Monty Merza, Xpotential & Dave Drzewiecki, Absolute Dental talk near shore Patient Service Centers

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Welcome everyone to the Group Dentistry Now show. I'm Bill Newman, and as always, we appreciate you watching us, whether you're watching us on YouTube or groupdentistrynow.com. Maybe you're listening in on Apple or Spotify or Google, but we, we certainly appreciate you checking in with us and always have great guests, great discussions. You know, a lot of the discussions of late have been around technology and AI, so we're certainly going to touch on that today. We're also going to focus on call centers, which always seems to be a topic of, you know, do— when do we, um, do we bring one in? Uh, do we outsource it? If we're not outsourcing it, you know, what's, what should we be doing, right? So we're going to kind of hit on all of those here. So we have one new guest to the show, and then we have a returning guest. It's been, it's been a while since we've, we've had them on, but we're happy to have them back. So like, uh, everybody to welcome Monty Mirza. He is the president and CEO of X Potential Marketing Group. Monty, first off, thank you. You, you are new to the podcast. Thanks for being here today.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

And we have a returning guest, uh, Dave, uh, Drzewiecki. He is with Absolute Dental Group. Dave was on— gosh, I think it was probably during COVID times, if we have to think back to that time. But, um, Dave, thanks for— thanks for being back on. We didn't scare you away.

Nope, not at all. Great to see you again, Bill and Monte. Always a pleasure.

And Dave is the CEO and chairman of Absolute Dental Group. So a little bit of background on Monte and Dave, and then we'll talk a little bit about their organizations and we'll get into the Q&A. So first, Monte. Monte, again, I mentioned he's the president and CEO of Exponential Marketing Group. Also, you can think of them as XP, so I might shorten it up a little bit. But Monte actually has a really interesting background, actually similar to mine. I was also in finance. So he started a career in finance, but he also has experience at major retailers and some telecom experience. And then in 2008, he got involved with Dental One Partners. And if you think back to Dental One Partners back then, that was Doug Brown. So Doug Brown was leading the organization back then. And then Monty, you moved on to North American Dental Group. And I think at both organizations you were involved in marketing roles and you also were not just in patient growth and you, we'll talk a little bit about that through data analytics, but also the efficiency of call centers, which we're gonna focus on today. So before I move on to Dave, what did I miss there? Maybe a little bit more about your background and your roles at the two dental organizations.

No, that was really good. Thank you, Bill. Yeah, so I, you know, the key for both of those was driving patients through data. I was brought on as a data analytics capacity, and we were really honing in on how to achieve more new patients, how to bring back existing patients into the practice. When it was all data-centric. And of course, worked with Dave on the call center. He was involved at DentalOne at that time as well. And he was one of my mentors. And then when I moved on to North America, I actually started handling the call center over there. And we had about 35 people in-house and we were taking calls as NADG was growing. So that was a very focused area for me as well.

Mati, maybe a little bit about xPotential. What do you do there at the organization? You obviously took a lot of the skills that you honed at Denouan and North American.

Yes, for sure. Yeah. So, XP, we basically have 4 different verticals if I were to sort of separate them. The key one is marketing, which includes, you know, We're agnostics in our approach, but we do everything from digital marketing to direct mail to TV. We have back office support, which, you know, we're going to sort of talk a little bit more about today, which includes call center, insurance verification, and billing. Very focused on DSOs is what we have, but we have other clients outside of dentistry as well. Data entry is a service that we provide as well. And because of my background in analytics, we do a lot of BIs. So we do operational BIs using Power BI, financial BIs for our partners to really show them the direction in which their organization is going. It's pretty amazing to me, and it's not a surprise, however, is that a group of 5 to 10 practices doesn't really understand, you know, the leaky bucket concepts or, you know, how much production they're gaining in one practice versus another, what type of an ROI their marketing is producing for them. So we really help them with that, you know, in those areas as well. And then the final vertical that we have is product and signage. We have a platform very similar to like a Vistaprint where our customers, our clients can come on and they can order their pre-approved products online and they're delivered to them seamlessly. So those are the 4 major verticals that we have.

Thanks, Monte. Dave Drzewiecki, again, second time on the show. Thanks for coming back. A little bit about his background, CEO and Chairman of Absolute Dental since 2017. I didn't realize this, largest DSO in Nevada and looks like you're close to 50 locations. You also have the connection to Doug Brown. You are a part of the Dental Innovation Alliance. They are a VC firm that's focused on early-stage oral healthcare technology. I'm also involved with them as well. So that's an interesting organization. Dave, a little bit more about your background and maybe tell the audience that isn't familiar about Absolute.

Yeah, sure. So my background was primarily technology distribution. I was an application developer for many years, programmer, if you will. So certainly I have a technical mindset of how things work. It's all about process and people. So that seems to be, as Monty was telling the story about how we worked together earlier on and then I want about marketing and data, it's all about data. And Monty, I was chuckling that there really was no data back then. There was a lot of, call it data points, but I'm not sure there was data or information. There certainly wasn't knowledge back then. But my background is all about how we improve process and the patient experience. Came from Dental One Partners over to Absolute in 2016. Quickly realized that, to Mani's point, it was a very immature platform and had the ability to really understand what we could do to drive, call it patient growth. And the first couple years we didn't do a lot there as far as growth because we were more focused on the transition from a privately held company to how do we professionalize that organization. And then in 2020, is when we started really the growth factor. So we grew that from 24 units to about 48 units over the last 3 years. And with that became a lot of the opportunity to leverage some of the technology that we see in Dental Innovation Alliance and or even outside of that venture capital platform. So certainly all about that idea of how do we improve the patient experience and clinical outcomes through Absolute Dental. Absolute Dental is all dentistry in one place. We're about 50/50 as far as specialty business as well as general dentistry and hygiene. That allows us, because of our density, because of the 50, nearly 50 practices in Nevada, our density allows us to have a robust specialty model.

So let's get into some of the questions here. And maybe first of all, we'll start off with Dave. What is the relation? So how long have you been working with eXp and what's that relationship look like?

Yeah, so started back in 2020 as far as call it, let's, Call Center, right? But as I was, you know, thinking about this podcast and understanding, you know, Monte and I go back, you know, quite a while. But even before we got him involved in call center, I remember talking to Monte and helping us pressure test some of the marketing we were doing. So, it started even before 2020. It was probably in 2017, 2018 when we asked him to come in and really just give us an objective opinion and overview of what we were doing in marketing. Which was helpful for me having worked with him before and having worked with him in a few years since then. It was helpful for us to come in and get that outside look. We started then in 2020 when it became really contact center, call center. We had a small call center then. Besides of all the unknowns in 2020, not knowing, you know, we had none of us knew what was happening in 2020. So we were starting to redefine, you know, the contact center and how we could arbitrage labor and, you know, just get more more patients through the door, but also higher quality of patients. We had a small call center already, you know, maybe 20 agents or so. We weren't necessarily professionally led. We had grown that internally after all those years. We were growing it because of the higher turnover at the practices and the front desk. We just had too many missed calls. And to Monty's point, you just don't know what you don't know as far as the leaky bucket piece of it. And so we wanted someone to come and give us a professional opinion. We didn't really have the technology to do answer rates and conversion rates and hold leaders accountable and really improve that patient experience. So having started that relationship with him in 2020, that's when I, that's when I say we really started to professionalize the call center. In fact, we changed it to the contact center because it's not our core competency. I think what some small groups think, or maybe I thought at that point, and maybe I still think from time to time, is the call center needs to be a core competency. But when you, you partner with a company like XP, that's their core competency. So it allowed us to focus more so internally.

Well, Dave, so leads into the question really. So you consider it a contact center, not a call center, I guess similar, but maybe that's a little bit more well-defined than a call center would be. Talk a little bit about the improvement in efficiency and just also the patient satisfaction that you have working with XP. And what I would say, let me make sure I have this right. So would you consider it a centralized nearshore contact center? Is that right? Are we kind of defining it correctly?

Yeah, I would say that's definitely what it is today. I mean, it's evolved over time since 2020. I mean, in 2020, I think we set it up as let's just have some augmentation of workforce to help us answer calls. Quickly learned that We're not, you know, our core competency is not contact center. And so we asked Monty to help us build what that could look like. And so that moved from call it call center agents to they're going to, you know, lead that contact center for us nearshore, nearshore Columbia. We're in Las Vegas, Nevada, primarily in Reno, Nevada. We get lots of benefits from that. Certainly there's bilingual capabilities, which fits perfectly with our patient base. The time zone is very similar to us for that, for sure. It is centralized. So all the new patient flow goes through the contact center first. And then we also have rollover from the practices if we don't answer the call inside the practice. It just allowed us to have that consistency of staff SOP and making sure we were doing the same thing what we were in the beginning. Lots of improvement. Besides cost arbitrage and all the reason why you want to go nearshore, Monty and team at XP, they've really taken on the entire, call it, HR oversight. We don't have to do the onboarding and offboarding any longer. They follow the SOPs and the training. We simply say, hey, this is the answer rate we're looking for and the conversion rate we're looking for. And that's what they deliver to.

Maybe we'll move on to you, Monty. Just really the same question here. So, talk about how, you know, your team is really streamlining that process. And it's not just the call center side of it, it's also insurance verification as well, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So as Dave was mentioning, Bill, you know, the focus, of course, here is the patient and the patient service that we provide. And I know that we use all these terms, you know, contact center versus, you know, we internally use— we're a patient service center. We like to do what's best for the patient. As far as streamlining is concerned, you know, I'll just tell a quick story. And we did this back in late 2020, early 2021, that for one of our groups that we handle, we audited about 30 offices and we actually walked in and really observed when a patient comes in, you know, what do they go through? So we saw that on average, a patient is spending about 75 minutes in the practice. But of those 75 minutes, there were only touchpoints, if you were to calculate that in terms of minutes, there was only touchpoints of about 40 minutes. So basically that means that, you know, the front desk greeting the patient, the patient interacting with the assistant, getting the X-ray, then eventually, you know, moving on to the provider or the hygienist. So we felt that, you know, there's something that's missing, but the office is very busy, right? So the office, the people in the office are constantly working on various things, whether, you know, they're verifying insurance or they're on the phone with the insurance company while, their waiting room is full. So they're verifying insurance for the patient. They're taking a phone call from another patient who is trying to rebook or cancel or schedule a new appointment. And they're trying to prepare treatment, right? So we felt, and our thing was that if you want to maximize on the production that when the patient walks in, give them the attention, offer them the same-day service. But you're not gonna be able to do that when the patient is constantly looking at their watch and they're like, hey, my time's up. I gotta be go, you know, I gotta be back home or I gotta go back to work. So that's where the streamlining really came in is that, you know, our philosophy is that the office should do what they're great at, which is facing the patient, communicating with the patient that's in front of them, and we can take care of the rest and we can take care of the rest in a very uniform sort of a way. And as Dave was speaking, there are trainings that are involved, but we would train for, in his case, 50 of his practices the same exact way. So it won't be Monty's training or Susie's training or Nancy's training. It is Absolute's training that we are giving in that case. The insurance verification is going to be done in that same exact manner as well. The absolute way, or, you know, whatever, whoever you are, it's going to be done in your way rather than, you know, this being a sort of a local knowledge transfer of things. So those, you know, those are the things that we were able to do in order to streamline. And the other difference that we have versus your traditional sort of the call center is that You know, Dave has been amazing with his team. They just simply don't outsource and say, here you go, take it and do it for us. We're very involved and it's a very collaborative sort of a model, right? So his team actually comes and visits us in Colombia, in our offices where we sit together. It's very motivating for the team because they know, you know, that who, who they're working for. But at the same time, what's amazing here is that, you know, Dave has skin in the game and his team has skin in the game. To, you know, look after the key successes that we are trying to deliver on as well.

So it's, you know, it's—

for that, it's been somewhat easy to really streamline these operations.

That's great. Thank you, Monte. That kind of leads into what I wanted to talk to Dave about, which is, you know, that in order to be successful, there's this level of collaboration. So let's talk about you know, the involvement from, you know, Absolute side of things. Monty touched on that a little bit, but can you go into that in a little bit more detail?

Yeah, sure. I mean, it was certainly much more simpler to set up than I thought it was going to be. I mean, when you're doing your own and you're in the day-to-day, you're realizing how difficult things are and you always hesitate, I guess, in onboarding a new partner. But this was extremely easy to set up. Maybe, you know, I don't think it was because we worked together previously. I just think it was because it was We both had great intentions to get this to be a win-win. And the win-win model, I mean, certainly we don't have to provision equipment anymore. They, you know, XP provides the computer equipment. They log into our system. Like Monte said, it's the process that we want in the SOP. We don't have the onboarding and offboarding anymore. There was a setup there of how do we expect this to work? And we agreed on that and that just worked. We had an aligned service level. You know, we literally say we want a 95% answer rate and a 37% conversion rate. And we look to you to staff to achieve that. They have sophisticated staffing algorithms that we didn't have previously in our call center. And so they have that capability and tribal knowledge and just scientific call center professional experience that allow them to do that, to achieve our end goals, as opposed to us trying to figure out, you know, how to do that ourselves. It would be more prescriptive. The sharing of ideas, Matty said it right. You know, we go back and forth all the time in a very collaborative fashion, whether it's efficiencies, whether it's IVR call routings, whether it's how we're routing the calls back and forth, that what's being said, do we record this call, do we record that call, the verbiage used, the cultural verbiage used, the feedback of the quality of phone calls. It continues to be very collaborative.

You know, that does make us feel like, you know, we are not an outsider, but we are an insider And that happens sort of, you know, without even my knowledge at times. It happens seamlessly, but it's amazing. So we are, you know, and the reason that we continue to perform at the level that we do is that one, we feel very motivated. We want to do well, right? So as Dave actually already mentioned, that the intent is always there. And that's the case for every one of our partners that we are dealing with.

All right, Will, let's move on to the topic of the past couple years, I guess, uh, this and probably same-store sales growth, um, AI, right? So let's, let's talk about the impact. And this is Dave's wheelhouse. Dave loves to, you know, talk about technology and AI. Um, what kind of AI technologies are emerging that you see, um, you think will transform back office function? You go to a lot of these group practice DSO meetings and there's a lot of— it seems like three-quarters of the vendors there are AI, and then, um, probably the re— the rest are some type of technology company. It's almost all technology now. So Dave, from your perspective, you know, running Absolute, what technologies do you see out there AI-specific? And I guess the question is, how long are they going to take to become mainstream?

Yeah, it's a great question because I think, you know, that term AI thrown around a lot here recently in the last couple couple years, certainly most in the last couple months, but been doing a lot of research on it. And I think you have to peel back what certain vendors say that they have an AI-based solution. There's difference between automation and AI, in my opinion. There's some awesome automation products out there that I think are starting to incorporate AI as they begin to use some of the large language models on how that works. But I would say in the immediate, certainly back office automation will be prevalent and will continue to evolve and mature I would say in the immediate though is absolutely where we're talking about now, which is in contact center. You know, it's not just the IVRs answering and routing phone calls anymore. It's actually having a conversational AI interaction with patients. And if anyone has used ChatGPT or any of the other similar platforms recently, you realize that you can have a very intelligent conversation with artificial intelligence as a computer. And Monty and I have worked very closely together to figure out how we implement that and incorporate that to improve the patient experience. And we've done just that. We introduced a proof of concept several months back. We got together, we looked at several different platforms to figure out if there was anything available. And the answer was there really wasn't because it was so new. So we decided to work together and build our own. It's all about that. Patient experience when you have high turnover at the front desk, which is a very demanding role when you want 24/7 experience for patients because the Amazon effect, really, everyone can order something at night and it's on their porch in 3 hours, right? It's pretty neat to see that. So we worked together and stood up a very quick proof of concept that handled the top 7 items that patients looked for, whether it's scheduling, you know, whether it's asking for directions, whether it's a do you accept my insurance, whether can I pay my bill, do I have billing questions, can I do some kind of appointment maintenance. It was implemented and stood up very quickly in a conversational AI format. And it's like, hey, this is Susie answering the phone because the front of the desk is full or busy at the moment. I can help you with common items. And we were very successful at standing that up and comparing the data back and forth between what the call center agent might do versus the actual AI might be doing. Very happy with that. We realized in about 6 weeks after testing, we had, you know, call it reduced the incoming call volume by 75%, which to Monte's opening point allows the front desk to focus more on that patient in person. And then we just continue to work together to iterate through that product to the point where we got this now rolled out to 8 practices internally. We've probably taken close to 100,000 calls answered by what we call the virtual assistant. We continue to work with a consultant that we hired to tune that conversation and that outcome. At the end of the day, 55% of those 100,000 calls are still patients calling in for what I'll call appointment maintenance, whether it's schedule me a new appointment, confirm my appointment, I need to reschedule my appointment. And we're getting better and better at using AI to answer and actually perform those tasks. But at the end of the day, we still need those contact center agents to handle the more high-touch items. That's what I see now as far as what's happening.

Monte, pose the question to you as well because, you know, you've got the call center side of it. It's the service model industry, right? And you've got people. How do you incorporate AI? And right now, how do things work at xPotential? Like, is it a mix? And is, or really, is Dave's situation unique or is that pretty similar to what you're doing with some other groups out there?

Yeah. Yeah. So I think, you know, as far as the evolution of your traditional call center is concerned, it's changing dramatically. And I think within the next 3 to 5 years, and Dave kind of mentioned this, I mean, it's going to be sooner for Absolute, of course, but in 3 to 5 years, the call center agent is going to be more of a specialized resource. They're going to be subject matter experts rather than be generalists, which actually is an amazing thing, right? So we're going to be able to supplement the technology, AI that we are using in resolving, you know, a good 50-75% of the questions that a patient has. And then anything else would become more specialized and become more focused and the patient will actually may even get better results because you're not dealing with generalists anymore. So we already started giving a lot of attention to that within our own ecosystem to where we are really understanding, okay, how do we specialize people, right? So throughout this point it's been, and to Dave's earlier point, how do we get a 95% answer rate, a 40% plus conversion, now we're going through the sort of, you know, a little bit of the weeding out process, right? And we're really looking at, okay, how do we get a more specialized agent who is going to be able to do, you know, the subject matter expert type of a call comes in? Again, it all goes back to providing great service to our patient who is, you know, answering the phone. Phone call or who is making the phone call.

So let's go back to some of the results with this using AI. Dave, we can talk to you a little bit about that from just from the, maybe from the patient perspective. And then, you know, just you talked about freeing up time for that front desk person to, you know, which is a demanding role. You're pretty much doing everything, managing everything, freeing up a lot of time there. What have the results been like?

So I would say we've reduced call volume at the front because the way the AI system works is it automatically answers every phone call and it then uses conversational AI to understand the patient's intent of why they were calling. We've probably reduced practice calls by 70 to 75% in those 8 pilot practices that we have. The appointments are automatically being scheduled into the Dentrix enterprise system that we have for our practice management system. We had to customize that to allow that to happen, working with our partner over at Henry Schein. But we got that to work through our online scheduling capability that we've talked about before. The results from a patient perspective, when we talk to patients, the patients who understand that technology and want that technology, they have given us positive feedback on the interaction of that. However, we've also learned not all patients are ready for our conversational AI tech. So we're giving patients the option to opt out and talk to a live agent quickly if necessary, either at the practice or at the contact center because again, we want to make sure we're providing the best possible patient service and experience. I am optimistic though, as we see over time, the capabilities improve and the conversational engines improve and learn from itself that we'll have more and more patients utilize that because they just want a point answer. They call up, they have a very specific question, and we can route them very quickly into individual call queues within other departments or send them links. The technology today is multimodal, which allows them to get text messaged on the fly, whether for online scheduling or whether to pay my bill, etc. So the patient feedback that we have is this is more interactive and more immediate versus having to talk to somebody. It just, it's faster, right? I would say just a couple other, you know, what I wasn't expecting as far as results was, you know, I was thinking more traditionally we could answer the phone with conversational AI and give patients answers to their questions. But the pleasant, call it, side effect of that was the virtual agent isn't on a shift. It answers calls 24/7. And it answers calls with the highest and the same quality every single time, right? So, we've eliminated the training mechanism or need, if you will, with some of the front desk folks because the virtual assistant's taking more. We can implement wide-scale changes more quickly. So when we start adding tuning to the conversation of, hey, why are you calling in? And they tell us it's an emergency, then we can automatically put that across every single practice as opposed to training, you know, 50 or 60 front desk for how we should best handle that. So that was a pleasant surprise is now we've stood up a 24/7 Amazon-like experience for all patients because as Monty and I get together and try to understand when patients are calling and why they're calling, It's not always during normal business operating hours. In fact, most patients who need us the most are calling us after hours or during the weekend or during that— they're trying to get in the queue quickly. So we're still learning some of the capabilities and possibilities, I would argue.

If I can just quickly add, you know, I think another major success, and Dave didn't mention this, is that beginning in November, Saturdays is going to be completely manned by AI. So we're not going to have any agents that are going to be, you know, be taking phone calls or have very few agents that are going to be available to take a few calls. But the AI is going to be the one that's going to be managing the majority of all the inflow of the calls that are coming in. It's a very exciting time for us, right? It's exciting because, again, you know, the center of all of this is the patient. They can get great service. We can provide great service to them and help them easily navigate and quickly navigate to the areas that they want to get to.

Monte, I don't know if you've got any data on this. It's just a really interesting point that Dave mentioned there was that there's the option to opt out quickly. So, there are going to be some people that are going to be fine with AI. In fact, they prefer not to talk to anybody. So, there's that person that's like, hey, I just want to do all this and the less people I talk to, the better. And then there's the other, which is like, oh no, I want to talk to a real person. So I mean, what do you have any— and I know this is kind of a relatively short period of time that this— you've had this AI out there. Do you have any data on that? Like the— how many people are opting out quickly or more people preferring AI? Just any thoughts in general on that? I'm sure there's going to be trends, it's probably— you're probably going to be able to eventually look at the age of the people, you know, is it older people that are opting out or is it younger people that want AI? And just any thoughts around that? I'm real curious.

Yeah, so I don't have any hard data at this point. We do know that, you know, about 50— there is a 50% rollover that's happening from the AI to our agents currently. But again, I mean, we're still tweaking the technology. We're still tweaking a lot of things that are, you know, the way that this is currently functioning. But I do think that, you know, the hypothesis is that, you know, the older generation is not gonna use it. And it's not that they're not gonna use it because they don't want to use it, but there's gonna be some, you know, perhaps some physical limitations. I always give an example of my dad who is, you know, 77 years old. And who has sort of a Parkinson's type of a thing and he just wants to talk to an agent. So he just keeps on saying, "Agent, agent, agent," so he can actually have an actual conversation. So those are definitely the types of people that are going to be more prone to having a conversation versus dealing directly with AI. But over time, this, And again, we're only in version 1.5, call it 1.75 at this time. But as more and more of this gets perfected, the reliance and the comfort level of the patient is going to improve as well. The technology for AI is going to improve and the patient level is going to improve. It's very early stage at this point, but as Dave said, we're loving the results that we're seeing We love the fact that, you know, it is a 24/7 capability. You can have 300 phone calls coming in within the same 5 minutes, which, you know, we otherwise, you know, and I will be knocking at Dave's door and his leadership's door that, you know, don't give us 300 calls because there's really no way that we can handle it. But over here, it's just server capacity and technological capacity that you need. So those are very, very encouraging things that we're seeing.

So let's talk a little bit about, you know, there's a ton of investment in AI technology. You're putting a lot of effort into it across the board. Again, you just have to go to one DSO meeting to see it's almost completely full of vendors that are AI or technology focused. So what does the future look like? And maybe specifically to call handling and what's the future of call centers? Look like? Maybe we could start with you, Dave.

Yeah, sure. So it's a— Monte and I talked about this from the beginning, right? It's a matter of time before traditional contact centers are significantly disrupted by AI. I even joked at one point, Monte, my whole goal is to put you out of business in the next 12 months, at least in this vertical that you supply, because we want to convert, you know, repurpose your valuable agents to other areas of high touch in the business. So how do we How do we handle the, call it, you know, the commoditized type of calls, right? So, and based on the earlier results, we're seeing we're on the trajectory to get there. So, that's exciting, number one. But I have no doubt, you know, with the fact that I can travel in multiple states with multiple airlines and, you know, go into an Uber and check into my hotel and do all this without talking to a single person, there's no doubt in my mind that sooner or later, and I would say sooner than later, that patients will be able to schedule a dental appointment with AI and then an automated contact center. They'll be able to complete their paperwork remotely. They'll be able to self-check in. They'll get pre-approval on financing, and they'll probably show up and walk right to the operatory without even talking to a human. And I think that will all be the genesis of what we're doing with the contact center here. And I have no doubt that Absolute will be one of the first DSOs to make that happen. With XP. I think XP, and I'll let Monte speak to this after me, but I think XP in the contact center, call it oversight, really shifts to the idea of tuning virtual agents. As Monte and I look at data coming back from the virtual assistant and compare that hand-in-hand with the agents, the human agents, if you will, it becomes a game of, okay, where's the gaps? Why do the gaps exist? How do we close those gaps to ultimately improve that patient experience so they're getting their answer day one? So I think we're going to have to learn how to look at huge amounts of data and coach and tune virtual agents. That's where I see the future going.

How about you, Mani? I'm sure you're planning for this right now.

Yes, no, so absolutely. And actually, I would say that we're actually welcoming this right now, right? Because we are in a situation thankfully working with Dave and his team in developing this and being sort of the pioneers in putting this together. So we welcome this. I think, again, it's going to make things better for everybody. The role is absolutely going to change. And for us as well, actually, I welcome it because we're not going to be as people-dependent either. Right? So we are still gonna have a lot of dependency on people, as I have already mentioned that, you know, we'll have more specialized people. But I think that we'll actually be able to serve more people and be able to serve more, have more partners who are looking at this because there's still a lot of barriers to entry for some of our partners. Technology and a uniform technology can start to take some of those things away, right? So if you have a group which needs, and I'll just throw a number out there, 50 people in the next 3 weeks, that's not very achievable as of this moment, even with, you know, with a caliber of the team that I have to put 50 people in Colombia. But with AI, we are gonna be able to do that and we are gonna be able to provide them the level of services day one. I feel benchmarking is going to become easier, right? And what AI is going to be able to do, it's pretty amazing, is that, you know, it can look at the past 100,000 phone calls and we can start, you know, creating algorithms and logics, you know, based on it and eventually constantly increasing the level of service that we are providing. So, you know, I'm actually pretty excited on both fronts, both on the technological front And I think as a result of what this is, you know, what's going to happen is that we're actually going to be hiring more people. Again, it's not going to be for Absolut, but as we add more partners, they will need more specialized people along with the technology. So this is a pretty exciting time for us.

So as we wrap up the podcast here, I'd like to get final thoughts. Dave, if you want to talk a little bit about You know, anything more you want to talk about? Maybe give us— this would be good. What's Absolute going to do in 2025? Any predictions on any new locations, working more closely with Xpotential? Just final thoughts about where is Absolute going in 2025?

Yeah, I would say Absolute in 2025, you got a couple of things we're focused on, and you mentioned it earlier in this discussion, same-store sales, right? Certainly organic growth and understanding how we do more with less. You're hearing that throughout the industry. You're hearing that out through other similar industries. How do we leverage innovation and technology to do more with less every day while improving the patient experience? And I think that that's that key. And as I think about, you know, what we've done here, we talked a lot about AI today and the service level of that. I think, continuing to align ourselves with great partners in this, with this shared vision. In this case, it's the patient. I think we've been fortunate, Monty, we've been fortunate to work together where we have teams that are aligned and they're getting done what we need to get done and executing. I would even imagine that there's other opportunities here to leverage, whether it's the AI automation piece or whether it's the patient experience piece, You know, we have further opportunity, I think, with XP to the question to understand what we can even downstream or even maybe even upstream on the insurance verification piece as automation, AI, and other, call it technologies begin to more come together. There's a whole process. There's a whole patient experience here, not just the phone calls coming in. I think there's a bigger and broader patient experience here. That I think XP and Absolute will be able to develop even further patient improvements.

Excellent. Monty, what does 2025 look like for XP?

We're looking to have a great year. Once again, I think, of course, we want to increase our sales as well. We want to continue expanding the role that we have, really focus on technologies, continuing to work with Dave and his team and some of our other partners. And really understanding the patient desires and starting to deliver on them from a technological standpoint. Looking forward to a great year.

So, Monty, if anyone in the audience wants to find out more about xPotential Marketing Group, want to reach out to you, has some questions maybe about call centers or AI or a combination of the two, how do they do so?

Yeah, so they can go to our website, expotential.co. So, it's expotential.co, or they can call me directly. I'm available to talk. I'd love talking to existing partners, new partners, and they can call me directly. And my phone number is listed on the website.

Okay. And we'll drop that number in the show notes as well and the URL. Dave, how about you? If anybody wants to reach out to you and maybe get a little bit more insight as to the partnership you have with, Absolute has with eXp, how do they do that?

Yeah, they can contact me directly, dave@absolutedental.com. I'm on LinkedIn as well, so feel free, reach out. Happy to share anything we've done with AI as well as any, you know, conversation around eXp.

Excellent. Thank you both. Great, great conversation. I mean, exciting times. I think 2025 is going to be a really eye-opening year as the AI and technology just seems to really, really change the way we work and at an accelerated rate. So this time next year, we're probably going to be having a completely different conversation. But this is— it's fascinating to discuss this. And thank you both for taking the time. And thank you, everybody, for, for watching us today. Until next time, I'm Bill Newman, and this is the Group Dentistry Now Show.

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