Stijn Hendrikse has spent his business career making life easier for entrepreneurs and companies. Among other accomplishments, he was instrumental in introducing Microsoft Office to the world, was CEO of a cloud contact center for the SMB market, and co-founded a marketing agency dedicated to helping B2B SaaS companies accelerate growth.
As founder and CEO of Amy, Stijn is helping small business owners better manage resources, improve customer service, and save money through an intuitive chatbot service solution tailored to their business. Here he answers common questions about Amy just as Amy answers common questions that customers have for any small business.
What is Amy?
Amy is a customer service solution—a chatbot—that answers all the common questions small business owners repeatedly get from their customers or prospects.
What’s a chatbot?
In this case, chatbots are computer programs that simulate human conversations via text messaging. As with any type of technology, there are badbots and goodbots. Amy is, as you might guess, a very goodbot.
Who is Amy especially suited for?
Amy is a great solution for a business that’s on the small side, where customers or prospects ask the same kinds of questions day in and day out. But where the owner may not have the resources to hire staff to handle those inquiries personally or the IT capacity to create an automated solution.
Amy can quickly answer those questions and provide customers an engaging experience. Owners save money on staffing and IT. Best of all, Amy allows owners to spend their time on their craft, which is what they do best and what they love to do anyway.
Why Amy?
According to the Small Business Administration, there are more than 37 million such companies in America. Nearly two-thirds of them with websites. Smaller businesses relying on web traffic may not have the resources to incorporate a chatbot into their sites to provide answers 24/7. And most chatbots available are either designed for e-commerce or are watered down versions of enterprise solutions.
Amy is specifically designed for small businesses. She’s intuitive, easy to set up, and programmed to answer the most common questions small business owners—from bakers to florists to yoga instructors—get every day. Not only that, a basic version of Amy is free.
Why now?
COVID has had a big impact on small business. It’s become hard to find, train and keep people. Staff want to be engaged and not have to do the same thing—like answer the same questions—over and over.
Amy eliminates those challenges. She’s ready to start immediately. She’s smart, friendly, quick to respond, reliable and tireless. She’s a quick study and can adapt to the customer service needs of virtually any small business.
All this and she costs a fraction of an actual employee yet is invaluable to a small business owner.
What makes Amy so special?
In addition to the above, Amy will adapt herself to the look of a small business’ website. So, she’s always on brand. She’ll easily lead an owner through set up in a matter of minutes. She has several templates for companies—from catering to clothing boutiques, churches to clinics, locksmith to law offices—that allow owners to plug in answers to commonly asked questions for their business.
What kinds of questions can Amy answer?
Amy can answer any question an owner wants to provide an answer for. But for the most part, she works best answering the kinds of questions a small business gets asked over and over again. For instance:
What are your hours?
What time do you open/close?
For a restaurant: do you take reservations?
For an accountant: what’s the deadline for filing income tax this year?
For a brewery: do you give tours?
For a church: what time are your services?
For a dental office: are you taking new patients?
For a personal trainer: what does a one-on-one session cost?
How much does it cost to hire Amy?
I always love being able to say this: small business owners can access Amy for 500 chats a month for free. Or they get unlimited chats for just $9/month. What’s more there’s no sales process. Engaging with Amy is completely self-service.
A premium version would cost a small business only $108 a year. That seems a small price to pay to have “someone” else answer all the questions that a business has to answer countless times a week.
How can Amy be contacted?
She can be reached at Amy at amy.us.
Then owners can try her for free. As I mentioned, she has a list of templates for many small business types that already have question and answer flows built right in. All owners need to do is provide the answers to the questions businesses like theirs get asked the most. They’ll get a sense of what Amy can do as she takes them through the process.
For instance, she can answer frequently asked questions, collect customer information, and point customers in the right direction on a website. She won’t ask for time off or complain, will save her owner money, and provide customers with an engaging experience so that her owner can do the work they’d rather be doing. In short, she’s perfect for the job!