Connected at NADA 2024 Special Episode: Technician Videos with Warner Jones from TruVideo

Greg Uland: Hi, I'm Greg Uland with Reynolds and Reynolds, and this is Connected. We're live at the NADA show in Las Vegas. This conversation, I get to sit down with Warner Jones. Warner is the senior vice president of product at TruVideo. Warner, thanks so much for joining me.

Warner Jones: Thanks for having me.

GU: Absolutely. So TruVideo goes back quite a ways and has some true expertise, I think, in video production and video recording and really pushing that entire kind of segment of the industry forward. Before we get there, before we dive into that, Warner, you've been around the block a couple times, so I was curious what your, what your background is? We haven't met. We, I think we met on a zoom call briefly, and that was about it. So, how did you get into automotive and what's kind of your background?

WJ: Yeah, my background, started in tech. I was actually a programmer for a number of years. I sold computers. And in one of my jobs, I transitioned over into product. I sold this product, and, nobody was there to build it, and it was CD-ROMs and DVDs and those kinds of things, way back. And somebody had to do the product side. And that's sort of the first time I put on the product hat. And I've been doing product ever since, in a bunch of different industries. The short story is I played basketball with this one guy, and he said, “What are you up to these days?” And I said, “I'm looking for something.” He goes, “We're thinking of doing this thing. Do you want to come over and help us?” And that guy was Joe Shaker, who is the co-founder of TruVideo. And I came on and I did a bunch of different roles, but it's always been the voice of the customer, the view of the customer, is sort of where I've been in translating customer needs into the technology solutions.

GU: Yeah, yeah. So are you still playing basketball?

WJ: I still play basketball. Not quite as fast as I used to, but, I can put up the three.

GU: Yeah, once a week or what's your, what's your schedule?

WJ: A couple times a week if I can.

GU: Okay. Nice. Yeah. We have a, a Sunday game we usually play. I actually got the text this morning. “Hey, who's in for tomorrow?”

WJ: Yeah, right. I get those all the time.

GU: I'm out of town.

WJ: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

GU: So it is, it's fun to, to shake the rust off a little bit every now and then. And, you know, it's funny too, because we usually just do it in the winter. And, we'll start up in November and everybody looks terrible, right? And then by January, it's like this is actual basketball.

WJ: Yeah, yeah. And then you go play golf for the summertime.

GU: And you're terrible in March. Right. And then it gets, gets a little better. Yeah. That's a lot of fun. All right, so let's get into, maybe TruVideo first, then we can start talking about video in general. But, for those that don't know, give if you don't mind, like, the background of TruVideo, you said, you know, you mentioned Joe Shaker and brought it up at, a pickup basketball game, but yeah, give me the genesis.

WJ: Yeah. So, so TruVideo was founded, we're over nine years old now, and the two founders, Joe Shaker was a car guy, and then Douglas Crystal was a technology guy. And, you know, one day Joe was, you know, had this question. He goes, “I wonder how I can improve my customer experience, and I'm curious about if my customers really trust me?”

GU: Yeah.

WJ: And so he went-  

GU: Real quick, too, I mean, Joe has, how many stores… is it one store?

WJ: He’s got six stores.

GU: He’s got six stores. So, and these are franchise dealerships, I mean, you know, big stores. So this is a problem being solved by somebody in the industry. This isn't, you know, some some kind of random- I mean, this is a guy who's been in it for a long time. So, anyway, sorry to interrupt.

WJ: Yeah. And Joe's a 25-year dealer. Yeah, he's been in it since he's been real young. And his question he asked was, ‘Do my customers trust me?’ And so he went out and actually surveyed his best customers. And he said, you know, he said, “Hey, you've purchased three cars for me. All your cars get serviced here. And last time you were in, you spent $1,200 with me, and, everything we suggested you accepted. You said, ‘yeah, let's go do all that.’ And you do that all the time.” And he said, “But did you ever have any doubts? Right? Did you ever look at think, ‘Oh, do I really need those things?’” And, almost every customer said, “Well, of course you're gonna have doubts.”

GU: Yeah.

WJ: And that was the moment Joe said, I gotta find a solution where I can develop trust. And that solution ended up being video, and this was, this was way back, you know, over nine years ago. And it was a new concept.

GU: Sure.

WJ: And, we spent a lot of time in our first few years educating people on why they needed video and, you know, and today it's more about which video solution, what are the features? But the education piece was a big part of that.

GU: Yeah. Well, I'd say, you know, there's still a large percentage of dealers that aren't able to or haven't figured out or don't have the buy-in to do video. Because, I mean, we do, we've done a lot of surveys with consumers over the last 24 months. And, you know, one of the areas that we focus on is fixed ops. And we ask, you know, ‘what's your experience or what do you want in a service experience?’ And, and, you know, there's different pieces to that. You know, obviously everybody wants to schedule an appointment online and everybody wants to check in on their phone or at a kiosk. But one of the big things that stands out is everybody wants to see pictures and videos of the work that you're recommending. They find a lot of value in that. But then we ask a follow up question, “Okay, if you were into a dealership in the last 12 months, what did you experience?” And that gap between ‘we want it’ and ‘we got it’ is huge! It's like 73% ‘want it’ and 12% ‘got it.’ I mean, it's massive!

WJ: Yeah.

GU: So that's a big value gap that we can fill relatively easily. The technology is there at this point.

WJ: Totally. Yeah.

GU: So when, when you think about that, and you're looking at how do we get adoption? Because I don't, I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but every dealer that I've talked to doesn't object to the idea of video, right? It's, it's the implementation. It's the execution. It's-   how do you make this effective? How do I get my techs to use it? How do I- how do I store it? What's the right way to do it? Right? Is it on their phone? Is it on a company phone? Is it on a tablet? Is it- what do I have to do? So, that's a big- That's not even a question, I guess. That's a big, big thing to unpack. You know what? Maybe I just like down talk about because this this, I think, can get us into answering that question. You sent me a preview of that, that book you got there. Yeah. Talk about that a little bit, because I think it's a great idea and a great resource for, for dealers. So talk about that a little bit and can lead us into.

WJ: Yeah. It's- so over the last two years I've been giving webinars, free webinars to prospects and our customers and anybody who wants to join. One was on utilization, how you get your dealership to use it and get your numbers up, and then and do a webinar on quality. How do we do quality videos? And then I do yet another webinar on artificial intelligence, which we can talk about in a second. And at one point I said I really should codify all of this and just get it in one place. And that's what this book does. It's about 120 pages. It's, professionally illustrated, and there's 37 chapters, and it really breaks it down. And it's a, it's a great door opener. And to say, ‘Hey, you should take a look at video.’ I've presented at NADA twice now. Last year was on utilization. This year was on quality. And they have rules. When you present, you do a workshop and they say, “You can't promote yourself, you can't put your logo everywhere, you can't say, ‘come back to my booth and, you know, get a mug.’” And so the book is written in that language of, you know, there's definitely a backstory and an origin and so forth. And we do mention some of the things that TruVideo does, but most of the book is generic to ‘how do we implement video in my dealership? How do I create quality videos?’ And so it's, it's a great way to get started for anybody, whatever platform you’re on, if you're just thinking about, using video, it's a great way to get started.

GU: Yeah. How does a dealer get that?

WJ: They can send us an email. We'll have it on our website. And it's $14.99 on Amazon today. But we'll, we'll send you one out for free. Again, it's, it's a bit of a calling card for us.

GU: Yeah.

WJ: We're probably going to get this in the hands of most of our customers as well. And I think it's great people have been using our platform or any video platform for a while, maybe they get it. But somebody who shows up at the dealership and has a new service advisor, new technician, maybe they go in there and they can kind of look at, you know, how do I get started?

GU: Yeah. And I think it's a, it's a great resource. It really is. You know, when I was looking through it, you did a great job with it.

WJ: Thank you.

GU: And I think there's a lot of value in content like that in general, right? So we have, at Reynolds, we've done pieces similar, just like, ‘hey, a checklist. And how do you do these things?’ I think a good supplement, and you might have stuff like this too, but we have an example video that we put together, it's a couple of years ago, like, “this is what good looks like.”

WJ: Yeah.

GU: So you have that template. And then you have instructions on how to, how to get to that good. So I think those two things supplementing each other could be, really beneficial.

WJ: Yeah. Yeah, there's, there's a couple sections in here, one of the things I'm pretty proud of is I created a, a report card, and it grades, technician video on 25 different criteria. And then I list those criteria in here.

GU: Yeah.

WJ: Is the car on the lift? Is the hood open? Did you speak clearly? Those kinds of things. And we actually provide that to our dealers.

GU: Yeah.

WJ: And give them feedback so they can improve their quality. And then on the back, we actually have a green car script. So a vehicle that has no issues. And you know, you call it ‘in the green,’ it's word-for-word, what you should say when you're walking around a vehicle. So similar to what does a good video look like? I have a script and what to say when.

GU: It's perfect. So all right, that kind of leads into a couple of questions. The first one, and it's maybe it's a two-part question. So the first one is what's the most effective way to train technicians to do this? And the follow up is when the technician doesn't want to do it or isn't good at it, what are the other options? You know, is there, are there other ways to do it outside of having the technician his or herself do it?

WJ: Yeah. So it there's, there's a few pieces to that. You know, there is a process when you look at a dealership. And what does a successful installation look like at a dealership? You definitely need management buy-in.

GU: Yep.

WJ: You need to have a champion who cares about it, and especially early on, looks at it every day. It's, it's good before the installation actually happens to have meetings with each of your groups, and the messaging to each group is going to be a little bit different. The message to the technicians is going to be, ‘have you ever felt that the advisors never sold your work? Would you like to speak directly to the customer?’ Right? And you can really talk to that technician group. And then the advisory group is going to be a slightly different message and so forth. So that preparation leading up to the installation is really important. We do, in the book, I actually address five objections.

GU: Okay.

WJ: And, you know, one of the key objections that is overcome is, that selling of work and video. What we found is video fixes this communication chain in the dealership. So usually a technician uncovers 5 or 6 items, tells the advisor, and then the advisor tells the customer about 3 or 4 of those things. And you wonder why. And maybe the advisor was busy. Or maybe the advisor was thinking with their own wallet and not the customer's wallet. And for maybe they didn't trust that the technician was actually telling the truth and was trying to oversell. And so that communication chain, whatever the recommendations were, not all of them end up getting to the customer, right? And so when you educate the technician, you say, listen, 100% of your recommendations are going to get to the customer 100% of their time, unfiltered and unedited. That can really bring people around. Yeah, but sometimes you still do have issues with convincing technicians, and we'll recommend, paying an incentive. Some dealerships will pay one tenth. They'll pay two tenths. I've seen 3 to 5 tenths of an hour to do the video.

GU: Do they do that forever or is that like kind of a ramp up, you know, six months or three months or something like that to get, get the habit built? What, what do you see?

WJ: Yeah, we seen both. I think a lot of people think incentive to get it going and then we're going to pull it away. But we have dealers that actually leave it in place, and they said, ‘Oh, I'd pay that in money all day long for the improved CSI and the customer retention and so forth.’ So we've seen it both sides. The nice thing about it is now that if you're paying a $3 a video or a tenth for each video recorded, you're actually paying your technicians more money so you have a better ability to retain your, technicians because they actually make more money. And recruiting technicians becomes easier because now you have this extra incentive.

GU: Yeah. No, that's a good idea. That's a good idea. So taking that a step further, you were talking about selling the work. Still not all work is going to get, get purchased, right? Not everything's going to be approved. So I'm curious what you've seen if we've gotten there yet for leveraging video in follow ups. Right? So there's, there's a recommendation to the customer. Customer says ‘no thanks.’ You know, dealership most dealerships are going to have some sort of process in place to follow up. Right? If they don't, they should. Where, okay it's been a week that was marked red. You said no. Hey, did you get this done? We want to make sure your vehicle's, you know, safe and on the road in good condition. If you come back in this week, we'll give you a 10% off, whatever that might be.

WJ: Totally.

GU: Have you seen dealers implementing video in those follow ups? As a, as a recall mechanism. Right? Because it's one thing to get an email that says this and then but can you also link off to the video or something like that?

WJ: Yeah, yeah. So on the TruVideo platform we actually have a reminder system. And for any declined work you do, you check a box and it says, right, would you like to send out a message to this customer about their declined work? And you can say, next two days, three days, two weeks from now and it pops up and we don't send it automatically because the customer may have come in already to fix it. So you got to check to make sure they didn't come in already. But it will craft a predetermined text message and a predetermined email message that you're going to edit, and then you just hit send and it will actually send it out with the video attached.

GU: That's great.

WJ: So very similar to what you said. You declined break services last time you were in. Here's the video showing you how bad your brakes are. 10% coupon. Come on in.

GU: Oh that's great. That's great. I think another piece of that that that's really important that it's certainly important to technicians that I've talked to, but also to the fixed ops department in general, is when that work comes back in. And one of the things that we're we always get excited about working with our dealers is getting that work back to the technician that recommended it. Right? Because it's so important, there's nothing worse than, you’ re a tech- You spent time to do the inspection. You spent time to do the video. You don't like doing the video, even, right? But you spent time doing it. You did a good job. Send it to the customer. They declined it. And then two weeks later, you see that same car on the lift next to you. So they went to somebody else because, because the advisor didn't know or there wasn't a good way to track it. So I think that's another piece of the puzzle. You know, when you're looking at this holistically, the video is a great selling tool. But then I'll tell you what, when you get that vehicle back in, make sure it goes to the guy who's on the work.

WJ: Yeah, that's a great point.

GU: It's so important, or else you lose that trust with, with your employee.

WJ: Yeah. Very good point. I was going to, you had asked earlier about resistance and and, and actually who should record videos. And, and there are three solutions to it. I think many dealers look at it and they say, ‘I'll have my advisors record the videos. They know what to say, they know how to say it. They talk to the customer.’ So yeah. Anyway, yeah, they're comfortable. The technicians, we're going to keep them back there. And the challenge with that is that if the advisors are busy, especially during the morning rush, there's no videos being recorded. They're out there addressing customers. And so you don't get 100% compliance in your video recording. And so then you look at the next one where you hire a video guy, you know, like, all right, we're not going to bother technicians, we're not going to bother advisors. Going to hire a video guy. And the challenge with that is if the video guy is out sick or on vacation, you get zero videos that week or that day.

GU: Well, that and does he really, can he articulate, can he narrate the video, right? Articulate the problems with the vehicle and what's really there. You can give em a script?

WJ: Yeah. What we've seen is that, somebody will the dealership might hire a former technician. Okay. That's, can't lift tires anymore. Turn a wrench. Right? Yeah. And, he just pushes a cart around. He's got his tools and his gauges and things like that. And so we've seen it be successful there. But what we realized and what we saw for the first 3 or 4 times was as soon as an advisor, you either lose an advisor or they're on vacation, they're sick. Next man up is video guy, and now you've got the one guy who was recording videos, now he's writing up, you know, ROs in the front desk, and they're you're down to zero utilization again. So the way to scale and the way we see a majority of our dealers is technicians are doing it. But then there are all sorts of issues around that. Like what to say. Right? Advisors know how to sell a break job or an alignment… technician doesn't really know what to say. So I go over sort of a word track structure here, that talks about your top op codes. And what do I say if it's in the red or the green or the yellow?

GU: Do you, do you recommend that the tech is really trying to sell? Or, because in my head, it makes sense for the technician to be concise, right? Like here's the facts. This is what's going on. And the advisor can then provide the color commentary. Then they can, can actually sell, where the technician is. is providing the information, right? And yeah, there's a little bit of position, but they don't have to write like here's, here's the measurement on your brake pads. This is where they're supposed to be. This is where they are.

WJ: Yeah.

GU: This is this is a safety risk within the next three months.

WJ: Yep.

GU: And then the advisor can take that, take that information and sell off of it, but I don't know, expand on it. That's, that's my perspective in my head. I don't know what your thoughts.

WJ: Yeah, so, so the word track section here is ‘inform, educate, recommend, implicate.’ And your word tracks, I think just about covered everything I was going to say. And, but that's appropriate that the technician is not there to sell. The technician is there to inform. So when whatever you're looking at, give them the measurement. This is dirty. This is worn down. Whatever that informed piece is, the ‘educate’ is, how does this breaking system work? Well, you've got pads and a caliper and a rotor and, and so forth. And so now that you've got an informed consumer, “Ah that's how my brake pads work.” The ‘recommend’ is pretty obvious. You know what we're going to recommend you get, get you replace your brake pads today. And then that fourth piece is a little bit of a twist. It's not meant to scare the customer. It's meant to let the customer know what if. So the customer's like ‘Oh, $400. Well, what if I don't get that done today? Is it a safety concern? Is it a ride comfort issue? Is it going to cost you more money if you don't get it done today?’

GU: That's the big one on the wear parts, right, with, with pads. If you just leave it go, then when you come back in it's going to be pads and a rotor. And if you go too long then it's a caliper and a hose.

WJ: Right. So as a consumer, wouldn't you like to know if I don't get this done, you know, my windshield wipers I've got to chatter and shrieking all right. Well, guess what? Next time it rains, you may not be able to see very clearly, right? Those kinds of things. So the, the ‘implicate’ thing is a little twist. And then the fourth piece on that is if everything's in the green then you can talk about monitoring. Let the customer know, how do I know when my windshield wipers are bad? Well, if it chatters and so forth. So, those op codes are really helpful to put together to educate your technicians on what to say, because most don't speak to customers on a daily basis.

GU: Right. Right. Have you had… it's top of mind for me, I've heard a lot of conversations, especially there's certain franchises that are pushing it, but mobile service. So getting vans out there, GM's down the way and they have a mobile service van that they've decked out.

WJ: Yeah.

GU: And a lot of manufacturers are going that route and kind of encouraging dealers there. And I do think it depends on, geographic location. It depends on your customer base and clientele and demographics. You know, as far as utilization goes for those types of services. But my question is, in those scenarios, have you seen or do you see video becoming important? And I ask because in a lot of instances, the customer’s there, right? They'll come out, they'll look over your shoulder, they'll see what's going on. Or is it more of, an in person, like, ‘Hey, here's, here's the cabin air filter. It's pretty dirty. Do you want me to replace it?’ I don't know if you've seen that yet or if you have thoughts on that.

WJ: Well, there's two pieces there. And the first part of that, I will, say let's, let's take the mobile part out of it, the remote part, and just talk about if I have a customer in my dealership waiting for their car to be serviced, why do I need to record a video? I'm just going to bring them out. And what we've seen is if you bring that customer out and you show them whatever is wrong, oftentimes they need to call somebody back home and go, ‘Hey. Should I get this thing done?’ And they have very little information to then pass on to the confidant or their partner and so forth. The other thing is they may not have understood it the first time. Well, I don't have an opportunity now to listen to it again. And so even if somebody is waiting for their vehicle, we still recommend doing a video. And we see on average videos are watched two times. And basically what that means is they're either giving it to a friend to watch where they're watching it multiple times for understanding. So take that into a remote situation. We still recommend the video be recorded, even if the person is there, because they may have to share something with, with somebody, remotely. So that's kind of how we look at that.

GU: No, that makes a lot of sense. I didn't really think about that, but it's, it's so true. When you're making, you know, it's a relatively large financial decision for most people, right? It's not like a lot of people have 1200 bucks in their, their budget for the week or whatever. And many, many customers, they do want to think about it, at least make sure they're making the right decision. And, yeah, run it by somebody else that. ‘Yeah, should not do this. What do you think?’ And, you're right. So that's that's a good point.

WJ: I thought you were headed into the, pick up and drop off question. And one of the things that we're, our tool is also use for us condition videos.

GU: Oh, yeah.

WJ: So, we have a number. We, we are pretty big into trucking as well. And, you know, a truck gets dropped off and the first thing they do is actually walk around the vehicle and record any damage because they often get accused.

GU: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

WJ: ‘I dropped it off and it didn't have that.’ And so when you're doing, drop off and pick up kind of services, there's an opportunity for, for conditioned videos, right. I drive my loaner car out.

GU: Yeah.

WJ: And I take a video of that to make sure I've recorded the condition. I take a video of your car before I get in it, show you that the scratches and dents are already there. Yep. Then I drive it back and then you do it on the back end. And so you've got an opportunity to show four condition videos just to make sure that nobody accuses you anything.

GU: That's, that's a good idea. Yeah. I like that, I like that. So one other thing I wanted to ask about is, hardware, right? So again, I think I just assume the phone is the way to go. But I also just we were talking about basketball earlier. My kids play basketball. We record the games, right? So I'm constantly out of space on my phone. And that's a, that's a me problem. But yeah, you know, you got all these photos, all these videos, everything on your phone. So if I'm a, if I'm a technician and I'm constantly recording these videos and I have to delete them and just… is the phone the only option or is it the best option? Are there other options that you see people using from a hardware perspective to record the videos?

WJ: Yeah. So a couple of things to address the storage question first. We have a setting for each of our dealerships and it says, how long do you want to keep the videos on the phone?

GU: Yeah.

WJ: And the normal I think we set it for two days.

GU: Okay.

WJ: Some guys say ‘I wanted on there for five days’ because it will then leave the phone, right? And you can't kind of go back and look at it and so forth. And so, if an average video is somewhere between 50 and 100MB and you've been doing this for 2 or 3 days, it starts to get, filled up, and then we just delete it. So if you're using a personal device, you don't have to worry about storage because it cleans it out consistently. And over the weekend you're going to start Monday and there won't be anything in it. If we do get pushback and resistance from technicians, ‘I don't want use my own phone,’ we’ll recommend that the dealership buy a couple of phones. $250 Android phone with a case and a handle. You put it in a couple of strategic locations, and a few technicians share that phone.

GU: Okay.

WJ: After a few times of waiting for that phone to free up because somebody else is using it, they reach into their pocket, they download the app, and they're going to use their own phone.

GU: Yeah, yeah. So the phone is definitely the most effective way because you need the app to upload it into, you know, the storage and everything else. So the, the phone is the way to go. There's no, no GoPros walking around in the back of the service drive?

WJ: No, sometimes people use iPads and things, but we recommend a smaller format to get into the engine compartment and so forth. I did, I did take a video of my workshop the other day, and I put on the Meta glasses.

GU: Oh, yeah?

WJ: So Meta Ray-Ban is, about $300 and I literally stood there and I said, ‘Hey Meta, record a video.’ And it started recording.

GU: That's crazy.

WJ: And you can do whatever you want with your hands and measurements and this and that and move things around. And I think that's going to be a thing. When Google came out with theirs at $1,500, didn't make a lot of sense. But it's almost the same price. And, and basically what you do is you open up the Meta app and you say ‘download video’ and it puts it in your gallery. And then our app allows you to pull the video from the gallery and associate it with a repair order.

GU: Very cool.

WJ: And so it's pretty seamless. So you could literally record it and it's voice control. You just tap it and it takes a video and takes photos and you can upload them all to the RO. So I think that's where we're headed with the hardware I think it's pretty cool.

GU: That is cool. That is cool. I feel like I'm wearing you out a little bit, but I do have one more. So it popped into my head. So lighting, right? I think about when I'm, when I'm working on my vehicle, right? And I try to get a flashlight in there to see what's going on. Even, even just me for personal use, trying to see what's happening under the vehicle can be a little bit difficult, right? So thinking about lighting, any recommendations on, on that? You know, just your, your phone camera light, you know, might not be enough.

WJ: Yeah. It's, we definitely recommend that you have the light turned on when you're recording a video, especially for the engine compartment or under the vehicle. We talk about pointing things out because oftentimes the technicians say, well, you know, your battery looks good and your belts look good. And I'm like, I don't know where where's my battery on my belts, right? And so we recommend you pointing or-

GU: -actually touch it.

WJ: Yeah. Touching it. Some technicians will use a flashlight. And they go boom. And they'll shoot the beam on almost like a laser focus, that kind of thing. And so we do see that, especially if there's a leak somewhere up in the engine compartment. You get a bit of an assist from a flashlight, those things. Usually the camera light though is going to be enough. The forward facing light.

GU: Yeah okay. All right. Yeah. Just that is one that it seems like to get a good quality video. You know, lighting is important.

WJ: Yeah it is, it is. And we do see every once in a while they use those magnet lights. And I've got a couple of sample videos of that. And it really casts a lot of light on the area which is helpful.

GU: Oh that's good. That's good. All right. Warner, what about, what's, what's kind of next, right? We think about video. We're talking about utilization. And I think we do still have a, a decent ramp up time for the entire industry to, to really embrace this. But, we're going to get there, right? And as we do and as, as hardware gets better, like you were describing, it gets easier and more accepted. You know, as we look forward, what's, what do you see coming and how can we use video or other technology differently?

WJ: Yeah. So we spent a lot of time in the last, say, 18 months on artificial intelligence. And TruVideo at its core is it is a video platform, but it's got a companion texting platform because you got to get that message out and we apply artificial intelligence to both aspects. So, on the texting side, we actually look at every message that comes in and we evaluate it on positives and negatives and neutral or very negative. And if it's a very negative message, we actually send that off to the, to the service manager. What you find with remote work, you know, if the customer drops his vehicle off and leaves, you don't get that digital body language. Like if you're in the dealership and you're agitated and you're raising your voice, I know, I gotta go talk to you. If you're having a text conversation, I don't know what's going on. And so we actually do this sentiment analysis with alerts. The other thing we do is that every inbound message we analyaze and suggest an outbound message.

GU: Okay.

WJ: So AI says ‘This might be a good way to respond to that.’ And then any message that you type, we do sort of this Grammarly thing to it, we call it Text Pro. We clean it up. And so now we're going to make that whatever that shorthand is or an all caps message. We're going to clean up, make it look nice. And then the last thing we do is translations. So I could be conversing with a customer and they would like to speak in Spanish. They reply to me in Spanish, okay, comes back to me in text, in English, and then I can send it back out in English and it gets to them in Spanish. And then when we look at the video side of things, we do two things. One, we do subtitles. So we take the take the video, we strip out the words and the narration comes back and it's just going to play over, just like Facebook and the other guys. We can also play translations to that. So an English speak speaking technician, you can now read, Spanish subtitles. Very powerful. And then the last thing that blows most people away is the noise canceling.

GU: Yeah.

WJ: So we use artificial intelligence to actually strip out the background noise. It's like putting on noise canceling headphones. It's an amazing experience. Nobody else has that feature. And it's, it's a great customer experience improvement. So that's really where we've been focusing. We've got some other things down coming down the road, but those are the key things that are out there today.

GU: Yeah. So thinking even further into the future too. I mean, you know, with the advancements in AI and what we see with Dolly and things like that and, and kind of pulling these pieces together, do you see opportunities to get a lot more efficient with videos, too? Because in my head, you know, you have kind of your standard stack, of content, and then you get a couple shots of the customer's car, you piece it together, you can probably have a voiceover realistically, right? You can have something pieced together for you where the technician doesn't even have to narrate. It, can evaluate the video, see what's going on, and point it out, and maybe I'm getting way too far into the future, but to me, I think there's opportunities there. And, you know, maybe it's way too far off to even consider it, but I, I got to imagine that there's a time not too far in the, you know, way distant future that will be able to create these efficiencies and overcome a lot of those concerns or objections from text. And, you know, it's like, look, all you got to do is literally take a two second video of the problem. Or, you know, just do a quick walk around and we can create something and put a voice over it and do all those things for you.

WJ: Yeah. So we also our video platform is also used for sales. And I think definitely in the short term is more applicable to the sales side. You take one video of that hard-to-find vehicle. And then you do the voiceover for ‘Hey, Mike, here's that car.’ ‘Hey, Michelle, here's that car.’ Right? So kind of incorporating some AI technology and some voiceover kind of stuff. I think we're going to see some more efficiencies in, the object recognition for the, for what I'm looking at. So instead of pointing at it is just going draw a circle around it, incorporating helper videos. What, what's an alignment? Why do I need an alignment? Instead of the technician having to explain it every time you're going to have a helper video? And then, I even talked a little bit about in my, my workshop, some of the presentation of, commerce.

GU: Yeah.

WJ: If a technician says, ‘Well, I got to let you know that your brake pads are two millimeters, I'm going to recommend that you get those replaced.’ Why doesn't that just fill in, you know, a quote for the customer, those kinds of things. So, yeah, we're definitely going to see more and more of that over the next year.

GU: That's great. That's great. All right well, Warner this has been a great conversation. Anything we didn't talk about that you want to hit on before we, before we jump out of here?

WJ: Boy, I think, I think we just covered, covered almost all of it. No. It's great. The questions have been great, and I appreciate that.

GU: Yep. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for taking the Time Warner Jones, senior vice president of product at TruVideo. Really appreciate it.

WJ: Thank you very much.