Leveraging an SMS API: The Story of ShapeNet Software

extremely grateful for Larry coming on, who has been a great client of TrueDialogs. And we thought it was just a wonderful story of how he had implemented the TrueDialog APIs in order to service his client base. And I think it’d be a good time just to Larry, could you just tell us a little bit about ShapeNet software and the services that you provide? Absolutely. Thanks, John. It’s great to be here. And we all know texting is very important. So my story was, I was a computer programmer at a college. I was living in New York city, working downtown on wall street and 9 11 hit tragic event changed my life and many other people’s lives. I just started in 2001 to start a software company on the cloud to start it, to create a gym management software system. And. I just evolved the product, started hiring people. We found a great niche with management software for the health club industry. And as you grow your company, you start looking for strategic partners. And obviously one of my strategic partners is TrueDialogue with the texting. And here we are today. Thank you, Larry. think really what we’d kind of like to talk to you about a little bit is, Can you tell us a little bit about the problems that you had that caused you to start looking for a texting API to incorporate into your software? Sure. And it’s not always easy to find the right partner and sometimes it’s trial and error. So I was using some other texting partners and we struggled at times. The texts weren’t going through, onboarding clients was a struggle sometimes. And I finally was introduced to John and his company. And they had so many positives for my company. Number one, I was able to integrate to them probably in about a week because their APIs were very easy to use and their support was outstanding, which helped us along the way. So we were up and running very quickly and we immediately got results with our clients integrating with them. One of the things that you mentioned there is working with other providers in the solution that TrueDialogue provided. You mentioned a couple of the problems. I think one of the other things that you’ve been vocal about is the ability to onboard new clients very quickly. So currently, how many customers do you have on your application? We have 400 plus clients and growing using our application right now. Fantastic. And you know, when you bring on a new client and add texting to their account, how long does that typically take? It’s a great question. It used to take a couple of days. I’m telling you, I’d have to send an email to my provider with your service. I’m able to get a client registered in about 10 minutes. It’s really a simple. process to get the number registered, hit all the legal requirements to get it properly set up and set the codes into my system, and they’re off and running. And for those of you who are unfamiliar with when Larry was talking about the registration process, in the last 18 months, the carriers have been very much putting pressure inside of our industry. and have forced all businesses to register with a system called the campaign registry. The campaign registry is a lack of a better term if you compare it to the banking industry, it’s kind of KYC, know your customer. And that says, know, who’s using the phone number, what are their uses of the phone number going to be, and then associating that number with the youth cases in it. automatically our TrueDialog system as part of our, in addition to APIs, we also provide you with a dashboard to do this registration. And you don’t have to wait on us. You can go directly inside of the UI and register everything. And it submits those registrations directly with the carriers. And you have to register, each carrier has their own requirements. So T-Mobile, AT &T, and Verizon for the most part here in the US. So within that, I think One of the other things I think was evident early on in working with Larry is the way that TrueDialogues API is structured and allows Larry to have an administrative account and create children account underneath that, which I think from a billing, that solved kind of a lot of the problems that you had on the billing and administrative side, Larry. Absolutely. I would sell my service for a fee, plus I’ll give them a thousand to two thousand free text. and I’m able to go to their dashboard very easily at the end of the month to find the clients that exceed those limits and charge them independently a fee for each text. And what’s amazing, the people that are maybe texting 20,000 a month and I charge them an extra fee for that, they never blink because they’re getting value with the texting. A lot of times I send clients an extra bill every month for different reasons. and they’ll complain. They never blink. It’s almost like they’re thanking me for this bill because they’re getting results in their gym because of the texting. Fantastic. And that just leads us into the results. Can you talk to us a little bit about some of the results that your clients have seen? Absolutely. As we all know, you figure out, texting is probably the most effective way to communicate to your members. So I sell my software to gyms so they want to communicate with their gym members. So we’ve built automated business triggers in our software and we’re integrated to true dialogue. So for example, I can text somebody if they haven’t checked into the gym in 10 days or a classic one would be their credit card fails. Would nudge them a little text message saying your card failed, please log into the app to make payment. Two days later, we’ll send them another one. We have different business cases, maybe if a member canceled every 30 days, text them to say, why don’t you come back? So those are just some simple examples and I can elaborate on some others, but those are simple examples of what works really well. So I think the end result is that it kind of works across, has multiple use cases. So administrative on the billing, membership, enrollment type stuff. And then also on the marketing. So reactivation of clients who’ve canceled, cetera. And that’s just value add and money back into the gems back pockets directly. Right? Right. One classic example, I almost forgot about this one. When a member adds a prospect to the system, sometimes that prospect won’t come to the gym to do a tour. So the system every day would text the member and the gyms can set up on our software using true dialogue day one to say, Oh, please come in for a tour. offer free spinning classes. Day two, do know we have Peloton bikes? Day three, something else about the gym. So the bottom line is the gyms are telling me these are prospects that probably wouldn’t have signed up, but every day they’re nudging them different value points about why they could come in to the gym and their staff is doing nothing for this to happen. It was just all automated. So, you one of the things I think, you know, a lot of our clients benefit from is the fact that although a lot of use cases are one way in nature, as you mentioned, you also talked about several instances where if the member replies and you can create a dialogue with the customer at that level, can you talk about some of the experiences as far as managing inbound and outbound messages? Absolutely. That was a great feature we built in because a lot of people are concerned about two-way texting. We’re able to, for example, automate a text message when somebody canceled the gym and say 30 days out, 60 days out, 90, and they’ll put in the message, please respond with yes or some type of code to have us call you to get you back in the gym. So they might send out 2,000 text messages and they look in the queue for the 30 people that respond, boom, they have them right there on a queue, they call them up. They click our dashboard, they move them from the dashboard. So it’s a great way to communicate back and forth with different, that’s one example of how it’s being used pretty very effectively. That bottom line is it puts money in the gym’s business with minimal effort. Fantastic. you know, I think, you know, in talking about this, I think one of the other use cases is for the trainers inside the gyms and as we’ve talked about, you how valuable it is for the trainers who make their money on training sessions. several of the owners are in fact trainers themselves. Can you talk through how they’re using it to drive additional personal training sessions? Absolutely. So they might do a training session and then an hour later they’ll get a text message to say, thanks for the great workout. Why don’t you log into the portal on our mobile app? to do the video workout we mentioned to you while you did the workout with me. So that’s automatically happening, or they might just say, do you want to maybe respond and how you felt the workout was? Just respond to the text. So the bottom line is communication is key, and all of these communication touch points are done with hardly any effort from the trainer. So a trainer could work out with somebody And then just follow up, maybe the next day say, don’t forget to drink your eight glasses of water a day. Just a little nudging, just a little reminders. And if they ever wanted to opt out, they just type in stop, we’ll just reply back. Why don’t you slow down with the texting? And that’s fine. But most people like it if you strategically make the message effective and less salesy and make it more informational. And Larry, think, you One of the other things our customers, as they’ve moved over to us, is not so much about using TrueDialog, it’s just about the industry as a whole. So have your customers experienced declines with more traditional communication connection points like a telephone or email? And that was one of the impetuses behind moving to adding text as a communication channel? Absolutely. I mean, the most effective way, I can’t preach it any better because I get this input back from my clients, is texting. Emailing is, I mean, I usually use this number. I’ll say, if you email a thousand people, 10 % would open the email within a couple of days. And typically, if you text a thousand people, you’ll get about a 95 % open rate within 20 minutes. You might be able to clarify those numbers, but you could dissect all these numbers you want. The bottom line is the texting works. The other methods can work too. Sometimes you could text and email and you’re hitting them multiple ways, but the texting is without a doubt the most effective way of getting a response. Yeah, it’s interesting. And one of our clients had a very poignant point, much like you. he said, what we’re doing is oftentimes if there’s update your credit card is one of the things that you’re using it for the system. And he said, What we use text for is to alert them that the credit card needs to be updated. And then we will alert them that we’re going to call you from this phone number in 10 minutes and collect your credit card. Because maybe some people don’t want to collect that information over line. it’s to your point, it’s a good nudge, but it’s also a good alert. And if 10 minutes isn’t good enough, tell me when I can contact you and call you for me to get your credit card information over the phone. Right. And John, you made a good point because I’m telling you, You know, we, sell my software and it’s always the second connection that typically is most effective. that technique you just mentioned is a home run. He’ll text them saying, I’m going to call in 10 minutes. And if you didn’t do that initial text, that secondary call probably wouldn’t work, but they’re waiting for it. And it’s such a great, it sounds simple, but it works. It’s that second that normally gets through. Yeah, it’s interesting. They said in today’s world of the spam calls and all of that stuff, that they actually increased their connection rates on telephones by having that text notification go out, I want to say by 60%. So it wasn’t an insignificant number. It was literally 60 % of your customers. So with that, I’d also just kind of like to talk about, you know, With regards to the APIs, this wasn’t as simple as just setting up, send a message and receive a message. Your implementation went beyond that as far as, okay, we’ve got a new client who’s onboarding, establishing an account. That can all be done through the API, right? Your development team? Yep. Did it all through the APIs. Your APIs are very clear and easy to use. And probably the best thing that you provide, in my opinion, was outstanding support. to get clarity on any question we had, especially during the onboarding process, to expedite that process. And the support is outstanding along the way, because you mentioned before about the registry and the legal issues of texting. It’s evolving so fast. I sometimes call your support just to learn where the industry’s going and how to most effectively do things to make sure the messages still go out. That’s really, people overlook that. That you think you just integrate and you never talk to the company again? No, we do, but it’s very effective and useful. Fantastic. And a little self plug here, for those of you who have questions on that in the resources section of our website, we’ve got a multitude of webinars that deal with legal and compliance issues that we have that carrier partners sit on and discuss as well as legal partners sit on and discuss who litigate this stuff all day long and can walk you through best practices of how to implement texting into your business. So thanks for bringing that up. With regards to ease of use, I think it’s, we talked about the easy to use, the registration of the numbers and a little bit about the ease of use of the APIs. I think one of the things that is important to understand from your experiences, your development team, the ease of use of implementing the APIs, the test beds that they were able to set up, how quickly can you talk a little bit about that? Right, sometimes that’s a struggle with other companies. With your company, it’s been great and we get integrate and maybe add a new feature that you’re always seem to be offering us like. because as your industry is evolving, like you mentioned before to me about the ability about trying to use the right keywords to minimize, to hopefully get the message to go through. So we’re continually trying to work with your company to make the APIs better, to leverage more of your services. And I’m not resistant to it because it’s easy to do it. relative to other experiences we had with other companies, where there’s always a struggle. Yours is very straightforward, and that’s one of the best things about it. I think the other thing is our support. For those of you who listening today, we’re very proud. We are built in our support is all 100 % US-based, so no overseas support. And we’re very proud of that. And it’s one of the things I think that continues to rank true dialogue high with regards to our clients is the fact that, you know, no company is without problems. When problems do arise, our client support teams are in Detroit, Michigan and in Austin, Texas. And they all are on US hours from 7 a.m. East Coast to 7 p.m. West Coast time. and here to service and support our client base. So thanks for mentioning that. I think we are nearing the end of our presentation here. Larry, do you have any final thoughts before we go into Q &A? I’ll say this. When you want to work with a company and sometimes you’re not sure who you should work with, I’ll say this about TrueDialogue. And I’m saying this from my heart. I work with a lot of different strategic partners and the attributes I look for is ease of use to implement and support. And I give TrueDialogue five stars on both of them. And I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it, because I work with a lot of good partners. And sometimes I make excuses for some of my partners and say, well, they have a little bureaucracy. That’s part of it. You guys are five stars all across the board. and That’s humbling for me to hear that. So thank you, Larry. And we appreciate you and your time today. Sure. With that, Amanda, are we ready to get into the Q &A? And do we have any questions from our audience today? We do. We do. We have the first question here. And I think this is for Larry. Larry, how long did it take to implement the API? For other companies, sometimes APIs could take a month or more. With TrueDialog, it probably took us about four days. And the best thing was that the API was very clear and concise. And whenever my programmer had a question or two, immediate response. We had a system to work with and got it up and running, I think, from start to finish within one week. With minimal effort, it wasn’t a full 40-hour effort for my programmer. It was pretty straightforward. That’s so great. Yep. The second question I have here is how long did it take to onboard or I should say how long does it take to onboard a new client? Okay. On my prior texting companies I worked with, it could take two or three days. When a client now wants to use my texting services, I’m able to get them up and running within 15 or 20 minutes. Wow. I can register the number through their portal, get the number for them. uh, go through the, uh, the legal process to get it. And John, what’s that terminology? 10 DLC, which is really important to make sure you don’t raise any red flags and you’re doing it correctly. So the answer is 10 to 15 minutes up and running in their system. Wow. think the, if I can kind of be clarified that I think the automation that you’ve done in your system, getting a new client into ad techs into your system is a minute, right? But it’s the part that takes a little bit is the registration. That’s the main of the 15 minutes. Maybe that’s 10 or 12. Absolutely. could get it up and running in a minute. When I say 15, I’m logging into the panel. I’m getting a number that takes 30 seconds. They used to take two days with the other provider because I get on demand, get a number. If somebody said they didn’t like the number, I could generate another number for them if they really don’t. I don’t like that number for some reason. OK. You know, it’s pretty easy to get somebody up and running ASAP. That’s great. We have two more questions here. The second, I’m sorry, this third question. How has it helped gyms and country clubs to grow their businesses to have the SMS? Okay. So we built a panel that triggers based on business events that the member does at a gym, like maybe they haven’t checked in in a while, et cetera. But we have six large gyms, I’ll plug them, call our fitness. They have about 3,000 members at each location. And they started implementing the automated text when a member cancels. So whenever a member cancels, and they figured out the right numbers to say, have the text go out on day 30, 48, 55. 75, those are the days. So somehow mathematically, they felt those were the best days. They are telling me that every month at each location, they’re getting about five or more new members from people that canceled where the number used to be zero. And all this is happening with them doing nothing. So it immediately affected their bottom line with zero effort from the staff. because they could get the text and sign back up or call them or say, call the gym if you want us for a quicker response. Or like John said, I like that we can call you in 10 minutes if they did a personal text to somebody. But these are the automated examples that are working like a charm. It really is. It’s amazing. That’s great. I think you mentioned when we were chatting earlier, you had a couple of success stories. of different customers of yours that leverage the SMS to better grow their business? Right. The prospecting examples I gave you, it’s like sometimes a guy might go on the internet and say, want to register to see a tour of the gym and they won’t show up. But the key thing is they were interested and all they need are daily nudges to come to the gym and say, you know what? You’re right. I got to go to that gym because every day the system’s automating a different text message about the gym. So those are people that they wouldn’t have gotten. And the other classic example that John mentioned is when their credit card fails, nudge them to please, oh, just a reminder, a friendly reminder to update your card. So that’s revenue they weren’t getting sometimes, because people would be negligent in updating their card. And this just makes it easier. both those examples affect the bottom line immediately for the gym. With again, I can’t stress this enough, minimal involvement from the staff to do any of this, because it’s automated. Yeah. And I think, you know, my experience, the, the, the gem that I go to, I’ve been telling Larry and I’ve been telling them to take a look at Larry’s system because they, they use one of Larry’s competitors and they’re, they’ve been around for a while and their messaging is, I would say at at best incomplete. It’s very dumb. It’s non interactive. They’ve added text, but I think it was, they haven’t done anything with it in so long. And I think probably seven or eight years since they’ve done anything with text. you know, if you respond to it, you know, this mailbox is not monitored. It’s, if you try to get off of it, you can’t. It’s Larry has really taken the, gym software world to a new level. So, and I think the other exciting thing is that using TrueDialog’s automated voice, he’s actually one of the new products that he’s going to be looking at and rolling out is the TrueDialog automated voice applications as well. So we’re excited to talk about that. We’re looking forward to doing that. And see, that’s an example of when I call your support, they mentioned to me these new things that are emerging. So it’s great that you don’t just call and just get support. They’ll suggest new things I can offer. And that was, I, who was the rep’s name I deal with a lot. David, he’s a superstar and he’s the one. And we’re just so busy with things. didn’t finish. I didn’t start that integration, but that’s another exciting thing we want to add the, uh, the automated calling, which, uh, we’re excited about, you know, introducing that, but, That would be great. And that will give the gym owners the opportunity to record a message and broadcast it out in their own voice and tone and culture that matches their gym style. That’s exciting. We have one more question. Last question. How did you find TrueDialogue customer support? This person writes their current provider’s customer support is outside of the US and it’s hard to sync up times to get things worked out. What was your experience with the support or how did I get introduced to John and his team in true dialogue? Is that the question? I think I understand the question to be your experience with customer to dialogues, customer support. It’s a home run. And like I gave the example before, they don’t just give you good support. They give you good suggestion, good tips to use moving forward. And I’ll give you a best practice tips. And that’s probably the best thing. Their website’s very good with the, uh, the, the, the open APIs and everything. And the website’s very helpful, but the support’s just very, uh, it’s very fast. It’s, it’s pretty immediate and they’re very concise with helpful information. They’re not just giving me like, just trying to get, trying to close the ticket and get, get rid of me. They’re really caring about how they’re trying to help me, especially David. It’s been exciting to see your customers grow. Because every week it seems like you got another 10 or 15 added. So it’s been exciting to watch. Right. And I could use your dashboard to figure that out easily. That’s another thing I didn’t mention. The dashboard I log in to manage all of my accounts is idiot proof. I don’t think I got any training on that. I’m telling you, it’s really well done. It’s very… It’s very clean and simple to use and easy to get access to all of your accounts that you’re texting. And you could see the text that went out, how many texts are failing. And you can easily find out those failures. And sometimes I’ll send that list to my gyms and say, these numbers are all bad. Take them off your lists. So they go, wow, thank you, Larry. It’s very useful. Because it’s easy to get it from your dashboard. It’s useful data. Thank you. Gentlemen, I have one more question that has just come in. This person is asking, how does the audio message work? They missed that part. John, you can explain that better than I can. Yeah. The audio message is something that we are adding into the TrueDialogue platform from an acquisition that we did of a well-established company called VoiceShot. who’s been around for 20 years, been around longer than TrueDialog. And we’re extremely excited about it. And the things that we’re really excited about is number one, what’s new is old again, or what’s old is new again, because the primary benefit that our customers like about the voice calling application is that it’s not VoIP based. It is all over traditional copper lines. And the call quality is tier one. If it’s listening for a live person or a answering machine, the call detection is, I don’t know, 40 to 50 % above what VoIP lines are. Those can be very staticky. They can be incomplete. If you’ve ever got a message on your phone that was VoIP-based and the message started was already halfway through by the time the beep happened, those are problems with VoIP lines. And we’re doing all of our transmission over traditional copper lines, which is just heads and tails. And the last thing which we didn’t realize until one of our customers pointed out is that because of the way VoiceShot’s technology works is that because it’s over copper, when you get a call from an unknown number, most of it does not show up as spam likely, which all VoIP lines, one of the big things that the device and the carriers use to, if it’s unknown number and it’s VoIP, that’s a big trigger for them to put project spam likely on the device. So our phone calls seem to circumvent that because they are over copper, because the carriers know who we are, and because there are more, we actually have to stay up to date with all of the carriers in carrying copper lines, that they’re not getting flagged at the way that copper or VoIP lines are. So three big benefits and thanks for bringing that up, Amanda. And John, have to say, when David, told me about the audio, the first thing that I said to myself is, I bet you the quality could be mixed. And he told me on the call, but we use copper lines, which makes it a clear message. And that’s the kind of support you’re getting. He goes over the top and gives me clarity on the service that I was getting. And that’s what makes us want to do it because I don’t want to broadcast a muffled message, but you demonstrated through your technology that you’re trying to use cutting edge technology to make the audio clear as it can be. Well, it’s not cutting edge, Larry. It’s actually like the old copper that used to of the wallet. Right, but it works. But cutting edge to me is it works great. To me, that’s cutting edge after being in business all these years. You can be cutting edge and things are slower. What’s old is new again, right? All right. Just like you said. Good point. Well, thank you very much, Larry, for your time. Thank you both.