Let CX be your guide.
Humans have cared for dogs for over 30,000 years. Are puppies universally the best? Is Caspian Studios staunchly positioned as “dogs are better than cats”? Yes, to both. But it wasn’t until the 1920s when the human/dog relationship exponentially changed. When Morris Frank first met Buddy, he knew his life was forever changed. As The Seeing Eye program brought guide dogs to thousands of people, CX leaders saw a lesson to be learned.
CX leaders try to get ahead of their customer’s problems and face them head on. Today’s guest, Ty Smith, Founder and CEO of CommSafe AI, makes a living off of protecting customers before things escalate. To learn more about how he and his team can protect you too, click play.
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“You should be glued to your customer’s hip.” - Ty Smith
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Time Stamps
* (0:00) The CX Buddy system
* (7:57) The story of Ty and CommSafe AI
* (10:04) Why this work is important
* (13:06) The pros of robotic reporting
* (14:05) How to deliver great CX solutions
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Sponsor
This podcast is presented by Oracle CX.
Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at Oracle.com/cx/perspectives
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Links
Narrator: Thomas Panek approaches the starting line at the New York City Half Marathon. He’s merely a speck in the sea of competitors. The Brooklyn streets buzz with noise from all directions: Sirens in the distance. The sound of the cheering crowd pulsing against his eardrums. The breeze carries smells to his nostrils: from hotdogs to garbage and back to hotdogs again. Competitors bump into him as they gather towards the starting line. Thomas blocks it all out. He takes a deep breath.
13.1 miles later he makes history.
Excuse me, they make history.
Thomas had always been a runner. But 25 years ago, he became legally blind. Since then, he’s relied on human guides to compete in races. But wanting a sense of his independence back, he decided to try a new way of racing: guided by dogs.
Thomas passes the 5 mile mark. His black lab, Westley, leads him to the sidelines. Quickly, he swaps Westley out for a yellow lab, Waffle.
Waffle and Thomas approach mile 10, where Waffle leads him to the oldest dog of the group: Gus. Together, Thomas and Gus cross the finish line.
They are the first guide dogs to lead a blind man to finish the NYC Half Marathon finish. A century ago, this would have been unthinkable. But that all started to change thanks to one incredible German Shepherd named Buddy.
Let’s rewind to 1927.
In Nashville, Tennessee, a 20 year old man by the name of Morris Frank sits in his favorite armchair. His fingers glide across the pages of a book. Young and eager, he is a student at Vanderbilt University, searching for his purpose in life.
Morris can identify just about anyone from the sound of their footsteps. You see, in a wild turn of events that included a tree branch, a horse, and a boxing match, Morris lost his sight. Since then, he’s learned how to prosper despite his disability. But he still relies on the assistance of others anytime he leaves his home.
Morris’ father takes a seat. He pulls out the newspaper from his jacket and reads outloud an article by a woman named Dorothy Eustis. The article tells the story of Dorothy’s work in Switzerland: She is helping train German Shepherds as guide dogs for World War 1 soldiers who were blinded by tear gas.
The more his father reads, the wider Morris’ grin grows. Could this be the opportunity for independence that he has waited for?
As soon as his father finishes reading, Morris writes to Dorothy, promising to bring the program to the US if she would train a dog for him. He waits for a response.
A few weeks later, Dorothy invites Morris to Switzerland.
Morris knew the journey would not be easy, but was ready to do just about anything to feel a sense of independence again. Terribly, As a blind man, Morris is labeled as a package rather than passenger on his flight overseas. Once he arrives in Switzerland, he learns how the dogs are trained. But most importantly, he learns how to trust them. These special dogs cared about protecting their handlers from danger at all costs. He spends weeks with Dorothy in Switzerland, and returns with a German Shepard named Buddy.
After arriving in New York City from Switzerland, reporters flock to see this miraculous blind man who now sees through his dog. But not everyone is convinced of Buddy’s abilities. While Morris and Buddy pose for photos on a New York sidewalk, one reporter gives them a dare: cross the busiest street in New York.
Morris and Buddy were ready. Buddy was trained to protect Morries from any threat. So lace up those running shoes and get ready to cross the street because today we are talking about protecting your customers.
Welcome to Often Imitated, a podcast about remarkable experiences from the past, and how they inspire people to create great customer experiences today.
This episode is all about helping shield your customers from potential threats before it’s too late. How Buddy, the first US service dog protected his handler from danger, and how that can impact CX leaders today. In this episode we’ll hear from Ty Smith, Founder and CEO at CommSafe AI, about how he and his team help companies identify toxic behavior in their workforces. But first, a word from our sponsors.
Often Imitated is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at oracle.com/cx.
Morris and Buddy take their first step onto the busy street. Trucks rush past. Drivers honk their horns and shout out the window at them. Morris loses all sense of direction. He surrenders himself to Buddy. Step, step, stop. This continues for a few more seconds that feel like hours. Buddy guides him through the chaos. (Take a beat.) They reach the sidewalk.
The next day, Morris telegrams Dorothy one word: “success”.
In the following years, Morris and Dorothy teamed up to create a training program called “The Seeing Eye”, with the goal of making the entire world accessible to the blind. They were invited to the White House and helped pass laws allowing blind people and their guide dogs to enter public spaces. On their last trip together, Morris and Buddy flew on a plane as passengers, not cargo. They proved that guide dogs could easily fly with passengers. As a result, United Airlines updated their policy to grant all Seeing Eye dogs permission to fly with their handlers. Soon after, Buddy passed away.
During their time together, Morris and Buddy traveled over 50,000 miles on foot, boats, trains, subways, buses, and planes. In his lifetime, Morris had 6 different German Shepherd guide dogs, all named after Buddy. The pioneer of the guide dog movement, “The Seeing Eye”, remains the oldest existing guide dog school to this day. Thanks to Morris and Buddy, the blind can run half marathons without reliance on others.
One reason guide dogs are so essential is because they alert their handlers to potential dangers that they wouldn’t otherwise see. Today’s guest is helping companies do the same. Ty Smith is the founder and CEO of CommSafe AI, a revolutionary company that’s on a mission to disrupt a pressing threat: toxic behavior in the workplace. Let’s learn a bit more about Ty.
Ty: Inherently, I'm a protector of human beings. That's who I am. That's who I have always been. And I grew up in east St. Louis, Illinois, uh, being bullied as a kid and then developed into, uh, the, the fighter that I think I always was and got out of east St. Louis as quickly as I could and joined the United States Navy right as I graduated from high school. Um, I had a dream in my back pocket of becoming a Navy seal someday, and that's what I ended up doing. And so at the end of my two decade career in the Navy, I knew that I wanted to continue protecting people because that's who I am. And was given the opportunity to go to business school at Marshall business school at USC, and just really started drinking the entrepreneurial Kool-Aid there and decided to turn down a role that I'd already solidified with the FBI in order to take the leap, the leap into Entrepreneurship and I did that by launching vigilance risk solutions, a tech enabled security consultancy, uh, the predecessor to Commsafe AI while I was in graduate school and preparing to retire from my career in the Navy, and that was almost 6 years ago now.
Narrator: Ty knew that he wanted to continue his life’s mission to help human beings. That’s why he started CommSafe AI. How exactly does it work, you might ask?
Ty: CommSafe AI is a San Diego based B2B SAS technology company. We sell primarily to the large enterprise and our niche is disrupting toxic behavior and communication. And the large enterprise, our solution integrates with the internal communication services, a company uses. So their email and chat services and alerts HR professionals in near real time of instances of toxic communication, like sexual harassment, bullying, discrimination.
Those types of things that potentially happen within email and chat so that the company can actually intervene immediately instead of losing time, money and talent later, because they didn't know.
Narrator: As Colin Powell once said, “bad news isn’t wine. It doesn’t improve with age”. Ty’s philosophy agrees.
Ty: That’s one of the reasons why we created this solution because we were working extremely hard to keep companies to the left of boom instead.
Narrator: Ty noticed that most solutions to misconduct were reactionary. He knew his customer experience needed to be preventative.
Ty: you're simply responding to an event where people have already been hurt. Damage has already been done to the company's brand. The company's lost talent already. They're losing money already. And we want to keep companies to the left of those things from happening and that’s one of the reasons we created this solution.
Narrator: In large organizations, toxic behavior can be challenging to spot. CommSafe AI alerts you when it detects a potential threat before it can hurt more people.
Ty: Consider a sexual harassment. Like we've seen this a million times over and again, where you've got a large enterprise, uh, and, and they have, thousands of employees. So it's very difficult for organizational leadership to understand what's happening across the entire company. And what's the culture like across that entire company, the CEO might think he or she has a very good idea of what the culture is like, but what about all the sub cultures within that company? Because again, the more human beings you put in that organization, the more risk variables and some of those risk variables are subcultures within that company. And so typically when you take a look at a situation like sexual harassment, more often than not, it's a lower level employee that's being harassed. Oftentimes we see, unfortunately the culprit is someone in management. And so now you have a lower level employee that's being harassed by someone that is technically.
You know that person's boss or they're, they're higher in the food chain in that person. And so the person that's being harassed is really uncomfortable with the idea of standing up for themselves or going to HR and saying, Hey, listen, this is a problem for me. I don't like it. I'm thinking about leaving the company or even worse. I'm thinking about suing the company because you owe me better than this. If I'm going to show up to work and do my job for you every day and more often than. That conversation never takes place because that person is afraid to actually report that they're being bullied or they're being harassed. And so the person just leaves the company and now the company's lost money.
They've lost time. They've lost talent. And guess what? Their problems are just beginning.
that's why we created this solution because we want companies to get ahead of these types of incidents. And we don't want companies going into, you know, a lawsuit going well, Hey, your honor. We didn't know. We just didn't that that harassment was taking place because that excuse isn't cutting it anymore for companies.
Narrator: For victims, CommSafe AI removes any possible stigmas around reporting wrongdoings.
Ty: What's great about CommSafe AI is that we've removed the need for a human being to report because we found that nine times out of 10 human beings are not going to report for whatever reason.
They're afraid of losing their job. They're afraid of being. You know, outcast by their colleagues. They're afraid of the person then coming back and retaliating for all of these reasons. We've identified the fact that nine times out of 10 human beings are not going to report. So with the use of CommSafe AI, we removed the need for the human being to report.
Narrator: Part of the reason The Seeing Eye has been so successful is because it was co-founded by a man who became his own first customer. As a blind man, Morris Frank knew the struggles his customers faced because he had faced them too. Ty’s philosophy on success echoes this idea.
Ty: It’s you being glued at the hip to your customer and really understanding your customer's business and their problems. And, and what's keeping them up at night. Is there a way I can glue my solution or my solutions to solving those particular problems. So in our early stage, we're really learning what our customer experience should be like. And we're doing that. At the ground level, by just obsessing what obsessing over what our customers are thinking
Narrator:
In the end, the best CX leaders are guides. We show our customers a vision of the future and help them on the way.
Dorthy and Morris guided millions of people to get access that was previously unavailable.
And Ty is helping guide companies on how to remove toxic behavior in the workforce.
As leaders, we should ask ourselves ‘what is something I can protect my customers from that will allow them to be their best selves?’
Every single one of us has incredible potential. With the right guide, anything is paws-ible. Yes, that was a paw pun.
This podcast is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at oracle.com/cx.
This is your host, Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios. Thank you for listening to another episode of Often Imitated. If you like what you’re hearing, tell one friend. This podcast was narrated by me, Ian Faison, written by Emma DeMuth, and produced and edited by Mackey Wilson, Callen Turnbull, and Jon Libbey. You can learn more about our team at CaspianStudios.com.