About the Episode

Today we’re going to talk about the value of qualitative customer data, and how to use it well.

To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Daniel Erickson. Founder & CEO at Viable, an AI analytics tool that enables businesses to instantly access and act on valuable insights from customer feedback.

About Daniel Erickson

Daniel is the Founder and CEO of Viable, an AI analytics tool that enables businesses to instantly access and act on valuable insights from customer feedback, saving them hundreds of hours spent analyzing feedback.

They launched in 2020, and have already raised $8.9M from high-profile investors such as Craft Ventures, whose notable exits include Tesla, Bird, and Airbnb, and Javelin Venture Partners, whose portfolio includes Mythical Games and SmartAsset—both of which have recently joined the unicorn club.

As you know, many businesses collect data from a variety of sources, including help desk tickets, surveys, product reviews, internal customer notes, call transcripts, etc., and store it in various databases and formats. As a result, much of it goes unused.

Viable changes this by allowing businesses to automatically aggregate, structure, and analyze all of their data, so they can understand what their customers are telling them and use this to better serve them.

Daniel, an engineer by trade, co-founded Viable with his identical twin brother Jeff, who is a designer. They took a different path than most, skipping college entirely and starting a consulting firm in Portland straight out of high school to help early-stage companies build their very first products, create MVPs, get their first users, and/or get their first investment.

Prior to founding Viable, Daniel was VP Engineering at Eaze. Before that he spent time as CTO at Getable and also had a front-row seat to Yammer's rapid growth during a 3-year stint as a Senior Engineer at the company.

Resources

Viable website: https://www.askviable.com/

The Agile Brand podcast website: https://www.gregkihlstrom.com/theagilebrandpodcast

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Synopsis

In this episode, the Daniel Erickson of Viable discusses the potential of AI to enhance human teams' analytical capabilities and provide superior recommendations. They emphasize that AI has the ability to process vast amounts of information that would be challenging for humans to handle. Humans may be biased or overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data, but AI can generate more accurate and insightful recommendations. The speaker views this as a form of AI human augmentation, where the combination of AI and human skills can lead to even greater performance. They argue that while humans alone can achieve about 80% effectiveness and AI alone can also achieve around 80%, the collaboration between AI and humans can result in a performance level of approximately 150%. This perspective aligns with the notion that AI can enhance human abilities and improve decision-making by leveraging its computational power and data processing capabilities.

According to the episode, the underlying philosophy of AI is human augmentation. The host firmly believes that humans can achieve about 80% effectiveness on their own, and AI can also achieve a similar level of performance independently. However, when AI is combined with human expertise, their collective performance can reach a higher level, around 150%. The concept revolves around AI's ability to augment human teams by processing vast amounts of information that would be impossible for humans to handle, ultimately providing superior recommendations. The episode suggests that AI can benefit various teams within a company, such as marketing, product, sales, and customer experience, by offering valuable customer feedback to help them achieve their objectives more effectively. By utilizing AI to analyze customer feedback, teams can identify benefits, gaps, objections, frequently asked questions, and prioritize their efforts more efficiently. Overall, the episode highlights the potential of AI in enhancing human performance and achieving better outcomes.

The Viable platform leverages AI to analyze customer feedback from multiple sources, including chats, surveys, and reviews. The AI component of the platform continuously aggregates data in real-time during customer conversations and enhances these interactions by identifying various topics discussed by customers. This includes identifying reported bugs, complaints, feature requests, compliments, and more. The AI-generated analysis provides valuable insights to companies by organizing and analyzing the feedback. The platform can generate periodic reports that highlight the most common complaints, compliments, requests, and questions based on the enriched data. This enables companies to gain a better understanding of their customers and make informed decisions based on the feedback they receive.