E50: How Smooch Business Messaging Can Make Our Lives Easier with Warren Levitan

Warren Levitan is co-founder and CEO of Smooch, the omnichannel conversation platform for enterprise software makers. He previously served as CEO of Radialpoint, which was acquired by AppDirect. Founded in 2015, Smooch connects any business software to all the world’s messaging channels for a more human customer experience. It was named New Startup of the Year at Techvibes’ sixth annual Canadian Startup Awards and a 2018 CIX Top 20 company by the Canadian Innovation Exchange. Episode overview: This week, Warren  shares his vision and insights on what is happening in customer experience and how messaging is going to make all of our lives easier by connecting  consumers to businesses in a more personal and convenient way. He will also be dropping sales and marketing tips, the story on how Smooch came about and the lessons that he learned throughout his journey as an innovator. Smooch is about building relationships between consumers and brands. Smooch is not a bot platform. Smooch is helping businesses build new channels of communication with customers through their own websites and mobile apps, plus the messaging apps consumers are already using to connect with friends and family. Businesses can handle these conversation via their existing customer experience software using live human agents or ring on automation with chatbots. Customer intimacy (getting to know your customer and being very personal with them) - building an emotional connection between consumers and brands. Warren and his team don't want the new digital channels to turn into a crap where you are stuck or when you are  just typing to your agents or something but instead it is really about the connection between brands and where the consumers are and you can layer bot on top of that. “It's really hard for brands today to compete on their products.” As consumers interact with brands, we generally don't know everything we need to know to place an order or acquire something. Sometimes we do but most times we don't and brands have traditionally pushed us through forms and flows that make sure they get all the information from us. “As a consumer all you want is to engage with the lowest effort in the places we're already are and not jumping through hoops.” How the idea of Smooch come about: Warren shared a story about his last business delivering technical support for telcos around the world. Experiencing it firsthand, Warren realize that no matter how good they want to be in helping their customers and assisting them with their problems, by the time the call reach them, the customers are already angry. That is why he thought that this situation could be prevented. They would have solve this customer's problems so much easier if they were their first interaction. And that is where the idea for Smooch was born. Warren also shared about their venture and partnership with the biggest messaging platform, WhatsApp. What makes this a Canadian Innovation or Innovative thinking? Montreal-based Smooch is changing the way businesses create, nurture and grow one-to-one relationships with their customers. The Smooch Conversation Cloud allows brands to engage with users on all the world’s leading messaging apps and voice assistants, with support for both live agents and AI, revolutionizing and humanizing how people interact with businesses and technology. Smooch powers the conversational products and experiences of global leaders such as Zendesk, Oracle, Genesys, Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, Betterment and Bird. Resources Recommendation: Restaurant: Dinette Triple Crown  Book: Summary of Principles by Ray Dalio Company Mission: At Smooch, our mission is to humanize the relationships between businesses and their customers. With over 4 billion messaging accounts worldwide, people spend more time messaging than any other activity online. This shift, combined with the power of conversation at scale, creates an opportunity to make interaction with the brands we trust more useful, more immediate, more intimate, and ultimately more human. "The future is already here it is not just evenly distributed" As consumers grow to demand personal and human communication on a wide variety of channels, businesses are looking to their software vendors and partners to innovate and deliver these customer experiences. “Transformative change takes time” All great changes takes longer you might have imagined the best part of it is dance to be bigger and what you have imagined Sales and marketing tips : Make sure you're focused on your customers problem and not your solution Productivity tool: Messaging Slack Smooch WhatsApp Hot spot: Dinette Triple Crown in Montreal Jazz fest during summer Connect with Warren: Website: https://smooch.io/ Twitter: @SmoochLabs and @wlevitan Facebook: Smooch LinkedIn: Smooch.io Thanks again for tuning in! To help out the show: Please leave an iTunes review or post a comment below. Your help is greatly appreciated. If you know any Canadian Innovators whom you like us to feature, please feel free to email us. Listen to more innovators who are crushing it here. I’m still channeling Gary Vee! Ratings and reviews are my oxygen! Have you seen the new CanInnovate resources & tools page, that provides different offers and discounts. Who doesn’t love to save money? We are a big supporter of Unsplash.com photos. Special thanks to Ross Findon!