Smith.aiReviews of smith.ai

Response from Smith.aiJul 8, 2024

Hi Jay, Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We understand your frustration and will continue working with you to rectify the situation and improve your experience with us. We know outbound calls to customers — and missed call summaries — can have a major impact on your business. Our records indicate that you have had an issue with four outbound callbacks that our team made to prospects interested in your services. All four of those calls were made within seven minutes of receiving them. The first within 2 minutes, the second within 1 minute, the third within 2 minutes, and the fourth within 7 minutes. Those calls all went to voicemails. As you know, we can’t control whether the prospect answers the phone or not. We’ve discussed this with you in the past, but unfortunately, the call summaries were not sent for those callbacks. We apologize for that, and as a result of the error, we did not charge you for those four calls. Since that time, our Customer Success team has worked with you to update your call instructions and ensure call summaries are made for all outbound calls. Corrective coaching was provided to our outbound agents as well. We've been working hard to get on the same page as you and help you understand our process here. Please know, we're dedicated to improving our service and regaining your trust. Thank you, The Customer Success Team at Smith.ai

Response from Smith.aiMay 7, 2024

Hi Ryan, thank you for sharing your feedback and I'm sorry you experienced our outreach in this way. Our sales team strives to be prompt, engaging, and supportive, as we know business owners and operators are exceptionally busy and any reminders are often welcomed. We had reached out to you in response to interest you had expressed. Your input is valuable to us, and we’ll use it to refine our approach to be more sensitive. If you’d like to discuss your experience further, we would welcome hearing from you; please email us at [email protected].

Response from Smith.aiFeb 21, 2024

It’s unfortunate that you feel this way as we’ve worked tirelessly to align your call instructions to meet your firm’s expectations, but that requires your active collaboration and cooperation. Over the past year, our support team has met with you an average of 1 - 2 times per week to discuss your account and provide solutions when you requested changes. During these meetings, your instructions were reviewed and updated after your approval to better align with your expectations. These constant meetings and updates also involved other Smith.ai teams to help with implementing your account changes. We also made concessions to add additional screening and intake questions at no additional cost. After many rounds of revisions, it seemed like we would be doing this endlessly and you would never settle on a single set of instructions to continue with consistently, so we eventually required that your call instructions be simplified in order to best set your firm, your callers, and our agents up for success. During this same time, you continuously increased your disrespect when speaking with our support teams, even reacting unpleasantly in your responses to other teams involved in helping your account. On February 15th, during a call with our team, you started berating our rep about a non-relevant topic to the scheduled call, while they were providing an update on the original topic for the meeting. It came to a head when the disrespect became abusive. Another important challenge in managing your account was you continuously ignoring our emails to approve your changes to call instructions. For obvious reasons, we’re unable to make changes to your instructions without your explicit approval. We requested you approve changes via email and not by phone only for greater transparency, but those were ignored. For as often as you have requested changes, it’s even more important for you to be active and responsive via email. We had hoped we could continue handling calls for your firm, but working with you has been difficult and abusive to our team. We wish you the best.

Response from Smith.aiNov 28, 2023

We appreciate your feedback. While we are disappointed in the outcome, we believe strongly that the issues encountered are resolvable and we would welcome the opportunity to demonstrate that to you. Concerning your review, we wanted to provide some clarity: Smith.ai bills clients monthly with no annual commitment. Per our terms of service, your payment is due on the same day every month from the start of your first billing cycle. As soon as it was brought to our attention that there was miscommunication during the sales process about the start of your account, our team took immediate action to ensure that this was handled to your satisfaction. To confirm, this charge was fully refunded. Your feedback about our call dashboard is greatly appreciated, and we have shared it with the relevant teams to improve our customers' experiences with it. We want to reiterate that your personal contact information listed on your dashboard was for internal communication only as we need to keep an alternate phone number on file to contact clients directly in case any urgent issues arise. Our native HubSpot integration has standard, fixed features that nearly all of our clients make use of. This standard integration creates “Contacts” within our clients’ HubSpot instances, and this is well documented on our website and help docs. However, you wanted us to create “Tickets” instead of “Contacts.” This is not a trivial change, but we are capable of making this adjustment using other tools available. As that would require some customization, we offered to schedule a time to iron out all the details with our Solutions team, but you emailed us on October 11th letting us know you already had an established workflow. So, we didn’t pursue it further out of respect for your time and understanding there was no longer a need. We do integrate with RingCentral and work with many customers who forward their calls to us. Our integration here simply means businesses can forward any call they receive in RingCentral to our receptionists to answer. However, you were asking if we’re able to log in and access your RingCentral account. We do not have this capability for liability reasons of how personal information and data are stored. We shared this with you, however there remained a discrepancy in how you wanted us to interact with your RingCentral account. As we communicated to you multiple times, our contact email changed. You continued to send correspondence to an old, unmonitored inbox. If you email [email protected], responses are typically sent within two hours. Again, we regret the overall experience you encountered. Unfortunately, you were outside of our 14-day money-back guarantee window. This is why we offered you credit. We would love the opportunity to see this through and show you how capable we are of exceeding your expectations.

Response from Smith.aiNov 6, 2023

Trustpilot readers: We ended our business relationship with this client. Jason, we have worked tirelessly with you to make the corrections you requested to your call handling instructions, despite your continued verbal abuse and miscommunication issues. When we have made mistakes in the past regarding instruction updates, we have done our best to offer you substantial discounts to compensate for those errors. Recently, we assigned one of our most tenured account managers to your account to help get things back on track. However, you chose to belittle our team by calling us “idiots,” and worse, including profanity. As you know and as we’ve reminded you, we cannot make changes to your instructions without your explicit approval. As recently as October 25th, our team immediately leapt into action to implement the changes that you requested to be made after your discussion with your account manager. Unfortunately, it appears that there was information that you wanted to be updated that you did not include on the shared Google doc that we were working from, together. Some of your most recent complaints reference terminology and instructions that you provided yourself, included in a shared instruction document you edited — in place since January 10, 2023. And while we would have liked to continue working with you to resolve these challenges and prove our value, we ended our work engagement due to your unprofessional and derogatory comments to and about our team. We hope you find another service better suited to your style.

Response from Smith.aiApr 26, 2023

It’s unfortunate that you feel this way as we’ve tried working with you directly to handle calls to your preference, but we’re unable to make changes to your account’s instructions without your approval for liability reasons. When our support rep attempted multiple times to confirm with you about your new updates that would improve call handling and lead qualification, you were unresponsive when asked for your approval. You indicated with our support team that you had limited availability to manage the approval process so we attempted to streamline your changes which you also were not supportive of without reviewing before implementation. In short, you told us you were too busy to review the changes you requested, yet refused any updates to your account without your approval. In your first month of service with us, we handled 5 new potential client calls for your business. Only 1 caller was interested in scheduling an appointment, which our receptionist happily booked in real-time. The other 4 callers declined to schedule an appointment while on the call with our receptionists, prompting them to send follow-up messages that we have on file for your business for qualified leads who weren’t ready to book a meeting. We reviewed your feedback and found no instances of in-person consultations not being offered to callers interested in scheduling a meeting. There was only one instance where you were referred to as an attorney, but in that case it had accidentally been included in a call summary (i.e., it was a typographical error), not to a caller. We’ve found no confirmation that any receptionist said you were an “attorney” to a caller. Our support team then took extra precautionary steps to ensure this would never happen again. Our investigation verified it did not happen again. Regarding your follow-up emails to customers, we used the follow-up message exactly as you shared it with us. You requested certain updates that weren’t capable of being done, which our support staff informed you about. At your request, we implemented an update to your follow-up email to include your signature quickly after this request, and when the other changes were resolved. We’d love to continue working with you to resolve the challenges you’ve experienced, but the process requires that you “help us help you” by reviewing and approving the changes to your account. Ignoring our guidance doesn’t help you or us, and for liability (and obvious) reasons, we can’t change any customer’s call handling instructions without their permission. We hope you can understand and respect our perspective, and we’re sorry to resort to a public forum. Ideally we are always able to resolve these matters directly, and we remain open to doing so.