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

Josh (00:00:05) - Hey there, thoughtful listener. Would you like consistent and predictable sales activity with no spam and no ads? I'll teach you step by step how to do this, particularly if you're an agency owner, consultant, coach, or B2B service provider. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create more than $10 million in revenue. Just head to up my influence 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 up my influence and click on podcast. We'd love to have you. With us right now. Ryan Glasgow. Ryan, you are the founder and CEO of sprig. You're found on the web at sprig. It's great to have you, Ryan. Thank you for joining us.

Ryan (00:01:10) - Thanks for having me. Josh. Excited to dig in today.

Josh (00:01:12) - Yeah. So give us an overview of what sprig is.

Ryan (00:01:18) - 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, and they're all spray 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. Or 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, try a new feature. Help us seeing 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, and so are 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 and working about their product experience, but ultimately to hit the product goals based on that user experience insight.

Josh (00:02:36) - 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?

Ryan (00:02:55) - That's something we do hear folks ask about that. How does the bias work? What's working or not working? And 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 have a Yelp review, it's probably less than half a percent. But those half a percent that do leave those reviews, it's a 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 Sprague, we have a 33% response rate platform wide for all of our surveys. And so 1 in 3 people that see a survey are responding and engaging with these surveys. There's a lot it's extremely high.

Ryan (00:03:46) - There's a lot of work we do behind the scenes around the targeting, making sure reaching a very small sample size often just 1.1 to 2.5% 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 1 or 2 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. And 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.

Josh (00:04:39) - 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 where companies that maybe didn't pay close enough attention to this until the problem was really, really big.

Josh (00:05:02) - What I want, what I'm hoping to do, is paint a little bit of a horror story for people who don't take this seriously, right?

Ryan (00:05:09) - I'll say that the companies that we work with, the reason why they move forward with Sprague is that they're often the category leaders, and they're they're where they are today because they deeply want to understand what their customers think about their product experience, and they see Sprague as really the solution to get there to achieve that job. I will say that some of the companies that considered Sprague but didn't move forward with Sprague are the ones in the news. 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. And so don't want to say any names, but some of the companies in the past few months that have.

Josh (00:05:49) - Really they know who we're talking about.

Ryan (00:05:51) - They know who they are. And, you know, they looked at it maybe for a reason. They didn't move forward.

Ryan (00:05:56) - And, you know, I don't want to say I told you so, but I think it 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 scalability really understand how their experience is with your product or service? And 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, if they know about problem and 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.

Josh (00:06:37) - Why would someone look at Sprague and say, yeah, no thanks. Well, like, what's going through their head? Mean again? Maybe they have some internal or in-house solution that they think might be getting them good data. I mean, that possibly could be one way.

Josh (00:06:53) - Sorry, I'm starting to answer your question, but you know someone that's not doing this. I'm just wondering psychologically or culturally what's going on with that organization?

Ryan (00:07:04) - 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, you know, 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. And I think that's where the disconnect can happen for companies, given all the market shifts, given that macroeconomic 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 we move into a more difficult economic environment, you know, customers, the line for what's critical, what someone must pay for, you know, is really increasing that bar for excellence is increasing.

Ryan (00:08:00) - And I 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 what they think and let's move forward with that data.

Josh (00:08:18) - One thing that you had mentioned, and 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?

Ryan (00:08:41) - We've been really excited about the recent advancements in AI, and the first person that joined me at Sprague 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 and GPT four models to ingest the entire survey.

Ryan (00:09:08) - Some of our customers are getting over 100,000 responses, maybe to a 3 to 5 questions 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 of that for you in a short paragraph. And then we also just launched the ability to ask questions about that data. Correlations between question one and question two help me understand the most burning problems identified in the survey. And even you can ask the LM, 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.

Josh (00:10:01) - Now. 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. So you think about, you know, if sprig is digested all of that data and to be able to actually have somewhat of a conversation, okay, you know everything.

Josh (00:10:25) - 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, you know, to to the application of it. But, you know, 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? Is that kind of what it does?

Ryan (00:10:52) - 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 being able to understand the data in real time.

Ryan (00:11:29) - And 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 that you should move forward with to best impact and move forward that product experience.

Josh (00:11:50) - Ryan. So obviously you're working with a lot of very large enterprise level companies. You 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 Sprague.

Ryan (00:12:12) - We work with a lot of companies who are pre product market fit. Also just you know getting product market fit, maybe a pre-seed a seed round a series a some a lot of companies that are not venture backed know and they're really bootstrapped. And you know for all of them it's even 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.

Ryan (00:12:33) - And we have a very generous free plan. So sign up so you can try it out. You can install RSC 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 the we have a template around product market fit. We also have templates around understanding why someone would continue as a product or not continue as a product, or whether it's solving their needs. So we're seeing a lot of these early stage startups in different businesses. Bloggers use sprig in their products to say, hey, we're not even sure what our direction should be, but sprig 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.

Josh (00:13:26) - And this is really exciting, and I think about, you know, being able to allow, you know, any company better optics as to what's going on in the lives of their customer.

Josh (00:13:36) - 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?

Ryan (00:13:45) - I think I, 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 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? And so right now, it's just a greenfield race of different I know, you know, 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.

Ryan (00:14:56) - I think that's where the true intelligence in AI has really come into place is, you know, it's actually helping you do higher order, more advanced levels of thinking about moving those products forward.

Josh (00:15:09) - Wow. It's almost like, you know, having like your 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. You 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 and be able to rapidly respond to it and also, I think to just a idea of showing that we care and that were listening, right, and that we, you know, we want our customers to be successful. Like I think that just matters so much today.

Ryan (00:16:00) - And that's absolutely what we see, is that companies that actually are running these surveys, their customers become more loyal. You know, they see just 1 or 2 questions. And that's really the vision of Sprague is instead of that long winded 50 question email survey, you get, you know, a week after, you know, taking your flight. Could it be when you book your flight, you're getting one question about that booking experience you're onboarding, maybe your mobile app. You sit down here to see your mobile app, and the Delta Airlines app asks about that onboarding experience onto the plane. You know, maybe you order a drink, you know, how is that martini? You know, on the way to Cabo, off board. 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 off boarding experience. Maybe someone else gets the one about booking, and then these companies can just deliver these ten out of ten experiences that really wow us as customers.

Ryan (00:17:01) - And that's really what our vision is, is making experiences that matter in the world.

Josh (00:17:05) - I love it, I love it well. Ryan Glasgow again, founder and CEO of sprig. Your website is sprig.com to someone's been listening to our conversation. You'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.

Ryan (00:17:22) - Yes. So we have a free plan sprig. Com slash signup. And you want us 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 slash thoughtful entrepreneur. So check it out. Talk to our team. They'll get you set up to answer all of your questions. And we look forward to hearing from you.

Josh (00:17:44) - Yeah. So again that was sprig. Com forward slash sign up for the free trial. And not that we work this out in advance. But please do use Thoughtful entrepreneur when you sign up and get a hook up.

Josh (00:17:57) - So Ryan Glasgow again founder CEO of sprig. It's been great having you great conversation. What an exciting future. It's been great having you awesome.

Ryan (00:18:05) - Josh, appreciate having you on the show today.

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