Podcast appearance
From Audiology to AI: Helping Small Businesses Win the Trust Game
How small businesses can turn review knowledge into better decisions and stronger local growth.
How small businesses can turn review knowledge into better decisions and stronger local growth.
Lori Brooks moves the conversation beyond collecting and improving reviews. She identifies the larger opportunity: extract the knowledge customers provide and use it to improve how the business operates.
Quoted on the RightResponse AI homepage
“It's not just helping the user collect the reviews. It's helping the user truly implement the knowledge gained from collecting those reviews.”
Lori’s observation follows a discussion of reviews as both public proof and a source of operating knowledge. She identifies the larger opportunity: use what customers say to improve decisions, operations, and future customer communication.
This passage appears at approximately in the original conversation.
Terminology note: this conversation uses the earlier word “facts.” RightResponse now calls the verified business knowledge used in a response “messages.” The transcript preserves the language used in the original recording.
Small businesses can use review management as a practical learning system. Reviews help visibility; responses communicate with prospective customers; and the language inside the reviews shows what customers value, where the business is succeeding, and what needs attention.
A consistent flow of reviews supports local visibility, while the review content and responses help prospective customers decide whom to trust.
It can identify recurring strengths, service problems, employee recognition, customer priorities, and changes that may not be visible in an average rating.
No. A structured platform can automate routine analysis and publishing while routing the situations that require judgment to a person.
Reviews contribute evidence and visibility; responses give the business a public opportunity to acknowledge the customer and add useful context for future readers.
The original Lori Brooks episode and YouTube video are linked from this page.
Explore the Review Management Platform
Visit the original episode from The Small Business with Lori Brooks Show
This transcript was generated from the original episode audio and lightly formatted for readability. Minor speaker or wording errors may remain.
[00:00:00] Welcome back to The Small Business Show, where you get to hear the journey find the challenge and create solutions. I'm your host Lori Brooks and I thank you so much for joining me today. Here enjoying the show don't forget to subscribe, like, and share. This week's guest is George Swetlitz co-founder of RightResponse AI. RightDitation management platform helping local businesses use AI to boost visibility, wing customer trust, and grow through smarter reviews strategies.
[00:00:40] A Harvard Business School graded with deep operational roots. George previously led Alpaca audiology to over 220 locations nationwide. Now he's on a mission to help small businesses compete and win using the power of AI without breaking the budget. George, welcome and thank you so much for joining me today. Yeah, thank you. It's pleasure to be here.
[00:01:03] It's a pleasure to have you. I'm excited to dive into the journey. But before we even get there, I want to rewind Macau. I want to rewind Macau to the days and let's go back to junior higher high school. I want you to think about a time when an aunt and uncle, a mentor, or even your parents would have asked you, George, what do you want to be when you grow up? What was your answer to that question back then?
[00:01:31] That's a good question. So I always knew that I wanted to be in business. My father worked at Westinghouse in strategic planning and he would travel around the world and talk about these big issues. And I just thought that was the most interesting, you know, the lamerists life. And so I always thought that I would want to be in business. I love that.
[00:01:57] And the ability to witness someone who was in strategic planning and traveling, the globe doing so, that had to have been quite inspiring and exciting. So share with us the evolution as you grew up. Which direction did your journey take? Did you go into college saying, okay, I'm going to go into strategic planning. And this is where the journey is. How did your journey evolve into Alpaca before we get there?
[00:02:26] Yeah, you know, it's interesting, you know, so when I was in college, I thought I wanted to work for a company. And the jobs that I interviewed for seemed so boring. That I was like, I don't want to do this. And there was an area, you know, of called consulting. And so I started interviewing for consulting firms and ended up getting an offer from a company called McKinsey and Company, which is a very large global consulting firm.
[00:02:53] And so I did that for a number of years. Went all over the world. I lived in Indonesia and Sweden and working on all these projects, getting exposed to lots of different industries. And then I went to business school. So I went to Harvard Business School. And I kind of revisited that initial desire,
[00:03:16] which was to work for a company. But this time I had some better offers. So I ended up working for a company called Cerely Corporation. Ran a factory for them, ran a business for them. And so did a lot of things like that over the years. Mm-hmm. You started stacking the experience, stacking the knowledge with different positions
[00:03:39] and quite large companies and then chose to go back to school to further education, found better opportunities and different positions. And I'm really started stacking that knowledge. How do you feel all of that kind of came together as you were, you know, really leading with Alpaca Audiology? Yeah, so, you know, the second phase, and it started in 2008. And so I decided that I wanted to start doing things on my own.
[00:04:10] And at that time, you know, there was a lot of data in the world and people were struggling with how do we use all this data. So I started a firm to do analytics, kind of data analytics. And because of my experience, I thought it would be very important to be able to integrate that information into the companies themselves. So I ended up starting a software development company
[00:04:35] to support that effort in India and build that business. And that team in India, they've been with me wherever I've gone since then, right? And so fast forward from 2008 to 2018. So in 2018, one of my clients, which was a private equity firm, had a portfolio company that was a roll up of or a consolidation of audiology or hearing aid clinics. And they asked me to join the board and see how I could help that company
[00:05:11] as it evolved in group. And the next year, 2019, was COVID, right? So we had 200 locations, we shut them all. Every single location was shut. And the private equity firm asked me to step in and take the role of CEO to manage this very tumultuous, complicated, risky time period.
[00:05:39] And so as I'm in this business, I start thinking more and learning more about local marketing, local SEO, because we had 220 locations and we had to build that. And so first I learned about software development. Now I'm learning about local marketing, what's important, how do you win? So in 2022, we ended up selling the business, the private equity firm sold the business, 2023, 2023,
[00:06:13] chat GPT gets launched. And so I get my team, this team in India, and I said, we struggled with this kind of at scale thinking about local marketing. Let's see whether with AI, we can help solve this problem. And so that was like the stacking, all these experience stacked. And in 2023, we launched right response. We spent about a year developing the software.
[00:06:46] And then we launched the business to the market in 2024. That is outstanding. So congratulations on the entire evolution. And I want to just bring it back just a bit. Because I'm curious as to what that spark that moment was when when chat GPT came out and you had this team already, that you said, OK, reviews is the direction that you wanted to go.
[00:07:17] What was it that that sparked reviews as your interest for you? Well, it was two things. One was, and you know, it's still a problem today, when you try to get in chat GPT or the other platforms to do complicated things. It doesn't always do what you expect. But what we found was that if you're working, let's say you're working on a blog post and you're using AI, you'll do it paragraph by paragraph.
[00:07:43] Most likely you might have its structure of the blog post, but then you'll break it down into pieces. Because it can handle really well one section at a time. But when you think about a review, it's one section. Reviews aren't that long. So at that time, AI was pretty good at dealing with something small, right? And what we struggled with at Alpaca was, you know, the review responses,
[00:08:18] which is such in my view, and we can talk about that, it's such an important part of the connection with the customer, right? That, you know, those, they just collided into each other. And I thought this, this is how we solve that problem. It was the ease of use, the seamlessness of the AI's ability to isolate on that specific tiny bit of something, which you write, you know, once you're handling larger data sets or a larger bits of information of any sort,
[00:08:57] you're going to run into some sort of hallucination of some sort. So I totally get why you were narrowing it down. I'm still curious as to what it was about the reviews that sparked your interest mouse. What was it? Was it just the recognition that the reviews were what was driving the market? Well, it was, it was really, you know, when, when we were at Alpaca, and we were talking to providers of services to our locations, they were very expensive.
[00:09:29] And they were terrible. I mean, honestly, they were really bad at that time. Yes. And you may remember, but at that time, it was all about templates. You would create a template and then, you know, someone would have to come in and say, well, that review is kind of what fits in this response template. And you put that template in.
[00:09:52] But if you look through the reviews, they were all very similar, right? All the written, because they followed these templates. And so at that time, I thought this, this, this is a bad solution to a real problem, which is, so kind of framed it. They're, you know, top of funnel bottle, bottom of a funnel, right? Top of funnel bottom. No one is closer to the bottom of a funnel for a local business than someone reading your reviews, right?
[00:10:27] They're making that decision now, right? And so small businesses, local businesses, they spend so much time on my website, my store, my location, all these, is so pretty, so attractive. And then the person who's actually making that decision goes through your reviews and they see these really stupid responses, right, that don't connect in any human way, right? And that to me is like this real breaking point is, I call it marketing malpractice. To me, it's like a point of marketing malpractice, right?
[00:11:07] Where, you know, here they are, they're there. All you have to do is connect with them, connect them to you, and no one spends the time. And so that's what I thought the spark, that's what the spark was for me, right? And people will say, when I think it's completely off basis, people who, in my view, aren't really thinking that AI takes the humanity out of it. My view is that it puts the humanity into it, because what we do is we, is the user, the client takes all the kind of interesting things about their business and creates facts
[00:11:50] right in our platform. And so when a review comes in, the AI looks at and says, this fact is really relevant to this review and pulls those two things together. But that fact didn't come from nowhere. It came from the owner of the business. It reflects their, you know, feeling about their business, their emotional feeling about like what makes their business special.
[00:12:16] And we just help them integrate that into the response in a way that's scalable. I love that. I love that. I love that. So share to us more about right response, AI. Here are the best how we work with your clients and services that right response is truly provided.
[00:12:33] Yeah. So essentially what we, in my view, based on my experience, there's two things that you have to do. You have to understand the competitive environment, right? When we had 220 clinics, I could have two clinics that internally perform equally as well. That trick is exactly the same, but one would be very profitable and the other one would
[00:13:00] be unprofitable. Why? Because it was a competitive environment. You know, they don't exist, you know, by themselves. One might be in a market where there's no real competitors and what they were doing was enough to win. The other one might be competing against a really great local business that really understood
[00:13:23] what they were doing and what we were doing wasn't enough and we wouldn't win. So the first thing is you have to understand what are your competitors doing and what do you have to do to get higher in the map rankings so that people get to your reviews. That's the first step. So we have some, we have some tools that allow businesses to understand that very simply. And then the second point is, once you understand that, then you actually have to do it. You have to get the reviews.
[00:13:55] You have to learn from the reviews. You have to respond to the reviews in a way that connects with your potential customers. I always say to people that reviews or reviews are for rankings. Responses are for people, right? You get the reviews because Google looks at the consistency and recency and that quantity of reviews as a vote of popularity. They don't know.
[00:14:32] So if you get a lot of reviews, they think, oh, you're popular. So that helps you with your rankings. But that doesn't help you connect. In order to connect with the customer, you have to actually engage with them. So that's kind of what we do. We help, especially small businesses, maximize the opportunity that they have. I love that.
[00:14:58] I love, you're not just helping people collect or highlight or even improve their reviews. What you're truly doing is helping them collect the knowledge from the reviews and implement that knowledge into their practice. That is truly revolutionary. And it is not what I thought, right, response was doing. So I'm super excited that we've had a chance to chat because I definitely needed that clarity for myself in terms of the way that right response is truly going about assisting.
[00:15:40] It's not just helping the user collect the reviews. It's helping the user truly implement the knowledge gained from collecting those reviews. That's game changer. You know, it's most other platforms and it's like, you have to do these things. It's painful, but you have to do them. We look at it as, this is how you win, right? This is how you win.
[00:16:12] People are in business to do well and win in their local market. And this is what you have to do to win. And so that's really the difference. We're very focused on helping people understand, you know, how do they engage? Because the problem is, if you're a local business and you're competing, think about this. If you Google coffee shop near me, Starbucks will always be number one, right?
[00:16:42] Because you can compete with the power of the name and the website. You just can't wear a new England over here. I think don't so have to, you know, right? But you know what? If you're number two or number three, it's great. And so how do you get there, right? And the way you get there is by engaging with people in a way that Starbucks will, right?
[00:17:10] You have to be different. You have to take advantage of your unique capabilities. Mm-hmm. No, definitely. I agree because otherwise, many others that I will not with stuff on this show wouldn't exist. They wouldn't be around and they wouldn't be local favorites for many of us.
[00:17:27] That's true. So, you know, definitely we have to find a way to diversify in the market, no matter who it is, that we're serving, and no matter what it is, that we're serving. So, but I truly love the way that you've implemented AI in terms of not just collecting or assisting in delivering reviews, but truly helping the business owner implement that knowledge and put it back out into their own practice.
[00:17:56] That's pretty impressive. And it's a really exciting change for things. I'm curious, if you could break down how small businesses can actually begin using AI to see where they stand versus their competitors. Yeah, so I think there's a couple of different angles to that. One is sometimes, so from a very, to answer your question directly, right? The, our platform does help people.
[00:18:27] So, for example, if they, if they're a pest control service, they can come into our platform, we have a place where they can say pest control near me, right? And they can see where they rank, and they can also see where all their competitors rank, right? So, it's the first piece of competitive intelligence, and they might actually then know more about their competitors than their competitors do.
[00:18:57] That's the first piece. The second piece is, whenever you look at the map at a location, you'll see it's a, you know, it's a ranking. You know, it's number of reviews and the average review. Those are all time, right? So, 400 and 50 reviews all time, average rating of 4.6 all time. But that is completely irrelevant, right?
[00:19:21] The number of reviews somebody got 10 years ago doesn't matter. What matters is what's happened in the last 180 days, right? And that's very difficult to do on your own, because you'd have to go in, you'd have to count, right? You know, there's no way to do that. So, what we do is we download the reviews, and we crunch all those numbers, and we say, this is what you've done over the last 180 days,
[00:19:45] and this is what all your competitors have done over the last 180 days. This is how many reviews they responded to. This is how many, all of these things. So, you can start to say, well, wait a minute, and I was just doing this the other day with a, with a client, and they weren't any better or any worse than anyone else. And so, I said, that's your opportunity.
[00:20:08] You can win. If you focus on this, get more reviews, engage. You will have 10 reviews per month, and everyone else will have two, and you will be number one. And so, we help people understand that, and we use AI to do that. But I think the other thing that businesses think about is, well, how do I just use AI?
[00:20:35] And it seems such a monumental thing. And my advice would be, don't try to think about overarching things. Think about small things. Think about the small things that AI could do for you that could be helpful. And start small, and build a lot of these small things, as opposed to thinking about, how do I get AI to run my business? Move them out in all my marketing or whatever.
[00:21:07] You know, I truly find that that is one of the bigger barriers right now. It's mindset for everyone. It's, you know, this fear of adoption, this fear of something new, and it's something that we see every single time something new comes into the market. I can't explain what it was like pre-COVID. It was literally pulling teeth to get clients to do a Zoom meeting. Everybody's afraid.
[00:21:36] Nobody's interested in it. But, you know, once you get people to begin really focusing on the fact that AI is replacing task, it is a tool that can replace tasks. It is not replacing people. That's when I see that fear of adoption kind of change. So hopefully the audience takes that to heart and pays more attention to the fact that it's really find what task, like George said, bring it down to the very, very tiniest bit.
[00:22:09] What is the task that you're repetitively doing that AI can replace? Don't try to move them out and don't try to repair your whole business. Don't try to redo your entire website. Figure out what task you're doing all day, every day, and implement AI to start relieving yourself of those small pieces day by day. The point that you just made what you said, which was it's not about replacing people. It's about replacing task.
[00:22:38] I think it's critical because what I found in dealing with kind of larger clients is that they'll have teams of people doing very repetitive things. And our software alleviates all of that. And so what their team can start doing is focusing on the dissatisfied customers. They can actually spend more time now engaging personally with their dissatisfied customers to save that. And whether that means someone will change a review or whatever it is,
[00:23:11] they may not have the time to invest in a higher value way to do things that AI can't do. It didn't replace their job. It just made their job a lot more interesting. Exactly, definitely. And George, you've become my new best friend because you literally just plugged the title of my program more time. And guys, I didn't pay him to do that.
[00:23:33] That was just random. Just kind of happened there. But that's the truth. That's what AI does. It gives you more time. It's providing more time in your day. Again, replacing tasks.
[00:23:48] It's a tool. It should be used as a team member and a tool. It's not replacing people. It can replace bits and pieces of what you do in a repetitive manner. And you, George, have found one of the most creative methods of implementing AI to help someone in their business. I have not at all hands down whatsoever in the entire time.
[00:24:13] I've been doing this show. But anyone else who is using AI to assist in not just the collection, but the implementation of the knowledge from the reviews that they're collecting. So who does you for such a creative way of implementing AI? I'm super excited to see how this grows and where you're taking it. The show was really designed, of course, to assist the viewers in coming up with an idea for a business in an industry that they
[00:24:44] may not have been thinking of prior to checking out the show. And seeing as well, this is the first time we've ever had anyone who's using AI to really help implement the review knowledge into a practice. This is a unique industry. So I'm very curious. If you had a magic wand and could change anything at all,
[00:25:09] with what you're doing right now with right response AI, what would you change? What I change about what we're doing. I just wish we could develop faster, right? Yes, I just meant a great build it. I mean, there are so many, I can think of so many things that we can do.
[00:25:32] I agree. I said forget 5G. We are ready for 100T at this point. We've got a lot to do when our servers aren't moving fast enough. Agreed 100%. I'll just give you an idea, right? I'll just give you an example.
[00:25:46] So we talked before about creating the kind of the, I don't know if I said it this way, but you know, whole idea is to kind of bring your website to the review response and we do that through these facts about the business. And so then the question is, well, where do those facts come from, right, to someone who have to think of them by themselves. So we started to write an built an agent that would literally go out and read
[00:26:11] up your, you know, your, your thousand reviews and then suggest what could the facts be, right? Kind of built that for you. And so there's so many things that we could actually do if we had, you know, more developers, more done. Understood 100% 100%. I feel the same every day.
[00:26:38] I struggle at this point to not play around with tech tools. I swear, I could do not at this point. I am having more fun playing with tools than anything else. I mean, aside from the puppy, but that's another conversation for another day. Josh, I'd love to know if you had the ability to say, go back 10, 20 years and tell yourself something before you started the entrepreneurial journey, before Alpaca,
[00:27:07] before AI, before any of this. If you could have told yourself just one thing, what do you feel like that would have been? Well, what I have told myself that, you know, all those years ago, you know, I think looking back, I would have gotten involved in technology sooner. Yeah, just jumping in, diving in, and not knowing that fear prevent AI, I 100%
[00:27:38] Yeah, the things that I did across my life were not really technology driven. And even when I got in and started to develop a company, it was around something that wasn't really technology-based. And I, you know, I had peers, you know, the way back in business that like went to Silicon Valley, like way back. And, you know, if I way back then had done that, I think I think it would, you know, it would have been maybe fitting my personality a little bit better.
[00:28:13] Technology and it is obviously is changing everything. And everyone has to figure out how they can leverage technology, be involved with technology, use technology. So that's kind of what what I would have done a little differently. Agreed, agreed, leverage it sooner, figure it out sooner, dive in sooner. So let that be a lesson to everyone you heard George dive in. Get on board, figure check out, stopping so hard of it because it's changing rapidly.
[00:28:46] You know, next thing, you know, the robots will be here. Forget the agents, forget the chat bots. The robots themselves are on their way. So before, as my husband would say, the robot wars begin, dive in, figure it out, guys, because checking something that's moving fast. But it is so beneficial, especially when you figure out how to implement it. You'll really help yourself.
[00:29:11] And that's what this is all about. George, you've come with one of the most creative ways. I've seen anybody at all implementing AI. So I am super excited about your journey. Super excited about this new vendor. I look forward to hearing more about it. And I beg that you not be a stranger on this show.
[00:29:29] Please share the best way for our viewers to find you. The Beth Walsh, so right response AI. And we actually have a place for your listeners. So right response AI, backslash, Lori Brooks. And we have some resources there that I think will, you know, that your listeners will find useful and helpful. And that is very sweet of you.
[00:29:51] Thank you. Thank you. I will be sure to include the link in the general's page. George, you've been outstanding. It's great to be here. It's wonderful to meet you. And I think maybe over time we can share the continuation of the journey.
[00:30:06] I look forward to it.