How Customer Experience Becomes Your Competitive Advantage

where money is even myself as a consumer, I want to have a great experience. You know, and I think so often we all get wrapped up in our own business or lives that maybe you don't take the time to really think about how you can stand out from the pack.

And if we can use technology today, which we can with AI, to really make a difference, but still make it personal. You'll learn a lot from that. And it takes you one step closer to success.

Alexi Baneri is a pioneering and results-driven technology executive and the co-founder and CEO of DAS Technology. Building on over two decades of tech marketing expertise, she helps thousands of businesses worldwide seamlessly connect with consumers and optimize their digital

response, empowering them to maximize their ROI and setting a new standard for consumer engagement, technological innovation, and sustainable business growth. Let's not just monitor digital conversations and engagement with consumers, let's help businesses strike

and take action to make a difference and use our technology and AI to actually do that.

“That's what I love about being an entrepreneur, right?”

We're always finding new ways to make things better.

That's also something I love doing. Just make things better for people. In your business as an entrepreneur, how can you think outside the box? It spans the globe.

Like a super high school. The internet health is ready. Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone. It's not over. I'm telling our way.

The living your legacy podcast for those who live to leave a legacy. That's insane, man. That's awesome, though, man. Oh, that is sensational, too.

Open. She come up with the way you say, Paul. In the box is not on the planet. You can live your dream. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen,

to another episode of the Living Your Legacy Podcast. I'm your host for today, Jason Tyler, and I am joined by a very special guest who is a heavy hitter and you're a double feature on the platform.

We just finished recording two episodes. Alexi Veneri, Alexi, welcome to the show. Thank you. It's great to be here. It's a pleasure to have you.

Now, we're on the other side of filming not one, but two episodes for you. First of all, how are you feeling? - Feeling great. - I feel like we blazed right through it.

And one thing that I ask all of my guests here on the show after we finish filming is if, you know, for the viewers out there, what's like the number one lesson that you'd like people to learn from your story?

“- I think that the lesson is it's okay to take risks”

and try new things, a job, new technology, don't be afraid. Even if failure happens, you'll learn a lot from that. And it takes you one step closer to success. - Mm-hmm.

I totally agree with you on that. I think one of the main things that we touched on throughout going through your whole story and going through the business journey for DAS was the gray area.

- Yeah. - We live in the gray. - Yeah. - And the ability to just kind of pivot a DAPS, life's gonna throw you curve walls all the time.

For the business owner out there, you know, our audience, their super entrepreneurial, the very business minded for the entrepreneur out there that's thinking, "Ah, I kind of want to get into this thing, "but I don't know, I don't want to if I want to take the risk."

What's your message to them?

- You know, it's always better to try and fail

than to wonder what if and not try, I think. And I know that's cliche, but I really do think that every entrepreneur just like in life. Not everything works, so try a lot of things, and at some point you will get that home run.

So definitely don't be afraid. Also be a lifelong learner, learn from other people. It's great to talk to people, get knowledge, try new things, as long as especially whatever you're doing has a good reason and a good outcome behind it.

So how can you make a difference? - How can you make things better? - Exactly, always make it better. - Always make it better. And another thing is don't be afraid of feedback.

And I think that's a great segue to kind of talk about what you do with that technology, which is allow for businesses to get great feedback on making their processes better, making their different touch points for their customers better.

So it talks to me a little bit about just like what that technology is first and foremost. And then how we're making these businesses better, mostly in the automotive field, but along all of the different verticals.

- Exactly.

I've always been sort of a believer in like,

we're only here maybe for one ride. We don't know what's after this life. So why not do what you're gonna do, the best way you can do it. And there has to be a way to make literally,

I think everything your life better, right? And if you're always striving for that. So we like to find ways to help businesses do a better job in terms of the customer experience and the customer journey.

“Part of that is you have to ask questions.”

You gotta be open to feedback.

for automotive.

So after you would buy your service of vehicle,

you actually would get a survey from us same day. That didn't happen before desk technology. We actually have a patent around that. It seems really commonplace today, but in the old days, how you'd get feedback

or give feedback oftentimes is you'd wait for the manufacture of the vehicle to mill you, physically mail or sometimes you mail a survey. I'm gonna be like 17 pages and no one's doing that. Or if you didn't wait for that

or you had a really bad experience, you know, review sites popped up before we built the survey. And so some people that really upset and maybe rightly so would go leave a bad review.

“Is that one out of 500 consumers with that business, right?”

What about the other, you know, 499 consumers that had a great experience?

So we kind of wanted to tell their story.

And I think you touched on it like I am a storyteller, you know, from early on to it. It's not just, she wasn't just a storyteller, you know, just in business, you were storyteller, you were writing scripts,

you were doing stage play, screen plays, all sorts of things in like a creative capacity early on even before you got into business. So it just goes to show like your whole ethos just built around telling that story

and developing that story over the course of time with long-term clientele. - Yeah. - I think one of my biggest takeaways from being able to having the honor of doing your interview

was being able to see just how much you care about not only your direct clients through who you're touching hundreds of thousands if not millions of people through different avenues,

“but just how much you care about the consumer experience, right?”

And I think not enough business owners really take into account the from point A to point Z of the consumer journey through interacting with their business. Talk to me a little bit about like where that care comes from. - Sir, I'm Bob, I love our day-to-day thank you

for interviewing me and learning about our story and the company it's been awesome. I don't know, I think that it goes back to when I was a kid. And you know, I'm a Gen X. We kind of had to take care of ourselves.

And I always appreciated when you visited a business

or a teacher took time with you, right? Like it made an impact, for sure, if I'm going to spend my time or money as even myself as a consumer, I won't have a great experience. You know, and I think so often we all get wrapped up

in our own business or lives that maybe you don't take the time to really think about how you can stand out from the pack. And if we can use technology today, which we can with AI, to really make a difference, but still make it personal. And also by doing that, we can free up the humans

and these businesses to sit and have time like this, like what a luxury I've had a day with you talking about stories. I mean, this is a dream, right? When do we ever get time to do this, right? I can't even be on my phone.

And you've been so nice and amazing. And that never happens anymore. We're constantly bombarding with messages and texts and emails and Slack and all of the different platforms that were on Monday.com and this and that.

Well, actually many years ago, I refused to be on Slack and now teams chat because it was too much as a CEO. I'm like, I just, I can't. I want to put my phone down, not like in my email and have real conversations.

And I get, there's obviously a time in a place and it's a quick way to message. It's like, you know, group texting through your work.

“But I was just like, no, I think we all have to be protective”

of our time and use technology in the right way when it makes sense. But also, like, how do we engage with each other and do have a real experience? So we're just very unique. We do two things.

We help leverage technology to be more personal and get consumers and the information they need while we're also freeing up time for the humans that work at these businesses. So they can engage one to one, you know, in person.

Now, one of the things that we got to talk a little bit about which I want to kind of just get your opinion on here. AI is this brand new frontier in technology. It's ever expanding. We talked about a couple of times like every two weeks.

There's a new development in AI. Now, we're working on agentic AI and developing these different agents that can go off and actually do tasks independently of the actual user and come back and report on what they've done. And it's this whole huge thing.

We really have, I liken it to, in Iron Man, he's got Jarvis. Jarvis, for what my groceries are going to be. You know what I mean? What are you most excited for with AI and how it can be implemented in these different businesses that you're working with?

Great question. And we are doing that and we are investing in agentic AI.

I think twofold. So we're excited because even as our own business, we intentionally created a committee of our own team members and every department to use it ourselves. And be digested ourselves and see how it can help every position.

You might be an HR and accounting. Whatever the role sales, marketing. And so we're using it and learning from it. And doing the best practices ourselves, such as the biggest thing, is protecting our own data.

You can't just let any employer, anyone in your business, you know, sign up for any free tool and try anything, or let a rogue agent, you know, do whatever they want fully. Now that might be coming to the future, but for right now, we really, we like to learn from it and protect it,

but secure that data. So that's really important. But then I'm excited to see how much more it frees up our team

and ultimately for our businesses when they use our AI platform,

frees them up from mundane things, right? Like the little background. Oh my god, there's so many things like something very, very basic. And that, you know, not that long ago, especially if you weren't working with us,

if you submitted a lead to a card dealer and said, hey, I'm interested in this BMW, right? And they had a list of questions, maybe. You know, does it come with a warranty? Whatever they might ask, you know, how does this size

“compared to this other maybe SUV I already have today?”

A human would have to get the message, would have to find the time, would have to look at it, would have to themselves go research. Maybe they would have to search their own inventory on their own businesses' website to find that. They would have to do comparison.

Now, what you're doing all of that to answer one inquiry? Well, what are you not doing? You're ignoring maybe the consumer in the showroom that really wants a test drive, you know? And every minute you're spending responded to that one consumer,

more emails are building up, more text are building up, right? A customer you sold a card to last week is in the service lane. You know this, you're not experienced. Yeah. And they're saying, oh, the salesperson promise that, you know,

this would happen, or this just broke. And maybe I want, there's so much going on. And that's just one example on automotive. Today, we can now still understand kind of what the, the preferences from the business owner or that salesperson

or how they want to respond. But we actually can go and use RAI technology to quickly less than a second, know all the other options for that inventory. Actually, get the answers to that consumer's question and answer it with the right information quickly.

And also alert the salesperson how we answered it, and still give them the information. And at any moment, the consumer can still text or quickly engage

“with that human, but we've freed up time on both sides, right?”

And that's the beauty of it. It's so exciting, you know, to even relate it to something else.

My husband and I Dave have a son, Griffin, who's amazing.

He's 15, and we've, as technologists, we're very open and we're using technology. And he's now in a school where they like encourage them to use AI with certain rules. But I'm like, that's amazing.

No, he doesn't have to go research and text books or even search online the way we use to in school. He can engage with AI to get him a lot of information, but then they challenge him to then make it as a, and learn from it. But the amount of information he can get so quickly.

First of all, he's learning more. But now he's also learning how to use AI. Not just that subject that he's maybe writing, you know, a paper on. So I just, I think it's fascinating and amazing if used in the right way. Yeah.

Because then it can also free us all up to be more human. We might find out that the prior 20 years, we weren't human enough

because we were so busy with a million slack messages and chats and emails

and all these systems and log into the CRM and go look at the inventory system and like we didn't have time for our family.

“We didn't have time to have real conversations, right?”

You were back to back to back in meetings and then you're somewhere trying to scramble and look at your emails and that might have been the worst time. Not now. We're maybe finally able to go back to like when I was growing up as a woman. On the cuss, I believe.

We talked to each other. We didn't have cell phones. We would go play in our parents didn't know where we were and we'd figure things out. So in a weird way, I'm really hopeful that it'll give us back a little humanity because we'll have more time.

I feel like, and I actually had a conversation with somebody about this the other day, but I feel like we had sort of like if you look at the internet as a timeline, right, we had this timeline of from the start point to write up until now with the advent of AI or we were just the internet was functioning kind of as this library for all of human data over time, right?

All of the knowledge that humanity has composed, compiled, together was in one place in this database, right? And now AI comes in and is the interpreter.

It's an aggregator. It's able to quickly go through, peruse that data and spit it back to you exactly what you asked it for in record time. And I think that is where we're going with being able to kind of shift away from having to go search through this massive, massive library of data that's created to now being able to just say,

hey, all right, I need to find this thing, cool, found it by. Right, we were the librarians sifting through all this stuff. Or now we actually all have our own virtual assistance or multiple assistance in the agents doing the task for us to free us up.

But ultimately, we still have that humanity and we need that logic and the understanding and really

“the creativity and innovation might be unlocked a bit more with all of us, which that's what I'm”

looking forward to. Uh, me as well, me as well. Now, as we kind of wind down the pod here, I have one more question that I ask of all my guests here on the show. We're here at Inside Success. So I have to ask for the entrepreneur out there.

What is Alexa's number one key tip for success? Oh, man, you did not prep me at all for that. Uh, oh, there's so many tips. Uh, I feel like, well, I'm all about the life hacks. Maybe that's my tip. I like to sometimes find this shortest, you know, distance between two points.

And sometimes I say order off the menu or live in the gray, but I'm always, you know, a life

long learner. And if someone can share like a great, like life hack, just like a business hack. And that a lot of what you guys do include is to you for sharing all these stories of all these great entrepreneurs. Thank you, thank you. Amazing. Um, you know, if you can, you, you get those embrace it, try it and then share.

That to me is, is amazing. Um, I'll give everybody a life tip that is nothing to do with my business. Uh, one of my very first, not my very very very first, one of my very early jobs. And when I was still in university in college, uh, I worked at the front desk of a four seasons.

“And it was a job I can, you have to class.”

And I got the night shift, right? I'm working three p.m. to midnight. And I'm thinking, oh, this is so cool. They give me a suit or, you know, some business attire, I'm at the front. Oh, my gosh, I quickly learned it was the worst job in hospitality. Because you're on your feet, the whole shift. And when you're working the late shift, the night shift to midnight, you get all the

travelers that maybe their flights were delayed. And I would tell us also overbook because there's a no show rate. And now it's not as you people coming in and you may not have a room or you have the wrong room. And you, you're great, greatest job though, because I went to juggle a lot, right? And I have so much going on all the time, yet you were the face of the hotel. You have to smile, and be presentable. You learn very quickly, how to like, not let them see you sweat.

And you were just trying to create a great experience for usually a phrasal traveler or a business

traveler or a flight attendant. And, um, I was always amazed at some point like they didn't even see me.

They didn't know my name. They didn't think about my day, right? And I remember thinking, you know, one day I'm going to learn from this. I'm going to learn from this. And how, and I actually have, I guess, learned how to create better experiences for consumers using technology. But I'm like, I'm never going to forget. And if I can ever afford every time I go to hotel to tip the front desk, and thank them, because nobody ever does. There are least appreciated. Yep. And it is, it is not

changed. I'm not young anymore. I'm no longer in my early 20s going to school and at the front desk. And it hasn't changed at all. And, you know, last night, I just tip the front desk. And they sometimes they almost start crying. And I say, like, I don't need anything from, I just want to say thank you. I've had your job. Mm. Tip the front desk. So there's a life hack. So I think that in life, if you can find the shortest distance, you, you live in the gray,

you appreciate people, you create great experiences. And sometimes how you get a great experience is you pay it forward. Tiping the front desk without asking, they will upgrade your room. They'll give you free water. They'll give you a late checkout. You know, they don't have to do any of those things. But just because somebody took the time to learn their name and thank them, probing on their feet all night, or during the day. So those little things, that's a little

life hack. And now everyone's going to start to be in the front desk. Yay. Thank God. But just those

“little things. But anyway, that's what I love about being an entrepreneur, right? We're always”

finding new ways to create, to make things better. That's also something I love doing. Just make things better for people. Love that. I love that. And, you know, it goes to, I think you just help me identify kind of a gap in the market where I'm like, wait a minute, how have we not updated this system and I don't even know how many years? Oh, the front desk is still so our kick. And there's people that'll do, I know people doing new software and stuff. And yes, there are self-service chaos. Yes,

but have the time they don't work. More people still want to go to the human, which is, which is good.

like, treat them like a human. You know, it's just such a fascinating, wonderful time we're in.

We can use technology now to take care of the mundane things so we can all be more human. Yeah, even if it's just a simple thing of like, yeah, the kiosk is there. If you're a quick customer, you've got everything sorted. You just need to get a room key printed. Cool. The kiosk is there for that. But it frees up the human to not have to be on her feet and at the desk the whole time. If we need to speak to a human, just press a button on the kiosk and she'll come right up.

Or have a conversation. Uh, I hope till I was just at, um, first time ever. This is maybe a change. I don't know what they called this human. I still tip them. It felt like they were a belman.

“And they said, oh, we do the check and process at your room now. Like, why do you have to go to the”

front desk? They took the bags, put them in the room, and they walked me to the room. And in the room, what you would call a belman or whatever, said, can we just verify the card on file? Because you

give a card to make a reservation. And I did it all at the room. Amazing, right? I've not experienced

that one. Yes. Just in a hotel like, yes. Rits Carlton Dorado, everyone. All right. Well, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to, I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm joking. But I need really like super nice, right? Like, you know, just, just again, in your business as an entrepreneur, how can you think outside the box? Help everyone that's going to engage with your business, have a better experience. And then

“everyone wins. And that is the key takeaway of all key takeaways. I think for both of your episodes.”

Now, guys, if you're still tuned in at this point in the podcast, I want to make sure that you check out Alexa's episodes of both next level CEO and legacy makers, which will be coming out shortly after this podcast episode air. So make sure that you guys stay tuned for that. You're going to get a full deep dive on her story as well as the story of dust technologies. So make sure you stay tuned for that. Now, Alexa, you've heard the audience, where can people find you on social media,

where can they interact with your business? Where are you located at on the World Wide Web? Sure. Well, we originally started as digital air strike. We still use that handle,

“you know, in all social networks as well as dust technology. And that is what the dust stands for.”

It's digital air strike. So the early part of the company was, let's not just monitor digital conversations and engagements with consumers. Let's help businesses strike and take action to make a difference and use our technology and AI to actually do that. So digital air strike, you know, we're out there. We're we're very creative when we love to hear from you. All right. Well, guys, make sure that you follow her and for my editors here, guys, make sure that we

put those at somewhere on the screen. And you guys know when you see me pointing around the screen, just throw up a little logo there somewhere. But Alexa, it has been an immense joy. Love you. You're the best. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah. I cannot wait to see your episode once it has fully been realized. And to keep up with your story. Thank you so much. Well, hey, we're all just beginning, right? There's I'm sure a lot more to come, especially with where

technology is going. I love it. I love it. Well, guys, this has been another incredible episode

of the Living Your Legacy Podcast. Again, I'm your host Jason Tyler and I will catch you guys in the next one.