This episode features Interact’s CEO, Josh Haynam, Digital Marketing Manager and Host, Jessmyn Solana, and Customer Success Manager, Damaris Pacheco
In this episode we will cover:
- What is needed from a human to make a good AI quiz?
- Which AI quizzes exceed customer expectations and which ones fall short?
- What kinds of revisions do customers want for their AI-generated quizzes?
Ready to put our AI-powered quiz maker to the test? Learn more here!
Hi guys, and welcome back to Interact’s Grow podcast, where we talk about all things marketing and business, and what’s going to actually help you grow. I’m your host Jessmyn Solana, and with me today I have CEO, Josh Haynem. And for the first time on our podcast, our customer success manager, Damaris Pacheco.
Damaris, thank you so much for hopping on with us today. We are going behind the scenes into our Interact AI, so we were really excited to bring you on and get to chat about our experiences using it. Do you wanna go ahead and introduce yourself to everybody? Tell us a little bit about what you do at the company.
Yes, of course. Hi. Hi everybody. I’m Damaris. Very excited to be here for the very first time. The best way I could explain my role is basically I do a little bit of front facing with customers. So I do a little bit of chat support, I do strategy calls. With probably a lot of you listening in today, emails back and forth.
We’re now doing AI quizzes for our customers. So really encompassing anything customer related. I’ll be your, your go-to person and then anything else in between that we need to, to sort of work on customer outreach. The. I love it. And chances are, I think what’s great about our podcast is chances are you’ve probably talked to all of us at some point in time, whether it was through email, social media video calls and so on.
Yeah, absolutely. I probably have, but ha if anybody recognizes me. Hello? Hi. So Josh, do you wanna actually jump in cuz I know. You know, the actual behind the scenes of how our Interact AI is being created. And then I’m passing it off to you to host today since we’re the ones creating the quizzes.
Yeah, I’ll try not to mess up the hosting too much. So kind of to set the stage on what we’re doing with ai. We are building a layer on top of models like chatGPT, Google’s, Bard Cora’s, po and honestly, whatever else comes along, we’ve, we’ve kind of taken little bits and pieces from a bunch of them to build what we’re building.
A lot of it does run back into chatGPT at this point, I think is the best one. So we’re building a layer on top of that too. The process of creating quizzes using ai just way easier and the stage that we’re at now is that you guys and other people on our team are using it to help our customers create quizzes, and then the eventual goal is to have a version available that all of you listening can use on your own.
We don’t want to rush that because I think what we’re seeing with a lot of AI products is. The number one feedback, and this is kind of the impetus for this show, is like the founder of writer.com posted on LinkedIn and she was like, the number one feedback we get from people when they’re using AI is they have to stop and think before they use the ai.
And in our experience, and you, you guys can speak to this as we’re doing this, like once someone has to stop and think, you might lose them forever because. They might need to think for three years or five years or eight years. Like, and I’m not, I’m not exaggerating on that. Like we have a lot of people that have stopped to think about building their quiz in 2014 and now they’re ready.
So, and it’s 2023, so it’s quite a long time to think. That’s a lot of backstory. Basically where we’re at now is, like I said, we’re using it to help customers, so I wanna use this call as kind of like behind the scenes, but also selfishly to learn from you guys as the first users of the product of what we can do to start moving it more and more towards what we could put out that would actually be simple and understandable and easy to use.
And I. This isn’t in my question. So we’re throwing this in here. But what’s fun? Like how do you make it fun to use? Because we don’t want it to just be like, oh, make a quiz. You’re gonna have to do work, et cetera, et cetera. But we want it to actually be an enjoyable experience where it’s like you’re getting something fun out of it rather than just creating.
So let’s jump right in. I have a few questions that we kind of talked about before this, but the number one question that I have is, When you’re building quizzes for our customers using the ai, do you have an idea of when it exceeds their expectations and when it falls short? And I guess as a follow up to that, like potentially why, and either of you jump in and answer that one first.
I feel like we’ll have a couple of different answers based off of our role in the company. For me, it’ll be coming from thinking really hard about marketing and marketing tactics to marris. Tell me if you want to answer first, cuz I will let you No, go ahead. I’ll jump right after. Not a problem.
All right, sounds good. And then for customer success, I’m sure it’s different, but the first thing that came to mind, I think, is something we talk about all the time on this show. Even before we were doing growth and talking about business growth, when it was purely creator stories, talking to entrepreneurs as you really need to know your audience.
So even though we’re making a ton of different industry style quizzes, like depending on the industry you have to know what kind of a quiz your audience needs. So our target audience is primarily, you know, right now coaches consult. People with e-commerce products. So you have to know what are the things that they want to be able to relay to their customers?
What are the questions that they wanna ask their customers to know if this quiz will exceed their expectations or even meet their expectations? You can’t do it without knowing that there was Josh, what was that quiz? It was like a mental wellness quiz, I think the other day that I called you. Because what I had put into the ai, even with all of the prompts that you provided for us, cuz you took all the time in making sure those were very specific and curated.
I was like, these questions suck. And if I were looking for help in mental wellness, These wouldn’t capture me. And so we talked a little bit through, okay, maybe we need to find a different prompt. We’re not using the right one. How do we put in the correct definitions to make sure the AI is reading it properly?
And so on and so on. So I guess it’s like, the answer for me is just branding, making sure that you know your audience, you know your brand, and you know exactly what your customers want to know.
I like that a lot. Mm-hmm. That’s, that’s been my experience as well, cuz like the more it’s tailored to it. And I have, I have an update that I just put in this morning that we can talk through, but I wanna hear what Damaris has to say first. Damaris has a lot to say, but to start off well, at first I wanna say it’s been a phenomenal experience to just dive into the AI tool and then trying to understand our customers.
Brand, their, their voice, what they need. Then, we get so many different industries. And, it’s been very exciting from my experience just building out the quizzes these last few weeks. It’s, it’s really come down to. Back to adjustments was saying how specific you want your quiz to be around like your brand, your strategy, whether it’s courses you’re trying to sell, whether it’s a persona you’re trying to build.
The more information you give me, To make your quiz successful, the more the AI tool is going to give you very specific answers to sort of fit your brand voice and your idea. The times where it’s fallen short is when I get feedback of I don’t really have an idea of where I’m going and I’m sort of just spacing it off of what I’m seeing.
But it’s a difficult position because I am not, of course, your business, so I don’t have the full idea of what you’re trying to achieve. So I think tho, tho those are, those are the big, big differences that I’ve seen when somebody’s very specific. And, and believe it or not, whoever’s listening, your idea most of the time works.
You understand your audience way better than we’ll ever understand your audience, you. Probably already have a good idea of what outcomes would work for your company or your business. It’s just a matter of giving us a little bit of that information and we’ll do the rest for you. Hmm. I wanna add to that.
I think where part of the falling short is because it’s, you know, right now to our customers, it’s assisted AI, meaning we use, like the company employees use the AI to help you create a quiz. But they don’t know what information we need in order for us to input it into the AI to get a quiz. Mm-hmm.
So there is, and it’s tough though because each, I mean, you have your general questions of, okay, what outcomes do you want? Are there specific questions you ask your clients, but they don’t always know. The outcomes are, they don’t always know what would make a good quiz with good outcomes. There’s so many different types of best practices, so many different types of quizzes out there, and it’s really hard to tell when you’re in that beginning phase, especially if you’re new to quizzes.
Hmm. Yeah, that’s an important point I think. And I, I, I, I echo what both of you said in terms of my experience working with clients as well. That’s a big thing of like, how do you get it to be in their voice, like to be tailored to what they are looking for, even if they, you know, and, and we all do this, right?
Like we don’t actually know what we’re looking for until we see it. But that one is interesting because on the point of one specific way of doing quizzes, It really is Interact AI. Like I was going on this long diatribe about car analogies yesterday, so I’m gonna keep running with that. But when you think about cars, right?
Like a Honda is great and a Toyota is great, but they take different approaches to being great and. Interact AI is great and there’s gonna be other quiz, Interact, quiz, quiz AI that are going to be great and they’re going to be different. So the way that ours are formatted is a very specific structure based on 10 years of doing this and like we’ve launched hundreds of thousands of quizzes.
So you’re getting all that when you’re getting Interact, AI quiz. It’s not just like, oh, let me throw something together because that’s a really important distinction between our. If you just go straight to chatGPT, like, I don’t know if you guys have had this experience, but I’ve talked with some people that were like, oh, I tried doing this in chat.
G B T took me like two or three hours. And what you end up with is like very verbose long quiz that kind of doesn’t say anything. Whereas you run it through ours and it’s very concise to the point the outcomes are like three sentence. Very punchy, like it grabs attention. So that’s a really important distinction.
There’s another, well there’s, there’s a slight update that we’re making because I’m hearing the same thing you guys are hearing where a lot of it is, oh, this quiz is great, but I want it to be more specific to X topic. Like, I thought the questions would be more specific to this thing. And sometimes that kind of takes me back cause I’m like, oh, you didn’t say anything about that.
Like the first time. Like I didn’t know you wanted it to be like only about, you know, you wanted a food quiz but you want it to only be about tofu. And I’m like, you could have said something, but this is also pretty human. I think we like see something and I’m like, oh actually I meant for it to be this.
But I didn’t think about it until I saw the first version. Just this morning I was adding some prompts where you can dial it in based on a variety of different parameters that you want. Like I want this to be focused on a specific topic. I want this to be focused on a specific audience. I want this to be written in a certain voice.
Those are kind of the top three. I don’t know if you guys would have any more to add to that, based on your conversations like, well, I want this food quiz to just be about tofu. I want this food quiz to just be written towards professional chefs. I want this food quiz to just be written in the voice of Shakespeare.
Like you can do those three parameters. And modify the quiz after it’s built. That way you can see it one time and be like, oh, actually I want it to be like this. So that is a cool update that, you know, behind the scenes we’re implementing right now. And if you guys have anything to add, definitely jump in.
But I wanted to move to the next question, which is, from your perspective, using what we have so far, which like it’s not public facing, it’s for our internal team at this point. Which parts of the build is fun for you and which part is just like annoying work? And then which part is like, oh, I have to stop and think, which is probably the hardest.
Oh, drum roll. We’re, we’re gonna get very honest now to everybody hearing. Mm-hmm. I can start if that’s okay, Jasmine? Yeah, go ahead. For me specifically, I, so just since we’re talking a little bit about behind the scenes, when I get a customer that writes in back to Jasmine’s point the idea is not always right specific of what, what they’re trying to achieve with the quiz.
And so a lot of the time, my best practice is, you know, I’ll ask the customer first, Hey, did you have an idea in mind or did you have maybe a quiz title or even outcomes? They can honestly say, no, that’s totally fine. But sometimes they do have an idea and so we sort of brainstorm through that. I wouldn’t say that’s the annoying part, but that’s more of the lengthy part, just sort of getting down an overall idea of what our customer wants.
The fun, the fun part for me is the aesthetic piece of it. You know, going to the website, looking at our customer’s website and the colors they’re using, the color scheme, the images that you’re currently working with, you know, things of that nature to sort of match. Their aesthetic is fun for me.
I think I spend a lot more time than I should doing that, to be honest, but it’s, I like it, so, so that part is definitely interesting to me as far as the tedious work, which. Josh just resolved this for us, a c like last week it was just sort of copying over. Right now what we’re doing was copying over the data of the builder and building it out for you guys.
But that was, you know, as we get better that’s, that’s improving as well. So that’s sort of been my process behind the scenes. I don’t know if you have anything to add, Jasmine? Yeah, mine’s actually totally different. I will say. That’s funny. Figuring out the idea and what the quiz, the quiz needs is the lengthiest part.
Because you know, if you’ve had all the information you needed and you create a quiz, you’re like, wow, this looks great. But you send it to them or they see it and they’re like, actually that’s not quite it. I think I had one where, She had the outcome, she knew what outcome she wanted, but didn’t know what the quiz would really entail.
So when I sent her a few ideas for the quiz title, none of them hit the mark. So then she finally sent over a few more ideas. So I, that’s where I would say it, it’s a little harder because you wanna do it in the least amount of time possible, which is the idea, but you also wanna make sure you’re really catering to the customer and.
Making sure that the quiz is actually going to be something they wanna use and pay for. But the fun part for me is, I wanna start this off with, I am the first, I think, in the company to always play devil’s advocate for every single thing we do. Josh knows this cuz I’ve been doing it for like six years now.
But I do it with purpose because I know these are questions that people are going to ask. I’m also always the first to be completely amazed by everything we do. After playing devil’s advocate. I believe, at least this is how I felt once we started getting into this project, all the questions that I had about like, well, how is this gonna work?
How are we going to answer the really tough questions that people are going to ask? How are we going to still keep this very humanistic, which is really core to our brand? I think once you really figured out how that whole. Goes into play all of the stuff that still stays true to what our mission and values are.
Putting all of those prompts with the customer information into the AI and watching it load is the funnest part for me. I actually wished I recorded it the first time I did it because I was like, wow, I was so amazing. I texted like four different people that I was creating a quiz with AI, and it was so cool.
I don’t even think they understood what I was saying, but they were like, that’s great. Good for you, I guess. And it really is so cool to watch because then you realize, okay. How many times have I been asked to create a quiz for someone? Mostly on the spot. Especially with like, and Damaris, you can speak to this too, like strategy calls.
You know, you have 15 minutes to come up with a quiz idea and you start throwing out things that you’re like, I don’t even know what that made sense, what I said on that call. Or they ask you what questions should I be asking people? And in 15 minutes you gotta do it. Or you have a q and a of like 40 people only an hour to.
Answer these questions and it’s really tough, but when you do it with ai, knowing the prompts and it loads right on the screen for you, you can just tweak as you go. Like, you know, that quiz title wasn’t quite right, but it gave me the idea for exactly what I wanted and how I wanted to say it. Yeah. I do wanna elaborate a little bit on what you just said since you.
Reminded me of strategy calls and sort of like the difference now working with this AI tool. It, it is mind blowing how, if you are putting in the right prompts in the AI tool, it’s really sort of creating the strategy for the quiz for you like in real time. And the more you start. Working with it, you start catching like, okay, that sounds like a really good quiz.
I think this is gonna really fit the customer. Or you start realizing, okay, that’s a really good question. Oh, I didn’t really like that question. Let me run the prompt again. Maybe I can get a more specific question or the outcome, things of that nature. And so it does it so much faster than going back to your point of.
Being on the phone with a customer for 15 minutes. Oh, what do you think of this? What do I think of this? You know, the AI tool is really learning from our prompts and taking that time from us to sort of help get better over time, right? With quiz making and, and getting it better to our, our, the brand voice of the customer and all of that.
So, that piece has been very, very fun to watch. It would take me hours. To actually, I would actually get off the call and say, give me, gimme some time. I’ll send you an email by the end of the day. But it would take me hours to actually think of, okay, what, what do I know about this customer in the short time we had together?
How can I formulate something that’s really cool, never been done before, or has been done before and is easy to replicate? You know, and how do I make sure that it’s really branded to them or something? They’ll wanna pay us for. And I think from, you know, a software company’s point of view, it’s really easy to look at it from the outside and say, oh, they’re just trying to make as much money as possible.
They’re just trying to get more people in and so on. But from our perspective, I would say it’s actually quite difficult to. Get people to say yes to new things. Quizzes were a new thing. It was difficult. AI is now a new thing. It’s pretty difficult to like, get people to, to sort of get that buy-in.
Mm-hmm. You actually just reminded me a process that I would do during strategy calls that has now sort of evolved with this new AI tool in during strategy calls for those listening that have taken calls with me. We, I would try to get a template that we had or something close to what you’re trying to achieve or maybe the industry or something.
Something like that, right? We were trying to discuss or sort of have dialogue around that. Now it’s sort of changed to, okay, what’s your idea? What are you working on? Let me just build it out for you. And so that has been, Completely different from what we were doing just two months ago. So that’s, that’s just another thing that, to keep in mind that how this AI tool has really sort of helped evolve quiz making overall.
Yeah. I wonder if, sorry Josh, if you were gonna like move on to the next question, but I was going to say that keep on, I wonder if using. Using AI because it’s creating a quiz specifically for you, the customer. It’s different than if we were to say, take this template and make it your own, because people don’t always know how to make it their own.
But also you don’t wanna tweak it because when you say it’s conversion focused, you are fearful of changing anything that could ruin. Focus of conversion, I guess you could say, but you’re worried about actually tweaking it and making it worse. Whereas when you have a quiz created by ai, you’re giving the exact information of who you are, what your business is, and you’re getting a conversion focused quiz.
Specifically tailored to you. There’s no, there’s no tweaking a template that, you know, maybe you feel thousands of other people are already using and it feels more special. Hmm. Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest takeaways from hearing you both talk about that is seeing the quiz read out is fun and exciting.
Seeing the quiz come to life almost with your brand, your style, your images is also really exciting. The most difficult thinking part is the coming up with the idea and then the tedious part, which Matt just. Beautifully removed last week is copying it to Interact because now you don’t have to do that.
It just transfers directly. So you don’t have to copy and paste anything from chatGPT, which for those of you listening who are building quizzes with chatGPT, you are probably already realize that is the biggest problem with trying to use chatGPT to create content as they, then you have to copy and paste everything out that ends up taking you five times longer than it took you to generate the stuff in the first place.
And it’s just like really boring. Does that sound accurate as a reflection of what you both were saying? Yep. Yep. I would say so. Cool. And I like thinking about it as an evolution of what we were already doing. Cuz that’s my view too. I mean, and, and like evolution, right? I think we all kind of have a basic understanding of what that actually means.
It’s like, You know, it’s a, it’s a slightly better adapted version of the previous thing, like the world changes. And so this, I don’t know, alligator gets smaller because of meteors or something. However, revolution works. It’s the same thing like you are now. Using AI to do the same thing that we did before.
And it makes it easier and faster and more fun and delightful for everybody involved. So it’s not like, oh, AI is just coming in and changing everything. And I think another important takeaway that I was hearing as you both were talking is like, especially at this point, and honestly for me, it’s still an open question of like, there may just be humans involved.
Like maybe the next version of this is, Customers use it directly, but we have live chat on the same page. That’s like, talk to an AI expert or a prompt design expert, like live chat in and we’ll, like live chat help you. You know, here, you, you got stuck on this. Like, try this prompt instead because, I just don’t know that like we’ve really, we’ve really reached the point, and I’m also not convinced that we’ll ever reach the point where there won’t be like experts.
It’s just like, maybe there’s new jobs now where you’re an AI expert, you’re a prompt design expert, whatever you want to call it. So those are kind of my thoughts on that. Yeah. And then I like also what you were saying about like, you know, how it’s easier to come up with something and more exciting.
That relates to your brand directly instead of starting from a template. We do still have a lot of templates that, you know, I think it’s also just like different types of people, like some people like seeing a fully baked template and then modifying it. Other people like to start from scratch and like build it out as you go using the ai.
So I think we’ll have different approaches to this. And then the biggest thing that. We’ll address the biggest problem that we’ve identified today of how much thought it takes to come up with an idea will be solved as soon as we get access to open AI’s new web crawler, which if you’re listening, Sam, give me access.
He’s not listening. No. We need access to the web crawler because then what it’s gonna. Is as long as you give it permission, it will ingest your entire website and then run a bunch of prompts to figure out who your customers are, who you are, and then what the best quiz ideas are for you. And then like spit out three that you can choose from.
So it should solve that problem as soon as we get access to let the chatGPT crawl your website. So that’s a huge new update that we’ll have Hopefully next time we talk. AI quizzes, so this was super helpful for me, as you know, somewhat of the, the architect behind the scenes and I hope for our customers, whether you are, you know, working through Jess or Damaris or Jackie or Jesy or myself or whoever you’re working with on our team, or if you’re building it on your own, you’re the DIYer who is like, I just want to go and, you know, do this myself and chatGPT, which you can totally do.
Hopefully this is helpful context too. How to build out a good quiz with the AI. Do either of you have any lingering thoughts or, you know, last, last takeaways from this? I would say, For those that are listening. I think it’s natural to, when you start using a tool, when you start sort of experimenting with something that you’ve never, like, you don’t really fully understand going into it.
You just have to try it. You know? Now I look at it as it’s just a tool like anything else that we use, right? It’s just like, you know, if you use Grammarly, a password saver tool or something to sort of enhance your experience, it’s, it’s really. It’s really a tool to help you and your strategy and your business get better.
And, you know, and this, and this just happens to make your quiz way better makes it, makes it easier to sort of strategize versus you having to do everything yourself. So I would say not be scared of change. Embrace it. I love that. I love that. I was gonna say something similar, but to add to it would.
Really be that we’re not taking the human out of the process. You’re not. You’re not. And by using an A, by using AI to create your quiz, you’re not, you’re just kind of skipping steps, I guess you’d say. You’re not really like removing anything from it. It’s really like Amer enhancing the experience and at a faster rate.
I think it’s easy to kind of feel. Really scared when something big like this comes out because it literally was all over the internet, all over social media. It can be used in education, in tech e-commerce, everything. But when you get to the core of what you’re really trying to do, if anything, it’s just helping you help your customers faster and probably giving you a better idea.
How you can do that. Hmm. Yeah, I like both of those takeaways. Those are both great. And from my perspective, thank you both for being adaptable. As always, it’s part of the ethos of our entire team at Interact that I think. You know, both positions us to grow as a company because we’re able to jump on board with new trends that happen because, you know, as a team we, you know, it is scary.
It’s different, like the workflow changes. So I appreciate when we make a shift like this and everybody’s just like, let’s do it. Let’s see what happens. And it’s also part of our experimental mindset of like, you know, the core that drives our company is helping our customers. And that’s like, 80% of everything we do is just directly helping customers accomplish their goals.
And then we have this like experimental piece that’s, you know, the other 20%. I think that’s also a big takeaway for me out of all this is like, We don’t know what’s gonna happen. Like maybe the AI will keep getting better. We can automate it more and more. Maybe it stays where it is and it stays in this stage where it’s assisted and we help our customers do it.
We don’t really know what’s gonna happen. And I think it’s, it’s great for us like to have a team where we can just jump onto these things as they come along and continue to grow and adapt and evolve, like, Like I said, we’ve been doing this for a decade and you know, we’ve stayed alive in the face of a lot of, a lot of companies falling by the wayside.
And I personally think this is one of the biggest reasons why is like AI comes along. We don’t overhype it, where it’s like, oh, now everything’s AI and we are, you know, an AI company. It’s like, No, we’re gonna use it to do the thing we’ve always been doing, and that’s to help our customers build great quizzes, and that’s, that’s what we do as a company.
So those are kind of my closing thoughts. Jess, do you have anything else? Just kind of a general closing for the episode? Yes. There is a form if you are interested in getting a quiz made for your own business whether you’re an existing customer or a new customer, Josh. What’s the URL for it?
I always forget. Yeah, yeah. It’s just AI dot tryinteract.com. Yes. And we’ve also added option on there. If you’re not ready to just like jump in straight with an idea, you can request a demo and that’ll get you in touch with one of us as well. If you just kind of want to talk through your ideas first.
We also have. Our email address that you could reach us at. Hello, try and rack.com if you, for whatever reason, can’t find the form or you just have a couple of general questions. If you are already a customer, you can reach out to Damaris via live chat. Just log into your account, say hello, and yeah, we’ll link some of those in the show notes and we’ll see you guys next week.
Bye. Awesome. Thank you both. Bye.