Lance Hood (FranPro): 0:00

Today I would like you to meet Aslam Abbas, the co-founder of Collect Chat. Aslam welcome.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 0:08

Hi Lance, Thank you for having me.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 0:11

So 25,000 happy businesses using Collect Chat Pretty impressive.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 0:19

Yes, it has been a very long journey, a five-year plus journey for Collect, not Chat.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 0:30

What makes chatbots so important for business nowadays?

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 0:36

See, chatbots embody the best form of communication between human beings. We like to chat and chatbots are basically conversational interfaces which mimics chat. So that's a very easy, comfortable form of communication and that natural interface conversation interface means the user has no friction into having a chat, giving their details and submitting the details to the business owner. They're more comfortable in that. So that is why I believe chatbots are important for all businesses of all kinds.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 1:17

Right, so instead of sitting there and filling out this huge form, people can be asked one question at a time, just like they're talking to a person.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 1:27

Exactly In a form. There is a lot of friction. They literally feel like, oh, I've got to fill this details and fill the next one. But in a chatbot you're asking one question at a time. You're not telling them you have 30 questions to fill. It's just a good one for question, so you pick this option. Okay, what's something else we should do? That is what the chatbot actually does.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 1:52

Right, and so you know people are familiar with you know you have the chatbots and then you'll also have live chat, which are similar, but the thing is is for people, live chat can be a lot more expensive, so they both have their uses. I think that the chatbots are affordable for everybody and easy to use and quick to deploy.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 2:15

Yes, chatbots are definitely quick to deploy. Live chat also, when it works best, it does a good job. If you have the right team to attend all the customers that you have globally spread out, speaking in different languages, then, yes, live chat is an option. But many companies and businesses do not have such a big team. First of all, you have to hire a good set of people. You need to train them. There's a lot of money and cost and time involved in that. But when it comes to chatbots, this is about creating a conversation which is repetitive. 90% of conversations with customers are repetitive. You're asking the same set of questions, so why not make it automated? Have it in one single chat interface and put it for the customer to interact with. It runs on an autopilot and interacts with everybody all the website visitors. So you have the data in an instant.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 3:13

So that's what chatbots actually do.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 3:16

I have found that, even for a single person who has a website and a business, chatbots fit into any budget just because you're not paying that human and you're not coming up with all those different FAQs and responses that a human would have to understand to ask any question a person would ask. Instead, there's guardrails on it, there's specific questions and people just go through that process.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 3:43

Yes, yes, basically one thing that people should understand when you are adding a chatbot, you're not removing the human out of the equation. You're making it easy for the customer agent on the other side, giving them all the information they need to act upon that particular customer support ticket so that they can provide support faster. They will know their name, account, email or whatever service or problem they're facing In all its details. They'll be available via the chatbot conversation.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 4:13

So that's the beauty of it, it's a much simple process for providing assistance, getting leads, getting feedbacks and much more.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 4:23

Right. And if you think about if you had a salesman that worked for your company and they never asked for people's business. They just stood in front of people and they just stood there and looked at them and they never once asked them for business, that wouldn't be an effective salesperson. But people will have a website that just sits there with no chat on it or no nothing. It's not communicating with people, it's just something to read and think that it's acceptable, but it's not. Every page should be interactive for the purpose of that page, instead of making people go look through your website to find a contact us page. I mean, that's crazy. Even your purchase pages could have a chatbot that would assist people with those pre-purchase questions or ask if they'd like to take an order. I really see it as adding life and interaction versus just a dead site that doesn't. It's just out there.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 5:25

Coming to the salesman analogy, a salesman is one man can only handle one person, but as a handling a person, you might have another curious customer who might be more interested in purchase or buyer surveys.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 5:43

You cannot attend that person. You have to keep them waiting. Customers do not like waiting. They do not like delays. With a chatbot it's all automated. But the thing is you need to keep the conversation as human-friendly as possible. Don't make it like give me all the information I need. No, keep it very simple so that the human at the other end can easily assist in an organized manner and attend to all these different humans later and make them happy.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 6:16

And you said it's not just one person, and I see that, because you can have different bots on different pages. But if you have a thousand people on a page, they can all be serviced by their own bot simultaneously, so you're not limited in any way, and really a big purpose of these bots is. There's other purposes, but one of the biggest is lead generation right Like it's collecting leads for you from people who are on your site and interested in what you do.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 6:45

Exactly, lead generation is one of the primary use cases of our chatbots. That's something that we have seen over and over with customers using collect chats. Chatbots fold and it's pretty easy to create a lead generation bot. And also, once the lead data is collected, we have very good set of integrations to send the data from the chatbot to perhaps a CRM that they're using, so they can do all those integrations within a single link in our dashboard.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 7:19

Right, or you can use the scheduling bot that you guys have to have them book right into your calendar. So the other, oh, go ahead, aslam.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 7:31

I was just saying appointment booking is another use case that also people use the chatbot for.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 7:38

Right, and then maybe objections, like if you have sales objections, they can handle a list of a few of those. You also have the what do you call it, your customer support type pages where they can collect that data.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 7:56

Yes, yes, you can actually send data to tools like FreshDisk, zoho, to create a ticket. In those tools, support tools and all those conversations become a ticket. That is also possible.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 8:11

What are the? For everybody who hasn't been in the system, I just said we've been through a demo and it was the simplest, shortest demo I've ever seen in my life. That was, I think that anybody could walk in there and build one. It just takes seconds and then you just grab that code and paste it in your header, header or footer, whatever, and you're done Exactly. I was shocked at how simple it was. Thank you.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 8:40

One thing we have focused on always is people who the business people who are signing up on Collector Chat. They know the output they want and they don't really want to spend a lot of time in creating it, because if they spend a lot of time trying to learn the product or figuring out XYZ features, that's going to create additional friction and they're going to drop off. They may hires or maybe pass on the task to someone else. Whenever we design the product, we made sure that they got the output they needed in a matter of minutes, which is why we created over 50 templates. No matter from which domain you're coming from business domain we will have a template that you can use out of the box. You just need to edit out some notes and you will have a ready made chatbot for you to use on your website.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 9:35

I think anybody that has a lead page or an opt-in page or is paying for paid traffic. You should really have a lead generating chatbot on those pages, because if you're going to pay to have a bunch of people go to a sign up page or something, you should have a secondary backup that will engage them. If they're going to wait on making that decision because they have questions, you could add a chatbot as some sort of communication tool to grab those leads. So what are the? How many can they do at once? It's unlimited, right.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 10:16

Yeah, there are no limits on the number of bots they can create. In fact, we encourage our customers to create different chat bots for different pages, because people visit your homepage for one reason, but people might be visiting a feature page, or maybe a particular product page, for another purpose. So the conversation that should be on that page should be different, and we don't have any limits on the number of chat bots you can create.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 10:44

You guys, are there some ways that people can, things that people can do to increase conversion or improve the how their chat box work by either changing the words or changing backgrounds, anything that you guys have learned that will increase engagement or conversion.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 11:02

Yes, so some pretty basic rules. So the best converting chat bots do not have more than 10 to 12 questions. So 10 to 12 questions are 10 to 12 pieces of data points that you're collecting from the customer. So if you have a website and you need to capture data, try to capture the most essential data points in these 10 questions. But also, you should try your best to make them very simple and, instead of providing text-based questions, make them option-based questions so that the user does not have to even type. You can just click, click and then next one. Make it easy for the end customer and you'll get your data. So that's one thing. Keeping the questions brief is another point. To not opt for very large number of data questions. Yeah, that's pretty much what I have to say.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 12:05

Okay, and then, so are there what I want to ask you a few questions. As a business owner, what have you noticed about companies that they all have in common, for companies who are really succeeding in doing well?

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 12:23

So okay, good question.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 12:25

So all the companies that are doing well from what I have observed, they're only solving one problem and they're solving that problem perfectly well. So, if you take our example, we are creating chatbots. We could have done, maybe, a customer support thing what to do with the data that comes from the conversation we could have built a CRM or we could have done a lot of other features, but we don't focus on those. We focus on solving one single problem and that is to help customers create chatbots in the most easy way. So focusing on a one single problem is important. Finding product market fit is important and communicating with your customers. In our early days, with almost all our first customers, we tried to have a video call, tried to go through how they use the product.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 13:26

Even their minor mouse actions will give us an idea. Okay, is this working or is this not working? Is this feature clear to them? Not clear to them? So just by observing, without them even speaking it out, we are able to understand. So, interacting with the customer, trying to support them over and beyond, that has actually helped them. We have customers for five years the ones who started then. They are still using Collector because it works for them, they are happy and they still continue to use it. So focus on making the products and we'll solve one problem. You know, pay attention to your customers. Understand what they really, really want to do, what customers say in an email. They might say I want to do X, but you got to ask in a PoliTrade why do you really want to do X? That will give you a lot of insight into what is your business process, what's their work, and that will give you ideas.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 14:28

Right. That why? Question really would be important, because you're going to learn the context behind that decision, which helps you formulate your business Exactly. And I like what you said about keeping having a single focus and keeping it simple and intuitive, because really, the more complex things get, the more we need to simplify them and make them naturally intuitive for the user so that they can do it, because not everybody wants to go out and hire someone who can do these complex things. These chatbots is something that I believe, from walking through behind the scenes, anybody can do, like you don't need to hire anybody.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 15:10

Exactly Now that you mentioned about hiring. I have seen on Fiverr and other upward marketplaces people are hiring chatbot experts for other products because the product by itself is not intuitive. It's powerful, but there is a learning curve to it. So you yourself are not able to make the output you want to, and very, very rarely I have seen somebody asking for an expert with a collect chat, because people are very easy for them to create a chatbot Templates are only the system is completely intuitive, so that is something we are very happy about.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 15:54

Well, and the thing that I like that I haven't seen other people really do, that you guys did is as you, as you click through different chatbots, or as you flip the switches and make adjustments, you get a real time preview right next to it, like you actually see it as it's changing and what you're, what you're actually going to get at this moment in time, which is very cool Was that based upon what you watch? The customers wanting?

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 16:22

So again, this is again saving and extra click. Usually all platforms have make a change. Click on save, see the change. So we took away the save button, so everything is on auto save and that actually means people can work faster. People when you want to change, when you're working on creating the conversation script, so your brain is so focused on how should I format these sentences and then you instantly want to see the output.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 16:51

But in the meantime, if you're disturbed by going to click on save changes and see the changes, you're disturbed and you break the flow. So we don't want to do that. Everything runs on auto save and you get to see the instant.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 17:14

And then you have to go back into the process just to make the next addition, Like I mean, this is very, very smart.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 17:24

Yes, you don't need an extra moment to work with the same point.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 17:32

And then what have you seen with companies that struggle? You've probably seen people come up and they try things and they just they're struggling and trying to get off the ground or stay in business or they tend to get pushed out by the new people that have it more organized.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 17:52

So that's a very broad question. I will write in my perspective. So one is lack of focus. You are spending your money probably in ads or in getting leads, paying influencers to feature your product and all those activities, but you forget about improving the product itself. Your time is spent in trying to talk to customers to evaluate the idea, but you do not have a ready made product to showcase and see if you get a live feedback about, on the product that you make.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 18:34

That is something that we have tried to avoid. We always try to make a product that has set out to solve that single problem. Now, if you do that, one advantage is, whenever you are having a call with a customer to validate the idea, you have a live product which you can pitch them. Hey, remember the idea I spoke to you about. I have this idea and I have this product ready made. Maybe can you spend five minutes to just test it out. So there you get a very active and strong feedback which helps you improve, and that's a cycle process which you have invested a lot of time to help us create a good product. Many companies that I know they try to skip this.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 19:20

They try to save it for later when they have a lot of customers, or maybe when they have a lot of investors and money. But that should be something they should focus on from day one.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 19:32

Well, I agree, and one of the things that you said is they focus on marketing or getting new customers, versus improving the product, and I've mentioned that in this series. A lot is that if you don't continuously improve and simplify and make your product or your service better, then you're going to spend a lot more money on marketing to try to get it out there, because it's not going to naturally take off, because it's okay, it's just not as good as it could be, and then you're going to have to deal with the customers or the people who buy into the product that aren't as happy as they could be. So you're adding friction to the process by forcing yourself to grow with it, not as an optimized business.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 20:22

Yeah, you're just simply eroding yourself away with time and even the money. You're burning it too fast in marketing. So don't do that. Do not let that be your first focus. Make sure you have created a product or a service which is so good that people will not refuse it.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 20:46

Right, and if you have too high of a burn rate of capital, like the money to pay for your staff and all your expenses is high then it forces you to be driven to focus on new sales to pay and cover your monthly burn rate versus have a profit, and so sometimes you might have to trim that back while you're focusing on polishing your product. Otherwise you're really not able to focus on being excellent. You're forced to focus on the next sale.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 21:21

Also, they just don't focus on sales to get more cash, you might be tempted to go after investors to bring people on board and then all your time as a founder will be to create a pitch deck to pitch before a lot of people give out.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 21:43

share your metrics and everything and then only to bring investors. Sometimes it will backfire very badly and might even let you to close down the company. I've seen that happening, so it's a pretty good escape place. So get your product or service correct not to the very best in the market, but it should do what it promises. If it says you can create a chatbot, it should do that in a very simple way. So if you're able to solve that problem, others should take care of itself.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 22:19

And then, another thing that you mentioned was clarity. And I think that's true, because when I look at businesses and I'm evaluating franchises or stuff there's so much time that I'm like, when I just look at their marketing materials, I don't know what they do. They're like we're the best, we save time, we do this, we lower your, raise your bottom line. But I'm like, but what do you do? Because they're selling their franchise business. But I'm like I see this name, but nothing in the logo tells me what you do and nothing in the thing. I wish that they would take the time to distill down the essence and core of what they do into one or two single sentences. And that is the very first sentence they say, because that is the context of all the other stuff they're going to teach you is based upon the clear statement of what they do. And the next one is how are you different?

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 23:15

That is very important. Even our product is named collect chat, so that means collecting data via chat. So that's how we name the product. It is very. You use the word clarity. I'm going to use a word value. It is important for customers to understand the value of using your product or service. The marketing copy that you're creating should highlight the value. Why should people use collect or chat? Because it helps you collect data on autopilot. It saves you time and money, a lot of time and money. That simple statement hits on the right code with the right customer. So that is something that you should focus on whenever you're pitching your product to anybody your customer, to your friends or to investors, whatever you have to focus on your marketing copy and bring in a use value based statements.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 24:19

What do you think? Times are always changing. We always have to stay on what we're doing but kind of adapt. People are different, times are different. How do you guys stay relevant?

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 24:34

So we always look out for how the market is changing. What's the new, latest product out there? For example, a couple of years back, Webflow was not in the picture, but now everybody uses Webflow to create a website and very recently, chat GPT has become a storm. Everybody is creating new products, trying to discover new use cases. Always keep an eye out, Always have this mindset of being able to learn. Even if your product was successful any year back doesn't mean your product is going to be successful today. You need to be able to learn to adapt to new marketing conditions. So the reason I brought Webflow is you need it is important for products like ours to make sure we have a presence in those platforms.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 25:31

To be able to tell the customer hey, you can use this product on Webflow also or on WordPress also. So when something new comes up, embrace it, understand it, research it and then figure out how to penetrate it.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 25:50

And one of the strategies I've seen people that are really good way as a stick strategy is for us to stay in business. A lot of things. Collaboration is a very good tool and I've seen companies do things where they integrate together. I mean people understand that with software and web based things, well, we'll just have an integration between the companies and so customers of this company will see that we exist or it's easy to use us if you use them and vice versa. But I mean that can happen with any businesses. There could be a franchise company right now that could integrate or have a strategic partnership with somebody who would be an ideal pairing of the businesses, which then just gives them more interconnectedness and keeps them as part of the conversation without spending money on marketing.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 26:44

Yes, collaboration. You have to be very smart when you're collaborating. You have to go, walk in the shoes of your customer. Try to understand where the customer is getting their information from. Now, I'm not trying to talk about using influencers, perhaps if Starbucks Coffee wanted to collaborate with to get more customers. People are riding the metro all the time, which means having a metro ad, or maybe in the metro tickets that are issued back behind it.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 27:25

If you give a Starbucks coupon, that would be a great collaboration. It's very pretty cheap. You already have the ticket being issued. You just need to have the Starbucks logo in the back. So that's one great easy way to just collaborate with brands that you don't even think for the first time, but a great easy way to navigate through the customer's eyes, see where you can make an impact, where you can make yourself visible, and then make such collaborations and it will have an impact. Excellent, I think it works.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 28:06

Any other thing, aslam, that you think that we should discuss today, that you'd like to share with people? Any thoughts or ideas, or just one last thing about collector chat.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 28:21

In collector chat, we say that anybody can make a channel, and that is true. The product that we have is so simple to use and so simple to integrate with any website that you have running on any web framework. You can also share this chatbot as links, so this is one feature that we also highlight. Most people talk about the pre-sales aspect of the chatbot, which is interact with potential customers or visitors. However, I'm talking right now about what to do after the customer has used the product or service the post operations. Our chatbots can be shortened and used as a link, which means if you're sending out surveys in email or SMS campaign, you can include the chatbot in this particular message and there also with very less friction you'll be able to collect data from the customers, so that is one thing that you can use collector chat for.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 29:31

Just keep doing what I should share.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 29:34

Right? No, I was thinking about that because it's actually like, when they click on the link, it goes to almost like a web page dedicated to that chatbot and you can ask, post sales questions how did you like the product, how was the service, you know, or how was it like working with a person that helped you or anything like that. It's a very simple way to pass it. It's not really just attached to your specific website and that is a great tool. The link right here next to the video. Go there, check it out. Check out collectchat. It's a great company. It's simple product. I mean, I really like how it renders it in real time, because you guys were smart enough to hit auto save and eliminate all that stuff. So in real time, every single change you make, you can see it rendered on your screen. So very cool, very easy, unlimited chatbots to collect leads, customers, schedule appointments and everything. Thank you, aslam, I really appreciate it.

Aslam Abbas (Collect.chat): 30:33

Yes, thank you Lambs, and we'll talk soon, I hope.