Alex Beller, CEO of Postscript, explains how AI is bringing back the salesperson role in e-commerce through text messaging. Dr. Squatch's AI persona "Chad" drove their highest conversion rates by mentioning dogs in texts. SMS marketing carries $1,500 penalties per non-compliant message, so Postscript built guardrails to keep AI honest while preserving brand voice.
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They are not going to let a black box AI agent just run. And so with Brand Center, we built an interface where they can curate and have really firm control and visibility into what all the different AI products are creating on their behalf.
How do you maintain this brand voice under the hood?
Do you know Dr. Squatch, the soap brand?
Yeah, the soap.
An interesting thing was happening in their infinity testing program. Their character that sends their text messages, they've named him Chad, like soap and Sasquatches. That's his persona. And those were seeing the highest engagement rates, and that was was like a complete surprise to the merchant.
That's very interesting.
It was definitely a surprise.
For A/B testing, I can think of two messages. But you're testing at a thousand, tens of thousands level. How do you handle that?
This is a huge challenge. The models are really smart, but the brands are only interested in that up to a point. If you send marketing messages to anyone who hasn't explicitly opted in, the liability for those messages is enormous. It's $1,500 per message sent.
That's crazy. Is that a benefit for the store owners to use Postscript because you actually have that baked in your conversation engine?
It's an enormous benefit. We've had millions and millions of manual sales conversations previously. Do you know Dr. Squatch, the soap brand?
Mm, I've heard of that soap.
An interesting thing was happening in their infinity testing program. Where the person that sends their text messages, their character is— they've named him Chad. Texts at Dr. Squatch come from Chad. He's this bro. He likes soap and Sasquatches and things like that. That's his persona. And whenever he would mention his dog, click-through and conversion rate would go up. And so the, like, Postscript Infinity Test agent was testing all kinds of different content. And at one point was like, oh, this like dude Chad, like he might have a dog. He's probably someone with a dog. And messages where he was mentioning his dog in like marketing messages being like, I'm just over here like hanging with my like new puppy, like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like we just dropped some new soap. Those were seeing the highest engagement rates. And that was like a complete surprise to the merchant who also is very on brand for them. So like they love that story and they've used that elsewhere. but it was definitely a surprise.
That's very interesting. I mean, it's hard to imagine, right? For A/B testing, I can think of 2 messages to send. Maybe I can come up with 10, but you're testing a thousand, tens of thousand level. It's not a human work.
I love innovation in the space. Here's the reason why it's harder than it seems. This is regulated. If you send marketing messages to anyone who hasn't explicitly opted in, and there's definitions for both marketing and explicitly opted in, the liability for those messages is enormous. It's $1,500 per message sent. It's crazy. It's essentially like a telemarketing rule to prevent spam telemarketing. What that essentially means is that like, if you're just starting from scratch, you need to like have a way to build a compliant opted-in list. Them, uh, and with phone numbers, opting in doesn't say like you clicked a box to sign up. It's like a very formal thing. It means like with the proper compliance language, they send the first message to sign up or they check an unchecked box. It can't be pre-checked with, again, with the proper messages. But because the penalties are so high, there's a big industry of lawyers who are full-time plaintiffs in SMS and they just send out demand letters all day long trying to catch brands up in lawsuits. So we have kind of this like large compliance operation that is its, is its own beast. And I think like, if we knew all about that before starting Postscript, we probably would've like thought twice before getting into SMS.
Yeah, but you were, you're, you're brave enough to actually crack the nuts. Do you feel this is the hardest challenge in building this? Using LLMs, hallucination, my come into play. How do you handle that?
So this is a big project. This is a huge challenge. So in general, balancing brand voice with driving conversion was something that took us a little while to dial in because the models are really smart. And so the models would quickly learn that the more aggressive you are in like sales tactics and marketing, the like better performance would be. But the brands are only interested in that up to a point, right? So for example, if the, if the agent, the agent will realize that if I send a message that says there's only 3 of these product left by now, but that's like completely not true, it'll drive a bunch of sales, but the brand will be really mad about it. The team took like a pretty sophisticated approach here and it took a little while of putting like prompt level constraints. In place to really limit the aggressiveness of some things and like require subtlety. Um, but also use a thing called like batch validation gates that would block messages containing like off-brand content before they ever went live.
Yeah.
For example, like if a subscriber asks the shopper agent we have, which is a conversational selling agent that's different than an affinity tester. When someone says, hey, can I get 10% off on this product? If we don't have information loaded into our system, or if we don't have information from their website. Like that, that's what it wants to do. And especially when it's tasked with conversion. And so instead it like redirects to the website or to support, or it'll say, I don't have information about if that's available right now. And so in that case, we built a supervisory agent that will like cross-reference all the information and the product links and, and things like that against the like actual information database we have before sending. And so that's how we've dealt with hallucinations.
Do you really see a lot of hallucinations?
Not anymore.
I guess if the first proactive message from the bot is like, I feel very personalized and it hit my pain point, I do feel convenient to just respond there. And if I can just make the purchase, it seems to be, you know, it seems to make sense.
I think it's the, I think it's like Here's the great version of this. So actually I'll, I'll tell a story, cuz this is something you'll be, you'll be really interested in that, that we haven't covered. We have this thing called Shopper right now.
Mm-hmm.
Like 3 years ago, we started a business, maybe more, 3 and a half, called SMS Sales.
Mm-hmm.
And SMS Sales was a giant office in Phoenix, Arizona called the Ecommerce Sales Center, where we staffed up tons of humans Who would do this for brands? They would like answer questions and conversationally sell for brands lots at once. We had this whole software suite for it. And through that experience, we learned all these like tactics and insights about like what actually drives revenue through conversations. And the vision for that and the vision for this is you walk into a Nordstrom, right? And someone comes up and they help you shop, right? Sometimes maybe you walk into a Nordstrom and you shop around and you buy on your own. Other times maybe you have a quick question. Other times maybe someone actually pulls outfits for you and it helps assemble an outfit. All those different things happen when you shop in a retail, and that hasn't existed for e-commerce previously. E-commerce is the big empty silent store and you can browse around and yeah, you can email them for support and they'll email you 3 days later, but that's very different than having someone who can actually answer questions about like, size, fit, materials, and actually try to coach you towards a sale. So that was the original vision and background, and we've learned a lot that has then informed this product.
That's a lot of a sales conversation experience that you have. Is that a benefit for the store owners to use Postscript because you actually have that baked in your conversation engine?
It's an enormous benefit. We've had millions and millions of manual sales conversations previously. It's been like an unbelievable set of training data and an unbelievable set of, um, just like strategic insights that have generated. I think that if someone was starting from scratch with a chatbot trying to get it to do sales, it would take them like— it would— I don't think it would be— I don't think it would drive much revenue.
