The Cost of Bad Technology: Lessons from AI Bots and Meeting Calculators

The Cost of Bad Technology: Lessons from AI Bots and Meeting Calculators

[David] Let’s get over to Allen Pollack with this week’s tech update, Man, there’s so much to report on the tech side Allan, so, take it away.

[Allen] I want to start off, David. You hate me because you ain’t me. How do you like that?

[David] You hate me because you hate me?

[Allen] So, I throw that out there. I thought it was funny. So, there are a number of people that are taking to social media to sell their brand, who they are, what they do and some people said that they started doing it, they didn’t like the negative feedback and all this other stuff. And I heard a very good comment from somebody that said if they have the time to give negative feedback to you, then they’re not doing anything positive themselves. Let it go and so I thought that was really funny. And the quote was you hate me because you ain’t me. And they said, go do your influencing. And the more and more the way the algorithms work, the more and more I keep looking at mortgage industry people talking about technology, talking about, how to do a loan rates. I’ve seen people live saying, give me your scenario and I’ll tell you if you can afford a home. It’s every day there’s thousands and thousands of people engaging in these videos. If you’re not doing it, because you’re afraid someone may say something about you, or you don’t like to present yourself on camera, you can use an avatar. But reality is you hate me because you ain’t me. So I thought that was really cool. All right. Also, David, to all of the folks that listen to our podcasts and sometimes, especially on Mondays, they just can’t focus. They’ve got a lot of stuff going on. They feel like, man, maybe I have ADD. Go try out some neuro energy gum. You can buy it at Walmart, Amazon. It’s a little bit of caffeine and a nootropic and the gum is actually really good and you focus and I’ve used it a few times, so if you’ve got something due today or tomorrow and you just, you need to blur everything out of your brain, go buy some nootropic gum. It’s called neuro gum and E. U. R. O. By the way, we don’t get paid advertisements. It’s just something that ran in front of me today that I remembered that I have taken from time to time and I keep it in my desk drawer. So try it out. All right. David to our listeners. Can we train our staff to use new systems? Why is it so hard when we bring new tech into our organization? Is it the vendor’s fault? Do they make it too confusing? Do they not want to help us? Are we as lenders not paying extra for extra support? Who’s at fault? Who wins the battle? If you want the answer to that, you need to listen to the podcast recording that David and I did with Sue Woodard, and it talked about vendor and lender relationships divorces, not divorce, you name it what’s a good tip? How do you engage better? And even the services that Sue and the Stratmore group provides. So check it out. It’s been published this week. It’s on LinkedIn. Yeah, it’s a fun conversation David and I had a lot of fun meeting with Sue and thank you Sue for your time. All right. David, how many times have you been in a meeting? Actually everyone on our podcast where, halfway through the meeting, you’re like, how much money are we wasting on this meeting? There is a website out there. I’m sure someone’s going to turn into an app. It’s called the meeting cost cutting calculator. And before you go into a meeting, or when you’re in the meeting, you put the roles of the people, and it’s got hundreds and hundreds of roles in here. So I did a sample and I clicked software engineer, product manager, CTO and, a designer and it lists the average salary across the United States, and then you put in the time for the meeting. And so I did the timer and I ran it for 2 seconds. And it said that the cost of the meeting for 2 seconds was 5 dollars and 77 cents. At the end of the day, if you feel like too many people are being put in your meetings, or you’re talking to your staff about better ways to plan and use time and get work done, take a look at this. It’s online. It’s called it’s cost to meet dot com. C. O. S. T. M. E. E. T. and it’s called the real time meeting cost calculator. So from my X amount of seconds, my two seconds of the meeting, it costs 5 and 77 cents. Can you imagine if that ran for a full hour? Wow. Pretty darn expensive people in that room.

[David] Yeah. Then there’s the people want to be in all the meetings because of the FOMO, fear of missing out. So FOMO is pretty costly. Yeah. FOMO can get costly. Exactly.

[Allen] David, every week we talk about. Customer service and everyone wants to implement an AI bot do something cool. So I’m going to break this into two quick little parts. The first one, I’m going to talk about a brand new AI bot on the market, which I think is awesome. And second, I’m going to talk about a very bad example of an AI bot that I ran into myself. bot that I thought was pretty cool company called Zumper. Z U M P E R. It’s a rental company and they launched their AI bot. It’s more than a chat bot. Zoe, Z O E so Zumper has Zoe. It can answer virtually any question about your community or neighborhood while guiding renters to take the next step by submitting leads and requesting tours. So instead of searching through listings and looking to find answers to your questions, you can legitimately just talk to a bot. Ask for what you need and have it presented to you right away, and then it can help organize and can make call outs to get all of your appointment schedule. So if you’ve ever looked for a property, even if it wasn’t a rental, you know what it’s like to look at properties and go to the details you’re filtering. So, you’re trying to find things, but then you expand your filter because you’re not sure what’s in your filter. Check out Zumper. Very cool way to implement AI technology into a conversation.

[David] Interesting, ZUMPER, Z U M P E R.

[Allen] That’s right, Z U M P E R. And then, David, here’s a really bad implementation of an AI bot that went so bad that they lost my business. And I’m going to go through it really quickly. So my daughter was home before going back to college and said, Dad, I need to go to the doctor. So I said, no problem. We have three days before you go back. Let me call today and get the appointment. Now, granted, they’re just down the street. So I called them up, went through two to three menus, as we all know, typical phone system, and then got to the message where it said, please leave us a message. All lines are busy. And our AI bot will send you a text message to confirm we received your message. So I left the message and then I get an SMS message and it says, click here to go to our website. I go to the website and it says, please log in or create a new account. So all I did was call to make an appointment. I don’t have an account. So I clicked to make a new account and then it sent me a text message to confirm that was my phone number. It already had my phone number. That’s how I got there. Yeah. Then it said, we have your message. Someone will get back to you within 24 hours. So I said it’s probably just standard. I’ll wait an hour or two. So the day went on. This is the first day of three days. That’s about 4 o’clock in the afternoon. Nobody called me back. I called them again. I went through the same process. Day number 2 went through the same process. Day number 3 got in the car and went to the office. And they said that I cannot make last minute appointments. And I said, I’m trying to make an appointment for 3 days now. And they said, oh, yeah, it’s the system. We’re working out the kinks. So I said fortunately, my daughter goes back to school tomorrow. So they said, yeah, unfortunately, we won’t be able to see you because we don’t make last minute appointments. So I took my daughter somewhere different. So don’t do this. Don’t be this doctor’s office. Don’t rely on just technology. Technology is great. It is not perfect. By the way, us people implement the technology, and if we didn’t do a good job implementing the technology, Then we may not do a good job using the technology. So remember customer forward with the impression, with the experiences of the end user, the person. And I’m sure you can read between the lines on that example, but good luck on your next AI implementation. And thanks for listening, everybody. Have a great rest of your Monday. Appreciate it.

[David] Appreciate it very much. Yeah. Any commentary, Bill, thoughts on that report?

[Bill] I think that’s fascinating and one of the pretty simple way to make sure you’ve hit the mark, make the people working there be the first ones to go use it as a customer. Boy, I think that would stop a lot of that stuff from getting into the real world. Yeah. There’s a restaurants are great at this when they do a soft opening with friends and family. So that way when they plop themselves out on open table and they have their big, they’ve already experienced it and they’ve experienced it with people that are going to give them the honest, candid feedback. And, so Allen, what you’re describing, if the folks working in that doctor’s office had to go through that technology path the way you did, that would have never seen the light of day or if it did see the light of day, then taking your business elsewhere was a pretty smart move.

[Allen] Yeah. Actually, just on top of training which I should have mentioned, thank you for bringing that up. That is probably the number one thing is doing adequate and proper testing and training. I actually have health insurance. I’m independent now. So prior to working for a big company and I was able to use the Cobra for 18 months it just ran out and I went to a new company and I couldn’t register on their website. And when I called customer service, they blamed the cold weather on the fact that it couldn’t find my account.

[David] Yeah. We’ve had outages here recently in our area with spectrum. Very unusual for that to happen. So anyway, Mark, any thoughts you want to add as we wrapped up the podcast?

[Marc] A couple, I’d like to basically thank Alan for his topics every week. He has really educated me on a bunch of tech things that I had no idea about. And I go along with what was just said on the call because being a high level elite type member of all these travel programs, when you call in, you’d expect good service, BS we put up with to have to talk to a person. So I’m going to give you an example. Marriott decided if you’re going to make a reservation for somebody other than yourself with your points that you have to call in and do that. You used to could do that online in this contact hotel. Now you got to contact national reservation number. You cannot get successfully through their phone tree in less than 10 minutes and most of the time you get cut off. That’s the kind of service we got out there coming, but I just had to make that point because I experienced what he talked about, but I want to mention something about the modular housing real quick. And last year, I become somewhat of a knowledgeable person. I wouldn’t call myself an expert on single wides, double wides, manufactured housing. Modular homes, whatever you want to call them, but the research I’ve done on cause we’re going to start doing some modular home lending. The research I’ve done on them is just unbelievable. I don’t know if y’all have ever thought about it, but if you get on the highway behind a double wide or a single wide being towed somewhere, and it’s going and bouncing through the holes and the pavement and all that. And I can’t help but think what kind of conditions that thing going to be in. It’s going to, it’s got to go from the plant to go to the dealer. It’s got to go from the dealer to go to the house. And it’s out there going on in many cases, rural, most of it’s in rural areas, so it’s going to go through some rough areas and all. And so I was talking to the manufactured housing people and the things they were telling me about the construction. The things they were telling me about the technology they put inside of it, the insulation in it. It’s 60% cheaper to heat than a cool than a normal house. That’s going to be something because the world cannot live in a whole bunch of mini houses. Okay, and they can’t afford these things that are now million dollar houses in California. It’d be 200,000 houses in Alabama. So I think we’re going to have modular housing come into play. In a way it’s never been. And so we lost the trailer, the single wide, the double wide, and then the manufactured housing, which was a little bit of a modification. And now now we’re going in to, manufactured housing. So I’m all for it because we need housing for folks out there, but I would advise all of you if you have an interest in that, do some research or not like I did. It’s a fascinating thing and the things they’re doing in the modular housing piece.

[David] Yeah, what they could do for efficiency and costs. It is really saying, but you make up a great point. As you see those things bouncing down the road, what is that doing to the overall? But anyway, that’s a good topic. I’ll be at the modular event. I’ll let you report on it next week on the podcast. It’ll be great.


Allen Pollack, Chief Operating Officer, Tech Consultant

Allen Pollack, a Mortgage & Financial Services Technology Advisor, is a subject matter expert in the mortgage origination process along with software product management and software development.

In today’s financial services push to all things Digital, Allen has been helping lenders and financial services solution providers align their digital transformation and technology strategies by removing the human element of risk, and automating processes that drive efficiencies and margins into profits.

Over the course of his career, Allen has co-created and developed technology business models that have birthed highly successful, innovative solutions and companies.

Allen co-founded and served as CTO of New York Loan Exchange (NYLX), a loan product eligibility and pricing engine (PPE) that made an immediate impact on the industry, scaling the company quickly and forming partnerships with multiple mortgage and financial lending companies. In 2012, Allen was a co-founder of a merger between NYLX and Aklero Risk Analytics that created LoanLogics, A Mortgage Loan Quality and Performance Analytics company. Allen served as CTO where he continued to bring new and innovative product solutions to the market that made a significant impact to mortgage lenders that reduced risk, scaled business channels, and grew profits in a very competitive and highly regulated market.

Allen is also is mortgage and finance technology contributor on a weekly live industry podcast, Lykken on Lending, and is launching a new podcast soon to be released, TechStack Radio, dedicated to technology and innovation in Financial Services.