Changing Real Time Customer and Employee Feedback for Companies with Adam & Kfir Alfia

Jeff Amerine: This is Jeff Amerine. This is the Startup Junkies Podcast. This is about those stories for the people that are afflicted with creating the next great products and services that are going to change lives, not just in America but worldwide. We’re going to tell the stories of the next great beer brewer, new product apparel makers, and those people who don’t accept the status quo. We want to make people welcome to the Startup Junkies Podcast.

Davis McIntyre: All right. Welcome back to another Startup Junkies Podcast. My name is Davis McIntyre. Thank you for tuning in, whether you are watching us or listening. We appreciate it. Be sure to like, subscribe, and do all that fun stuff so you can catch up with the Startup Junkie crew weekly.

I’m joined today by my co-hosts, Jeff and Victoria. How are you guys doing?

Jeff: Fantastic.

Victoria: Awesome.

Davis McIntyre: I’m very excited about the podcast today. Joining us are Adam and Kfir Alfia from Real Time Feedback. Guys, how are you doing today?

Adam Alfia: Wonderful. Yourself?

Davis McIntyre: Doing fantastic. So before we get into kind of an origin story, could you give us a little bio on what Real Time Feedback is and what you guys do?

Adam Alfia: Sure. It’s a 2-way private customer communication platform that allows customers at any business to directly communicate with management digitally in real time to give both compliments and criticism, with the goal of fixing issues while they’re still doing business at that location.

Davis McIntyre: Amazing. Well yeah, let’s get right into it. What’s your story leading up to Real Time Feedback? Both of you, if you want to take turns.

Adam Alfia: Yeah. So my brother and I have run a company for the last 17 years called Maestro, and that’s a digital personal assistant service with live remote agents. We started it in 2005.

Our biggest footprint is in automotive. If you think of what OnStar was for GM, we duplicated that kind of environment for non-GM vehicles. We are currently in 4 manufacturers’ vehicles: Nissan, Mitsubishi, Subaru, and Infiniti. In any of those 4 cars, if you push the soft button in the car on the head unit or on the roof, it comes to our call center here in Dallas, and we pretty much help you with anything you need.

Think of it a little like American Express Black Card. You call up and you want tickets, dinner reservations, or help planning a trip to Italy because your wife only eats vegan food. Whatever it is, we take care of it. Our motto is really anything, anytime, anywhere. We’ve been doing that for the last 17 years.

So we’re really hypersensitive to customer experience. When a customer calls our service, we want them to hang up and say, “Wow, that was 1 of the best phone experiences I’ve ever had.”

We really noticed a big decline in customer engagement, customer experience, and customer service, especially in the last 7 years, and really even more so during the pandemic where there were no face-to-face experiences for a while. Now that everything has come back, and with what people call the big quit, it’s really hard to get qualified, customer-oriented employees. A lot of businesses are just grabbing warm bodies. If you’ve got a heartbeat and can speak, you’re hired. You see places like McDonald’s giving $1,000 bonuses just to work. It’s crazy. So it’s really put pressure on finding good customer experience people that can come in and handle customers well.

My brother and I would always swap horror stories about experiences we had at restaurants and other businesses. We always talked about this idea that, “I wish I could speak to the manager and tell them what I’m seeing right now,” but it was always hard. You don’t want to make a phone call and say, “Can I speak to a manager?” If I’m walking around a Bed Bath & Beyond and see an employee on their phone for 5 minutes while I’m looking for help, I might, if it’s bad enough, go find a manager and say something. But most people won’t.

So we built a really cool platform for customers who are having an issue to directly message management and hopefully fix the issue before the customer goes online and blasts the business with a 1-star review.

Before we got to that point, though, we were dabbling with a couple of other ideas that kind of had us pivot to where we are now. We had a domain called BadEmployee.com where the idea was to shame the business publicly. You would take a video or picture of the bad employee or somebody slacking off, tag the business, and it would kind of call them out.

But after mulling it over for a while, we realized there had to be a better way to monetize it and a better approach overall. That’s when the lightbulb went off. Why make it a public shaming site? Why not keep it private and make it so you’re not really shaming the employee, you’re just giving useful criticism or feedback on any part of the operation, whether complimentary or negative, and sending it directly to management? That’s really how we came up with the current model.

Davis McIntyre: Sounds like a more engaging way to do something like a net promoter score, to some extent, where you’re giving that direct feedback but in a way that’s actionable. How’s it been going so far? How’s the uptake with enterprise?

Adam Alfia: It’s been really, really good.

Our first big customer was actually here in Dallas, American Airlines Center, where the Stars and Mavericks play. I knew some people there, and we did a presentation. They absolutely loved it, but they said they didn’t really know what the engagement would be. So we launched in December of 2019.

They had a previous system where you would send a keyword to a short code, but it wasn’t very successful. I think in all of 2019 they had received somewhere around 25 or 30 messages for the entire year.

I said, “Look, let’s put our platform in. It’s QR code based. It’s much easier than remembering a short code and keyword. That may have worked 10 or 12 years ago, but it’s not really something people do anymore.”

So we launched with QR codes in select areas, and the first night alone during a Mavericks game they received 42 feedbacks. Now they’re getting a constant stream of really great insights from both fans and employees.

One of the things we didn’t even fully think about when we built this was how much employees would use it. Employees are there more than anybody, but a lot of times they don’t feel like they have a path to management. They’re embarrassed to say something, or they don’t want to be the person who always complains. So a big portion of the feedbacks we see in retail and venue environments are actually employees seeing something and using the platform to report it.

The beautiful part about this, rather than something like an NPS score, is that there’s a response. Most surveys and NPS tools collect data, but nobody ever expects anybody to reach back out. We make it crystal clear, both in our marketing and inside the platform, that somebody is supposed to respond. And we put a lot of emphasis on response time because a lot of times you’re catching somebody in the middle of a negative experience, and you want to respond quickly and save that relationship in the moment.

Jeff: That’s such a clever insight as it relates to employees because there’s a full-on war to get talent, and it’s even more difficult to retain talent, particularly in the service sector. Part of that is lack of engagement. The culture seems like no one cares about what they’re doing. It seems like you guys address that problem. It’s very clever.

Adam Alfia: Yeah. The more we’ve done this, and we’ve really been actively pushing it since 2019, the more we’ve learned where it fits best.

We just finished a large pilot program with Ford at a large number of their service dealerships. They have a thing called Quick Lane, which is their express lube concept. We had 4 months of data come in, they absolutely loved it, and now we’re going national with them. They’ve got almost 1,000 locations nationwide.

We’re talking to a lot of other car manufacturers too, because right now, with inventory the way it is, the service department is really carrying the dealership. That’s where all the revenue is being generated. It’s incredibly important to keep the customers happy who are coming in for service because once inventory comes back, they want those same customers to keep coming in, and hopefully buy their next vehicle there too.

We’re launching grocery stores. We just launched with a chain of grocery stores. Party City is about to do a pilot program with us as well. These are all traditional brick-and-mortar locations that are really feeling the squeeze right now with employees. If you turn your customers into your eyes and ears, they’re able to let you know about deficiencies in your business that you otherwise wouldn’t know about because you don’t have the staff to catch everything.

Davis McIntyre: What are the major industries that you see using this? Is it industry specific or favored in certain categories?

Adam Alfia: Yeah, so right now we’re going after a few major categories.

We just launched our first hotel, and it’s getting incredible response. We also came up with something new and applied for a patent on it. It’s called a trigger code, where you don’t even have to type anything. Simply scanning the QR code sends out a preselected message.

If you’ve been to a hotel recently, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of hotels no longer make up your room every day because they don’t have enough housekeeping staff. So you’re required to call downstairs and say, “Hey, I need my room made up.” That’s a pain for a lot of people. A lot of people don’t like making phone calls anymore.

I’ve got 6 kids, and every time I call 1 of them, they text me back and say, “Hey, what do you want?” I want to talk to you. That’s why I’m calling you. But that generation, probably 35 and under, just wants text messages. They don’t want to call an 800 number.

So what we did was put QR codes on the inside of every hotel room door. As you’re walking out, it says something like, “Want your room made up? Scan this code.” As soon as you scan it, it says you’re about to send the message “Make up room 315” to housekeeping. Then it asks if you need anything else, like extra shampoo, more towels, or more coffee pods. It goes straight to housekeeping, and they respond back, usually with something like a thumbs-up. It’s a really simple, clean solution.

Another industry that’s a really great fit is the arena space, like Adam already touched on. If you’re at a game and someone in front of you is getting really drunk, cursing, or causing problems, you don’t want to start a scene. You don’t necessarily know who to tell. This offers the guest a very discreet way to communicate with management.

American Airlines Center uses this exact way. They can route somebody over there and take care of the situation. We even had another situation there where a concession stand was basically scamming customers. They were offering unlimited refills, but then shutting down after making the sale, so people couldn’t get the refills. Several guests complained through the platform, and operations found out what was going on. Otherwise they probably never would have known.

Actually, Gina Chapa at American Airlines Center was awarded the Pete Winemiller Guest Experience Innovation Award by the NBA for 2022. In her interview, she talked about how much that success was driven by putting the Feedback platform in place to engage guests. They even have it in every suite now. If you want another 6-pack of beer or more nachos, you just scan a QR code and request it, and it goes straight to the person handling your suite.

Victoria: That’s fantastic. I also think it’s very empowering that it can be anonymous because I’m definitely 1 of those people who doesn’t like to raise an issue in person if it’s not that big of a deal. I might not bring it up, but it definitely impacts my experience. So I think this is really important for a lot of people like that.

Have you seen any trends in the kinds of things managers typically care about versus what customers are actually reporting? Like things where managers say, “I didn’t even realize this was something we’d get feedback on.”

Adam Alfia: Yeah, absolutely.

We have a bunch of restaurants on our platform, and 1 of the first ones we launched was a chain of 24-hour diners here in Dallas. They’re known for late-night crowds on Friday and Saturday nights where people come in half-drunk at 4 or 5 in the morning, and the atmosphere is kind of festive. So they play louder music and cater to that crowd.

Well, they started getting complaints from people who showed up Sunday morning at 7 a.m. for brunch or coffee and the paper, and the music was still blaring. Most people aren’t going to call a waiter over and say, “Can you turn the music down?” But if you make it seamless to tell management through a QR code, they will.

That was something management didn’t know about. They also got complaints like, “Your ceiling fan is covered in dust.” When you work at a business every day, a lot of these things just become background and you stop noticing them. But customers notice. And if you give them a simple way to tell you about it, they will.

We’re also going after property management right now. We own our own building here in Dallas on the Tollway, and there’s always stuff breaking. A lot of the people in the building aren’t even tenants, they’re visitors. So if a visitor goes into a restroom and there are no paper towels, they’re probably just going to wipe their hands on their pants and leave. But if you give them a quick way to report it, that goes straight to maintenance and somebody can fix it.

Kfir Alfia: Victoria, the way you described your temperament is exactly who this tool was built for. There’s this misconception about Yelp and Google reviews. Most people don’t actually leave those. There’s a certain type of person who goes and leaves the Yelp review or goes on a revenge mission against a business. Most people are just readers of Yelp reviews.

There’s a whole swath of guests and customers who are silently having bad experiences and leaving, either thinking, “I’m never coming here again,” or, “I’ll tell my friends.” Those are the people, the silent majority, who really need a voice, and that’s who this tool was built for.

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Jeff: We’re going to take you down a little bit of a different tack here. I think it’s impressive that this is a family business. You’ve got multiple generations of the family involved.

We have listeners in over 100 countries now, and 1 question that comes up a lot is whether you can make a venture work when you’ve got family involved. My son is 1 of the managing directors here. We’ve worked together for 8 years. I’m a big fan of it, but you get a mixed bag of views on it from venture capitalists and others. I’d just be interested in your thoughts. You guys have obviously been successful with it. What does it take to be successful when you’ve got family involved in ventures like this?

Adam Alfia: My brother and I have a really good dynamic because we both bring different things to the table. He’s more level-headed. I’m more of the gunslinger. A lot of times he’ll talk me off the ledge. So we have a good balance. I bring the voice of taking chances, and he brings the voice of reason.

That’s not to say we haven’t had blowouts. We absolutely have. But we’ve always maintained the relationship, and after 5 or 10 minutes of yelling, we come back to center and work it out. The good thing is we’re stuck with each other. We have a very tight-knit family, and I know I would never choose a business over the relationship I have with my family. So that forces us to figure things out.

We’ve been working together for 17 years. When I first started the personal assistant company, it was just an idea and I was doing it with somebody else. That person backed out at the last minute. Kfir was working for another firm, and I called him up and said, “Hey, I’ve got this idea I want to explore, but I have to go to India.” Our first call center idea was in India, and we quickly abandoned that, but I called him and asked if he wanted to go to India and start a call center.

He called me back an hour later after talking to his then-fiancée and said, “I want to go do something with my brother.” And we’ve been together ever since. It’s been a crazy journey.

It’s great when you have somebody in the family to celebrate with. We’ve had a lot of big wins, and it’s great to have somebody close to you to share those with.

The secret, though, is that everybody has to be on the same wavelength when it comes to work ethic. The last thing you want is 1 person doing all the work and another person riding coattails. My dad actually had that kind of situation with his brother, where 1 did all the work and the other kind of got carried along. It got toxic, and now they don’t talk anymore.

Jeff: No, it’s good to get those perspectives because a lot of people wonder about it. The other thing that’s interesting is succession planning. When you have multiple generations involved, as founders you have to figure out how to work yourself out of a job and build that next level of leadership.

That’s something I think about a lot. We’ve been at it for 15 years. Brett, my son, who’s essentially our chief operating officer, is the 1 who turned it from a side hustle into a process-driven business where we’re actually able to grow it. It makes a lot of difference to think about what comes next so the business survives beyond you.

Adam Alfia: That’s a wonderful problem to have. And if you think about it, the survival rate for any new venture is low. If you get past 1 year, you’re doing something. If you get past 5, you’re doing something. And if you get past 10 or 15, you’re onto something and usually figuring it out.

You guys strike me as the type that are not complacent and are always hungry, always looking at the next venture based on a problem in the marketplace. That’s really how we operate too.

Jeff: How do you manage between the 2? You’ve got this existing large business, and now you’ve got Feedback growing too. How do you manage between them at this point?

Adam Alfia: We’ve really put the other business, Maestro, on more of an autopilot mode because there are only so many car manufacturers to go after, and we pretty much got all the big ones we could. Right now, with car sales the way they are, that product is really designed to support car sales, and they’re selling every car they can right now anyway.

So we’ve taken our foot off the gas there a little bit because it’s stable. We have the clients we have, and we’ve really spent the last 3 to 3.5 years living and breathing Feedback.

And back to having Aiden involved now, he sees a different side of me than he probably ever had before in the work environment, and he brings a fresh perspective. Employees will give you their opinions and ideas, but I think he feels more free to say exactly what’s on his mind because I’m his dad. Not that I’m not paying him, but still, he’ll say, “Why don’t you try this? Why don’t we do that?” A lot of employees won’t always steer you that directly. So it’s great to have that perspective.

Kfir Alfia: I wouldn’t say our other business is completely on autopilot, just that we have really talented and hardworking people in place. If we didn’t have that, it would be a lot harder to do what we’re doing with Feedback.

Davis McIntyre: So what’s winning look like for Feedback? You’ve got great traction, you’ve been at it for the last 3 years. What does it look like over the next 5?

Adam Alfia: When we first started, we were going after small and medium-sized local companies. We quickly realized that to really scale the platform, it was going to take enterprise customers adopting it. So that’s where we shifted our efforts.

We know it’s a longer sales cycle. Pilot programs, buy-in, legal issues, IT, all of that slows things down. But once you build a platform that works and a company adopts it, it becomes a long-serving solution.

One thing we’re about to launch is a self-serve model where smaller customers can just go online, pay maybe $49 to $99 a month, get their own QR code, and start using it without a lot of direct involvement from us. We’ll strip out a lot of the bells and whistles and make it very easy.

But really, to answer your question, winning for us is enterprise customers where the QR codes are everywhere, printed on receipts, included in emails, and built into the customer experience across locations.

The current emails people get are almost always 1-directional. Any survey you fill out, nobody really responds to it. You’re just giving data back to the company. But customers don’t really care about the big picture. They care about themselves. If you give customers a way to voice their concern and then get an answer back from the manager of the store they were just at, that changes the whole relationship.

Jeff: Yeah, they often say there’s that silent majority out there that are not writing reviews on Yelp or Google, and they’re voting with their feet. They’re just not coming back. This gives you a chance to engage them at an important moment of truth where you can keep them. It’s difficult to retain customers, and this strikes me as a really good way for customers to feel like the business actually cares about what they think and isn’t just going to blow it off.

Adam Alfia: That’s exactly right. And 1 of the things we tell businesses all the time when we go in is, “Do you really want to know?” Because if you’re just saying you want to know and going through the motions, but then somebody tells you something and it falls on the floor, then it’s worse than not having the system at all. You really have to make a commitment that if a customer has a legitimate problem and submits something, you read it, you respond, and you let them know you got it. We make it very easy. But if you don’t care, you don’t care.

Davis McIntyre: Right. It’s got to be something that’s ingrained in the culture, or it’s probably not going to work even with a tool like this.

We usually start to land the plane with a pretty theoretical question and kind of put you guys in the hot seat. If you could go back in time, maybe before Maestro, maybe before Real Time Feedback, if you could give your younger self any advice, what would that advice be?

Adam Alfia: Don’t ever take your foot off the gas. I’ve had times where we’ve won big contracts and I thought, “Okay, I can relax now.” I wish I never did. I want to go full throttle. Relax later in life.

Kfir Alfia: I’d probably tell myself to be more ahead of the curve on research and what’s coming. It’s easy just to be a consumer of the news and kind of find out things when everybody else does. But if you look hard enough, you can spot certain trends that are probably going to hit a couple of years before the average person realizes it. I think that would have helped us make better decisions at certain points in our trajectory.

Davis McIntyre: Fantastic. I love it. Well guys, if our audience wants to find out more about Feedback or connect with you about Maestro or anything else you’re working on, what’s the best way for them to get in touch?

Adam Alfia: RealTimeFeedback.com.

Davis McIntyre: Perfect. Hey, we’re really glad to have you guys on. And I’ll say it again, having your son in class was a treat. I’m glad we were able to make the connection and have you on the show. Have a great upcoming holiday, and we’re really happy to have you guys here.

Adam Alfia: Thank you so much.

Kfir Alfia: Thank you so much, guys. Really. Bye.