1764 – The Future of AI-Powered Feedback with Ryan Glasgow

0:28Hey there, thoughtful listener. million in revenue. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. You can even chat with me live and I'll see and reply to your messages. Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We'd love to have you.

0:59with us right now ryan glasgow ryan you are the founder and ceo of sprig you're found on the web at sprig.com it's great to have you ryan thank you for joining us thanks for having me josh excited to dig in today yeah so give us an overview of what sprig is at a high level we help companies understand what their customers think of their products. And so you might be using companies like Netflix, Dropbox, Robinhood, Coinbase, perhaps Peloton. They're all spread customers. And we work with them to help them understand what you think of your experience using their mobile apps or their web products or trying their products for the first time.

1:41Or maybe if a new feature is meeting your needs or not meeting your needs, we really help their product teams deeply understand that user experience. And we do that through three different ways. The first one is we have in product surveys. So you might have seen these in a mobile app and says, Hey, you try a new feature, help us understand what's working, maybe what's not working. The second one is session replay. So we'll record the user screen will help kind of use AI to digest and understand what you're doing in those products and look for moments where maybe you're having a tough time. And then the third one is really we analyze all the data with artificial intelligence.

2:17And so we're the leader in our category for understanding large-scale survey data, as well as session replay data, and really helping these teams understand at scale, again, what's working, not working about their product experience, but ultimately to hit the product goals based on that user experience insight. In this area of kind of understanding user experience and surveys, that sort of thing, is there known noise or is there known bias or opportunity to get bad data that maybe an inferior solution might be more susceptible to? We do hear folks ask about that. How does the bias work? What's working or not working?

3:00And I think if you look at some common examples, perhaps Yelp, and we often look at Yelp as a very trusted source, but for diners that might actually leave a Yelp review, it's probably less than half a percent. But those half a percent that do leave those reviews, it's generally a very accurate representation of the quality of the food and the service and the ambiance and the overall restaurant experience. And that's a very, very small response rate of people actively participating in those reviews. At Sprig, we have a 33 % response rate platform-wide for all of our surveys. And so one in three people that see a survey are responding and engaging with these surveys.

3:44There's a lot, it's extremely high. There's a lot of work we do behind the scenes around the targeting, making sure reaching a very small sample size, often just 0.1 to 0.5 % of a user base and going out and being very intentional and say, hey, Josh has had an interesting experience in our product. Let's reach out to him with a very targeted in the moment contextual survey that's going to ask you one or two questions about how that particular moment was with that product experience. And so maybe you make a trade, Maybe you deposit funds in, you deposit funds out. And because of how contextual and relevant and targeted is, it ends up leading to a really, really high response rate.

4:27And so that's how we've been able to really eliminate a lot of the bias by getting that high response rate. You know that generally you're going to get a very representative sample of those users' experiences. Can you think of any examples where like what we're talking about is critically vital to the success of a company or a product, right? And I don't know if there's been any historical examples of companies or maybe in your experience you've come across or heard this or companies that maybe didn't pay close enough attention to this until the problem was really, really big. What I'm hoping to do is paint a little bit of a horror story for people who don't take this seriously.

5:08Right. Right. I'll say that the companies that we work with, the reason why they move forward with Sprig is that they're often the category leaders and they're there where they are today because they deeply want to understand what their customers think about their product experience. And they see Sprig as really the solution to get there, to achieve that job. I will say that some of the companies that considered Sprig, but didn't move forward with Sprig are the ones in the news that And I'm seeing, you know, user backlash, customer backlash, having a tough time with user perception and really growing in a difficult economic year.

5:43And so, you know, I don't want to say any names, but some of the companies in the past few months that have really. They know who we're talking about. They know who they are. And, you know, they looked at it, maybe, you know, for any reason they didn't move forward. And, you know, I don't want to say I told you so, but I think it's just so critical to see where you stand with your customers. whether they're going to come back and whether you're ever going to hear from them again. And the best way to do that is how can you scalably really understand how their experience is with their product or service.

6:13And with that visibility, that awareness, really that empathy that drives success for the business, because the team now knows what the problems are and any team, what they know about problem, they, they care enough about the company. They just really need that awareness of where to focus their time, their effort, their resources, and what that problem is. And then they're on their way to address that problem. Why would someone look at Sprig and say, eh, no, thanks. Like what's going through their head? I mean, again, maybe they have some internal or in-house solution that they think might be getting them good data.

6:51I mean, that possibly could be one way. Sorry, I'm starting to answer your question. But someone that's not doing this. I'm just wondering psychologically or culturally what's going on with that organization. I think it shows perhaps a lack of empathy for the customers. And if you're not seeing a company that is making that concerted effort to see, what is your perception of our product? We just launched a new feature. What do you think? Because ultimately, these businesses are building for their customers. And if they're not really building for their customers, they're not trying to understand their customers.

7:25And I think that's where the disconnect can happen for companies, given all the market shifts, given that macro economic shifts, the competitive entrants that are happening in this space. When we see that disconnect happen, that gap grow, that's from afar, we will see some companies struggle. And so I think as we move into an increasingly competitive environment in the various different industries and categories, as you move into a more difficult economic environment, customers, the line for what's critical, what someone must pay for, you know, is really increasing. That bar for excellence is increasing.

8:00I think we'll see more and more companies really want to have that appetite of let's actually dig in. Let's not just have hypotheses or, you know, really take some guesses and wild swings here of what our customers want. Let's actually ask them, let's see, you know, what they think and let's move forward with that data. One thing that you had mentioned, and I I see that, again, this is just a couple of months ago that you announced this, the implementation of being able to look at data and have AI come up with meaningful insights. Can you give us a little more insight on how that works and what that actually adds to your customer's experience?

8:40We've been really excited about the recent advancements in AI. And the first person that joined me at Sprig was our head of AI. So back to when the company started, we started building the AI very much before we built the other parts of the product. So we started with the text analysis in 2019. And so really analyzing open text data, just a few months ago, we're using the latest OpenAI GPT-4 models to ingest the entire survey. Some of our customers are getting over 100 ,000 responses, maybe to a three to five question survey. that might be 500 ,000 pieces of data and individual responses. The latest advancements of AI can ingest hundreds of thousands of responses and actually summarize all that for you in a short paragraph.

9:30And then we also just launched the ability to ask questions about that data. Correlations between question one and question two helped me understand the most burning problems identified in the survey. And even you can ask the LLM, the AI, how can I fix this problem? It'll read all that survey data and come back with suggestions on what you can do to improve that product experience, to hit your product and business goals, and ultimately to better serve your customers. Yeah. Well, how helpful is this? Because again, I think by now, most of us have been using some sort of an AI product, ChatGPT, and so many new platforms are now giving us a better user interface where we can have conversations.

10:14So you think about, you know, if Sprig has digested all of that data and to be able to actually have somewhat of a conversation, okay, you know everything. Let's talk about this because we're trying to make some decisions here. Let me fully kind of describe this scenario. You can let me know how close I am or to the application of it. But just being able to have a conversation with an entity that understands all this data and says, well, here are the choices we're making based on everything that you've gathered. How do you imagine our customers would respond to option A, option B, or option C?

10:48Is that kind of what it does? That's exactly what you can do. And it could say, hey, here are all the different challenges we noticed in your onboarding experience in that onboarding flow. and you can ask here are suggestions that I'm considering, which one do you recommend based on all the data that you've collected from all these users who are actually going through this onboarding experience and this onboarding flow? And so you can just imagine how businesses can advance different parts of their products and their services by not only collecting the data in the moment at a very high response rate, but also be able to understand the data in real time.

11:29And lastly, like you're mentioning, even use AI as a thought partner to solve these problems and say, yeah, I think that option B out of the ones that you propose based on this survey data is the one you should move forward with to best impact and move forward that product experience. Ryan, so obviously you're working with a lot of very large enterprise-level companies. You'd mentioned some Dropbox, Robinhood, Loom, Square, Coinbase, PayPal, Mixpanel, Peloton, many others. Tell me about the application for an earlier stage startup, SMB, and how they can get value from Sprig. We work with a lot of companies who are pre-product market fit, also just getting product market fit, maybe a pre-seed, a seed round, a series A, a lot of companies that are not venture-backed, and they're really bootstrapped.

12:24And for all of them, it's just as critical in the early days to understand those customer pain points, to see what's working, to see what's not working. And we have a very generous free plan. So sprig.com slash sign up. So you can try it out. You can install RSDK into your product and start asking those targeted surveys, targeted session replay moments. And we're seeing a lot of companies find product market fit by asking some of the classic questions, like we have a template around product market fit. We also have templates around understanding why someone would continue to use a product or not continue to use a product or whether it's solving their needs.

13:05So we're seeing all these early stage startups, different businesses, bloggers use Sprig and their products to say, hey, we're not even sure what our direction should be, but Sprigga is really giving us that feedback, that oxygen for that idea that we have to figure out what that direction should be and how we should move forward as a company. Looking at, and this is really exciting, and I think about being able to allow any company better optics as to what's going on in the lives of their customer. I mean, that's, I hope, what we all want, right? And making it easier. Where do you see the future going in this space?

13:45I think AI, you know, we have some really exciting advancements coming out in the next six months around AI and better understanding that data, but moving beyond understanding the data to actually helping, you know, even more around solutions coming up with how do I actually resolve or how do I improve or how do I iterate on what, you know, my product is today. Another area that, we're really excited about is just different inputs. And how can we actually start to discern or extrapolate data based on a smaller data set? Maybe someone who has the same attributes as you has one experience. Can we extrapolate that other people might also have the similar experiences and really use small amounts of data to have more meaningful, large-scale representations of that user's experience.

14:39And so right now, it's just a greenfield race of different AI, using AI to complete larger workflows, using AI to kind of move further up levels of abstraction and really help AI not only, again, analyze, but also solve. I think that's where the true intelligence in AI is really coming into place is it's actually helping you do higher order, more advanced levels of thinking. about moving those products forward. Wow. It's almost, you know, having like your Sprig AI, you know, attending all of your product development meetings and user feedback meetings and where it's not just spitting out data, but yeah, that's exciting.

15:25You know, where it's like advising, it knows everything that's going on and what our goals are. This is really cool. I think about like the impact of what this could mean for all, nearly any energy, energy, automotive, right? You know, if we were able to get better real-time data about our customers' experiences, be able to rapidly respond to it. And also, I think too, just this idea of showing that we care and that we're listening, right? And that we want our customers to be successful. Like, I think that just matters so much today. And that's absolutely what we see is that companies that actually are running these surveys, their customers become more loyal.

16:07They see just one or two questions. And that's really the vision of Sprig is instead of that long-winded 50-question email survey you get a week after taking your flight, could it be when you book your flight, you're getting one question about that booking experience, your onboarding, maybe your mobile app, you sit down here and see your mobile app, the Delta Airlines app asks about that onboarding experience onto the plane. Maybe you order a drink you know how is that martini you know on the way to cabo offboard hey how was that flight was everything okay but really distributing all those surveys to different passengers on the plane so maybe you get the one about the martini i get the one about the offboarding experience maybe someone else gets the one about booking and then these companies can just deliver these 10 out of 10 experiences that really wow us as customers and that's really what our vision is is making experiences that matter in the world.

17:05I love it. I love it. Well, Ryan Glasgow, again, founder and CEO of Sprig. Your website is sprig.com. Just someone's been listening to our conversation. They're like, I'm motivated. I'm excited. I'm excited about this. What do they do now? Because you can actually, you can get started for free or you can book a demo. Yes. So we have a free plan, sprig.com slash sign up. Anyone wants to try it today? We also, for any of the listeners for your podcast, we do have a discount on our paid plans. So sprig.com slash thoughtful entrepreneur. So check it out, talk to our team. They'll get you set up. We'll answer all of your questions and we look forward to hearing from you.

17:44Yeah, so again, that was sprig.com forward slash sign up for the free trial. And not that we worked this out in advance, but please do use thoughtful entrepreneur when you sign up and you get a hookup. So Ryan Glasgow, again, founder and CEO of Sprig. It's been great having a great conversation. What an exciting future. It's been great having you. Awesome, Josh. Appreciate having me on the show today.

18:12Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com slash guest. If you're a listener, I'd love to shout out your business to our whole audience for free. You can do that by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or join our listener Facebook group. Just search for The Thoughtful Entrepreneur in Facebook. I'd love even if you just stopped by to say hi. I'd love to meet you. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day.

18:56Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful entrepreneurs. Hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning, that's right, seven days a week, you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed. I promise to bring positivity and inspiration to you for around 15 minutes each day. Thanks for listening and thank you for being a part of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Movement.

19:27Thank you.