Making Technology Human Again

Andrew Bolton joins Richard Lowe (The Writing King) on Leaders and Their Stories for a conversation about roots, humanity, and technology that moved too fast.

CEO and co-founder of Tech Rescue, Andrew built a 24-hour support hotline on a simple mission: make technology human again, treating every caller as the most important person and out-serving companies a thousand times his size.

Andrew Bolton is the CEO and co-founder of Tech Rescue, a 24-hour customer support hotline dedicated to making technology human again for people of every experience level. His mother is the company’s CFO and co-founder.

For more conversations like this one, see the Leaders Hub.

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Full transcript of the interview follows.

Richard Lowe: Hello, I am Richard Lowe and this is the leaders and their stories podcast. I’m the writing King and the ghost writing guru. And I’m here with Andrew Bolton and we’re going to have a fascinating conversation about our roots and how we become a little, disassociated from them lost. So, Andrew, why don’t you give a little bit about your background and then we’ll get right into it.

Making Technology Human Again

Andrew Bolton: Lost. Lost. Lost, I think it’s the right word. Thank you so much for being, it’s a pleasure to be here. My name is Andrew Bolton. I’m the CEO and co-founder of Tech Rescue, a 24 hour customer support hotline that allows people with experience or inexperience to just make technology human again.

We’ve become so far advanced, we’ve just walked past humanity. and at Tech Rescue, we bring back human. We bring back people back to the. the Avenue of help. We’re here to help you not throw games, not through mazes, not to bots, not to chats. When you need, when you have a problem, we’re here to fix it real time, real help 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

And what makes that important is because what I personally, and this is me, myself, and I, nobody else. I have found that we have completely lost our humanity in ourselves. And what I mean by that is in our earlier discussion is in terms of we have become so advanced, so far technologically savvy that we have gone past the point.

of actualization. We have gone past who we are as an identity. And I think a lot of our problems that we’re having is because we’re not grounded. We don’t have a base. We don’t have the bedrock in which we can build anymore. And we’ve now gone into this existential realm that has no meaning or any boundaries.

Yes, it’s amazing. Artificial intelligence and technology has created a world that is unlike anything we’ve ever seen, but… What have we given up for it? In order to reach the clouds, in order to reach the stars, we’ve left the base of Earth and we have forgotten that by the way, there’s gravity.

There is something you have to stand on. And I think that’s where we have gone completely off the rails is we are no longer standing on something.

When Business Moves Too Fast to Plan

Richard: I give you an example of that if you don’t mind. Business. So business used to change relatively slowly where you could keep up with it. And it’s been picking up speed through the years. Now it’s gotten so fast that just a few weeks ago, the big thing was this tool.

Now the big thing is this tool. Now the big thing is that tool. And everybody switches to it and it throws business to chaos. used to be SEO was the thing to make your websites work. Now it’s AI SEO. And next week it’ll be something new. And these things are throwing business out of Kelter because they don’t know, they don’t have a platform or a base to ground on.

I don’t know where this is going, but it’s, it’s certainly producing chaos. Cause you started digital transformation in your business and you got all these plans. Well, digital transformation takes years. of a business, how can you plan for years now when just tomorrow there’s going to be this new big wonder that obsolete everything you’ve

Andrew: So I say to a business owner, And I asked for help all the time. have board of advisors. I have my board of directors. And we were having a relatively, we were having a relatively similar discussion and it was about the branding and the image. And it was nice.

It was clean, but one, but One of my advisors said, it doesn’t drive it home. Who are you? What do you do, and why? And we had over the past two weeks, we we’ve been growing and we had to go back to the beginning again, which for me as a CEO, that’s.

That’s rubbing the scales in the wrong direction for my, for my personal feeling. I’ve created this, I’ve cultivated it, I’ve grown it. And now somebody’s saying, you’re not there. You have to come back. Well. You’re in the driver’s seat and you’re looking at the miles on the road.

You’re like, what do mean I have to go back? I just put a hundred miles on the road. You’re asking me to go a hundred miles back to get to a hundred miles. But there’s a reason for it. Because we keep advancing, because we keep producing, because we keep moving forward at the speed in which technology allows us.

unless you set that anchor chain and you drive it into the core of what it is that you’re doing, you’re going to get lost and you’re going to completely adapt your business. For example, when we started this business, my mother and I, about two and a half years ago, we had an idea and a concept that was drawn out on a refrigerator with whiteboard markers.

Now I’ve on my ninth, 10th revision of my website. implementing video, implementing SEO, implementing everything, and I understand the frustration. But where I want to guide somebody is to say, go back to what it is that you started. Why? Why did you do it? Why did you risk everything for that one idea?

That is your anchor. For us, it was my grandmother and my father. There was something there that wasn’t there before. There was nothing there that could speak their language in their time and their need to help them. Yes. There’s a lot of competitors in the space. know every single one of them.

Hi, everybody. I see you. I know who you are. Believe me. I have your names, telephone numbers and people. I know who you are. Hi. They have a great, they have a great product and service, but it didn’t tailor to what I saw. My grandmother was a woman of.

drive and purpose and, and, and devotion to a cause. All she wanted to do was just get some help. She didn’t want to scroll through, you know, videos. didn’t want to do libraries. She didn’t want to wait or schedule an appointment. She wanted it when she wanted it.

That was her. That was her. She wanted it when she wanted it. And my father, my father didn’t understand a lot of different things and I had to explain it to him. And then I realized that I don’t speak his language, but maybe somebody does. And that’s where it all.

That’s where it came from. I needed something that spoke their language. And guess what? Bots don’t do it. Person does it. Yes, Mrs. Johnson. Yes, Mrs. Cassidy. Yes, Mr. Bolton. How can I help you today? There it was. It revealed itself because I was… open to it. So to answer your question is how does a business guy stay ahead of the pack and stay ahead of all the noise?

And that’s exactly the comment that I want to harp on the noise. It’s noise. You’re on the highway. You’re looking around you. You’re coming into New York City or Dallas or Houston or Los Angeles or Las Vegas or Atlanta. You see the big intersections. You see the big wraparound highways and the roads leading this way.

That way. I-95, 48, 80, 23. It’s noise. It’s noise. What you’re looking at is the commerce of the world, the live highway, a flow of money and information and technology. Stick to what it is that you were doing. Why did you do it? Plant your flag, plant that anchor.

And what will happen is that path that you’re supposed to use will reveal itself. What you’re trying to do is chase noise. And when you chase noise, you’re swatting at gnats in the air and you look ridiculous in the end.

Do One Thing, and Do It Well

Richard: Yeah, that’s the approach that I’ve taken with ghost writing. I’m a ghost writer and I write books for people. And my first inclination as things were changing was, okay, I need to broaden my offerings and do that because I tend to do that. Well, wrong approach. The approach that I took was I write books and That’s what I do very, very well.

And that’s why I got into ghost writing is I like writing books because I have a passion for telling people’s stories in a way that other people can understand. Well, if I like writing books and that’s what I’m good at, and that’s what I’m passionate about. And I’ve got it down to where I can write.

I just had somebody who published a book and he sold like 5,000 copies on the first day. And that was over the weekend. and he’s thrilled. And that’s, that’s the kind of thing I look for. I had a lady named Doris, I wrote her book and she held it in her hands and she said, this is the same as the same feeling I had when my first born was in my hands.

Those are incredible things for people to say. So then I was thinking I had to broaden my base. And then I realized I don’t like writing blogs necessarily. I don’t write, you know, case studies and stuff. They can pay the rent, but I’m not here to pay the rent. I’m here to, I mean, that’s part of it, obviously, but

Andrew: You’re here to paint a masterpiece.

Richard: I’m an artist, I’m a creative, and I’m here to help people. I like to help them with their message. It’s what I do.

What AI Cannot Do

Andrew: so let’s do a fun little exercise. And this is hopefully for your audience to see the difference in terms of what it is versus what they believe. Let me ask you a question. Can you write a book in no time flat with artificial intelligence?

Richard: I could write a crappy book in just a couple of days. It’ll be really crappy. Yeah.

Andrew: Okay, you can write. All right, but you can write a book, right? Can you tell a story better than AI?

Richard: far better.

Andrew: Can you paint the imagery better?

Richard: I can get to the heart of the person that AI can’t get to. That’s what I do.

Andrew: But my point being is there’s something about you that is instinctual that AI just can’t do. You have that ability to find the well, tap it, and just bring everything out,

Richard: I make their idea blossom. This is way to put it.

Andrew: So guess what? Are you nervous about AI? Are you worried? Okay, bye.

Richard: Well, I’m only worried because it cuts out some of the low end stuff, but I’m not worried about it.

Andrew: Low end.

Richard: I’m not interested in the low end. mean, anybody can do the low end. That’s the problem with the low end. Your competition is huge.

Andrew: But guess what? Rolls Royce doesn’t advertise, it?

Richard: Not a lot that I’ve seen, yeah.

Why Human Support Cannot Be Outsourced

Andrew: I’ve never seen a commercial for Rolls Royce, but you know they exist. My point being is there are certain things that yes, artificial intelligence for our business can do a lot of things. Yes, I’m not disputing that, but what tech rescue is, is not that. So no matter what company reaches out to us, no matter what offers we receive to do integration or, you know, a new build out or a new configuration, I don’t care.

I don’t care. I don’t care what percentage profitability margins you up me by. I know my profit margins inside and out. You’re telling me that you can squeak out five percent, maybe about what? 0.5 to 1.2 % more in my operational, my operational profit. Okay. That’s fine. But for me and what we vowed and what we wanted, It just can’t be touched because there’s something about me being on the phone with somebody reassuring them that they’re not crazy.

They’re not silly. This isn’t a small little problem. It’s a problem because you called me. That’s the attitude that we take. You picked up the phone. You called eight five five two five zero eight five eight six or went to www.techrescue.io. You went to my website. You called my number.

It was big enough for you. Problematic for you. important enough for you to call me. That’s important to me. You called me, I’m here to help. AI ain’t gonna do that. No matter which way, no matter how good you make it, no, ain’t gonna happen.

Richard: Some of the best customer service that I’ve gotten is when I called and I’m almost immediately get to a human. I I might go through a little bit of AI to gateway, but I get to the human. The human said, explained to him what’s going on. And the human says, well, I can’t help you with that.

Let me put you on the phone with somebody who can. Then I get to that person and he listens and blah, blah, blah, blah. He says, you know what? I know an expert who knows precisely what you need. within That’s all within the space of five minutes. I’m, I’m attached to the right person, a third level tech who helped me with my problem and got it resolved for me.

So that was happy within 10 minutes. And, that company has my business forever, as long as they don’t change their model. Then on the other hand, the company where I have to spend three, literally 30 minutes getting through their gateways to get to a person. Because my problem’s not something like me handle with AI. I’ll be bailing on them as soon as I can.

Better Service Than a Billion-Dollar Conglomerate

Andrew: So for the audience, about two and a half weeks ago, my primary care physician retired. And my insurance card, big name, very big name in the state of New Jersey and New York and in the East Coast, very big name, has his name on my card. Well, there’s a problem with that.

That card is no longer valid. That insurance policy is no longer valid. My primary care is now done. He left. He retired. He’s gone. I was told at the front desk of my doctor’s appointment for my yearly checkup that this is no good. And I said, what do mean it’s no good?

And she goes, well, your primary care is no longer here. I said, okay, but I’ve got a policy number. I’ve got, I have everything. It’s no longer valid. You now have to call. So that was a day wasted and scheduling wasted. So now I’m sitting on the phone with this big insurance company’s call center.

It took me 20 minutes on hold through the maze to get to. All lines are busy. If you would like a callback, please press 1 and your place in line will be saved and the next available representative will call you back at your convenience.

Richard: Yeah, been there, done that. Although that’s obviously an HMO and a PPO is a little different. They don’t care about that kind of stuff. But yeah.

Andrew: But the point was, is I was in a position where I thought personally, because of the name, the card, everything that this was fine. It’s not. And when I needed help, when I needed something done, I had to wait 20 minutes to be told that you’re not important enough to us. We’ll get back to you.

Richard: Yeah. Yeah, what if it was serious and you were bleeding on the floor or something, you know?

Andrew: But it’s that point. I’m sitting there with this multi-billion dollar conglomerate, right? Who could hire 24 hour customer support without even thinking twice about it. And here I am, a small tech, and I’m like, I’ve got better customer service than a multi-billion dollar conglomerate. Okay, I’ll take that.

So by the way, thanks. You’re just making my job easier. I’m unapologetic. I’m tired of it. I’m not going to apologize for being a person that needs help and I’m here to help you. If you have a problem, you don’t want to wait. You don’t want to schedule a time.

You don’t want to drive down to the big box store. We’re not there. We’re not taking their business. We’re here to help you. You got a problem. We’re there. And that’s our model. We’re here to help. So as far as I’m concerned, and just gets back to your original question.

AI can advance all at once. You could, you know, you want to have drones hover around and whatever. Okay, cool. You’re still going to need somebody to fix them.

The Cost of Detaching From Humanity

Richard: It’s a fascinating world we’re moving into and it’s becoming very detached from humanity.

Andrew: That’s the part that makes me nervous.

Richard: And that’s what I build it and that’s what I do in my business is my business is very human as is yours. It’s, it’s, I’m really, I talk to people. I do this podcast cause I like talking to people, you know, it helps me get business too. It’s, it’s part of the brand.

But my main purpose in doing is I got to talk to you like you, I’d never met you. You know, I would never have met you before in real life if I, cause I tend to be an introvert, but this forced me to get out of my shell and talk to people.

And that’s one reason why I’m doing it is now I just met a fascinating person who, you know, we hold similar thoughts about AI. It’s, it’s useful tool. I use it as a digital assistant all the time. Does it do, do I still hire a VA? Yeah. Cause the VA can do things that AI can’t do.

The 1-to-10 Scale and Treating Every Call as Important

Andrew: There’s things that AI and there’s just something about the human interaction that just can’t be replaced. can sense moods, tones. I can listen to the frustration on a voice. One of my weekly things is I have 100 calls pulled out at random and I listen to every one of the 100 calls.

It takes me about three, four hours. I make notes, I make… I make suggestions. call up my project manager over in our call center and I discuss case one zero five AB one six seven. Let’s pull it up. No, I like this. I didn’t like that. I like this.

think we need to hammer this a little bit more. Her tone was a little bit condescending. You know, she’s a little, there’s all these twerks and tweaks that go into it, but When we’re, and this is one of the main, and this is my current problem. I have to find the right candidates to be able to work with our customers.

Now, who are the candidates that we’re looking for? Now, anybody can answer the phone in any language, that’s true. But we’re not one of the big boxes. not, you know, we’re not cold calling, we’re not selling, I’m receiving. So somebody’s coming in hot and bothered, right? So this is where we’re, this is one of the first things that we talk about with our recruiting process.

The call coming in is hot and bothered. It’s a hot call. Somebody’s calling cause they need help right off the bat. You’re going to deal with level seven to eight annoyance. If you think about it, right? You’re calling a hotline. So you’re already past that break point. Let’s say five.

Five is I’ll deal with it tomorrow or I can deal with it later. Six is this is a known seven is this is a problem. Eight is now nine is help and 10 is a five alarm fire. Now, if they’re calling it out of 10, they’re probably not calling me really.

I’m dealing with nines very rarely, but eight, seven, sixes. This is where I live. Every one of my candidates who goes into this role. has to understand that you’re dealing with a fastball coming in. isn’t, this isn’t Little League. This is Major League fastball, a hot, a fastball at 70 miles an hour is coming in.

So you gotta be ready. Second is the empathy. Somebody’s calling with a problem. They’re not here to annoy you. You’re not, you’re not there to just pass the funnel along. You’re there to catch. So when I have somebody call in, this is your aunt, this is your uncle, this is your, this is your cousin, this is your, your grandma, this is your mom.

This is somebody important. And this is the message that I have in the standard bold red print on the standard operating procedure. This is somebody’s most important person. Bold, highlighted, highlighted. This is somebody’s most important person. Somebody signed this person up for my service. This is somebody who matters to someone.

Treat it as such. And that is the very, very first page of the standard operating procedure that we had created. This is somebody’s most important. How would you feel if I walked into your house and told your, told your wife or your mother, Hey, I’m thirsty. Go get me a drink.

Ooh, that would rub you the wrong way, wouldn’t it? So when you call me, I already know that there’s a problem. How can I help you? What can I do to make your day better? Tell me your problems. Let’s solve this.

Richard: Well, I managed two help desks at Trader Joe’s, one for the warehouse and one for the stores. And what I did in my standard operating procedure said, these stores are calling you and they’re hot. Something’s broke. It may be the same stupid question that you’ve gotten 5,000 times, but it’s not to them.

To them, they’re down, they’re having a problem, they need help, and you need to show some empathy. And if you can’t do that, you can’t have this job. And they learned right away to be… Whether the call was something stupid or the call was something important, they would deal with it.

And sometimes the stupid ones turned into important ones because then they dug a little deeper. But they were told the store is the most important thing in the world to you. That is what matters. If I don’t care if the CEO of Trader Joe’s is calling you, the store is what’s important.

You deal with them first because he is not going to blame you if you put him on hold for the store. And that was true. Now on the warehouse side, it was a little different. He could interrupt all he wanted, but on the store side, that was our bread and butter.

Our customers were bread and butter and you, get one, one customer pissed off. get that just steam rolls and that suddenly you have a hundred customers pissed off because you mishandled that you fumbled that call. Learned that the hard way, of course, as we, the best lessons are learned the hard way.

Nobody Is More Important Than the Person on the Phone

Andrew: My mother, my mother is the CFO and co-founder and we made a promise that nobody is more important than the person on the phone. So people have gotten a phone call directly from my phone, from my cell phone, like owner of the company. You know, I, you know, I’m terribly sorry.

I got an email. I was told about this incident. I listened to it. I heard it. I took some notes. I have some suggestions. How can I help you today? And that’s all I ask. Listen, Mr. So-and-so, Mr. So-and-so, I got notified about this problem. I’m terribly sorry we couldn’t help.

It’s only happened twice. I’m sorry we couldn’t help. It’s been brought to my attention. I have personally seeked out the answer. How can I help you today? You have the CEO on the phone right now. How can I help you? Problem solved. Bad review, completely erased. Bad results, completely taken care of.

And this is where I say to people, yes, owners of businesses. Yes, there are going to be people that have got nothing better to do than besides, you know, go on a campaign. It’s part of the game that we play. But think about this. Why did somebody take the time out of their day to write something about you?

Why? Because they haven’t been seen. They weren’t heard. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why did somebody take the time out of their day to completely firestorm you? Because they weren’t seen and weren’t heard. You ignored them. You took the call, brushed it off like it was nothing.

Richard: I, I went through one of the, we’ll wrap this up pretty soon. We’re coming into the time, but I went through, an online dating service when I was younger and got some, a person who was psychotic. I mean, I was afraid for my life kind of things. And I called him up and I said, I want a refund.

I want, I’m done with this. Cause this is like the third person you sent. They said, don’t give refunds. I got up to the CMO. And finally, he said, we’ll tell you what, we’ll refund half if we never hear from you again. And I was like, okay. There was no really nowhere higher I could go.

I I literally worked my way up the chain and I spent the whole day and you think they got a good review?

Andrew: you I Here’s how I would have played that. If you were called and said there was a problem, I would have been notified. I’m notified about everything. I would have read into the case and I would have called you personally and we would have sat there and talked about it.

Not saying it was right or wrong. Maybe there’s some preferences that you have that we can look into. Now, I’m not a psychiatrist and I’m not a tech expert, which is why I always hire the people that know what they’re doing. If there’s something that I don’t know or I can’t do, I’m going to spend the rest of my time trying to figure out how to do it.

And if that’s something that we can do internally or bring in externally, that’s what we’re going to do. We as businesses have basically put you, the consumer as an integer, a classification, an analytic standpoint for us to measure quantifiably. That’s great for large data. Great for trend analysis. Great for marketing campaigns.

Treat Customers Like Neighbors

Andrew: Exactly. That is not how you handle loyalty. That is not how you establish. When we do business, I want you to look at me as your neighbor. You want to come to me and borrow my lawnmower? All right, fantastic. You want to come to me over at the barbecue?

Come on over. There’s a fence. There’s a quote from Benjamin Franklin that fences make the greatest of neighbors. He, Benjamin Franklin had a house that was right next door to, think, Firestone. And, and Firestone gifted Benjamin Franklin with a rubber tree and he planted it in his house.

My point being is yes, people are quantifiable. We have to understand this. It has to be done because business is metrics and how we measure success and failures and metrics. But what we forget along the way, and which is where our society and our business culture has taken over is that.

That person, that one integer is a person. They have rent, have food, they have a life, there’s people, there’s a story. And if you forget that, you’re going to hollow out the base in which your business stands on, which is where we see what we see now because the base has been crumbling.

And I’m here, gentlemen, ladies, business owners. Go back to basics. We need to go back to center. We have to stop going further than where we came from because the further we go out, the further lost we get. Think about all the things that are coming out today.

Think about all the things that are being produced. Do they make sense? Does it make like the products and services that are coming out right now, do they make sense? No, why? Because we’re not standing on solid ground. We’re not standing on our basics. We’re not standing on the core in which we built our businesses on. Started my business to help so if I started my business to help people why am I selling t-shirts?

Richard: Exactly. And I started my business to be a ghostwriter. And so why am I trying to do cybersecurity? That’s what I, that’s the question that I came down to. Let’s be a ghostwriter dude. And I mean, I am a cyber security expert. I could do that, but no, no, I could do a very good job.

I can do an excellent job at it. I could be a, you know, a CISO, but it’s not, that’s not my passion. So I decided to pick something that I could do very well and it’s done very well for me because of that.

Storytelling as the Human Bedrock

Andrew: But are you passionate about it? You are one of my favorite topics because storytellers get to do something that goes back to the dawn of time. What did we do as a species? And this is where my argument with many of my friends and associates is the human is an animal. Homeo sapi, we are a species. How did we start? We started around a campfire. We told stories.

Richard: It’s all social, not socialism, it’s socialized. We are social animals.

Andrew: We love a story. Why do we know Achilles? Why do we know the battle of Thernopoli and the 300? Why do we know the story of the Trojan Wars, the Odyssey, Odysseus? I mean, Hercules, mean, ancient Chinese myth and lore. I mean, we are a people that started around stories and you are an architect of our society that continues a tradition that dates back to ash and stone on cave walls.

We told stories. We lived our experiences through song and interpretation. And that’s how we spread our culture over the past hundred thousand years. You are that person. You are that legacy. You are the continuation of the foundation, the bedrock that was once ash and fire and stone to parchment and paper to quill.

Richard: It’s what unites us. It’s what unites us.

Andrew: and scroll to text and book to digital and forever. You are the continuation of that story. That is your core. That is your base. That is the bedrock in which you stand on. I am a continuation of a tradition that started with ash and fire. I am the continuation of that legacy. That is your core. That is your base. Build on that.

Sit Down, Shut Up, and Listen

Richard: Mm-hmm. what I’m doing. That’s what I do. All right. Well, on that note, I think we had a fascinating conversation. Is there one thing, just a couple sentences long that you would like your readers or listeners to get away from this?

Andrew: It’s amazing what you’ll find out about yourself and the path. If you sit down, shut up and listen.

Richard: Yeah. Yeah. In fact, all of the dating books and stuff should give you that advice. Stop and listen and you’ll do a lot better in whatever relationship you’re in.

Andrew: dating, business, whatever. Before you even begin, sit down, shut up, and listen to the voice in the darkness. Listen to the echo, because we have too much volume going on. It’s amazing. When that volume turns down, that echo gets a lot louder, and it’s amazing what you find out. Thank you for having me today was an absolute pleasure of a conversation.

Richard: This has been the Leaders In Those Stories podcast. Thank you, by the way. I’m Richard Lowe, the Writing King and Ghost Writing Guru. You can find me at thewritingking.com or ghostwriting.guru. And I believe you’ve already given off your contact information in the podcast. That was very sneaky of you. It was a pleasure talking to you. Thank you very much.

Andrew: It was an absolute pleasure and believe me, who knows, maybe there is a story later on to tell, but I have to go achieve it first.

Quotable moments