while we have different things prepared that we want to talk about we're going to talk about whatever you guys want to talk about so please make sure that you're asking your questions and we'll make sure that that katherine and kelsey answer those questions for you and i'll i'll hop in there every now and then and say a couple of words as well so with that said um we have kelsey johnson with smith ai with us and and and my good friend catherine valladis i love i love pronouncing it like that with nick steva how are you ladies fantastic great awesome awesome okay so without any further ado i want to go ahead and hand over to kelsey and we'll get this thing kicked off hi well thank you so much for now for first of all being here um and bringing your expertise and as much as you're bringing it in and uh catherine obviously as well uh what a wonderful panel to have um to discuss this this is something that i'm really excited about and just sort of you know how to really sound like an enterprise business and how to therefore sell to enterprise businesses as a small business this is something that's fairly new to small businesses um and i'm really really excited to dive into this again if you have anything specific that you want to ask us about um a pain point that you're having something that you're trying to solve uh we'll try to get to that as much as possible uh i am um kelsey johnson as ronald said i am the product marketing manager at smith ai if you haven't heard of smith ai we're a virtual receptionist and chat service for businesses we can answer calls chats texts facebook messages transfer calls and take some take messages qualify and intake new leads book and reschedule appointments and much much more on behalf of your business no matter the size and um we actually you know one of the things that we're really passionate about at smith ai is the tech behind the people so we hire amazing people to answer these calls but we create technology to enable them to really sound both in-house to be useful to sync with your systems already to help you create a lead nurture funnel and to follow up with people you know faster when you need to to help schedule with them and so i'm really really excited to discuss this today and i'm going to pass it over to catherine who can talk a little bit about nextiva and her own expertise which is very extensive wow i guess i have big shoes to fill i'm catherine valadares i am the vice president of enterprise solutions at nextiva so i'm actually the right character for this conversation as i said in my title enterprise solutions but the cool the coolest thing that i'm ready to share with the group today is the ability to create enterprise solutions for small businesses so i think one of the things that next diva has done extremely well and again part of my alliance to nextiva is because of this reason we've created a hosted communication system that is not only powerful and gives you the the ability to be whoever you want to be in terms of your communication but it also does it at a price point that isn't going to break the bank so we all are cognizant of the fact that as small business owners making decisions on on technology solutions is is a big task right and there's a lot of moving parts that go into that decision but i'm happy to say that we have a solution that is tangible um it it's awesome for me because this whole climate of where we are and how we do business today is completely different than it was 12 months ago let's all just be transparent and because of that it's given nextiva a huge advantage in the marketplace why because now we have the ability to give enterprise services to every business of every size across every vertical that exists so as we have our conversation today kelsey i'm going to talk through all the different capabilities that nextiva has i'm going to talk about where communication starts where it is now and where it's going well into the future but i also want to give some tidbits to the audience on ways that you can make your business better your customer journey better um aligning with companies like uh smith ai and what kelsey's bringing to the table but also using technology to your advantage like kelsey said there's there's so much technology out there that can give you the power that some of you probably aren't even aware of so i hope to have the opportunity to share that with each and every one of you on the call today so thanks for joining awesome i think that we're all very excited i will say that if you saw the thumbs up for me that's because what you know i get super excited when we're talking about enterprise level tech at the smb level and that's where let's let's face it guys we've got to start to step up we got to step up our game um you know with the pandemic just kind of um portable gasoline or than the s on smb in terms of adopting technology and and we've had to adopt some of this technology but the cool thing about this is that a lot of this tech that katherine is going to talk about uh is is technology that was too expensive for us in smb years ago it's too expensive and we couldn't get it now we can get it and it's awesome and we can really leverage it to to generate better outcomes for our customers to create additional revenue streams that you guys probably aren't even aware of today there's so many cool and fun things that we can do so again as we get this thing started i want to encourage you guys to please ask questions um again we have talking points things we want to talk about but we want to make sure that you're all getting what you want out of this we've got some fantastic subject matter experts with us today who can answer any question you throw i'll just wait in really quickly and before i'm going to let catherine take it away um at smith ai we really care about taking work off of your plate that is what we're obsessed with so we love the technology we're silicon valley based you know we enable our receptionist with technology but what the value that we are looking to give you not just through our own solution but through the people that we and the companies that we partner with is to have you set up systems and use this technology and use you know ai and as much as you can to do less of that work that you don't like to do so that you can provide true value to your clients right you can do what it is that you have a professional degree in or you are an expert in and take off all of that admin work off of your plate because it's not where your time is best spent awesome so i'm going to kind of just introduce communication as a thought to the audience and we'll kind of take this journey together um so as we talk about how businesses communicate in the new norm or in the the new era that we're in there's a lot of moving parts um but where it all starts is in the cloud so i'm going to give like a just a super easy understanding of what cloud is just so everybody has a good base to build this conversation off of because if you want to present as an enterprise business you must be in the cloud that's number one and so what does communication look like in the cloud each and every one of you have one of these i'm assuming um this is cloud technology so what i like to use as an explanation for for audiences like this is the iphone so in the iphone world you have a cellular device on that device you can pull things from the cloud like pictures movies conversations phone numbers etc but all of those things live in the cloud so as a end user and a consumer of those services i pull those down to my device every time i want to interact with the icloud voice communication in business is no different the beauty of going to the cloud however is that there is no limitation so i can continue to add more and more feature functionality and things to my communication stack in the cloud and that's really where i want this conversation to start so as a business if you are not using a cloud service as your primary focus for communication that's going to be your first step i'm getting into the cloud then gives you the ability to start leveraging some of this cool technology that even kelsey's talking about um to make your customer journey better so one of the things that has happened really dramatically in our current climate is number one the accessibility of communication so none of us are in a brick and mortar situation anymore everyone is working from home the truth is most of us are working from anywhere right whether that's in a hotel room at an airport on a beach in our backyard wherever it may be and so one of the key factors of moving to the cloud is giving yourself that flexibility so that you can pull your phone to any device anywhere at any time and represent your business that's key number one that gives you the flexibility that you need as a small business owner to be nimble to be flexible to be mobile to be able to attend meetings to have you know things happening in your personal life that don't impact your business because you're not stuck to a building with a hard wire and a hard phone that's number one the second piece to it is looking at communication as more than a phone system so that's something that's totally new most businesses historically i've got a number and it rings a phone and somebody answers and that's how i do business well i'm here to tell you that that has changed drastically over the last 12 months why because voice is actually taking a second seat to other forms of communication people are texting more than they ever have before in the history of other we're doing things like we're doing right now people are communicating via video and via webinars and via conferences like the one that we're on in addition to that people are really really looking at social media different than they ever have before so things like facebook linkedin commentary that's made about your business yelp reviews things like that are actually now becoming part of your holistic communication strategy as a business so again that's totally different it's not how it used to be and it's becoming more and more relevant and important every single day so to bring it full circle we have a solution and we have a solution that is at a price point that is tangible and tolerable for businesses that are of every size number one number two that solution brings all of that communication together so as a business owner you can get your texts your voicemails your calls your facebook posts your linkedin everything can funnel into a single pane of glass so that you as a business owner can holistically understand the impact that your business has from all of these different channels that are out there right so not only does it give you that view it gives you the ability to to really hone in on your craft but from the outside view being a consumer you look big if you're taking text messages from me guess what you're you're competing with the joneses you are coming across as an organization that is in the now that is with it the times that is giving me the ability to interact as a consumer in the ways that i choose to do so so that's number one number two it's also again giving you the flexibility of letting your consumers interact with you the way they prefer to so i'm going to throw out a couple of stats that may shock people but there are tons of stats out there and as business owners i encourage you to take a look at some of this information but let's start with this one nine out of ten consumers prefer not to talk to a human wow nine out of ten consumers and this was a report that was done by salesforce.com one of the biggest sas solutions that exists and if if nine out of ten of their consumers are giving you that type of feedback then you as a business owner absolutely have to entertain the thought of wow i need to give my business my consumers another way to interact with me because right now the only thing they can do is call me right so that's that's kind of one thought-provoking piece to the puzzle in addition to that i'll give you another stat that is 66 of all consumers would prefer to communicate via via sms than voice i don't know about you guys but i have the the awesome pleasure of being the mother of young adults and uh my 22 year old will text me from the same room before she will speak to me even though we are literally in the same room together so again if you're preparing yourself for the the next generation of consumers the truth is they have expectations and their expectations are that they can interact with you via any means necessary 24 7 365. so again we're talking about opening up different types of communication creating efficiencies within that communication kelsey and team come into play here because they can be your your voice in your hands when you don't have the ability to do so again giving you that 24 7 365 appeal which is also enterprise by the by the way guys um so that just adds to it but then where the magic really happens and where it gets super fun for me and i'm sorry if i'm monopolizing this whole deal guys uh is when you can start utilizing artificial intelligence so i really want to get into that because that is huge every single person that is participating in this event today has had a conversation with alexa siri or google at least one time in your life i'm at the point where i'm doing that on a daily okay let's just hourly basis um i'm just gonna let you know as a consumer if i can tell alexa what i want on my grocery list and that somehow magically appears at my front door guess what that's some pretty powerful technology and it's setting a different expectation for me as a consumer because for me if i can do that i have zero desire to go to the grocery store ever again let's just start catherine i'm asking my phone what the temperature is outside instead of walking out onto my patio another one you're 22 years old but i don't even get in my car without asking google where i'm going um i've become completely ignorant to driving uh but i know that google's gonna tell me not only how to get there but the best way the fastest way to avoid the traffic to avoid the stop so why wouldn't i do that right so why i'm using these examples is to get you just some thought provoking i guess conversation going with your business if i have that level of expectation as a consumer i have that level of expectation with everyone i do business with and i don't know about everybody on the phone i can speak for rannell a little bit but i work 12 to 18 hours a day every single day so if i can't pay my bill to you at midnight i'm probably not going to do business with you if i can't check the subscription that i have with your services on a saturday at 2 30 probably not going to do business with you simply because i i just don't have the time and i'm just uh i'm just a regular joe right um but if you take that approach and you look at that holistically that's where we're all at i mean we're all in a different place where we're working 24 7 work hours work life balance all of that fun stuff from the the early millennial is no longer the case right we're all struggling for moments to survive and we've gotta adapt to this new norm that we're in but that's that doesn't just mean us as consumers or me as as an individual human that that's all of us and more importantly that's every business so again part of this conversation is really to get everybody to know and understand that we're not talking to a certain subsect of people we're not talking to a certain size of business or a certain vertical of business this is every business of every size across every single vertical that exists so i'm going to take a breath sure i'm in sorry if i tole the stage for too long no no i love everything you're saying and i just wanted to remind everybody so there's an element here of sounding like an enterprise business yourself but really just sounding like all of your sounding in the right way that all of your clients are already gonna start to expect right all consumers who are spending money at target and in you know in these stats are also the ones who are hiring lawyers or financial planners that you know people are the ones who are starting to have these expectations and it is across the board people and so sounding like an enterprise business yourself is one thing that's really important but when you're when you're thinking about this client journey you have to also remember that when you are selling to an enterprise business or a bigger business or even a mid-sized business you know you are trying to sell your services or your products to these businesses you really are still talking to a person it is a person in this business and you know there's an element of determining who the decision maker is in that company but that person also goes to target that person also gets text messages from their dentist and their doctor reminding them of appointments that person expects to make a phone call and have it sound right and have it you know you pick up the phone every single time and so you know when you're putting together your systems and thinking about how to really accelerate your own sound even as a small business and using technology to do that don't forget that the journey that somebody's going on that's still that is a person you know that is a person who has expectations and who is busy you know if they're working for nextiva they're working 12 and 14 hours a day and um and they really want to get to the point yeah i think the key and all and all of that and what what katherine had just said is that the baseline has changed and it is what it is as you know as i'm talking to different um entrepreneurs and uh you know out there across the country i think there's a lot of pushback like part of what catherine just said was not sexy didn't sound fun what do you mean 12 14 hours i gotta i have to give people whatever they want whenever they need it listen this is a reality so you can either push against it and and not go with it or you can lean into it and make it work for you which is part of the reason why we wanted to have this this webinar so we could share some of this technology because that's what's going to make it easier for you at the end of the day you've got to lean into it you've got to leverage the tech that's out there leverage the resources that are out there for small business and the ones that are taking advantage of this sooner are the ones that are going to thrive um because best believe it's happening whether we want it to or not it's happening so lead into it so i'm excited to hear um and kelsey i'd love to hear you talk a little bit about uh the smith ai solution for for smv and how you can kind of help free up time right because now that's what captain just talked about was talked about time like working 14 15 16 17 hours but you can leverage some tech tech and companies like smith ai and there's so and solutions like those to free up time for you and your staff to kind of bring some of the focus to some of the other things we want to talk about yeah absolutely um so one of the most important things um when we're talking about this sort of communication with with people who have expectations is um i know catherine said there's still a lot of there's a lot of people in the future who want to text and and want to talk to you on social media but there are still a lot of people calling your business there are people getting to your website they don't want to figure out your prices they want to talk to you right away and so they're going to call you especially those sort of older generations um you know maybe like older millennials and older than that they're just like i want to get to the point i want to call your business and the fact of the matter is the expectation there is that you're going to pick up the phone every single time nobody is hitting voicemail anymore nobody even leaves a voicemail anymore i mean maybe my mom does but other than that i like i haven't even gotten a voicemail other than from spam and forever they are if they are finding your solution and they're calling you then they are and they're reaching a voicemail then they're calling the next company down the google list if they're already a client and they're calling you and they're not reaching you and they're just reaching your voicemail i mean that's creating this sort of bad client experience for them but mostly people just want to get their issue addressed so what you can use virtual receptionist to do is to make sure that that call is answered that that person answering is friendly that that person answering can actually you know the smith ai technology when we onboard people to our platform we will ask for a bunch of your information and even if you are currently a smith ai client like make sure that our receptionists have a whole profile built out with do people constantly ask the same questions you know give us the answers and so our receptionist can say you know oh uh this person's in court on tuesdays these you know this uh this firm you know only other our consultation fees are 200 an hour that kind of thing that can really address that question initially so that you as the you know professional don't have to get on the line immediately but um you can you can really customize this right so if you do want to take some of your calls some of the time you can set up these sort of schedules to where or or you know if you have like a in-house solution if you've got somebody answering calls in-house you can set up your schedule so that the receptionist only answered after hours and on the weekends so you're still answering those calls you know like catherine was saying there are still people who are like i just got done with my day it's 9 00 p.m i want to pay this bill or you know i just got in a crash i need a lawyer now but it's like saturday like there's there's still people who are going to be calling your business and so providing this coverage on like a 24 7 basis is you know really effective in order to like create this super professional super enterprise communication platform yo see i think you made a tremendous point in that in that the human element is important and that's one thing i don't want to get lost in this whole discussion is technology matters right but um i'm a huge advocate of using technology to forge better and deeper greater relationships right so whether that's business or personal so in the business environment we're talking about calls like people are still going to call to your point people are going to call when they call what happens when they call do they get a voicemail do they get um do they get you fumbling to pick your phone up and say hey or are they getting a professional answering on the other on the other end where it sounds like an enterprise business because again that's what to to catherine's point that's where the expectation is now the expectation is here so if it's anything less than here you're losing so i love that captain i want to bounce back to you real quick and because i know we wanted to get into this a i'm excited about ai so i know we wanted to get into ai a little bit um and by the way again i want to encourage you guys if you have any questions please please please pop those questions in there we want to make sure that we're answering whatever questions that you have um again the the topic of this is really how to leverage these enterprise tools for small small to medium business and um and to win so kelsey just went through smith ai solution i think that's a tremendous one a tremendous solution for for smbs to really feel and sound like an enterprise um katherine what's sexy over there with with next eva and ai oh all right so there what i what i would suggest to every business is number one look at and think about your automation strategy so to ronnelle's point it's here guys the future is now um the the whole thought process of robots is a reality uh and to jamal to ronel's point the quicker you adopt the better off you're going to be so my first skynet's one skynet one okay it's it's done terminators are on the way right my first thing uh my first suggestion would be come up with an automation strategy my second recommendation would be crawl walk run and what i mean by that is a lot of times as business owners we see nice big shiny objects and we just want to gravitate toward and we want to bite off the the entire solution all at once i would not recommend doing that as a business owner what i recommend doing is again creating a strategy around it and then have a phased approach into how you progress into the automation stack so what i mean by that is you've got kelsey and you've got artificial receptionists that's a whole one aspect of it right so you now you have people that can come in and then they can be you when you're not available or they can they can augment your customer experience so that you always have a live answer a great answer a great response take that a step further and think about ways that you can automate things for your clients and what i mean by that is self-service so again i talked about telling alexa i need groceries she somehow magically figures out how to get them delivered we have the same level of technology at nextiva that you can leverage as a business and what i mean by that is you can start to think about and create self-service applications for your clients so that your clients can do things like pay a bill at 2 30 in the morning they can go and they can do that with bot technology or maybe they want to call and check the status of an order or maybe they want to change the shipping address of an order or maybe they want to change the time of their appointment or maybe they want to transfer funds from this account to that account all of those types of activities can be done 100 artificially and i know that sounds super crazy and some of you go i hate those systems and i just want to hang up or i hit zero zero zero zero zero zero zero well the truth is guys that technology has come so far so far the point now where it's actually learning behavior it's not just artificial it's not just using your voice prompts to route you through a system if you will it's learning behavior it's multilingual speaks 135 languages in every dialect of every language it has a sentiment capabilities so it can tell if you're angry or if you're not and it can make decisions based on how you're communicating with it or the things that you're saying keywords that you're using and so become super super powerful for that customer experience because now i'm no longer calling in in zero zero zero zero zero zero zero i'm saying things and i'm having an artificial conversation that's actually way more beneficial than i could have ever imagined because this bot is telling me who i am why i'm calling the last time i called do i want to talk to the same person that i talked to before or am i just calling to uh update something in my account and that to me is a great experience right that is that is what i'm searching for as a consumer and i guarantee you every gen zer in this country is searching for as well because that allows me to do those things in minutes the truth is nobody wants to sit on hold for 45 minutes to talk to somebody who's going to do something for them that they could have gotten done in the first 10 seconds they were on the phone so as long as you start to think about tasks within your own operation that are considered mundane repetitive um things that your humans could be better served doing what they were hired to do i mean i've had so many conversations with receptionists for example not to steal your thunder kelsey but i have receptionists that say to me if i have to give directions one more time i'm going to lose it because i was not hired to give people directions on how to get to my office so using technology they can automatically figure out oh you're here okay you're going to take the 10 freeway you're going to get off at this landmine you're going to turn left that all can be done artificially without having to use a human so those are the types of things that i really want people to start thinking about because so ronnelle's point it's here whether you like it or not you're better off getting on board sooner rather than later and if you're gonna do it again go by my suggestion of crawl walk run expose yourself a little and then by over time get yourself to where you have a full automation plan so catherine um i love i love your your what you just said and it really really ties into one of the questions that we have we have a question from marlin and his question was regarding the human the human element and his question was how do you keep the human touch you elevate your tech and i love it because what you guys just did was explain it right so in this scenario where where smith ai and next diva just would work symbiotically like the idea is not to take humans out of it it's to serve people at a higher level it's to create to to to um create the sort of customer experience that they want so in that and what the example that you use catherine we're using ai to take care of that simple stuff like listen if i just want to know the balance on something i just want to change into my appointment to my my dentist or whatever um that's what we're we're using that and then when when we trickle it through we create an ivr tree that where when it gets when we need a live operator we've got that professional smith ai operator on the on the other line that's giving you the presence that enterprise presence that you want to have i think that is awesome and i think that's a great way to use it so we have a question from from jacqueline and jacqueline this is this is a great question because if we throw it around all the time in tech and we just assume everyone knows what we're talking about the question is can you define cloud who wants to take that who i'll take that all day long so i'm kind of like i talked about in the beginning cloud is basically if you if you just think about it as data that lives in the universe right it's just in the air and you get it by connecting to it so we use what's called ip or internet all of you've heard of internet um but by connecting via the internet we have the ability to pull that information down so whether that's pulling it to a computer pulling it to a cell phone pulling it to a tablet but that basically just gives us unlimited storage of data and information and once we've built that cloud if you will or put that data in that location now like i said we can pull it down to different devices we can pull it down to different instances or applications and to what i was talking about earlier that's how we can start using some artificial intelligence because artificial intelligence is in the cloud right so that is basically just using bots or bot technology to analyze that data and utilize that data for efficiency purposes so i'll give you a couple of examples just to get some clarity around this so if i'm a consumer and i'm calling in let's call it to my insurance company and my insurance company can see when my call comes in what my phone number is right everybody knows what caller id is everybody's caller id is is broadcast nationally at this point so this bot can take that caller id and it can look in that cloud and say where do i see this phone number somewhere else and it's going to find that oh you have a record that has your name and you have a two-car insurance policy you have a umbrella coverage over your house you have um your your preemies is paid on a monthly basis not in a six-month increments and your total amount that you pay per month is 229 and seven cents so that bought just by seeing my phone number was able to surf that cloud and pull all that information back so now that that bot has that information now i can do a lot of cool things like ask the bot questions li e well what is my policy number right or i can say to that bot you know what i need to add another car to my policy because i you don't have one of my cars covered or i need to file a complaint and and i want to make sure that you know it's on vehicle a under this policy so let's tie it all together and that's really what a bot is tasked to do it's tasked to bring all of that data together into such a format that as a consumer i'm talking to somebody who's intelligent even though it's a bot who knows my name knows my policy number knows what my coverage is knows how much money i pay every month and then i can leverage that to do things like add to my policy so now it has the ability to just add that in there as i speak it out and now i have new coverage on a new and guess what you just sold something without having to talk to someone that's where it gets super fun but um again back to the cloud question it's really just data being located in what we call a cloud it's not a literal cloud in the sky but it's basically data in the uh infrastructure of the world that you can pull down from the infrastructure of the world to your personal device or your personal instance hopefully that helped and didn't confuse i'll give you guys a real world cloud example there you go okay so uh how long was this 15 years ago 15 years ago um i owned and operated a contact center and i purchased uh roughly 80 000 in servers from a company by the name of touchstar who was a who was a call center contact center company and we put those servers in my office and we were off to go and those servers were used for supporting a call center right well here in 2021 i can for i don't know uh fifteen hundred dollars a month pay a subscription to nextiva for those same type of services much ten times better than what we ever had back then and i don't have any servers i don't have any equipment i don't maintain anything all that stuff is in data centers somewhere in wherever um catherine puts her stuff right and through the cloud that's how we access it we access it through the internet so we access those servers and now we no longer need to need to have those servers on site um there's lots of different solutions that people use every day that are cloud-based solutions like microsoft 365 is a cloud-based solution these are things that we used to have to install software on our laptops and and our hard drives for and we no longer have to um and so what that has done for the smb and why you guys should care a lot about that is it's driven down the price now you can afford this stuff remember i paid 80 grand for something now that you can you can get for a subscription of i just throw it i just threw that price out what is it what it actually is i don't know maybe it's a grand but whatever the bottom line is is that it's a a much smaller price that's something that smb can access now that used to be only an enterprise level um uh either product or service in most cases yeah i'll just throw out one other kind of assimilation to the cloud and that's this awesome company by the name of netflix um this company changed video programming for life um and they are the cloud so that is what the cloud version of um movies looks like so we used to go to what was that place called blockbuster i think and we used to rent those tapes and we had to like put them in a machine to watch them that's kind of like old-school communication where it's not cloud-based now it's cloud-based so i turn on my computer and i can pull down any one of those movies from the cloud without having to go to blockbuster so that's just another analogy of what cloud is but it is it should be impacting every piece of your business not just communication so ronnelle brought up office 365 so using email from the cloud is a very popular thing right now but so is sas in general so having a a crm that's cloud-based that allows you to manage all of your clients in a single pane of glass if you will that's also a cloud technology that's very very popular right now and the truth is as business owners you should have a cloud strategy just like an automation strategy because that's really where the future is at and of course in our new climate we don't have buildings anymore we don't have offices anymore so we don't have the liberty of doing what ronnelle did 15 years ago putting a server in a building is going to do you no good because unless you're in that building you can't use it um so that's another reason why cloud is so important and has really evolved in recent times oh we're all getting dated here that's all the comments i keep saying um i i like your point about a crm and this is something that is uh increasingly popular and available financially for smaller businesses and it is uh just to bring us back to the um communication topic it is something that is very very crucial to provide a good um experience for the people that you're talking to right this is most of them are cloud like cloud-based if you find one that's not just walk away um i think we've i think we've hammered in that point but it's basically a platform that um allows you to log all of your communications with a client right so sometimes we talk to somebody and they're a new lead and then you might not talk to them for two more weeks because they don't need your services yet or you know if there's just a longer buying process if they it takes them a while to go through their internal processes to get buy-in from the right people in their company you might not talk to them for another month and if you're anything like me you're not going to remember you know that you talked about uh what their pain points are why it is that they're hiring you in the first place where they live all that kind of stuff can be logged in a crm platform and you know this is the kind of stuff that even if you have a receptionist service or you are working through um a phone system platform like nextiva you can have things automatically sent to this crm platform so that when you go back and this goes back to sort of having the human element that goes alongside the ai when you go back to have that meaningful conversation you do not have to backtrack you don't have to annoy the person because they remember you probably you just have a lot of people that you're talking to you can get straight to the point you can you know come in where the conversation stopped the last time and so this is you know having a good crm and using the automation parts of it and also you know a lot of the functionality of it is a way that like you know we talk about the cloud and it's sort of this weird concept that you can't necessarily wrap your head around but this is one of the ways that you can actually use all of those things to create a really good client experience and i'll just mention that like a really good client experience is one that your client doesn't notice if you pick up the phone and already are taking off where you left off and you don't have to recap and you remember that they you know mentioned to their cat that is a really really good client experience and getting a crm which is now something that's very very accessible to small and medium-sized businesses and plugging it into your other communication platforms is really a way to you know use what we have nowadays and use the technology and sound big without having to spend big for it love it hey jacqueline had a question um that it's great it's a great question and i think that everyone this is something you should be thinking about especially now where security is always it's a big deal right it's a big deal right and um her question was cloud how secure is cloud and captain i want to bounce this to you before you answer this i want to say to jacqueline how secure do you think those servers were sitting in in an hvac closet in my office as opposed to subscribing to this service from a company like nextiva that has multi-million dollar facilities that are climate controlled and have all security up the physical and um data breach security which which captain can kind of talk to but that is a very valid important question but just i want to take you guys back to the environment as an smb that we kind that we were in prior to cloud applications being available to us uh we were really susceptible back then and i know whenever some sort of data breach happens it gets all the news right and it's it's a big deal because that's where we that's the sort of culture that we live in right we get hyperbolic and one thing happens and like every that means everything's bad um not necessarily the case now captain i'll bounce to you to address that question in terms of security is it safer yeah so you actually you just hit the nail on the head it is safer it's a lot safer but more importantly there are rules and regulations around security that protect small business owners so i want to start with that um nextiva as a provider we have rules and regulations that we have to put into play for your protection whether you know you need them or you don't so let's start with that um that's kind of your service carrier's responsibilities but if you want to take that a step further there are a lot of new things that have been added to this type of technology for security for example if you happen to be in the healthcare space hipaa compliancy is uber important and we all know it uh and there's lots of fear around security when it comes to hipaa compliance the truth is we've been able to perfect our craft to where there are things like point-to-point encryption meaning that that traffic is not translatable so even if somebody were to be able to hack it or access it it means nothing it comes across in foreign language and and binomial or letters and numbers that don't make sense right so there's ways that we've created protections around your data to make sure that your data is secure so i would say that's number one number two however and probably more important than security is redundancy so one of the things that ronnelle talked about is his one server in his office didn't do him any good if he wasn't in that office it was in a closet that wasn't climate controlled collecting dust and god only knows what but if that were to die so would his phone service right so and that's a bigger concern that i think all small businesses should consider and that is your if you're not in the cloud you don't have the redundancy or the replication of your system for somewhere to fall back on and so if you happen to be let's call it florida and there's a hurricane and your phone system is wiped out uh at in nextiva's world we've got eight other places we can route your traffic across the country so we're not stuck to florida and hopefully it's just affecting one area i always like to say though if it's not and all eight of nextiva's data centers which are kind of circular around the country go down we have a much bigger problem than worrying about your phone system but that's something that you don't get if you're using just an analog phone or a phone system that you have in your office that's another real big advantage to the cloud so i would be remiss not to mention that ronaldo agreed there was one other question that was asked and before we run out of time i have to plug nextiva real quick on something um there's been several questions about are you talking about salesforce is salesforce's crm is zoho a crm yeah those are all crm platforms um salesforce happens to be the powerhouse of the sales crm world but for a lot of small businesses it's not affordable i'm just going to be kind of the honest person here what nextiva has that's totally different unique and no one else in the marketplace has is we have the ability to incorporate crm with our communication tool what i mean by that is by purchasing the nextdiva next os platform not only do you get all of the sophisticated uh functions of a phone system so the ability to have a device anywhere in the world get your calls anywhere you want have sophisticated phone trees that make you sound bigger than life all of those things are great but included in our platform we also have crm functionality so that you can start to leverage our tools to gather client information to make sure that you have all accurate information when you do that it creates things like a screen pop so when a call comes in and the customers record is found it pops on your screen so not only do i know who i'm talking to but i've got the last 10 times somebody's interacted with them how they felt about it what their interaction was and i can go into that conversation a lot more educated to kelsey's point um so i did want to just plug real quick if you're looking for a solution that includes that crm piece maybe you're using quickbooks or spreadsheets as your kind of customer management today think about nextiva as a solution thirty dollars all in including your voice per user you get crm which is kind of unheard of in our industry right now in terms of a rate and i hate to throw rates out there but i want to be very clear if that is you let us know we'd be happy to supply that with you because having a crm is very important that's a great lead into um introducing jamel this point um so we're going to go ahead we've got jamel on the on on the webinar today who is uh uh next to a channel manager and for those of you that are that have interest in looking at some of these next diva solutions um he's gonna be your guy so i wanna go ahead and introduce jamel and let him tell you guys how you can reach out and connect with him jimmel thanks ronald yeah this is jamel pearson here i'm channel manager here with next diva um yeah so basically what we can do is uh once we get an idea of uh who we have on the call today i'll be reaching out directly um to you guys to uh just introduce myself make sure you have my contact information uh we could do some quick demos whatever we need to do to earn your business that's what i'm here for so appreciate that rhino awesome thank you so much for joining and and kelsey as far as a smith ai solution who do we reach out to how do we how do we take advantage of of this great um service where we're leveraging tech and sounding like an enterprise but being an smb um well you can uh i i will also send an email out after this um webinar with a recording of it if you like have any more questions or want me to go into anything else just email me back and i'll reach out to you and i can answer any questions i'm actually a tech um technology expert um for small medium sized businesses so i don't just know about um smith ai itself but also how you can incorporate it with a you know crm with a scheduling platform with a payment platform sort of do that crawl walk run thing that katherine was talking about um see where you can start and where you can really take it um but you can also just head to smith.ai and sign up and uh or get a free consultation and and figure out what it is that you know you can solve in your business uh with our services if you do um use the code nextdiva for 100 off your first month um and yeah you don't have to you should be a nextiva customer but you don't have to just if you um attended this webinar or watch this video um go ahead and do that and yeah we we want to solve some problems for you and so um reach out and let us help you figure out how well as we start to close here first and foremost i want to thank you guys the audience for uh for spending some time with us this afternoon for those of you that are watching this video and recording thank you for for giving us some time out of your day we greatly appreciate it and i want and i want to thank kelsey and catherine um you guys make me smarter just being virtually on the same zoom issue so i really appreciate you guys appreciate you guys taking the time to share this great knowledge that you guys have and and if you're not connected to catherine and kelsey or myself connect to us like uh connect to us you have some questions i'm always happy to answer questions i'm super passionate about business super passionate about tech and sales and leveraging this great technology to to provide again better outcomes for our customers and to sell more to sell more um let me ake sure i didn't miss any last questions before we wrap all right marlon says we made him smarter that's a win thank you very much for hosting rannell it was uh really wonderful to have you on um i know you do a series on your own uh that involves more alcohol than this does um so make sure everybody if you if you connect with rennell you know and and get signed up for one of his events uh it's it's definitely a lot of fun i'm sure it is and thank you for that um again thank you all for joining and have a great rest of your day you