Tids & Bits

Author

Bernard Desarnauts
May 29, 2025

Welcome back

Welcome to Talk to Walk, your go-to newsletter empowering small business owners with clear, actionable AI insights to boost your success from day one!

Today, we are excited to share a little bit from our recent interview with Matt Price and so much more.

From Deflection to Engagement: How AI Is Reshaping Customer Service

When Matt Price, CEO of CrescendoCX, plugged AI into his support team, he didn’t just cut costs, he changed the whole conversation. Literally.

For most small businesses, support is a cost center. The dream? Fewer tickets. But Price uncovered something wild: for every one customer who got help, five wanted it but bailed before engaging. Why? Long waits, clunky forms, confusing IVRs. But when AI took over the boring stuff, suddenly people stuck around. Handle time rose, but cost per minute dropped. That unlocked deeper, more valuable conversations, without ballooning payroll.

CrescendoCX now runs a hybrid model: 3,500 human agents plus large language models, with pay-for-outcome pricing. Customers only pay when a ticket gets resolved. The numbers speak for themselves:

  • Cost per support minute dropped from $1.20 to $0.60

  • Avg. call length rose 50%, but so did throughput per agent

  • Outcome-based billing killed buyer risk and sped up deals

But here’s the kicker: the AI isn’t replacing agents: it’s empowering them. Price invests in upskilling everyone, not just engineers. Prompting skills spread across departments, feeding fresh ideas to the product team, and boosting morale. One of his favorite internal moves? A “best prompt of the week” contest to surface the scrappiest time-savers.

Whether you're running a support desk or just starting to explore AI in your operations, here are five tactical takeaways:

  1. Train Everyone: Make prompting part of every desk job

  2. Build Trust with Guardrails: Start with read-only suggestions, test before you automate

  3. Go Niche with Outreach: Use GPT to find micro-vertical lookalikes of your best customers

  4. Reframe Support as Engagement: Use cheap AI minutes to make conversations richer, not shorter

  5. Sell Results, Not Hours: ie, pricing to business outcomes, not time spent

App of the Week: Tidio

Smarter support without the AI circus

If your inbox is full and your patience is running low, this week’s pick is for you. We’ve been talking a lot about AI-powered support lately (including in our interview with Matt Price of CrescendoCX), and one name keeps coming up when it comes to small-business-ready tools: Tidio.

While the internet chases shiny new models like ChatGPT and DeepSeek, Tidio has quietly focused on something most AI tools miss: actually helping customers. It’s not about flexing how many billions of parameters your chatbot uses—it’s about fast, helpful, on-brand replies that don’t burn out your team or your wallet.

💬 What Tidio gets right:

  • Combines live chat + AI bot (Lyro) in one dashboard

  • Handles up to 70% of customer chats with no human needed

  • Integrates with Shopify, WordPress, Squarespace, and more

  • Built-in knowledge base and email tools keep everything connected

We’ve been watching how Tidio is being used by real small businesses from solo Shopify sellers to growing service teams, and the feedback is clear: it’s fast to set up, easy to train, and delivers real value without the usual tech headaches. No dev team, no fancy workflows, just straightforward automation that saves time and keeps customers happy.

But here’s the bigger lesson: AI success isn’t just about plugging in a tool. Tidio’s own support team had to rethink how they structured and shared knowledge. That’s how they got to a 70% resolution rate. Not by chasing hype by organizing what mattered.

🛠 Pro tip for small teams: Start Lyro in “suggest mode.” It’ll offer draft replies while your team stays in control. Once you’re confident, turn it on full-time and let it work while you sleep.

🚫 Avoid the hype cycle.

✅ Build AI support that actually supports.

If you’re still using the free version of ChatGPT and wondering whether it’s worth upgrading, here’s a quick cheat sheet:

✅ Pay when...

  • You’re using it daily and hitting limits or lag.

  • You need help with longer tasks like writing blog posts, summarizing reports, or creating SOPs.

  • You want access to the best model (GPT-4o) it’s faster, more accurate, and better at following instructions than the free GPT-3.5 version.

  • You’re collaborating with AI to build, not just chat e.g., drafting emails, brainstorming ideas, creating visuals, analyzing CSVs.

🔍 What do you actually get?

  • Smarter answers. GPT-4o handles nuance better, remembers context longer, and gives tighter summaries.

  • Multimodal tools. You can upload images, files, and charts, and have them actually work with them.

  • Priority access. Less downtime, faster response time.

💡 Tip:

If ChatGPT saves you even 30 minutes a week, you’ve already made back the $20/month.

That’s less than one hour of a virtual assistant… and this one doesn’t sleep.

That’s it for this week.

Tell us what you want to see in the future. We are just beginning this journey, and we would love to hear your ideas. Make sure to subscribe so you can join us in this journey of discovery.

Until then,

The Talk to Walk team

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