Mark Fowler, President of Stowe Management Corporation and CEO of Revolutionary Conversations Interviews Lon Safko on the use and value of Chatbots.
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Mark Fowler has been working with CPAs and other financial professionals helping their clients and their customers focus on adding value.
About a year or so ago, we decided that we wanted to talk about the kinds of things that have helped us help companies grow, turnaround, expand and become much better at what they’re doing. And we figured out that the most important thing was the consistent focus on value creation throughout the business. That motivated us to have interviews with people who held that same mission of every day adding value. We can always be thinking about something better that we can do for ourselves, our career, the people around us, our business, our customers and our clients. And today we have Lon Safko. Lon has been on our podcasts before and has a wealth of information of value to share. Lon is a kingpin, a cornerstone in adding value. He has many, many patents and probably his most important invention the first computer to save human life, Lon welcome.
Lon has been in the IT field and marketing for quite a while and invented the first computer to save human life.
He did some of the first work on environmental control and artificial intelligence for United States Department of Energy. He has a strong background in what we’re going to talk about today: Artificial 
Intelligence in the form of chatbots and how it brings value to your customers. Lon was shocked at the positive results when he implemented his chatbot for the first time because he was not a real strong believer in them. Now he is a very strong believer and he talks in this podcast about some of those points and how AI chatbots can help you.
What is a Chatbot?
A chatbot is just a computer program, an app and it just simulates conversation. That’s really all it does. When the app starts to run, you ask it a question and it tries to find an answer. And then based on what that answer is, you ask it another question, and then the chatbot just continues this conversation. We’ve all experienced chatbots for customer service, whether it’s Amazon or Netflix or any of the big companies. They’re all using chatbots and have for or quite a while.
As Lon Safko says:
As Lon Safko says:“I had more sales from the moment I implemented the Chatbot. On one website, called Papermodelsonline.com, which provides school projects, downloadable school projects for kids. Here’s the bottom line, I saw a 30% increase in revenue. Yeah, I’m going to say that again. 30% increase in revenue. It’s maintained that increase ever since the chatbot was installed. And the reason is, when customers come to a website, they’ll have a question about your product or service, however, they’re not going to use the contact form. They won’t use the contact form. And when I had the Chatbot ask them why?, they said it was the fear of me harvesting their email and being sent more spam. That said, they’re comfortable having a conversation with a chatbot. And they would ask questions that I never anticipated. I would put those answers in the frequently asked questions (FAQ) page immediately and within 24 hours this particular chatbot would reread the entire website and be ready to answer that question by the following morning.”
That was the biggest revelation:
I sell school projects and thought the number one customer was the parents, they’re the ones holding the credit cards. The number two customer, I thought, was the teachers because they’re the ones who are recommending it to the kids. My number one product in sales, is the California emissions in 2014 21, California emissions for fourth graders. And it turned out, when I was looking at the chatbot by transcripts, almost 100% of my customers are nine-year old’s! The kids pick out the product, they are my Number One customer, and they go get the mom’s credit card. I would not have known this without the chatbot!
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Over the years, I have worked with many good corporate citizens, who know that many lives depend on the way they do business. In the process, not only have these businesses and organizations been more successful, but we have all had fun along the way.” –Mark H. Fowler