Why isn't every Shopify store using AI for customer service?

Jay Myers: Lisa, what inspired you to start Siena?

Lisa Popovici: So it was a combination of our feedback that we got from our customers. At Cartloop before Siena, we were working on a conversational SMS marketing platform for Shopify brands. And because SMS was the channel that we were focusing on, they were always asking us like, can we do email or chat?

Can we do other channels? Because we're drowning in tickets and 70 percent of our sales. Questions are literally the same, like where is my order, the popular ones, and they were really struggling. And obviously, you know, chatbots were not cutting it. And then also it was this customer feedback was combined with our vision of how the ideal customer experience should look like.

We're, we were always very bullish on this, uh, particular part of e commerce, a conversational commerce, the customer experience. And we try to look forward and we knew that the future was AI. And we started digging into the customer service market versus just the SMS marketing market. And we realized there's so much.

So many inefficiencies, there's so many pain points that have not been yet solved. So we try to look, okay, like how does the ideal CX look like today? How do humans actually do their job and work backwards from there and try to replicate like that experience. And it was a combination. So our vision and then customer feedback, market validation, just doing a lot of research, and when we decided that, okay, let's actually tap into, you know, The customer service market and address a bigger, a bigger challenge.

We wanted to make sure that our vision and the product that we wanted to build actually. Is going to be much needed. And we did, we started doing a lot of like discovery with our existing customers, with other businesses as well, just trying to really validate properly the idea that we were about to build, this is one of the biggest learnings is that, It's not enough asking people like, Hey, would you use this?

And if they say yes, that's not the answer that you're looking for. So we really like, we love the mom frame. Well, mom test framework, not sure if you've read that little book, but it's a really good one.

Jay Myers: Uh, I don't know that framework, but I always say. When you're asking someone if it's a good idea and they say, great, and they say, great, would take out your credit card and I'll get you.

You could be my first customer when it's ready. And they go, Oh, I don't know if it's that good of an idea. It's the money always talks. Okay. So. What exactly is CNAI?

Lisa Popovici: Yeah, so CNAI is an empathic AI agent designed for e commerce businesses. And this agent, it's a replica of a human agent that takes a seat into your ticketing system and starts working alongside your customer service team and can help you automate very advanced use cases across all channels and languages.

There it is. So we do email, chats, social media, DM, comments, WhatsApp, SMS, whatever your preferences are, and we tackle use cases that go beyond the basic FAQs, we integrate with order management systems with Shopify subscription platforms to do the end to end management of all of these like.

Transactional aspects of e commerce. And we also recently just launched a custom actions capability, which allows our customers to plug in any other vendors or custom backends that they might have. So they can create very granular and nuanced actions. For example, we just had, we just had someone integrate their, their own subscription platform.

It's like a custom thing that they've built so they can actually have Subscriptions or skip or pause or change the frequency or even replacement. So there's a lot of like advanced things that you can do. And I think one of the biggest differentiators of Siena is definitely it's modularity.

Jay Myers: I want to go back to something you said.

You said it is an agent, which I think is, I want to be really clear on something. It's not the chat tool software. It is an agent that works within existing software. Merchants already using, correct?

Lisa Popovici: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So we're very much specialized in providing an AI agent that takes a seat inside of whatever ticketing system you might be using, whether it's Zendesk, Customer, Gorgias, Intercom, and you treat it as a real human agent, like the way you train.

Siena is through natural and natural English, plain, plain writing instructions, give the context, the right context. So it's when you train it, it's literally the closest thing. As you picking up the phone, calling your human agent and telling them what to do when it comes to returns. So it's, it's, it's very easy to use and way different than how we were used to building automated flows so far.

Jay Myers: And so a lot of these platforms have some version of an AI support tool. I know Zendesk does, I think Gorgias, I think does intercom. Do you see it? Is it, do brands use them in parallel? Do they use the. Whatever chat bot tool that Zendesk has and Siena, or do they, if they have Siena as an agent, there's no need for that.

They can be on a less expensive Zendesk license or how does that work?

Lisa Popovici: Yeah. Yeah. So Siena. And these help desk platforms, they're very complimentary. They work very well together. So again, Siena is just like another person that you hired and you give them a user seat inside of Zendesk or Gorgias. So they can absolutely use.

You know, like almost all of the senders for Gorgias functionalities, because that's what they do. That is their core business being a ticketing system and providing those centralization of tickets, the inbox and analytics, all of that. That's definitely not. You know, what do we focus on at CNS? So we just focus on making sure you're hiring this AI agent that can actually automate as many of your use cases as possible and leaving enough room and bandwidth for the actual humans to do the important things, not the mundane and the repetitive things.

So maybe for example. We've had some use cases recently where the team at Cotterwee, they were able to finally launch their white gloves program, which was in the backlog for over a year, just because they couldn't do it because they were drowning in tickets. But now because of Siena, they finally got the time to do it or the team at Mad Happy, which finally were able to implement a loyalty program because it just, Siena took care of so many things.

So they finally had the time to do that. Now to cover like. What you mentioned, yes, these help desks, they've added their own AI add on capabilities. I think the majority of them have that, but again, like it's the main differentiating. Factor here is Siena being a specialized AI agent, and then the help desk, their main focus and what they do best is being a ticketing system.

There are some competing features at the moment. So we, even for example, when it comes to maybe smaller businesses that are just starting out, they might not have like very big advanced goals with AI yet. Uh, we actually recommend starting with the, um, AI add ons that these helpdesk that they're using are offering.

I think that's the best way to start. And as you're scaling, as you're growing, you might have more clarity over, you know, your goals with AI and how do you want to actually approach it? Absolutely. It's a way like recommended to, to look for an advanced AI solution like Siena that can, you know, really.

You can get very granular, you can customize and you can do a lot of additional, like just other jobs to be done.

Jay Myers: Is it a fair statement? And this may be, I don't know the space super well, but to say from an out, from my perspective, the AI tools that. Zendesk and other service desk tools provide is really just a, I see it as a bit of a better knowledge base.

Like they, they're trained on the knowledge base that's there. And then it turns it into a conversational experience with a knowledge base where Siena. Can do that, but also can do actions. Like, can I process a refund? I need to cancel my order. Can I update my subscription? Can I stuff like that? To me, that seems like a differentiator.

Is that, would you say when someone says what's unique about. Siena AI agent versus just an AI bot that comes with Zendesk. That's how it would that be an accurate view of it?

Lisa Popovici: Yes and no. So when you train Siena, you do have the ability to upload, um, a bunch of knowledge sources. This is actually how it's called inside of Siena Knowledge Sources.

So you can upload your Shopify product catalog, or maybe you have Google Docs, Google Sheets. You can upload your entire website, your entire knowledge center, like your help center, from the ticketing system that you're using. So Siena can easily use All the documentation that you already have to answer the basic customer questions.

And then when you want to really cover more advanced actions, that's where you would build out those automations with instructions, with context, with connecting your, you know, the other tools that where CNN would need to go and actually take care of those transactions, such as Shopify or. Even Bold, we were discussing about trying to, to see, to integrate with Bold and be able to support Bold customers with their subscription use cases.

Jay Myers: Yeah. To me, it's those, that's what I, what really makes Siena stand out is it's a capable agent. It's not just reciting content that's in a knowledge forum and reciting it, it actually can carry out actions.

Lisa Popovici: Yeah. And what's very unique is that, as I said, it's a very contextual. And it really replicates the way humans think.

Uh, so first it applies, like it tries to understand the entire context of what the customer is trying to achieve. It can even ask clarifying questions. For example, when it comes to subscriptions, let's say someone reaches out and says, Hey, I want to cancel. So Siena is trained to first ask for the reason, Hey, like, why do you want to cancel?

And then offer alternatives because maybe that subscriber does not know that they have the option to skip or update the frequency or maybe pause. And then Siena would offer those. And then only after the customer comes back with the final decision. Or if they're very adamant about a specific, no, I want to do this, or yes, I want to cancel, then she will go ahead and take that action.

So it applies that reasoning. And we just recently launched, we're going to announce it this week, our reasoning feature. So basically under in the Siena inbox, cause you have a mirror of watching your ticketing system. You can see in the Siena inbox and see all of the answers, whether Siena responded to the customer or the agents, you can see literally everything.

It's like an inbox. And then. Under every single Siena response, there is a little reasoning drop down where Siena explains herself, like, what did she do? What was her thought process? So you can really understand now where Siena went to get that information, what type of action it took, didn't go into Shopify or a specific third party platform to, uh, Take care of that transaction.

And what are the next back steps? So like you really get a full description of her thought process, which is such a good representation of like how we've built this product at Siena. We're very focused on like transparency, control, safety, making sure the there's like full accuracy in their response.

Yeah, uh, making sure there's like interactions where humans don't even need to interfere because the entire ticket was co completely closed by Siena, and it's really good for your fine tuning process. So for the actual optimization of automation, so let's say there's like a response and in the reasoning, maybe it was not like a specific step was maybe skipped or maybe Siena should have provided an additional thing.

So through the reasoning, you understand her thought process and know where to go, what to do, maybe what additional instruction or context to give Siena so the next time she will cover everything. So it's just really cool. It makes the actual optimization process much smoother and we're. Constantly investing in these control safety transparency features.

Jay Myers: Probably super helpful to understand too. If an answer that Siena gives maybe isn't exactly right. And you want to know, Oh, where did that come from? Why to be able to trace back

to the

Jay Myers: source, right? Like that, that to me, that's. Would be super valuable because otherwise it would be just like an employee.

If an employee gives the wrong answer, why did, where are you getting that information from? There's all ultimately some source of truth somewhere, right? So that's awesome.

What is some hesitation that some brands have, or like when you're on a call and call and do you find There's a certain mental hurdles. Are they afraid of AI? Are they worried that it's going to misrepresent a brand, their branding or their personas? And what are some mental blocks brands have trouble getting over to use Siena?

Lisa Popovici: Yeah, I would maybe I think I would describe the types of customers into today would put them into three categories. So the first category would be yes, like the skeptical folks that are still afraid of AI, they might have not had the Have any experience yet, maybe just with basic automation, which is like, you cannot compare it at all.

Uh, they're rule based and yeah, they're just like peeking, they're curious, or maybe they was, it's just part of their KPIs. Just go do your due diligence, find us a, an AI tool, because it's very popular and hot right now, but we have no idea what we're looking for or if we're actually ready for it. Second category, I would say are the more educated folks that have had Uh, experience with AI or automation in the past, but maybe they're just traumatized because their experience was not the best one.

So now they're doing a way better due diligence. They maybe want to go through a trial before they fully commit to a new vendor. Right. Because they've been burned in the past, so they don't want to make the same mistakes and they are actually. Putting so much more effort and like trying to make sure the vendor they're choosing now can actually solve for all their, you know, problems and also like, um, address some of the issues they've had in the past.

And then the third category I would say are the more. For visionaries, folks that are not afraid, they love embracing new technology, and they don't really, like, they're not getting panicked or scared if something does not go 100 percent differently, they are aware of the fact that AI, it is just Magical, but it's not yet magic and you do need that human input and like collaboration and you do need to put the resources and the work.

It really pays off. So they are the long term thinkers that like, this is pretty much where we want to bring all these like category one and category two. We want to bring them towards category three. And I do believe that it is our Our duty as one of the pioneers in AI agents for customer experience in e commerce to actually educate the net, like our community and the people and the businesses on how they can get to level three, let's say, but obviously it's a lot of like showing what's possible, uh, you know, continue building these features that allow for like transparent and collaboration between humans and AI and even the certification that we've launched.

I think that's made such a big impact because now before every, like every onboarding, like all of our customers, they go through the certification and it's like a, something like pops in their brain like, wow, oh my God, this, this makes so much sense now. I'm just so much. Like I feel so, so much more ready to actually tackle this new technology that is being put in front of me.

And I feel so much more confident and just, I trust my abilities now. And I'm slowly becoming an AI expert. These are the three main categories that we see at the moment. Yeah. Yeah.

Jay Myers: Super interesting. I actually, I wanted to ask you about the Siena certification. I wasn't, is that, so when brand signs up to use Siena, They have someone on their team that becomes Siena certified or when I first looked at it I thought it was there's Siena agencies like we have there's bold agencies that are certified for apps So that's an internal person that gets certified or is there external people that can help?

Brands launch Siena as well.

Lisa Popovici: Yeah, both, both, both. So the certification was designed for partners and customers. So we do give access to all of our partners, including consultants, including agencies or BPOs that we partner up with. And then we also. Give access to all of our customers. So it's definitely, there's, um, one AI manager.

We like to call it AI manager. You can also call it like the DRI, the direct responsible individual for implementing and managing a solution like Siena. So this is something that we In the pre like, yeah, pre sales process. We want to make sure we set the expectations. You need someone that will be able to, to take this responsibility and we'll work with our customer success team and we'll go through the certification and, uh, we'll make sure that we have this collaborative environment to get to the milestones that you want to get.

So they will absolutely, we absolutely recommend them getting certified, but then We also encourage, Hey, if there's all other stakeholders from your team that will be involved in the process or even your agents, it would be highly recommended that they go because they will understand and they will collaborate better with you.

They will know how to give feedback to Siena and maybe empower them to go and maybe make the tweaks or maybe. Give feedback or test some things in the platform themselves. So I think treating this as a team work, team effort has been resulting in the best success for our customers.

Jay Myers: Yeah, I think on a broader level, I think it's going to be pretty soon.

We started seeing AI departments within like it's, we never used to have a security department in 15 or 20 years ago for, or system ops and different. And so I think there's. I don't know. AI ops is going to become just a normal department in every single company. I think there's probably people doing it already, but yes, that makes a ton of sense.

I want to ask, go into a little bit on the actual setup and integration on Shopify. But one of the things like, I feel like we went over it really fast in the beginning. You can do it with WhatsApp, text, Facebook, Messenger, intercom, you listed a whole bunch. Now, Siena doesn't. necessarily power all those.

But if the customer service platform you're using supports those channels, then Siena works in it. Or. Is, is that okay. So if you're using.

Lisa Popovici: So right now, yeah, it depends on the customer service platform that you're using and through the customer service platform, we can help you automate across. Yeah. Yeah.

We do have our own chat that we will launch very soon. It's being used by our, our customer advisory board and our beta customers. So you will be able to leverage, you are able to leverage Siena chat in case you want to replicate. that iMessage experience, very conversational, that feeling of talking and texting with a friend without those buttons or like little pops and whatever, those things that we have on the original live chats of the world.

Yeah. But yeah, it now it works through the ticketing system. Yeah.

Jay Myers: Yeah. I think sometimes when you enter a chat, it sets a precedent right off the bat that it's a bot. It's a, what are you here? Today with questions for, and you select from three different things and then you select one and the list of more questions come up, you select another one.

And it, are you rolling that back and just starting conversational?

Lisa Popovici: Yeah, absolutely. So it's question, answer, question, answer.

Jay Myers: Yeah. So good. So that probably makes people less angry right off the bat when you feel like it's not a, it's not a bot. Does, is it, can it, can a brand have more than one? Siena agent, or is there typically one agent or is it different agents by channel or how does that work?

Lisa Popovici: Yes, they can have, they can create multiple personas inside of Siena. We call this functionality a persona studio. So in the persona studio, you can create multiple. agents, they can have different names, different set of context, different attributes, different instructions. And then you can deploy these agents slash personas across different channels, because obviously there's every channel is different, right?

Even the way you, maybe the use cases that you want to cover are different for email versus social media comments. Like you might not want to provide. Yeah. Sensitive information in the comments versus emails. Also on email, you might want to keep things more professional, maybe longer form. Comments or DMs can be short, sweet, concise, more, I don't know, fun, quirky, whatever it is that your brand represents.

Yeah.

Jay Myers: Can you make a persona angry?

Lisa Popovici: I don't know if our guardrails would, would allow that.

Jay Myers: Well, I'm thinking of there's some brands that like liquid death that maybe they want to like,

Lisa Popovici: controversial persona, but not swearing or like angry. Yeah. But you can absolutely do like sarcastic or more ironic and just, yeah, to match your brand.

That's the beauty of it. Yeah.

Jay Myers: Yeah. It's awesome. Actually, before this. I went on a few of your brands. I went on, not your brands, but brands using Siena. I went on Everyday Dose. I went on a couple others and I had some conversations and actually tried to trick it a little bit. And I was really impressed.

I had some, so Everyday Dose does some mushroom coffee. And then I, first I asked it about heavy metals and mushrooms and if there's any traces and they sent a PDF. Report, I guess it was a Siena agent and I asked, is this a bot or is this a person? And they said, just think of me as a friend who wants to help.

And it was good. And you

Lisa Popovici: can instruct it. So it really depends. This is a question. It's a very popular question. Right. Should I disclose or not that we're using AI and it's absolutely. Your decision, it's up to you. It's up to your, your policies and how do you want to communicate with your customers, but the majority of our customers do not disclose it's an AI.

They just use a real name. And if you know the, there's a more tech savvy customer that might figure it out. Siena can like, it will not be hidden necessarily unless you instruct her. To not say necessarily or mention AI, it's all about how you instruct, instruct CMS. So you can, it's very flexible. You can absolutely disclose it if you want to.

Jay Myers: Have you ever had anyone try to get like personal information or sensitive information through it? For example, Yes, we

Lisa Popovici: had once and it was such a good learning for us too. Yeah, I think the product team, yeah, really Learned a lot from that. Then they, they set up even more guardrails. Even

Jay Myers: just like competitive Intel, if I was a coffee shop, could, there's probably a lot of chatbots out there.

If I said, how many orders did you have today? It might be able to look that up. Or what was your. No, that's

Lisa Popovici: absolutely, that never happened. We were just more about. Trying to get information about Siena, like ourselves, not our customers. And then we just like, there was a good, like understanding, okay. Like we actually need to improve the guardrails there.

And, but like customer information. No, absolutely not. That's not possible.

Jay Myers: Okay. Okay. So now for integrating with Shopify, it's not a Shopify app, correct?

Lisa Popovici: Correct. Yeah. It's a platform agnostic tool. And. A very good example here is the team at Kitsch, they recently migrated from their old helpdesk to another one and they were able to literally in a few clicks just install Siena on their new helpdesk provider.

So this is the beauty. You can take Siena with you anywhere. You are not going to be locked in a specific platform just because of it. So I think that's what they really love. That's a great, that's a great taking your team with you. Like it's your person. Yeah. Yeah.

Jay Myers: So is it an app within the Zendesk app?

Lisa Popovici: No, it's not an app anywhere. It's not on the Shopify app store. We are available obviously on the Gorgias partner portal on all of these like partner portals. But the way you install it is through our own platform. And then when you connect it with, with the help desk, it's going to be done from inside of the CNR platform.

You just add your domain, there's a few extra steps there, but like typically in two to five minutes, you can just have your helpdesk integrated with Siena and you can start processing tickets.

Jay Myers: Okay, and what does onboarding time typically look like? Or

yeah,

Jay Myers: I guess this probably depends on size. Like maybe I should ask this question first.

Like what's a good size of a brand that should be using Siena? Is there a, do you say like at a certain amount of orders per month or tickets per month, or is it, could anyone? Use it or what does that look like?

Lisa Popovici: Yes. So absolutely anyone can use it, but it makes more sense for you as a business and for just as a business cost to look at AI, once you hit at least 2, 000 or 3, 000 tickets per month.

So we look at the ticket volume. It just makes more sense when you like get to a specific volume to invest in AI. Yeah.

Jay Myers: Okay. And then, so for a store that's doing, let's just say 3, 000 tickets a month, how fast can they be up and running with a Siena agent in their environment?

Lisa Popovici: Yeah. So the, the awarding does not necessarily like, it is not real, like the time, time to value is not correlated to how many tickets you have.

We have an onboarding process that we like kept improving over and over again. And now we found such a successful formula and you can actually see the time to value has reduced since even last year, right? But basically the beauty of the platform is that you can have automations running in minutes. Now, the, like the more lengthy process is the actual QA and making sure we review the initial responses and we are happy with them.

And then if they need optimization, we take the time and go and add maybe an additional instruction or maybe add another automation or upload another knowledge source. So we make sure slowly we fill Um, we fill all CNS gaps because it's pretty much the same as it's a person that you just hire, right?

You bring them into the team is their first week. Uh, you want to give them as much context, as much documentation as possible so they can learn and start tackling tickets, right? Because if you only give them one document that only covers returns, but then you give them access to all of your tickets. in your system.

So they will just try to make things up because they have no idea. They only were trained on how returns work. So it's pretty much the same with Siena, right? But the beauty is that you can have automations up and running in minutes. And the way we do things is we look at, we look in their ticketing system and we look in their analytics and let's see, like, what are the most popular inquiries that you're getting?

And start with those because we want to cover the The use cases that are the highest in percentage of like occurrence. And we started building those out. And most of the time there's like the basic options. Like, where's my order? How can I return? Maybe some product questions, all of these things. And we write, like we create all of those.

We can also import macros. We just upload knowledge sources. So we have some quick, easy wins because basically you just need to drag and drop some, some sources and then Siena can learn from those. Makes sense. In the first days, first week or two, we actually enable these automations under internal notes.

So what internal notes are, they are just drafted responses by Siena that are only visible to the agents and yourself, so they will not be going to the end customer, so you can have a. You can see how Siena responds, but you have that like assurance that, Hey, like these responses are not yet going to, to our customers.

And we are in charge of actually sending them out. And also it's a good, it's a good time frame for you to see, yeah, like a good understanding for you to see, okay, is Siena actually meeting our expectations? And. What, where there's room for improvement and optimization. Once you feel like, Oh, like these internal notes are really good.

Like you see, and I really responds very well. You can just turn that off and go fully autonomous. So that's like just an intermediate step in our onboarding process.

Jay Myers: So is the flow of the internal notes, if I'm a support agent, human support agent, and I'm. Answering tickets in Gorgias and a ticket comes in, Siena puts the reply of what it would have replied.

And then I can either approve it, not approve it, or suggest an edit. And then

Lisa Popovici: you can, yes, you can approve it, not approve it, give feedback. But then if you want to use that response, you just copy, paste and send it to the customer.

Jay Myers: Gotcha. And is that only for email tickets? Would that, can I approve it? Do the same thing like in a chat,

Lisa Popovici: any channel, any, any, any chat.

Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah.

Jay Myers: So, okay. So that, I mean, obviously that makes a lot more sense when I think about onboarding. It's an iterative process where probably in the beginning, there may be 20 percent of tickets are a Siena, then 40, and then it scales up. Right. I see on your website, you're saying on average, it's around 80 percent now, like a lot of.

Brands that are fully onboarded. Siena is doing 80 percent of all.

Lisa Popovici: Yeah, we have customers that are doing 80 percent and you're just crushing it and they knew. So the main difference here, and I think this is something that I'm very passionate about is that these. These types of customers and businesses who are automating 70, 80 percent and they're very successful with AI, there's one driver behind their success and that is curiosity and people who were very curious.

They, when they started and when they even started conversations with us before fully getting on board, they were relentless about learning, even in the pre sales process, or maybe they've gone through a trial and even in the trial, you could see that they were like sponges. They just wanted to build so much, do so much, test so much.

They were not afraid of putting in the work we've had. For example. The team at Terra Cafe were among our first customers and Madison, who at that time, she and Kate, they implemented Siena. So what they've done in literally the first week, they've built 100 automations and they were like relentlessly testing them and making sure they were optimizing everything.

So they really. We're very passionate about it. And that's, I had recently a, an event where I was a speaker and I talked about how to build AI first teams. And I'm always like challenging people, like to ask themselves, like managers, are you hiring people that are passionate about AI? Are you embedding AI into your culture?

Are you investing in AI infrastructure as a strategic advantage? Because if you really want to It's not just about let's just do some AI, whatever, find an AI app for customer service and just test it out because I saw it's cool because I've seen it on Twitter. Everyone is using it and we're not. No, you need the right people, culture and infrastructure.

And you really need to brainstorm with your leadership team or with your founding team. Okay. What, why are we, why do we want to use AI? Like where, what are our actual goals? Where do we see the business in 6, 12, 18, 24 months? And then what are the first maybe areas that we could deploy AI that are. Going to have the biggest impact, but you do need to think about this like a long term and you do need to make sure you actually have the right resources and team, the right mindset, if you want to actually get that successful.

And I feel like on the customer service side, like the customer service roles are evolving into high value, uh, positions that really require analytical and strategic skills. And I feel like, um, because of the team not being like always, you know, bogged down by repetitive tasks, they will become AI managers overseeing these AI agents that handle the groundwork.

So that's why I do believe, as you said, yes, we are seeing more and more like, AI specialists, AI managers or operations roles being opened because the way you will have to blend these set of skills in your team and the way you will have to build teams will be a little bit different. And even at Siena, like one of our hiring questions in the interview process is like, can you tell me some interesting use cases you are using AI today?

Like personal, but also work related. Um, Can you tell me some interesting tools, AI tools that you recently discovered? I do not want to hear tragedy. Or if you're telling me to be fine, but tell me something interesting that I haven't maybe tried before. So that's how you like, just. Create a culture and like, just change the way we've been doing things.

Jay Myers: That's so interesting. I think I can't remember which company it was. They found, so they found that people that who use Chrome instead of this was like, Five or 10 years ago, it was instead of either Safari or Explorer ended up being, it was like a 40 percent more productive employee that they had a higher tenure.

They were just better employees. And so you think, what the heck does using Chrome have to do with being a better employee? Like it makes no sense. A browser has to

Lisa Popovici: do a lot. Yeah. The tools that you're using. Yeah. I mean, you have to like.

Jay Myers: It boiled down to. I feel

Lisa Popovici: like I am a bit judgy when it, when I see people using like old tools.

Jay Myers: It's it, no, it's, it says something about the person. So the person got a computer and didn't want to use the default browser that came with it. And of course, like I, I use Chrome. It's better in so many ways, but it shows that person. doesn't accept just the basic. And so they had a form on their website that was when they would submit their form to apply for a job and on the analytics, you could see which browser it was submitted from and they just started only taking people that submitted it with Chrome unless it was like an amazing, I can't remember where the company was, but no, that's a great question to ask on an interview.

I love that.

Lisa Popovici: You should also, speaking of browsers, um, I am on arc now. You should try.

Jay Myers: Oh, okay. Uh, now see now I'm outdated on Chrome. Look at this. Okay. Outside of support, I feel, uh, can probably do a lot in the area of increasing average order volume or selling more, increasing revenue. What can Siena help in those areas as well?

Lisa Popovici: Yeah. Yeah. So Siena can, is already helping brands, especially beauty brands like Kitsch. So they have generated so much revenue. Since being with Siena without even optimizing Siena necessarily to sell, but because you're giving Siena context about your products, about like what your brand stands for, like just everything that you tell, like your human team, Siena should know as well.

And then maybe you give Siena or create some automation, like some seasonal ones or Black Friday, for example, or where we've launched this new product line, whatever it is, you can give that context to Siena, even if it's seasonal. Or create specific automations. And then because of the nature of being extremely empathic, I'm just.

optimizing like how the interactions are, are, are being done. It's just like, it's leading to high ticket conversion rates. So right now the, the average ticket conversion rate that Siena has is around 10%. And it's not even, again, it's not even like we don't have a standalone Siena sales agent. At least not yet, but you can do all of these things and it's so powerful.

And

Jay Myers: so wait, when you say ticket conversion rate, that's people who interact with Siena.

Lisa Popovici: Yes. And then after they purchase and then before they purchase. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That's super

Jay Myers: good.

Lisa Popovici: Because, you know, by creating those pre Sell, uh, automations and making sure Siena covers as many of those as possible.

When there's someone on the website and just browsing, maybe they have product questions, they might want to compare products or whatever questions they might have. Having someone there like an instantly respond really leads to higher conversion rates. It's just the nature of things versus just leaving your visitors or.

Even repeat customers just browse by themselves and a lot of the times being there really helps and leads to more sales.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Are you seeing brands do things, um, like promoting coupon codes? Like I never thought about doing this on a chatbot, but going on a website and asking what's on sale right now.

Or like often people go to a website, they add something to the cart and then they go to Google and search coupon code for whatever site. Maybe they can ask the chatbot that like, are there any coupon codes right now to save the time of how many people add something to a cart and then try to wait a couple hours for the abandoned cart email and then they completely forget to buy what they were going to buy in the first place?

Lisa Popovici: They do. Yeah.

Jay Myers: Um,

Lisa Popovici: there are a lot of customers who are creating automation specific to Discount codes or promotions or offers that might, that they might be having. For example, we work with Aidsleep. They also have a member's discount code that is built in one of their automations. So whenever someone asks, yes, Siena will provide that and we'll make sure even, okay, what are the benefits of being a member?

Okay. You also get the discount as a benefit. So yeah, for sure.

Jay Myers: That's so smart. So Siena is. About two, two years old. When did you launch?

Lisa Popovici: Yeah, two years old. We launched with our first beta customers, January, 2023,

almost two years.

Jay Myers: Yeah. I've been following along on the side and through social and it's incredible how far it's come. I imagine there's a lot like a fast forward five years. Like I think of everything you've accomplished in. This period of time, what's, what are some things that you're really excited about now that Siena is an agent, like maybe you hinted a little bit at sales.

And like, that's, that, that I think is a huge area, potentially. Like you, you want to talk to someone about, like, we work with Harry Rosen and they, I don't know, I think they may have developed it themselves, but they have what they call these digital style consultants and it's, you can talk to Upload your picture and they actually are giving real advice on what to wear for a certain event and things like that.

I don't know, like the sky is probably the limit, but what are like, what excites you about the next three to five years?

Lisa Popovici: Yeah, the sky is absolutely the limit

Jay Myers: where to start, right?

Lisa Popovici: Oh my God. There's so much to build and our roadmap is so exciting and I would love to just build everything today, but yes, we, so definitely, I think what we want to give to our customers and the market is what else can you do with all of these incredible.

Insights from conversations that are happening across multiple channels. We know that today they're, that these types of insights are being manually gathered and centralized by, by people. And they spend like dozens, hundreds of hours probably, every single month, just like going manually across every single channel and trying to understand sentiment.

What are people saying? Feedback? We just launched this new product, or maybe we've launched an enhancement of our current product, but we want to understand what's the feedback. How can we improve that? And then take all of these insights to our marketing, to our product team and improve the business, right?

So we want to make sure we provide the right tools to our customers to be able to do that and leverage AI. And then obviously we want to double down on integration. So one of the, I talked about custom actions. We are going to very soon be able to, our customers are going to be able very soon to share the custom actions that they're building for themselves.

So for example, Michael from Hexglad, we are working with him to To integrate order protection. So Siena covers those use cases. So we're building those actions. And then Michael will be able to share those actions with another order protection customer that might, they don't need to build it themselves.

They just quickly, just literally enable it in one, two clicks, and they will be able to have additional access. It's being able to, To leverage what, um, our customers are building and all of these like advanced, very nuanced, uh, functionality. So you can easily share them across and then we're obviously, we're going to double down on like other integrations, um, like Siena zaps

Jay Myers: almost prebuilt flows.

Yeah. So smart.

Lisa Popovici: Yeah. So integrations we're always investing in how can we make Siena's like even responses. And as I said, like. The accuracy, like reasoning behind her, her thought process, the actions, how can we always enhance those? That's like something that we're constantly investing in. And then definitely insights we're gonna.

Yeah, work more on, on, yeah, enabling more of the sales use cases as well. But yeah, there's just like a lot of things, I cannot share too much, but there's a lot of things going on and we are grateful to have our customers giving us so much feedback every single day. We just announced our customer advisory board.

So we work very closely with them and just trying to bridge their feedback, their needs, their needs. And then with our innovations and what we know that they might not know that they need, but they will absolutely need it.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Yeah. The insights is a really interesting one. Like the data that Siena has on what questions customers have when they're shopping and like the impact that could potentially make on conversion.

If you took some of that data and then brands. adapted their landing pages to address some of the most common questions. Like here's like their eight most asked things. That should probably be in the description or in the FAQ or part of the image carousel somehow address that better. If the number one thing people are looking for is order tracking, maybe that's a hard thing to find on the website.

I don't know, but the insights that can come out of the questions and sentiment and. That fascinates me. And I think that's a whole world in and of itself that like, I could see a world where Siena one day has its own app marketplace and there's like reporting tools and there's all these other things that live on top of it.

Just from all that data, like it's,

Lisa Popovici: yeah,

Jay Myers: this guy is the limit.

Lisa Popovici: Yeah. The goal here is to also help these teams uncover what might not work very well in their business. So if you keep seeing. Over and over again, month, one month after the other, like customers complaining about a specific thing, or they might need help with a specific transaction, which you could easily maybe automate, or maybe you can change something on the website or just improve something in the back end.

You want to be doing that because ideally you want to reduce your tickets. with AI. You want to go to the root cause because AI pointed you towards that direction and solve the root cause. I think this is something that still requires like this mindset shift because it's not just a patch. Oh, like you just hire more people or build more automations.

No, like you need to also learn from these things and see what maybe can be absolutely like completely solved without. Even needing to get more tickets around that.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Amazing. It's five years from now. Probably this will be, I will say this will be way more of a

Lisa Popovici: commodity, right?

Jay Myers: But I think brands right now, there's always that first mover advantage or early adopter advantage.

And I think right now there isn't, there's an opportunity to embrace AI, free up resources to, like you said, do more. Strategic growth, like the brand you mentioned that introduced their loyalty program. They were able to do what's important, not urgent, right? And we always get caught up with there's thousands of tickets.

I can't get to this project that needs to be done. Now's the time to, I think, get ahead on that. So why don't. We close with, like we said, we probably wouldn't go the full hour, but look, we did and always happens, but before we go on too far, I have, I think I even only got through a quarter of the questions I had, but I think that this has been a pretty good dive into.

Siena and leveraging AI. So if someone right now is thinking, I'm interested in embracing AI for my brand and I, maybe I wasn't that bucket number two that you mentioned, and I'm ready to take the step, what would you encourage them to do or where can they get started? Or what would be some next steps for someone who's thinking that?

Lisa Popovici: Yeah. So a lot of businesses are thinking 2025 is coming. We have these goals. We want to reduce costs. We maybe want to operate in a leaner way. We want to improve our CSAT scores. We want to maybe, um, open or start launching some new programs, some new projects, and we want to make sure we actually get all of these done and we're not going to end up end of 2025, not achieving our goals.

So that's good. Like you first have your goals. Where you're going and like, you have everything mapped out. So the first thing that you should do absolutely have clear goals and alignment with your team. Second, okay. You've decided that customer service is one of the areas that you want to embrace AI. On and it's one of the lowest hanging fruits.

So you have like clear customer service goals. There's some clear KPIs that you want to hit and AI is going to help you achieve and get there. Perfect. Third, just start looking at vendors. Usually I think there's so much noise in the market. It's crazy. I would, I just feel for everyone being probably targeted with dozens of emails and I don't know, per week of, Hey, do you want to try our, our product?

AI customer service agent and blah, blah. There's like a bunch of agents and you'd have no idea what you should be looking for. So here, I think just tap into your network and see which one of your friends might be already doing it and ask for recommendations. And then yes, I would suggest creating a list of top vendors that you feel would be worth speaking with and do proper diligence.

Do not rush. Do not think that you will be able to get to 80 percent in two weeks. And one of the biggest. like strategic things that you could do is actually start when you don't have where you're not in your peak season. So I think for example, Q3, it's very funny because Q3 is the best time for you to actually start Q2 or Q3 to start implementing AI.

So you make sure you're ready for Q4 and the craziness, right? Especially if you have a pretty busy schedule. period during like Friday or Christmas, but most of them are just like sleeping over the summer. I understand it's summer. You might just want to, you know, be sipping margaritas and not really caring about AI agents, but you do need to think strategically.

So you are not feeling like you're Oh my god, rushing where you're like have that pressure. Obviously, it doesn't take three months, but you do want to make sure you have a lot of time to actually get into a really good spot and even skill get to do more things. Choose your vendors, do proper diligence, ask the right questions, maybe create like a small spreadsheet.

Um, of the things that you, that really need to be, there are your must haves and then nice to haves when it comes to the vendors, share that with them. We also have one that we share with our customers because we know exactly what you need, because we're experts. Uh, and that's why we do like proper discovery and then we can share that with you.

So you're not being, in a way, pulled by, because a lot of people, a lot of companies have amazing salespeople. So you really need to be careful of understanding the feasibility and actually, okay, Is this actually possible or not? Maybe even go for a trial or some life testing sessions and then bring other stakeholders from the team, get their buy in, and then I think, yeah, you're ready to choose, choose a partner.

But yeah, these are just the steps that I wouldn't necessarily skip.

Jay Myers: Okay. Now, Lisa, I have asked like a hundred guests at the end of a show, what to do to get started in any specific area of the product or service they sell. And I've never had someone say, go out to the market and find a bunch. You're way too modest.

I was expecting you to just say how to get started with Siena. So like kudos to you for being a good human being. And I

Lisa Popovici: understand that the market is so noisy and like people will just think I am biased.

Jay Myers: Okay. Here's your chance to be biased. If someone wants to get started with Siena, what's the next step?

Cause I really appreciate how humble you are and you recommend that they go to the market. But I ciena's a pretty good option if they listen to this and they, well Siena it is the best

Lisa Popovici: option. Absolutely. There you

Jay Myers: go. There you go. How do, do they get, just get in

Lisa Popovici: touch with us getting with us. Uh, we are on LinkedIn or I will drop Jay, you can add our email.

I'll put all the show notes. Siena do

Jay Myers: CX is the site? Yeah. You're on, you're for sure on Shopify. You said your platform agnostic.

Lisa Popovici: Yeah. We are not on the app store, so the best way to reach us is on the website. Just book a demo with us. Or send me a dm on LinkedIn or my team what I love about my sales team is that we Are like always going to work with you and find what's in your best interest.

So we are very consultative. So we take time to really understand your goals, your needs, and then make the best, like action plan moving forward. Yeah.

Jay Myers: I think that's amazing. Lisa, thank you so much for your time. This has been a ton of fun and we'll talk to you soon for

Lisa Popovici: Thank you for your questions. Jay,