Automate Amazon Customer Emails. The Easy Way — Daniel Boross | How AI Simplifies Complex Support, What Makes AI Replies Sound Human, How Sellers

Automate Amazon Customer Emails. The Easy Way — Daniel Boross | How AI Simplifies Complex Support, What Makes AI Replies Sound Human, How Sellers Customize AI Responses Per Product, Why AI Support Removes Language Ba Speaker 2: Hey, I'm Claus Lauter and you're listening to the Ecommerce Coffee Break, the podcast that helps you grow your online store. In today's episode, we share the best way to handle Amazon customer support messages. Joining me on the show is Daniel Boross, co-founder and CEO at Fluvi.com. So let's dive right into it. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ecommerce Coffee Break Podcast. Today we want to talk about how you can handle Amazon customer support messages effectively. Now, Amazon is a big beast and if you have a good business, which I hope for, you will get a lot of customer support. I'm not an Amazon seller, but I have an expert with me and that's Daniel. He's a Swedish entrepreneur and co-founder of Fluvi.com who transformed a small iPhone repair shop he started at the age of 20 into a thriving Amazon business selling do-it-yourself phone repair kits. And in 2022, he teamed up with Eric, his co-founder, combining their Amazon experience to build an innovative software solution. So we want to dive into this and I'd like to welcome Daniel to the show. Hi, Daniel. How are you today? Speaker 1: Hey, Claus. Doing great. How are you doing today? Speaker 2: I'm very well. Daniel, you started as an Amazon seller and it was an interesting road and a bit of a rocky road. Tell me a little bit on how you got started. Speaker 1: Sure. So again, like you said, prior to starting with Amazon, I already had a little iPhone repair business back in Sweden. So I knew a little bit about the ins and outs of running a business. I also dwelled into SEO and digital marketing. So sourcing products from China, having a bit of digital experience made the transition to selling on Amazon quite smooth. And frankly, I also had a few friends that had gone down the Amazon path. So they also gave me some hints and tips. And eventually we had a little community with friends who were doing this all together, guiding each other, helping each other. But my big motivation really to get started with Amazon was the idea of being able to run a business remotely. This was back in 2015, mind you, so remote work wasn't a thing back then. But again, I was in Sweden, didn't like the long winters, cold weather, so I always dreamed of being able to live somewhere, work somewhere, have good weather, nice beaches, good food. But usually these places are in countries where the salary isn't fantastic. So I figured if I can create my own business, but run it remotely, then I got the best of both worlds. So that's really what drove me towards eCommerce. And then it was really my friends that pointed me in the right direction to try Amazon. And like you said, I started with an iPhone repair business in Sweden, which again, I learned a lot from. And that led me to try to sell cell phone or smartphone parts on Amazon, do-it-yourself repair kits. Again, that was also quite a wild story. I had four, five, six years of a real rollercoaster ride, where some years were absolutely fantastic. We were the leading brand in our niche. Some years were horrible, where Amazon actually shut down all of our products. It happened three times in total throughout my five, six years of selling, but probably last time was the most painful. Maybe a few words about that. This was in 2020 when Amazon was kind of a wild west with a lot of black hat tactics. And because I was the leading brand in my niche, at one point I had 60% of the market share in that niche, my competitors probably felt that they want a bigger piece of the pie. So they, after a while, back in 2020, they bought one-star reviews, negative reviews, and had them placed on my listings. So within a week, I received across my 14 listings, each and every one of them received a one-star review with the text saying something like, I bought this battery, it caught on fire and exploded. And when you get that on 14 of your products, it's kind of an uphill battle to get reinstated by Amazon. They don't really listen much to you. They rather look at what they perceive to be the customer experience, which is the explosion, which never happened, of course. But anyway, I tried everything to get reinstated. I even had an Amazon account manager. I was paying him a monthly fee for that. But even so, it took us, I think, three or four months to get just one listing back. And as soon as we got that listing back in a week, I got the same review placed on it again. So it was an uphill battle to say the least to get back and I never fully recovered from that. I eventually got a few listings back but then the momentum had gone and I was barely selling anything. So I just focused on clearing out my inventory and then I came to the conclusion that this is no way to run a business. I wanted to try something else. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think a lot of sellers out there have similar experiences as bad as it is. And as I said, Amazon is always on the side of the customer experience. So it makes it very, very difficult for sellers out there. Now, you had to deal obviously in your normal business beside of black hat things with a lot of customer support questions. And also with your experience, it came up with solutions to make the life of a seller much easier. Tell me how you came up on the idea of Fluvi. Speaker 1: So like I said, I ran my Amazon company for six, seven years, had a lot of friends in this space. So I felt that, well, if I'm going to do something, I should do it within the space that I'm familiar with, where I have contacts, networks and experience. So I got in touch with my friend Eric, also a Swedish guy. He's an amateur software developer, as he describes himself, a self-taught software developer. And he had actually built the very basis of Fluvi back for his own personal use a few years prior. So we got together and he showed me the software that he had built. And it looked fairly promising, even as basic as it was back then, three years ago. So we showed it to a few other friends and they also thought it had potential. So then we decided, Eric and I, that we should put some effort into Fluvi and try to commercialize it. And back then, we figured we should do an analytics tool because that's what everybody needs. But down the line, as ChatGPT came about, we figured, how can we utilize this? How can we leverage this to build some cool features that aren't out there? And I recall back from my days, I used to have 50, 60 customer support emails every day. In Seller Central, I had three customer support representatives answering all of these emails. But it was quite a hassle to deal with. And I also noticed that my customer support team, they each had their own tone, their own quality in their responses. And it wasn't as cohesive, as consistent as I wanted it to be. So again, solving the problem with customer support of creating high quality messages for your customers and being able to do so very swiftly, even without dealing with templates, was something that we thought would really Fill a hole in the market, provide utility to the users of that software. So that's how our feature called Assistant came about. It's really a feature that helps Amazon sellers reply to customer support messages in Seller Central in just a few seconds with a single click and in any language. Speaker 2: It sounds very interesting. You say when ChatGPT came up, that was a huge opportunity to work on that one. So talk me through how it works, because a lot of sellers might worry that AI for customer service might be just sound. You mentioned that sort of robotic. So you want to make sure that your responses feel personal coming from a person. How can AI achieve that? Speaker 1: Of course. So, Claus, can I share my screen here? Perhaps that would be the best way of showing this. Speaker 2: Yes, so for our listeners, you can go to our YouTube channel. You will see the screen share there and otherwise we will talk you through also so you can also continue to listen. Speaker 1: Indeed, so we'll narrate this as we go through. But I'm sharing my screen now and we're on the Fluvi platform now. So I'll just, we have the dashboard and we have a bunch of analytics tool, but if we go to Fluvi Assistant, we'll get to a page where we can then download or install the plugin. So if we click here, we'll end up on the Chrome store. And once we install it, we'll have Fluvi up here or perhaps among the extensions. Now, once Assistant is installed and you go to the buyer-seller messaging page on Seller Central, where we are now, there will appear a button next to the messaging input field at the bottom of the page. The button will say AI response. And when you click that button, In about five seconds, Assistant will read all the conversation that you've had with the customer. And based on that, generate a perfectly fine message as a response to the latest customer support message in that conversation. Speaker 2: That seems to be a huge time saver there. And the installation probably takes a minute and you're up and running. So basically you connect this to your Amazon seller account and then it pulls the data from there. Is that right? Speaker 1: Exactly. So again, you have to have a Fluvi account. You go to fluvi.com, F-L-U-V-I.com, sign up. There's a free trial. Once you create your Fluvi account, you'll be able to log into the dashboard, as we saw a few moments ago. And from there, you install Assistant, which takes not even a minute. Once Assistant is installed, it will show up in your Chrome browser and then you can utilize this tool. Again, this button AI response on the buyer-seller messaging page will appear once the plugin is installed. And I'll just repeat this. So again, once you're on the page with an email from your customer, whatever the message says, The tool will read that message and any prior messages as well. As the tool reads the message, it will then create a reply to it. We have a tailored prompt to instruct the system. It's free to know that it's dealing with the customer. It should behave politely. It should be helpful. It should be instructive. And based on that prompt, it will then generate a message that is relevant to the customer's question. So in this case, we're going to go into the particulars. The customer is saying, the customer in this case is me. This is our testing conversation. So here I'm asking the seller, which is Dan-Erik. He is selling supplements, caffeine pills, L-theanine pills and such in capsules, in containers. So here I'm asking for how long after opening the container are these pills good for? And again, as we saw, Assistant will then generate the message within a few seconds. It's addressing me. It understands that it's dealing with Daniel. He's thanking me for my question about shelf life of the caffeine pills. And then it explains that an open container is good for 72 days. And it also has a little bit of extra information. We recommend using them within the issued timeframe to ensure the best quality and effectiveness. And it all sends the message with saying, if you have any more questions or need further assistance, feel free to reach out. We're here to help. So it's behaving in a very natural and human-like way, even though it's a machine. But again, the beauty is that it will be able to reply to pretty much all your messages within a few seconds and also in any language. So if you're selling in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, it's pretty much impossible to know all these languages yourself and even more difficult to find a customer support representative. That can handle all of those messages in that many marketplaces, that many languages. But with Assistant, that's a breeze. And it will even answer messages in Spanish. So I'll take another example here. We have a message from Dinda, also something that we loaded Assistant with. And she Here right in Spanish. Now I know that this message says something along the lines, how big are these pills? I'm having difficulty swallowing larger pills. So the customer is essentially asking how big the pills that we're selling are. Again, if we hit AI response, then Assistant will generate a message in the customer's language. And not only will the message generate, it will also be given a translation. So again, if you don't know Spanish, you can still use Assistant to generate Spanish messages, but then you'll also be given the English translation instantly. So again, as we can see here on my screen, the reply says, hello Dinda, the pills you mentioned are half an inch in size. If you have difficulties swallowing large pills, these should be easy to handle. If you need more information or have any questions, feel free to ask. Kind regards. Speaker 2: I see that it's definitely a huge time saver there. And I think every message that goes out before you click send, you can edit, you can change to your tone, you can add information in there. So how many of these service requests are basically just let AI do the work and click send? And how many do you think do you need to do some manual work before you can send it? Speaker 1: Thank you for that question, Claus, because this is a beautiful segue to what the real beauty of our tool is. And I'm going to switch back now from Seller Central back over to our Fluvi platform. And in our Fluvi platform, let's see if I can move this. There we go. In our Fluvi platform, we can add instructions, documents for a system to consume. So I have a plus sign here in the top right corner of the page. If I click it, I can select any products or all products and then add text-based instructions. So for instance, in Dinda's case, let's do this live. So I'm going to copy paste the ASIN that she inquired about, the product she inquired about. I'm going to add it here to my instructions. I'm selecting the ASIN in the list and I'm adding a brief description of what I'm hoping that assistant will then utilize in questions regarding pill size. So I'll write a description saying pill size. And I'll write, for instance, these pills are a quarter of an inch in size. So by adding these instructions. I can really guide assistant in as much detail as I want to. So if we go back to Seller Central now to Dinda's message, I'll hit AI response again. And now assistant should utilize this new information that I've given it. So if we see here, Let's see. Actually, it's still using the old instructions. My bad. Point is that in the Fluvi platform, you can add instructions related to anything, really, the size of the pills, the shape of the pills, how you handle customer support, if you want to offer customers a refund or a new product in case of it being damaged. You can add any type of instructions and level of details here. You can add stuff like be extra polite to customers when you reply to them. Always wish the customer a happy weekend or a beautiful evening or something like that. So with these instructions, again, you can customize the detail of your responses as much as you like. Speaker 2: That makes perfect sense. And I think that you can customize it on product level. It's a huge benefit there. It also helps, I think, the human assistant, who obviously will do this, in understanding what the details are for the product. There's also some kind of reporting where I can see how much responses have been done, if there's anything resolved or not resolved. Speaker 1: So because this all happens in Amazon's own page, we can't really fetch that information. What I would say is though that you can measure how much you use Assistant. Each message that you ask Assistant to generate will consume one Fluvi credit. So again, this is a credit-based feature. If you open the Assistant extension in your Chrome browser, you will see the number of credits that you have. With your Fluvi plan, your subscription, you will get free credits every month for you to use. And generally those are enough for the average seller. But it's also possible to buy extra credits if you're a very heavy user of this tool. And this way you can kind of see how many credits you consume every month or every week. But because most of the action happens in Amazon's page, we can't really retrieve that in a meaningful way on our own platform. Speaker 2: Now, the AI assistant is part of Fluvi or can I get it separate? Tell me how that works. Speaker 1: Yeah, currently it's part of all of our packages. If you go to fluvi.com, you'll see the pricing. The pricing will vary depending on your revenue. The more revenue, the more orders we have to process. So Assistant is a package deal with all of our other features. If there's anyone in the audience that's listening that definitely doesn't need any of our other features, please do contact us and we'll see what we can do. But in general, Fluvi is a one package deal and all of our features come together, including Assistant. Speaker 2: Did you get any feedback from your existing customers, how much time they saved through the system? Speaker 1: So it really varies how your process looks today. If you're writing emails by hand, you will save probably 90%. You will lessen your custom support time by 90% or the hours you put into custom support. If you're using templates, you're probably saving, I would say, between 25 to 50%. In my own experience, no template is perfect. Each template has to be a little bit customized to the customer's question, whereas the assistant will actually read the question and base its reply half of that. So again, it's not utilizing any pre-existing templates. It will actually generate the words based on what the question is. Speaker 2: Okay, makes perfect sense. Before our coffee break comes to an end, Daniel, is there anything that you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet? Speaker 1: I guess I should say that it's free to try Fluvi. We have a 14-day free trial. You will get credits for assistance. You can try this without taking any risk or putting down any money, so to speak. I would say that the more customer support messages you deal with, the more utility assistance provides. But we also have customers who only have one or two messages every day and they just hate doing it or they're not very good at it. So for them, this is a great tool regardless of the volume of messages. So it really comes down to how much you don't want to do customer support. The rather you leave this responsibility to somebody else or something else, the more utility assistance will provide to you. And to give your audience an extra incentive to give this a try, we'd be happy to give them 20% off for two years for all the plans or products that we offer. And then the coupon code is COFFEE20, so COFFEE20, and you enter that at checkout. But again, we do have the free trial as well, free trial for two weeks. Speaker 2: Perfect. Yeah, I will put this in the show notes so then people can find you directly and take you up on your offer. And I think if you're selling on Amazon, this is a brilliant solution to save you a ton of time, a lot of headache. And as everyone knows by now, I'm a big fan of AI. I think ChatGPT working in the background. ChatGPT is only getting better and better. So this will be the future of customer support. And I think everyone should check it out. Go into show notes, click the links, get in contact with Daniel and take it from there. Daniel, thanks so much for giving us an overview. And for anyone who did not see the YouTube video and was listening on audio, head over to YouTube channel and check it out there. Thanks so much for your time today. Speaker 1: Thank you, Claus. Thanks for giving me this opportunity. Speaker 2: Hey, Claus here. Thank you for joining me on another episode of the Ecommerce Coffee Break Podcast. Before you go, I'd like to ask two things from you. 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