Shereen Qumsieh [00:00:00]:

We also deal with your online reviews. That's kind of a separate thing. But yeah, your direct feedback, bringing it all into a single platform and then helping you with. So AI will come in and they'll say, we'll analyze it. Every time it gets submitted, we analyze it, we go, okay, this is a risk management related issue. Let's say somebody has maybe fallen, maybe it's a food poisoning related problem. So that gets automatically tagged, labeled, the themes are identified, it's assigned to the right team, and an email is sent off to them right away. So we help with that initial escalation prioritization, because oftentimes, you know, if you get a ton of feedback coming in and you want to make sure that you address maybe the more severe concerns first.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:00:37]:

So sentiment analysis helps with that prioritization. But, yeah, I think having it all under a single, unified inbox is huge.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:47]:

Welcome to WISKing It All with your host, Angelo Esposito, co-founder of WISK.ai, a food and beverage intelligence platform. We're going to be interviewing hospitality professionals around the world to really understand how they do what they do. Welcome to another episode of WISKing It All. We're joined here today with Shereen Qumsieh, co-founder and CEO at Akira. So, Shereen, thanks for being here.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:01:15]:

My pleasure. I'm really excited about this.

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:18]:

Yeah, I was obviously checking out your website and what you do. Super interesting. I always like to start just for people listening in and wondering, what is Akira? Can you give them the 30,000 foot overview of what Akira is and does?

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:01:30]:

Absolutely. So the one sentence is, we simplify reputation management and we deliver prescriptive insights. And the goal for me is better storytelling with data and to start conversations that might not otherwise have been started. Just because there's a lot of unknown operators are busy, they don't know what they don't know. So that's the high level view. And then if you getting into the nitty gritty, we help with consolidating all their feedback in a single place, making sure that it gets assigned, escalated if there's risk related issues, ultimately resolved, how it was resolved. We track all that into a single platform. We also aggregate and help with responses with respect to the reviews, online reviews, so things like Yelp, Google Business profile, that sort of thing.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:02:17]:

And the last pillar for us is actually listing management. We feel that falls under the reputation management umbrella. So making sure that your listings, you know, just the basics, name, address, phone number, your hours of operation are consistent everywhere people search. And so having that kind of managed for you and streamlined. And there's a lot of AI that we leverage in a smart way to help you do all that day to day work. But then ultimately, for me, it's about delivering those insights and then for businesses to be able to make improvement. That's what we're trying to do here.

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Angelo Esposito [00:02:54]:

And typically like, and we'll get deeper into, but just at a high level, like what. What type of restaurant establishments you guys work with or what type of establishments in general.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:03:05]:

Yeah. So typically, you know, we have a lot of customers that are multi concept, multi brand. Definitely multi unit. We do things like NP's, and sentiment is a big deal. Right. So being able to understand, you know, not only kind of how you're rated, but what does that mean? What does an NP's of 24 mean? What is a sentiment? Let's. What's a good sentiment? What's a bad sentiment? When you're analyzing your feedback and reviews, just being able to do all that and being able to bring that all together for these operators in a single location. And we find that these issues tend to really be felt at that scale.

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Angelo Esposito [00:03:39]:

Got it.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:03:40]:

If you've got a couple locations and you're managing them, you're probably responding to your reviews on your own. You're probably capable of making sure that your location information is accurate and consistent across where people search. That gets harder to do at scale.

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Angelo Esposito [00:03:54]:

Yeah, that makes sense. We see that too. At WISK. At WISK, we, you know, help with all the backhouse stuff. But same type of thing is like, until the pain point hits a certain amount, it might not make sense, right? So. Exactly. Yeah. You know, for us, that analogy is like, if you're a mom and pop shop, you're there every day, you got like, two types of wines.

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Angelo Esposito [00:04:12]:

And, like, you know, you sell five types of pizza. It's like, you probably couldn't get away with it. A spreadsheet. But then when you kind of go higher end hundreds of skus, is that. Or to your point, multi units, that's when it starts getting hard. So that makes a ton of sense. And obviously, I was checking out your background and you have an interesting background, so I'd love to, like, understand, like, maybe some key moments from your early career that that influenced you to kind of become an entrepreneur. And then furthermore, start a kira.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:04:38]:

You know, when we first immigrated to Canada, my family had. We had three different franchises, so we had. I don't know if you're probably not familiar, but we had two mister subs and a Robin's donuts. And so I kind of grew up kind of in that world, and then my parents moved on and purchased a fried chicken and pizza joint. And so it's kind of been this thing, right? And, you know, my background's actually software engineering, so that's where I've got my actual. My training and education. And so for years, I did consulting, and what was really interesting. And so consulting, you know, really tailored around building custom solutions for companies that they couldn't really buy anything off the shelf.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:05:18]:

It didn't. It wasn't quite what they wanted. It wasn't tailored to what they needed. So they would approach company like ours, and then we would. We would build that out. So that was, you know, very early entrepreneurship was me running my own software development consultancy. And so what we learned in that world and doing that, and it was, you know, we had customers, like one of the largest food service operators in western Canada, centennial foods. Like, they.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:05:39]:

They would be. They would come to us and say, hey, we need to build this application. And What we learned was just by shedding light on things, just data, it generally led to improvement because it was things that maybe were otherwise not being measured or people just weren't aware of or company-wide. They didn't have the same alignment on what it was they were trying to achieve. And so just aggregating that all, kind of shedding light on the things I like to call it, the pearls and the oysters. Just highlighting those little things and then people get, they rally around, "Oh, that's where the numbers at.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:06:15]:

We want to get to here." And then they start to work towards that goal. So my father in law has a saying, what gets measured gets done, and I love it. And so that's kind of when I look at my focus and what I'm trying to do here at Akira, taking all that background and everything that we've done, for me, it's about storytelling with data, and I don't think there's enough of that happening across SaaS as a whole. You see a lot of products that pump out dashboards and pie charts and bar graphs, but then what you find is, if you really ask the hard question, I don't think any of your users are actually consuming it as much as you think they are, because they look at those things and they go, okay, what is this trying to tell me? You know, even six months from now, you might. You might have built something out. You come back and you're like, what?

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Angelo Esposito [00:07:00]:

What was it?

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:07:01]:

What was I trying to tell people here. So we use, like, we use natural language, sentences, like, we. When we talk about an NP's in our platform, it's like, you have. Customer retention is at risk. Right. We don't just give them a number of 42 because everyone's going to say, what does 42 mean? Like, how do I compare competitively and what is, you know, in different verticals, that means different things, you know, like, I think you got one of the best companies in the world if you are an Apple guy, right? But their NP's is not 100. I think it's like maybe 60, 70. And then what? Is that a good NP's? Is that a bad NP's? So we translated into, hey, this is what we think is happening here.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:07:40]:

Retention is at risk. You're losing more customers than you're retaining. And we actually use language like advocacy, loyalty, fanatical fans, you know, things like that so that people can really understand what it is we're trying to convey, and then they can actually take action on the things that we're. That we're saying.

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Angelo Esposito [00:07:55]:

I love that. It's funny because. Yeah, it's. It's always been. The question is that, okay, step one is getting the data, but step two is always like, what do I do with the data? And. And one thing you said that really kind of sparked just kind of a memory or a learning that we had at risk was just like, when we started, we were very focused on the barn side. So liquor and wine. And then I eventually, especially because of COVID we eventually added the whole food side.

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Angelo Esposito [00:08:17]:

So full service restaurants. But anyways, on the bar side, one of the most common things we saw was when we helped them catch losses. So, for example, like, hey, you guys over poured, I don't know, like, a hundred ounces of Jameson this week. And what we would notice is just having the report and telling their staff, like, hey, guys, we got to be careful because this whiskey and this wine, like, there's a lot of reporting or, like, there's a lot going missing. So let's just say it. Not changing anything, just telling us that the data is that, like, the beverage cost got better, things went down, whatever. So there's something to be said about your point there about, like, letting them know, you know.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:08:49]:

Yeah. Just shedding. Shedding that light. Yeah, we did. We did a similar thing with. We called it the butcher shop application, where we. We were shedding light on the. On the waste when they were chopping up the ant, the animal.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:09:00]:

And it was. There was a ton that was being wasted. And just by shedding light on that, all of a sudden those numbers started to improve. Right. And that all translates to money at the end of the day. Right. And this is such a difficult industry, I think, for operators sometimes, you know, these margins. My very first job was actually McDonald's.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:09:16]:

I was there for about a year and a half and got into a manager position. And so, like, I get it. Like, it was that we used to always say it was a pennies and dimes business, right? It was, it's that all that matters. Everything counts, everything just like, so that's my mission here, is like, how can. And if I'm not telling a story, I'm not doing it right. And so I'm constantly going back to our operators and our I and our customers and saying, like, it, does this resonate? Does this make sense? Has it started a conversation, you know, and measuring those of that improvement over time?

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Angelo Esposito [00:09:46]:

I love that. Just to touch on real quick as I'm curious because, you know, they say, like, when you see someone with McDonald's on their cv, it's great because it's like super rigorous trading and processes and all that. So just going back, it's probably been a while, but what was something that stood out from like the McDonald's era? Like that you're like, man, this is cool. And then maybe you're trying to, you know, mimic in your company today.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:10:07]:

Yeah. You know, it's a, I'm, I've always been so thankful for that experience, that job. That was my first job. I was still in high school and it just was, you know, and there's different, there's different. There's corporate owned McDonald's is, and there's, there's, you know, franchisees. Right? And I think we were, we were a franchisee. So we had, the owner had a few different locations and, and my, but it was, I think it really came down to the people. And we had, I had a manager above me and he was just amazing, like just learning to care customer service.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:10:39]:

He was really focused on, you know, that initial introduction, you know, how you greet the guest and then just all the way through operations just learning everything, all the nuances of, you know, everything that they measured, right, from drive through times to waste to yield to all that stuff. Right. But, yeah, I think it was just for me what, what stuck. And I still try to do, I, you know, I think I, we try to do it better than hopefully what others are doing, but we measure against ourselves.

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Angelo Esposito [00:11:09]:

Right.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:11:09]:

I think I'm my own worst critic is customer service. For me, it's, you know, every email that comes in from a customer, every bug that we see that gets logged, you know, we're just, we're on it immediately. At least at the very minimum, they get a response from us. It's never days of, like, what's happening. You know, we encounter this issue. We want to know about things before they, they've even had the chance to tell us about things. Right? And that to me, is just, it's just this, like, this level of custody service and care. It's that giving a given a crap.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:11:38]:

Can I say that on. So that's what, you know, and I think that really came from that. Working under that manager was, he was, he was just, that was all that really mattered at the end of the day was showing people that you cared, putting a smile on your face and kind of having fun, loving what you do. We had a lot of fun. That was, that was a year and a half of. A lot of fun. I have such fun memories of that, of that experience. So I highly recommend it, if anybody is.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:12:04]:

It was a great experience for me.

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Angelo Esposito [00:12:05]:

That's amazing. And it's funny because the point about reactive, it's like, in the early days, at least if I look back, it's like, and you probably had a similar experience, but, like, startup life, in the early days, you're almost always reactive. But when you start growing and you get the point where you can start thinking proactively, it's such a. Such a good moment where it's like, now you can get ahead of things, and now you have, like, a help desk, and now you have, like, so not everything's just like, okay, get an inbound chat request or email request and respond. But now it's like, how do we get proactive? And, you know, so that's a fun shift.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:12:37]:

It is. It's a fun shift. And it's, I think it's such simple stuff, but sometimes hard to get to do or hard to get right. And it's just that showing up for your customers and making them feel like their feedback matters. You care. And for me, it's also about taking that feedback. And if it, if it's. It's usually good.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:12:55]:

Like we, you know, we're what I like to call customer led development shop. So basically, our customers drive what goes into the product. There's not ideas happening over here in silos that aren't actually coming from them, and so feedback comes in from them. And it's usually implemented pretty quickly and that's, again, it's just part of, part of that feedback loop that I want them to have.

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Angelo Esposito [00:13:16]:

That's cool. And then so fast forwarding. Right. Like, what inspired you? So obviously, now we kind of understand the idea behind your entrepreneurial blood and, you know, coming, you know, immigrating to Canada, parents, you know, being entrepreneurs and opening, you know, those two, three franchises, et cetera, et cetera. Fast forward. What kind of inspired you to co found Akira? Like, where was the inspiration for, okay, this is the problem I want to solve. Like, you know, I love to understand, like, the thinking.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:13:41]:

No, great question. So we actually had a company, a large multi, multi brand, multi concept company approach us, and they, they had actually looked at a lot of solutions that were out there and they were faced with either two problems. Either they would have to have multiple platforms to do sort of everything that would fall under this reputation management umbrella. You know, typically you're dealing with something that would manage your direct feedback or something that would manage your online reviews, maybe something that would do both. But then there wouldn't be listings, and then you'd have to pay, you know, there'd be another per month, per location per month cost to manage your listings. So, you know, it was, they were, they were struggling with that. And then the other challenge that they had was pricing was cost. It was, it was cost prohibitive to do everything that they wanted to do.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:14:29]:

They actually evaluated Salesforce at one point, and I was just like, I don't know, I don't know if you want to go down that road because Salesforce not only is it a, it's at a, it's a per se cost, it's also, you've got a, you need an implementation partner out of the box. Salesforce isn't gonna, gonna get you where you want to go. So we went through that with them and then, you know, we presented them with, we'll put something together. And the other thing that we, I was really excited about was that storytelling element because I had seen what we can do and a lot of the solutions out there, you know, I don't think we're going to deliver from a storytelling perspective. You know, just actually really give those prescriptive insights to those operators, like, just tell them what it is that we think that they need to know that's going to be useful for them. And so it just looked, it was just this opportunity and I didn't want to pass it up. And, you know, we put something together for them in a couple weeks and sent it to them and they were, like, amazing. Yeah.

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Angelo Esposito [00:15:19]:

Awesome. So what, so was that your first paying customer kind of thing? Your first pilot customer?

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:15:23]:

Yeah, you got it. First pilot customer. First paying customer. Absolutely.

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Angelo Esposito [00:15:27]:

I love that. And then what were some lessons you learned early on? Because, you know, the first customer, I feel like there's obviously a ton of learnings. I mean, the learnings never stop. But what were some maybe key learnings you got from that first experience?

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:15:39]:

Yeah. You know what the biggest, honestly, mind shift for me was learning to tell better stories. I keep saying that, but better stories with that data, because what we did initially was we just presented them with dashboards. We had pie charts and bar graphs and things like charting all over the place. And I had met with them. You know, we meet sort of, you know, we have a frequency quarterly, and some people I meet with actually weekly. And I went in there one day and I was doing a presentation, and then I thought, you know what? I'm going to ask. And I said, show of hands, how many of you are on the dashboard and actually consuming this data? And nobody put up their hand.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:16:11]:

It was silent. And I'm like, okay, that's interesting. I went back with my team and we went back to the drawing board, and I actually picked up a book I've got on my desk here. I don't give a Reddit called storytelling with data by Cole Nafik, but it actually completely changed the way I sort of approached and thought about how we present that. And so we actually took a stab at redesigning some of those. I'll call it the pearls in those, like the nuggets of information, because you have all this data, but then it's like, what are we trying to communicate with that data? Right? And so, you know, typically the mistake that we make is we just dump all the data, and then it's like. And then we leave it to the end user to try to figure out what it is we're trying to communicate. So we took a stab at a redesigned, and that went viral.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:16:57]:

Like, that was, we laid it out as an infographic. It was, there was no pie charts, no bar graphs. It was just telling a story from top to bottom. And that's been one of those things that they're constantly giving me feedback about asking questions about. Can we add this? What about that? And so that tells you that you're onto something because you're all of a sudden getting feedback. Whereas we went a year, I didn't have any feedback about the dashboard. So, yeah, dashboards are dead for me. That's it telling.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:30]:

Yeah, it's funny. My, my CTO keeps on me. I gotta watch the movie her. Cuz sometimes, sometimes I'm just, I keep saying like, hey, one day we gotta get. But obviously this is like crazy and like talking like hundreds of millions of dollars. But you know, one of, one of the visions was always like, hey, imagine one day, like, get to the point where it's to your point, but like just natural language, like, hey, what should I order this week? What am I running low on? Should I be worried about any products are there, you know, yeah, like, etc. Etc. Just kind of speaking naturally.

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Angelo Esposito [00:18:00]:

But I like where you're headed because us too, like, we actually just came out with new dashboards, which are a lot more simplified in the core stuff and not too much data, but the day they need. But now it's like, okay, how do we tell them what to do with that data? So if they see, like, you know, historical purchases, what do they do with that? You know?

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:18:16]:

Angelo, I highly recommend you read this book. Then you just.

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Angelo Esposito [00:18:19]:

I wrote it down.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:18:21]:

I'll send you an email. You should just, it's really short, but holy smokes, does she articulate? Well, you know, sometimes you get, you get, you read some books and you're like, you know, wow, I highly recommend it because it completely, it's completely changes the way you are going to present that data and how you're going to tell that story. And it's going to serve your customers better, right? Because they don't have to be data analysts or have some sort of, I mean, it's that cognitive burden. It's that, do I have to, like, sit there and try to decipher what it is you're trying to tell me? And, you know, it's a problem when even as the engineers, you were looking at the dashboard and we're like, what is this?

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Angelo Esposito [00:18:56]:

Why did we do this again? What is it?

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:19:00]:

And we do that sometimes. And I'm looking at, you know, I was having a conversation with my co founder. I'm like this. If we're struggling, there's no way that they're not struggling. So we've almost kind of finished a full, whole scale removal of any. There won't be a single pie chart in our application from like next month onward.

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Angelo Esposito [00:19:21]:

So that's really cool.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:19:23]:

And the other thing I wanted to touch on that you said that I loved is the conversational data. That's something that we've got in development right now that's pretty close. And for us, the future, the evolution or the next step is we want the operators to be able to just query their data because we're aggregating. We have all this amazing information across all these different platforms, both online, and then direct feedback, however, they happen to be soliciting that. But being able to just, I think, as you said, you had a couple sentences you threw out, but like, hey, you know, in the last seven days, you know, how many complaints did we get about missing items and takeout orders at this location? Right, right. Because otherwise, to get that information, you know, we've got great sorting and filtering and all searching capabilities in the application. But still, to get at those insights might be tricky. And so we want them to be able to just ask those questions.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:20:15]:

And it, again comes from their need because they're sending me these requests. Hey, Shereen, how hard would it be to just quickly put together a report of, you know, some really unique raving fans over the last week? Because they want to celebrate those just as much as they want to deal with their concerns. They also want to celebrate their raving fans, which I think is an important thing. And so they want some really unique ones. You know, we get a lot of feedback that's like, you know, had a great meal today. My server, Jonah, was amazing. That's great. But then you get some that are like, oh, it was my anniversary, was our ten year anniversary today.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:20:46]:

And this, and the servers, like, you know, they really went out of their way and there's a whole big thing, and those are the ones they want, want to highlight. And this is where AI is really like, just fits perfectly because you can ask, give me some that are really exceptional or unique and it'll give that to you and then you can go off and celebrate those.

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Angelo Esposito [00:21:02]:

That's super cool. And, you know, I'm curious from your point of view, like, there's other people trying to do reputation management and whatnot. Like what are some current, maybe trends in the AI and reputation management kind of seen that just excites you?

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:21:19]:

So two things we just talked about, the one, so really the conversational data, I think that one's going to be really exciting. And I'm curious, for me, as a person that builds product, I'm curious to see how it's received and how it's used and being able to track that and see what people do with it. Because what you find is sometimes you throw something out there from a feature perspective and you have no way of really anticipating sometimes how it might get used or not used. Right. But the other one that I think is really interesting. You know, we've got this whole concept of key themes, key themes and subthemes. And what we try to do is this is something that the AI not only sort of calculates, but tries to deliver prescriptively, but what we do is we. Every feedback that comes in is analyzed.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:22:03]:

There's a sentiment scored score assessed on it, and it's also a key theme and sub themes are identified. And the reason that we do that is because part of that location storytelling is we want to let you know what the key themes are, what people are saying. And it's not just, you know, things like food quality and service. I mean, that's if you're in the industry, like food quality and service are probably always going to come up. But really specifically when we're dealing with food quality, what is it? Is it. Is it undercooked items? Is it, you know, things that were maybe prepared incorrectly, right. Or, you know, if it's menu related issues, is there a perception? So really drilling into what those key themes are and then attaching sort of the prevalence to them so that you can know how frequently those are coming up. And, you know, we don't bother letting operators know about things that have only come up once in the last, you know, hundred pieces of feedback they've received.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:22:55]:

But if it's come up 2030 times, super relevant. Right. And so really trying to. So not just a word cloud that just dumps up data that you already kind of know. Food service burgers. Like, yeah, we're in the food service industry. We serve burgers. But really drilling into what those key themes are and what they mean, you know, how frequently they're coming up.

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:17]:

Got it.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:23:18]:

And if they're both positive or negative. Right. Again, I surprisingly don't see that very often where someone might present you with a key theme. Service is coming up a lot. Service in a good way or a bad way, because it could be good, it could be that this particular location is crushing it. And then when you roll that up at the brand or concept level, it gets really interesting. You're gonna have individual locations that are gonna identify key themes. But then at the brand level, what is.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:23:44]:

What is across all my 120 locations, what are those key themes and what should I be paying attention to?

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Angelo Esposito [00:23:50]:

Right. I love that. And I know one of the features you guys have, I was checking it out, is kind of this site, this idea of like, unified inbox. I love to know more about that. Like, how does that help with. With the feedback management process and like, what impact does it have on. On your current clients?

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:24:05]:

Yeah. So for me, it's about breaking down those silos. You know, typically when we have a customer that's onboarding, there's feedback coming all over the place. They've got either online forms that they're soliciting feedback from. You know, they might have an email address that's posted or advertised somewhere that somebody just uses. Some people send in snail mail. We have some customers where somebody prints out a letter.

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Angelo Esposito [00:24:27]:

Wow.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:24:29]:

Sends it in phone calls, maybe, to the. If they've got a corporate head office, they might get phone calls to the reception. People find really creative ways back if they're motivated to. You know, often there's a QR code that's maybe printed at the bottom of a receipt. So we do those integrations with the pos that they can then scan, and then they can. They solicit the feedback that way. And everybody, we find every company is different. They have maybe channels that we hadn't thought of.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:24:53]:

You know, we have some. One customer that's got a separate platform for online ordering that they use, and then they want that. And people can leave feedback through that platform. Not the big players like skip or Uber, but it's still a player. So they want to have that integration. And so what we do is we come in and we go, where's all your feedback? Where are all these silos? And then we bring it and aggregate it all into a single, unified inbox. So you log in and there's all your feedback, regardless of channel, regardless where it came from. And I will say, Angelo, to be specific, it's direct feedback.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:25:24]:

So these are typically one on one private conversations. We also deal with your online reviews. That's kind of a separate thing. But, yeah, your direct feedback, bringing it all into a single platform and then helping you with. So AI will come in and they'll say, we'll analyze it. Every time it gets submitted, we analyze it. We go, okay, this is a risk management related issue. Let's say somebody had maybe fallen, maybe it's a food poisoning related problem.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:25:46]:

So that gets automatically tagged, labeled, the themes are identified, it's assigned to the right team, and an email is sent off to them right away. So we help with that initial escalation prioritization, because oftentimes, you know, if you get a ton of feedback coming in and you want to make sure that you address maybe the more severe concerns first. So sentiment analysis helps with that prioritization. But, yeah, I think having it all under a single unified inbox is huge.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:13]:

That makes a big difference. And out of curiosity, like, what are the typical, like, wins you might see from, from a customer? Because, you know, on one side there's obviously the just chaos and operational efficiency of, you know, like you said, unified inbox, everything in one place. I got too many locations. So there's clear, like, just organizational and operational. But what other wins can they see of, like, you know, okay, I've implemented this thing. These are some things that have changed in my business for the better.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:26:39]:

Yeah. So the very, like, just right off the gap, right off the. Right out of the gate is, is you now have, like, we were able to calculate NPI and sentiment. Right. And just being able to calculate. And then the other thing that we do with onboarding is we go, we sit down with sort of the Ops team and we say, well, what are, what's the goal? So if you. We've got your baseline now. We've been collecting your data for the last 30 days.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:27:01]:

We've been dealing with the feedback and responding to it. So you're sitting at. And then this is the thing they don't often know. So then right away we give your baseline. Your NP's is at 20, your sentiments at 54. Not great. Where do we want to get to? And so then we set that goal company wide. It's visible in the platform.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:27:19]:

We all work towards it. We celebrate when we get there. But it kind of goes back to what you and I talked about at the beginning. What gets measured gets done. And just the simple fact of just shedding light on, here's where you are today and here's where you want to get to. It's motivating people start to work towards that goal. And so what we see over time is that that increase. And there's so much data, like, if you just google so much data to support that, you know, let's look at, for example, Google reviews.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:27:44]:

You don't want to be in the three point something, right? But you also don't want to be too high. There's a trust thing there where people think, well, these are a bunch of fake reviews.

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:52]:

Interesting.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:27:52]:

So it's like, yeah, so it's like 4.0 to 4.5 is like this sweet spot where you want to be. And typically those locations outperform revenue sales wise. Right, than ones that are in lower. So we're working towards that. And then there's this concept of don't. If you've heard of the overall, we call it like a reputation score. So it's how well you're doing with respect to your reputation management efforts. And it's all of it.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:28:16]:

It's everything from how accurate your listings are. Are you responding to both positive and negative reviews? You know, do you have, are you having, do you have other ways of soliciting feedback? What's the volume of reviews that you do get? All kinds of stuff like that that would score you. And again, there's data to support that. A better scoring company brand concept does better than one that scores less. So all of those things matter. And I don't know if you, I mean, you're probably like me, using Google predominantly to make, you know, to check out locations, figure out where you want to dine, things like that. And it's really interesting to see how many companies are still ghosting their guests. So not responding, or you'll see some locations that respond only to the negative feedback and completely ignore the positive feedback.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:29:04]:

From an SEO ranking listing perspective, completeness matters. And completeness means responding to both positive and negative reviews.

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Angelo Esposito [00:29:12]:

Interesting. And I know you touched a bit on how Akira's or Akira's sentiment analysis. I'm curious to know, like, can you touch a little more? Like, how does the platform kind of prioritize, you know, critical issues and then maybe even automate some of those responses?

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:29:29]:

Great question. So what we do is every piece of feedback that comes in and review, it's a review and feedback, direct feedback, and online reviews gets analyzed. And we do, you know, so it's, you can analyze. We can analyze mixed sentiment so often, and this is really common, you'll get some feedback that'll come in that has both positive and negative themes. Somebody might have loved the food but didn't like the service or vice versa. Right. Or, you know, 90% of the experience was amazing, 10% of the experience wasn't very good. And that took a bit of, you know, time to get right.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:30:01]:

I found, like, I don't know if you, if you've worked with AI, you hear the language prompt engineering, right? Really learning how to prompt it, how to ask the right questions so that you get the results that you want. So getting that right took a bit of time, but where we're at right now, we're pretty confident with the solution that's in place. So it analyzes, it identifies the mixed sentiment scores, this here scores that there. And then what it can do is it can identify issues that are risk related. And so again, typically when you've multi concept, multi unit, you've got a risk management team, especially if there's a lot of locations. And so we want to make sure that that team gets assigned when certain things. What would you otherwise have to do? You'd have to have somebody reading through that feedback and then assigning manually. So that's where AI, you know, becomes really, really useful and it's able to just quickly identify a sign and an email gets sent.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:30:52]:

The feedback can come in on a Saturday night at midnight and AI analyzes it, assigns it, sends it out and then, you know, the timer starts. You know, this is when the feedback received. This is when we expect to see a response and then, you know, we're able to kind of follow up and make sure that gets quickly. So.

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Angelo Esposito [00:31:08]:

And you guys, so, yeah, I was just saying you guys also help with the. I think, I think the answer is yes. But just to clarify, do you also help kind of generate like auto responses or is the auto response being sent to like the risk management person?

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:31:22]:

That's a, that's an option so that the software can support both whether a customer and we see both. Some customers want to go all out on the AI and they can generate their responses and some want to be a little more cautious where they'll say, you know, here's a list of templated responses based on these workflow rules. So, you know, we'll often see something like, if it's a four or five star rating without any comments, here's what I want you to respond with. And we'll rotate between however many responses that they give us. Just random.

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Angelo Esposito [00:31:51]:

Can they still review it? Do they have an option or kind of like it can choose?

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:31:56]:

That's right. For each workflow rule, they can determine which require approval and which get posted automatically.

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Angelo Esposito [00:32:01]:

That's awesome. Awesome. I can imagine that. So just to kind of paint the picture. So like a typical client multi unit, obviously, potentially multi concept too. But let's say a multi unit. They got, I don't know, 20 locations. They come to you, they're interested.

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Angelo Esposito [00:32:13]:

What does the process actually look like? Do you guys do a pilot? You start with one location, you get like, is that a trial? Like how do you guys kind of go about getting their business?

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:32:23]:

Good. Great question. We honestly, we let the customer drive that. It's, it's, you know, there's a lot of factors that would determine, you know, what they're, what they can do on their end. So oftentimes they will, you know, they might want to do a pilot and they might want to pick, you know, a handful of stores and then we'll go from there and then we can measure. Right. So, hey, let's baseline. Let's see where we're at, and then let's.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:32:42]:

Let's start to measure over time. So it's really dependent on them and how they want to set things up. But, you know, the onboarding is pretty quick. You know, it's just a matter of, like I talked about, figuring out, well, where your feedback silos are, getting them integrated into Akira. You know, the reviews are simple. You're just typically connecting your Google Business profile to Akira or Yelp or whatever it happens to be, and then you go from there. You know, it's really interesting. What we find people love, for example, with the online reviews with Google Business profile, is Google doesn't give you sort of any trending or metrics.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:33:15]:

So while you know that your location might be sitting at a 4.2 today, would it interest you as an operator to know that in the last 90 days, you're actually sitting at a 2.5? Right. And if enough 90 days go by, that trend is still at a 2.5? You know, it's. It's. It's a part of that storytelling. And so this is one of the things that we just recently added, right, because it was, you know, there was a lot. We had a lot of operators standing behind their high ratings, but then we know that there's something that's not quite right. And so if we can reflect or shed light on that last 90 days, it tells a different story, and then it gives you something to focus on. And so.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:33:52]:

So, yeah, that's the kind of thing that you just can't get out of your Google business profile. Right.

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Angelo Esposito [00:33:58]:

That makes sense. And, like, I think you're awesome. I know you mentioned, like, feedback obviously can come from a lot of places, whether it's the receipt and a QR code, it could just be whatever. Anyways, we spoke about it, but do you recommend that your clients have a dedicated feedback page for capturing these insights? Or, like, how do you think about that?

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:34:16]:

A thousand percent? And I don't think there's anything wrong with doing that. We actually have these conversations a lot of. I think there's. Absolutely. Your strategy should be get ahead of your feedback before it gets online, because what we find was really interesting. The data, what it's showing us from our customers is think about this, Angelo. It's really interesting. I love this data.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:34:34]:

You can see I geek out about it. But let's take Google for a minute for all of the reviews that are left, for every kind of response that we post on behalf of our customers, if it's a negative concern. So it's a guest concern. We always invite the guests to take that conversation offline because you can't actually resolve it through Google. You don't know their email address, you have no phone number, you have no mechanism for contacting the guest, and you can only ever post that single response. So in lieu of that, the only thing we can do is say, hey, like, we. We desire to resolve this. Can we take this offline? And what percentage of people do you think actually take any business up on that offer? For us, it's sitting at about 8%.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:35:18]:

Eight, 9%. So, which is really interesting. Right? And so it tells me that the kind of the psychology, I don't know how you want to analyze it, but it tells me that Google feels more to me like a fire and forget. A lot of these online platforms are more of like a fire and forget. People might post something they're upset in the moment, and it could be because they didn't have a direct way of contacting that, that store or that location. And so because that happened, it went on, and now it's in the public realm, and you can't actually resolve the concern and you can't do that, you know, post resolution, soliciting them to maybe update the rating in a very genuine way. Like, if your experience or the rating that you left no longer reflects our resolution and how we handle this matter, we'd appreciate if you update it. We can't actually do that.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:36:03]:

So you want to get ahead of those. And so, you know, make it really easy for guests. Don't. Here's what I'm just working with one of our companies that's helping us with our go to market strategy. Just realizing that don't make it harder than leaving an online review to leave direct feedback. Make it super simple. And so there's many ways to do that. We help our customers with that.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:36:25]:

But yes, absolutely have a mechanism to solicit that direct feedback as quickly as you can. If they haven't left the location yet, even better. But yes, absolutely, you want to have that in place.

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Angelo Esposito [00:36:37]:

And I know you spoke a bit about listing management and you have that people. I'm curious, because obviously what comes to mind is, you know, Google and maybe, like, I don't know, Yelp, but that's because I don't really think about these things because I'm in kind of like the back of house world and inventory and all that. But out of curiosity, I imagine there's a ton. So, like what? Yeah, so, like, what what should. Typical, you know, restaurants listening in, they're probably like, oh, yeah, I think we're on Google. Cool. Are there other key listings they should have that you're like, this will help drive traffic and ultimately drive revenue.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:37:08]:

Yeah. So for us, the listing management component, there's the reason that, you know, it's in Akira, because, again, you don't see it in a lot of reputation management platforms. And the reason it's there is because if you don't have your listings accurate and they're not consistent, guess what happens? You get a ton of negative feedback, and nothing is more rage inducing. Sometimes some of the feedback that I'll read through than a guest that is really excited about whatever it is that they're about to eat, and they show up at that location because Google business profile told them it was open, and it's actually closed.

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Angelo Esposito [00:37:40]:

Can I. Can I tell you a quick one there? Yeah, that happened to me. I mean, I wasn't super mad, because I understand, but it was actually Columbia, so I was there with my brothers. And it's funny because in Colombia, basically, there's like a holiday every second Monday, give or give or take. Like, I'm exaggerating pretty much, like 20 holidays a year. And so it just so happened that Monday was off. So I'm like, fine, it's off. Cool.

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Angelo Esposito [00:38:04]:

But it didn't show on Google. But, like, I I knew because people were talking like, oh, yeah, it's off today. So on the Tuesday, I'm like, okay, let me check the hours. Okay, cool. They're open for lunch. Show up for lunch. And there were, like, a few people there, but they're like, oh, no, we're actually not open today for lunch because yesterday was a holiday, so we're gonna only open for dinner tonight. And I was like, cool.

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Angelo Esposito [00:38:24]:

They're like, oh, you didn't check our instagram? They posted on Instagram. And I'm like, obviously, I checked your Google. But it's funny. That's also, I think, like, a cultural thing is in Colombia, it's a lot more like Instagram and WhatsApp. Like, everything is like, what's up in the restaurant coming from the States is more just like, quick Google check and whatever. But it's a. It's a shitty feeling because, you know, you take an uber there, you show up. I'm with, like, six other people, and it's like, oh, we're not open today.

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Angelo Esposito [00:38:47]:

And I'm like, all right. That would have been cool to know.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:38:50]:

Exactly. And it's not a. It's not a nothing burger. Like, it's. Especially if you've coordinated. And I mean, I've got two young kids, a seven year old and a three year old. So we just had this happen the other day. Like, we got him in the cardinal.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:39:01]:

We, it was hard to find parking. We parked far away. We walked, we cracked them in. They're like at 30 degree temperatures in Vancouver right now. We walk them, we get to the location closed. And it was like a staff holiday day today or something like that, was not reflected on Google or anywhere that you would have otherwise searched. And so, and honestly, I think the listing management piece, Angelo, is more businesses don't know. They don't know that these things matter, that Google dominates that search.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:39:30]:

It's like 70 plus percent. Right. And so, heck, if you want to ignore the rest, please, at the very minimum, get your Google up to date. And so what happens with Ikea is we become the single source of truth. So it's very simple to do. You update your name, address, phone number and hours and any special hours that you want to configure. And we take care of syndicating that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:39:49]:

That's cool.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:39:50]:

And we're a bit opinionated about where we syndicate it. So, you know, there's going to be a lot of listing management solutions over there. And that's all they'll do, just listing management, but they'll syndicate out to like 150 plus directories. And so we're just kind of, I've never heard of 140 of those directories. So I'm gonna, we're gonna focus on the ones that matter. So things like Bing, Facebook, Google Business profile, Yelp, you know, those sorts of things, and making sure that those are accurate and correct. Because the other thing is that Google penalizes you from a ranking perspective when they find inconsistencies. So if on your website, you're listing your hours as one thing, but your Google business profile reflects something entirely, and then maybe your Yelp profile is completely old from years ago that reflects poorly on you.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:40:34]:

Right. It's, Google will penalize you for that. So again, it's just, it's stuff that they don't realize. And so we've got, we'll help you with just kind of at least, I don't know, just getting those basics in place so that you're not worried about it, you're not stressed about it, you're not. And then the other thing is, Angelo, we can then alert them. So, hey, we have a holiday coming up. Christmas is on its way. Please remember to set your special hours and you can schedule that ahead of time in Akira, that's one of the things you can't do with Google Business profile.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:41:01]:

You can't actually schedule regular hour changes. You have to kind of the day of, if you've got multiple locations, kind of run around across those locations, those Google business profiles and update the hours, whereas in Akira, you can bulk change it, update it, and we'll take care of syndicating it based on that, what you set it to.

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Angelo Esposito [00:41:18]:

So that makes sense. And on your side, you know, kind of flipping to maybe the, the CEO's perspective, like what's, what strategies do you guys have in place, let's say, at Acura to kind of expand? Right. Obviously you want to grow, you want to get more restaurants. I'm curious how you think about kind of partnering slash acquiring new restaurant type customers.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:41:38]:

That's a really good question. There's my network that I'm going through that, you know, we're at the point now where we're working with popcorn to do our go to market strategy for Akira. So, you know, we've got some really amazing customers that we're working with right now kind of fine tuning. And I think we're at the point now where I'd say, you know, MVP is ready to roll. So now it's just a matter of, we kind of narrowed in on who our ideal customer profile is. And I think I mentioned at the beginning, it's multi brand, multi unit, you know, so for us. So somebody asked me the other day, you know, like if you had a single operator, could they use a cure? And I said, well, I mean, I'm, I'm sure they, I mean, in theory you could. I just don't know that the pain would be, you know, there, they could still benefit from things like listing management, though, because that's an annoying thing to do as an operator, to have to go off to all these different places if I want to change my hours so that I close at nine instead of ten and I have to run around to like 20 different directories.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:42:36]:

That's an annoying thing. And that's why we try to, you know, my strategy is our pricing is very transparent. You don't have to contact us to find out what it is. It's right on the website. You can see what it is. So we want to make it really, really simple, really clear. We don't kind of tear things up where, you know, there's these add ons and it's just, this is the flat fee. You get everything right.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:42:55]:

And just because I think it's just, again, you ask, as a founder, as a CEO, it's because I'm annoyed by sasses that make me call them to find out how much they cost. And then also gatekeep all the features. Right. That I need to actually get what. So just be upfront. This is what we charge and this is what you'll get. And then just make it simple. I like, that's my, my strategy.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:43:17]:

We'll see if it works.

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Angelo Esposito [00:43:18]:

No, it's great. It's great. And I mean, obviously, uh, you know, heard nothing but good things about, uh, popcorn. Uh, actually had Michael on the show a couple weeks ago. He's, he's great. Super interesting guy. So he's, he's awesome. So, you know, to wrap up, I always like to do two things.

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Angelo Esposito [00:43:33]:

One is kind of just do any plugs. So really kind of like, if you just want to quickly flag, we'll put it in the podcast notes and episodes and links. But just like website, maybe your LinkedIn or any, or anything you want. If you're like, hey, we got this podcast, follow us here, follow us there. So this is a quick shout out. Anything you want to plug, floor is yours.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:43:52]:

Just the website. Helloakira.com. and there's, and there's a, there's a, you know, contact us form that goes straight to me. You'll hear directly through me. You can also shereen@helloakira.com. if you know, anybody has any questions or would love to see more about the product, but yeah, no, that's cool.

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Angelo Esposito [00:44:07]:

So people listening. Hello, Akira. That's akira.com. and then Shereen will be happy to answer. That's awesome. And then last but not least, just to wrap things up, I was kind of like, looking down to the future. So looking towards the future, what's next for Akira?

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:44:22]:

Well, we've got a lot of things on our roadmap, some of the things that we talked about today, but honestly, just more of the same. You know, we're really having a lot of fun. We're enjoying what we're doing. We're just going to keep doing this, keep bringing on more customers, you know, keep hopefully exceeding their expectations and then seeing these brands grow, seeing these brands improve again just by measuring. Right? So, yeah, I love that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:44:48]:

Well, Shereen, thank you for joining us. I really appreciate it. Once again, Shereen Qumsieh, co founder and CEO of Akira helloachira.com dot, thanks for taking the time to share your journey. Really appreciate it.

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Shereen Qumsieh [00:45:01]:

Thank you, Angelo. Have a great day, too.

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Angelo Esposito [00:45:03]:

Feel free to check out WISK.ai for more resources, and schedule a demo with one of our product specialists to see if it's a fit for.

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