Unleashing the Power of your Website

William McMahon: 0:02

If you don't have a sign on your shop, they don't know what you're selling. So the websites really promote who you are. They help you sell what you sell, be it a service or a product. For nowadays, it's like you have applications that pretty much build you the websites these days. You've got AI that can build your websites by just giving it a command exactly as Odoo does. You can just tell it what type of website you want to build. And within 30s you've got a website.

Amy Caroline Downing: 0:32

Hi, Odooers. And welcome back for another episode of Planet Odoo. In today's digital landscape, it's no secret that having a website is a fundamental aspect for businesses. However, only a select few organizations have truly harnessed the full potential of their online platforms. That's why we're here today to explore the secrets of unlocking the power of your website and rising above the competition with the expertise of our esteemed guest, William CEO of an Odoo partner Gravatai. With over 20 years of experience in marketing automation, William brings a wealth of knowledge on website performance, best practices, and budget management. He's here to share invaluable insight on implementing a successful website that drives real results. Ready? Let's get started. Hi William, and welcome to Planet Odoo. Thank you for joining me this morning.

William McMahon: 1:25

Thank you very much.

Amy Caroline Downing: 1:25

Yeah, absolutely. It's a pleasure. So let's start things off just about by hearing about you a little bit. So can you tell us a bit more about your experience in website and website performance?

William McMahon: 1:39

Absolutely. Yeah. So I'm from Ireland, originally from the West Coast in a small And back when I was 15 or 16, Ennis became the information age capital of Ireland. What that meant is every town in Ireland in 95, 96 got a computer, and that was my first introduction really to the Internet. Um, I started learning HTML as soon as I got my computer, self-taught myself HTML and started really seeing an opportunity to build websites for local businesses around the town. That really started my career. I ended up winning an entrepreneurial award at an early age, then traveled to Australia where again, I used my web development experience in building websites for companies around Australia and having a great backpacking experience of living in retail suites and all of this kind of stuff, but really got into it from an early age. I think it was the right time, right place, right opportunity, really.

Amy Caroline Downing: 2:52

So you really had the chance to see how things have evolved?

William McMahon: 2:56

Oh, completely, yeah. Like we're going back to the early days of we won't say the Internet because the websites are not just the Internet, but we were back in the day where if you wanted a web page, you had to type program script, you know, these things. So you had to learn new languages. We had some rudimentary tools. Again, most common would have been just Notepad, but then Microsoft FrontPage was a terrible application at the time, but it got us through many kind of website developments. And then Dreamweaver came about and these tools helped us certainly build websites easier, but it was a lot of learning you had to learn, you know, from I think it was HTML two days, and then you had to learn CSS and JavaScript and all of these different languages being put together. It was a good way to learn about, you know, computing, learning about communications technology at the time, which many people struggled to really understand what this magic witchcraft of the Internet was and what was it all about.

Amy Caroline Downing: 4:07

Right. Well, so I guess as time keeps going with all this new software and these

William McMahon: 4:15

Absolutely. See, you kids, these days, you don't know how lucky you have to see. It's yeah, it's completely different nowadays. It's like you have, um, applications that, you know, pretty much build you the websites these days. You've got AI that can build your websites by just giving it a command exactly as Odoo does. You can just tell it what type of website you want to build. And within 30s you've got a website.

Amy Caroline Downing: 4:42

Right, like magic.

William McMahon: 4:44

Like magic.

Amy Caroline Downing: 4:45

So of course, having a website is something that's critical for every business, reasons. So with your experience and the knowledge that you've gained over this time, seeing how things have evolved. What are some of the main key success factors to a performant website?

William McMahon: 5:07

Yeah, it definitely for websites it's having an online presence. That's the important thing to it. Like you said, people can have websites for different reasons. It could be a personal blog, a travel blog, but a typical business. If you start a business, you'll have a product or service that you want to sell. And before the times of the Internet, you know, to promote your website, you would have maybe done a leaflet drop around your local neighborhood, maybe your local town. You might have been in the Yellow Pages or the directory telephone directory that people could look you up if they needed your service. And you know, for back then your reach was only as far as you could promote it in your local area. So when you kind of come to the Internet, it's just a bigger directory. You've got a bigger directory of people, you've got a wider pool of potential customers that you can talk to or advertise to. So having that online presence is really, really important because otherwise, you just have a shop, a storefront where you're waiting for people to come through the door. And if you don't have a sign on your shop, they don't know what you're selling. So the websites really promote who you are. They help you sell what you sell, be it a service or product, and just build your credibility. Most companies, or sorry, most people these days will buy online. You know, the days of exploring, going from shop to shop to shop to find the product you want. It still happens, but it's not as much because people just explore the Internet, you know, they find the best deal. They find what is your USP, and why should they buy from you as opposed to the guy next door? So is it thoroughly important to have one, be it that it's just advertising who you are or be it that it's a full e-commerce platform for you to sell through?

Amy Caroline Downing: 7:17

Absolutely. And even if you are someone who still goes to the shops, I know I go Internet. And I'm looking at different websites there in the alley of the store, you know. So, yeah, it's critical. So what are some specific things that a business can focus on to really give themselves a great online presence?

William McMahon: 7:41

It would definitely be content, you know, looking at what your product is or think is really important. Time and time again, I explore the Internet and look for, you know, products or services and you come across some really terrible, very old websites, things that would have been built back in my day when I started, I suppose, never really maintained, you know, it gives a bad impression, you know, it's like again, walking into the to an old store with dirty windows and, you know, broken shelves. You really want to portray a professional clean image to your customers. So keeping, keeping it, you know, aesthetically pleasing and easy to use, so easy to use is very much, you know, keeping it keeping things simple don't over overengineer it don't, you know, aim for, you know, really snazzy buzzers and whistles and spinny objects. Just keep it simple, keep it, you know, down to simplicity that it's easy for the customer to navigate and find what they want. And then, once you've got your presence, it's all around data reporting performance. So again, it's like owning the store, the physical store. You've got an idea of who's coming into the store, you've got an idea of how many visitors you have on your website. You've then got an idea of what they're browsing. You know, are they going over to one particular department or interested in one particular product? Are they picking it up or are they comparing it to a different product? So the Internet and websites make that a lot easier because you have a digital footprint of everything they're touching, everything that they're exploring, what they're searching for, keywords and everything. It's all there in your reporting that allows you as a business then to tailor your website to your products, your services and your offering to what your customers are wanting or needing and, customers, you know, like that appreciate simplicity. They appreciate ease of use and ease of navigation. And they will then continue to return. Or they'll promote your website by referring to their friends where they bought the product. So it kind of elevates your presence, your business as well.

Amy Caroline Downing: 10:21

Do you feel that the data that you can get from your website, from how consumers make educated choices, design choices, or content choices for your website, or is there even something else you really need to do in order to optimize the website that you are building?

William McMahon: 10:42

I think data is only one element to it. It just tells you, you know what somebody's behavior is, but really taking it a step further into things like AB testing or conversion rate optimization where you're trying new things, you're trying different approaches, even down to things like colors, you know, the color of a CTA button, it should be orange or should it be blue. You get different indicators of performance and, by taking your website visitors and splitting them into groups so you typically have a control group, and then you'll have an AB test group, and you want to compare how performance is happening against these groups, and that helps you make informed decisions. Then as to does the orange button work better than the blue button? And then you will change that, and you're continuously trialing this thing. You know, that can be from everything from images down to the color of your CTA buttons. You want to try to personalize it as well for your customer experience. And that's where we've now come to on the websites, which is it's phenomenal of what websites do nowadays is that you might search up for, you know, a product, you know, some apples online and all of a sudden the entire Internet website that you're going to is all selling you apples because the advertising space is adjusting to what you're searching for, your interests. And it makes it more personal. It makes it easier for you to navigate through it. Because if you think that there are billions of websites out there, you want to make it easy for that customer to find you and to work with you.

Amy Caroline Downing: 12:37

Yeah, absolutely. And considering like, let's imagine I'm just a small business starting off, you know, there are a lot of aspects to consider. So do you feel that for this type of design or AB testing, it's important to work with a dedicated website designer, someone who can really help assist you in pushing that? Or do you feel that it's manageable by the individual, by the entrepreneur, to do that themselves?

William McMahon: 13:06

It's a really great question. I think doing it yourself is always better. You know, having support from a web designer, a web developer or an expert can accelerate your progress. But self-learning is the best way, you know, is exploring it. A lot of the toolkits, and again, I'll namedrop Odoo for that. They have these features out of box. They have drag-and-drop web development kind of templates and features that you don't have to know HTML or programming languages to do it. You could do it very easily yourself. And it's really just taking the time, the dedication to do it. Now that being said, not everybody is maybe creatively, you know, they're not a creative person, so they might not understand colors and branding and copyrighting of texts. So you might need support in certain ways. But, you know, look amongst your friends, your family, your work colleagues as to who can contribute a certain skill to doing it. And if you got yourself to a kind of a base level, that's good, That's good, that's better than maybe not having a website. And then you evolve. So it's a continuously evolving thing, and hopefully, your business grows so much that you then need to hire a web developer and you give the job to somebody else to do. But to get it started, really try to yourself, you know, there's no harm in giving it a go.

Amy Caroline Downing: 14:48

Always possible with a little effort of course.

William McMahon: 14:51

Definitely.

Amy Caroline Downing: 14:52

So a big topic when it comes to websites as well is security. So. How can someone really ensure protection from cyber threats on their website?

William McMahon: 15:03

Yeah, security is all over these days is you don't want a website that is Certainly if you're capturing customer data or customer information, if your website is just a brochure, you know of information, you might think security is not, you know, necessary. But it is because websites that can be hacked again can again damage your reputation, damage your image that you're trying to build. They can also be used maliciously in injecting code onto a victim's PC. So you don't want to have that. So securing it through things like Https protocols. So making sure you've got an SSL certificate makes that you've got a reputation, you've got a security reputation to it, ensuring that your the application that you're using if you're using a framework application like Odoo, that it is a reputable application, it's not just something you just download or you find off the Internet because you don't all want. What code might be injected into it. So use reputable software for that if you're dealing with things like customer data. So credit card information. Personal data information. It's really thinking about security of that. Where is it hosted? How it's hosted or stored. Who has access to it? You don't want to be storing data unnecessarily. So things like credit cards, you would have to have a very robust security protocol to be storing things like bank details, credit card details. So there are specific tools out there to do that. Don't just save it on a file on a computer laptop. We would definitely get you into trouble. But it is thoroughly important just to make sure that you're keeping up to date with your software versions, your hosting, looking at any of the recent security threats or breaches that are on the website, and make sure you're patching your servers and patching your applications so that you're not vulnerable to attack.

Amy Caroline Downing: 17:26

Do you feel that this is something that as well kind of similar to my last scratch? Or do you recommend using one of these web builders web platforms?

William McMahon: 17:40

Yeah, I would suggest going down a web builder platform like odoo if you're Well, you definitely want to then start learning a lot more in in programming, in development, You know, you'll be using third-party tool kits, you know, so it makes it a lot more complex and advanced to understand. While if you take an out-of-box like Odoo, it gives it all there to you. It's, it's a whole package solution. So a lot easier then for you to not be as concerned as to how it's done or how to set it up. It is secured for you.

Amy Caroline Downing: 18:26

And another line of thought that goes along with security as well as legal So of course, we see all of these cookie agreements that we have to we see popping up on all of our website. We have to accept. Exactly. So my question is more for a company who has an international presence across global. Of course, the regulations change between countries. How does someone stay up to date with that? Would you recommend just going with the, let's say, the most regulated way, and then that would apply for everyone? Or do you recommend changing depending on their IP, their country, their location?

William McMahon: 19:06

It's a really good question because yeah, it's it is one that you have to kind So design is secure first. So being applying the most robust, the most stricter policy is probably all is best. Even though it doesn't apply to certain countries, it would always be best. The practices of GDPR apply pretty much across the globe, well across Europe anyway, but certainly across the globe, whereas a European citizen it applies to you regardless of which country you're in. So you kind of have to kind of look at again what data you are capturing, how you're using it. Do you have a legitimate reason to have it? And if you don't delete it because just get rid of it, you know, there's no point of storing unnecessary data, you know, on or have have yourself vulnerable for this attack. Just be conscious of of that. Obviously review any legal specific legal compliance that is in your country or the countries that you serve. But I would always approach it in the the more stricter policies or the more stricter compliance is better to apply as a blanket across your markets. It makes it a lot easier to apply across all markets as opposed to tailoring it for different countries. Just look at them. What is the more stricter one and apply that.

Amy Caroline Downing: 20:43

Okay, so you feel that this is a better method. And the reason why I ask is I can imagine that potentially it could impact usability if you have a stricter overall, I think between most countries it's overall similar, the regulations, but I imagine that perhaps some people feel, okay, my audience, my users will be annoyed if they get this pop up every time they visit my website. Maybe then I will not do that. You don't feel that that would cause an impact in that way?

William McMahon: 21:16

I think we all experience it. It is always one of those annoyances of having to tick the okay button or opting in to these things. It is an annoyance, but. I think it's becoming an acceptance, you know, annoyance to have. It's the very same as reading the terms and conditions. You know, you have a five pages of a terms and conditions before you have to click and accept. And not many people go down reading all the terms and conditions. So you want to try to keep things again, easy to understand, easy to accept or read. It doesn't have to be too much in your face. You don't have to kind of make him jump through hoops just to do it, but just make them aware of how you're using your information. And again, it's one of those things of, you know, you won't need it if you're not using the data in ways of, let's say, marketing. If you're capturing data for marketing purposes, targeting your customers in follow-up marketing campaigns, and changing their advertising as they explore the Internet, I would like to know that I'm being tracked in that case. So if you're not doing it, you can pretty much, you know, ensure that you're not tracking, you're not using the data, so you comply to the minimum application of the compliance standard.

Amy Caroline Downing: 22:44

Okay, great. Thank you. So these are some essentials. And of course, there are also a lot of tools just to create the website. So can you tell us about the different types of website platforms that are available?

William McMahon: 22:57

Well, definitely.

Amy Caroline Downing: 22:58

And how do you choose the best one?

William McMahon: 23:02

Yes, exactly. This is this is the minefield of it. And I think so the main kind of application types you will have are content management systems. So very useful for like that, managing your blog, managing general content on websites. It can also be used for other content types as well. You've got the likes of e-commerce platforms then. So for that shopping cart experience, displaying your products, checking out all of those kinds of tools with it, the other types really then fall into that categories of either custom built frameworks, applications and tools that you kind of snap together to build a website. But the underlining principles of a website are effectively the same. You've got a front-end language like HTML, for example, that presents to you the visual aspects of your website, your content, your fonts, your colors, etcetera. And then you have back-end application frameworks. So that's your database where you're storing your data and now you could build them independently, of course, like that in your notepad and have a SQL database to do it. But like that you need the technical development skills to be able to join them together. Frameworks or tools. Odoo is love Odoo As you will hear, Odoo gives you that tool kit out of box. So if you want to run a blog, it has a CMS tool that you can snap together your own, your own website. If you want to run an ecommerce store, it's got a whole commerce application, so you've got the tools out of box that somebody else has developed all of these features like the favorite button and the follow and the add to cart. All of that functionality has been built by somebody else. You're just using the tool in that way. There's a lot out there. Odoo is obviously only one, but you've got the likes of WordPress as a pretty big CMS platform, and then that is similarly has its own e-commerce tools and you have tools like Shopify for e-commerce. There's many players in the market doing it. They've been around for a long time, but when you start looking at, you know, a tool, a single tool that can encompass many different things, that's where I found Odoo because it can then give you your website, your e-commerce tool. You can do your sales and your orders, your accounting, your CRM, your appointment, booking, your events. Everything can be all within one technology framework. You're not having to get different tools and try to integrate them between the different platforms. So it's very sensible and wise to kind of find those tools or to choose a tool that has it doesn't suit every customer. I find many enterprise companies would prefer to build it themselves, and they'll have their own engineering team. They might build it off an AWS stack, and that way they own it. They've built it, they've owned it. They are paying for, let's say, their own hosting or their own technology framework. But you kind of have to weigh up that cost of custom development to a licensed application that you can just install and be up and running in a matter of days or a week.

Amy Caroline Downing: 26:56

I suppose on one hand, it's a better choice in regards to scalability or if you don't have to necessarily work with third party, but via budget is a huge consideration for that. When you do have other software that can also follow you as you scale up as well.

William McMahon: 27:16

Definitely. And it's the maintaining of it as well. Like if you build your own custom solution, the person who can maintain it is you or the developer who built it. So you'll always end up going back to that developer and that developer end up might leave your company or might go elsewhere. So you have to then educate somebody else up into your solution and your technology. While if you take something that's kind of a framework out of box, like Odoo, you just have to find another developer plenty out there and they can learn that and learn your business process, but it'll all be applied in to the same technology.

Amy Caroline Downing: 27:59

So speaking of Odoo, Gravetye is using Odoo for their website.

William McMahon: 28:06

Yep, we certainly are.

Amy Caroline Downing: 28:07

What are some of the features that you're taking advantage of for your own

William McMahon: 28:12

Oh well, so we stumbled across Odoo a few years ago where a client came to us or for a point of sale application. And my role of a solution architect is to try to find all of the tools that are out in the market or what would be the best way to do it. And I stumbled across Odoo as the point of sale application and I was like, Oh, this is pretty neat. You know, it's a good, good little framework. And then as I started, you say scratching the surface more, it was like, Oh, it's got all of these other tools against it. So we were originally using a whole mix of applications. We were using originally WordPress for our website and suite CRM as a CRM, Xero as our accounting easy redmine for projects and timesheets, just a whole mix of applications that weren't really integrated that well together, even though we were techies. We spent more time helping our clients with their technologies, not our own. So when I, when I stumbled across Odoo and saw what it could give, I said, okay, this is interesting. This is the Holy Grail. I was always looking for that. It could do everything that I needed as a business. I just wanted one application to do it. So we took on Odoo about two years ago. The easy objective for us was, well, if we can port our website from WordPress into Odoo, that's a success. So we did that first and then very quickly started looking at taking from the website any leads, inquiries that come through the website, funneling these into the CRM application in Odoo, which again was very easy to do because it was fully integrated between each of the applications. So we started kind of expanding it further and further. And this was on version 14 at the time. We've since upgraded to 16. So pretty much the whole feature sets that we have in Odoo, we're pretty much using everything. We've like that kind of explore product by product. So we've got live chat working on the website. All the enquiry forms come through with booking appointments coming through. It's just really consolidated our technology landscape, made it a lot easier for us to run our business. Making content or publishing content a lot easier. Our marketing team like that are constantly churning out new blogs, updating the website. Like I was saying, on a B testing, we're constantly testing out who our visitors are, what are they exploring? Trying to improve our own metrics, not only on the number of visitors, but how long are they staying on our website? You know, how many pages are they exploring? What are they viewing, What are they reading? So we're making it more sticky for them and all of the tools are there. It's all Odoo where we're we're solely in Odoo house right now in running everything.

Amy Caroline Downing: 31:38

Yeah, that's amazing. And when you were First looking at using Odoo, you knew how the integrations were working. You knew, Okay, okay, we can directly work with CRM and live chat and take advantage of all these things. Or you started with Odoo, started discovering, started activating new features. What was that process like for Gravitai?

William McMahon: 31:56

Yeah, that's exactly what we did. We kind of got it out of the box, chose the first application that we would try, got it to a level and started exploring more. So watched all the videos. Namedrop yourself as a claim to fame Honors. It just started like that, looking at application by application. So we had taken Odoo, I think it was around October, November time, and had it up and running on a website within a few weeks. So it was pretty quick to get up and running. And then we were running our Christmas party. This was around lockdown as well. So we wanted to organize the Christmas party. And the first my first point of call that I say to everyone is, can we do it in Oodo? You know what? How do we solve this with Odoo? So like that we would explore in Odoo and say, okay, there's an event application in Odoo, let's install it. Let's spend an hour looking at the videos. Understanding the basics. Let's set it up. Let's set up a test event and just start using it, start it, start trying it. You pick it up pretty quickly. It's a very intuitive framework. It's very easy to explore. You might find small areas where I wish you could do that, but there's a nice to-haves there. Like it would be great if it could do that little bit extra, but for what it does, it gives you a whole feature set that you would be paying a premium for from another application. So it has it out of box, very easy to set up, very easy to administer it. And then you just keep exploring it. You just keep kind of finding these use cases or, you know, problems, statements in your in your business that you go, okay, how do I solve that? How what tools do we have in Odoo to do it? And before long, you've got 20-something applications up and running.

Amy Caroline Downing: 34:01

That's really nice to hear. And especially for someone from someone with such a technical background, you can build the entire website if you wanted to, but it's nice that you were able to make Odoo work out of the box for your business. But of course we have the possibility as well to customize a bit the HTML CSS even if we want to, from the front end. Is that something that you take advantage of, or you feel that it's flexible enough with the built-in options.

William McMahon: 34:30

It's flexible enough with built-in options. If you do want to push it further and further, you can. Um, it's again for us keeping things simple. So and you know, we're not a big development team, in-house development team to, you know, spend a lot of time on our own website. We obviously get paid to do stuff for our clients, so we want to make sure that it's, you know, efficient for ourselves to be able to build and push out. But also it's flexible. So that's what I found with another beauty with Odoo is it's an open source framework. So with our development team, we have come across situations where for either ourselves or with our clients, we've had to build a custom plug in, a custom integration, or we may download an application, or a third-party integration application from the App Store to integrate. So the tool kits are out there. It's very flexible. You're not limited as such by the technology and framework. You can expand it if there's a feature, like I say, if you found a limitation gap that you wished could be solved, you could solve it yourself, you could actually develop and fix that and contribute that back to the community, to Odoo as well. Or you just wait for Odoo you contribute basically the feedback to Odoo as suggestions and you wait for you to add it into the pipeline of work. So which you're very good at doing, by the way, because we've, we've been contributors to many ideas in features.

Amy Caroline Downing: 36:17

Absolutely. I mean, we love working with our partners because you have such They will contact us directly and we definitely take what they say into account, and that's something that's really important for us as well. So do you also take advantage of the e-commerce for your company? Probably you have implemented it already, but from your personal experience.

William McMahon: 36:41

So Gravitai doesn't for ourselves, but we have for other customers that yes, on it. Usually we find a lot of these are migrations from an existing tool like Shopify, Magento, etcetera, where yeah, the, the benefits and features in Odoo outweigh, you know, Magento or Shopify. It's got the exact same functionality and you're paying for it under your Odoo license. So you're not just buying an e-commerce application, you're buying odoo. So it gives you a CRM, it gives you a website, it gives you e-commerce, it gives you all the tool kits that you have. So it's quite redundant having running your own e-commerce website on Shopify and using Odoo, you may as well just move it all into Odoo. It's much more cost-effective. The features in Odoo e-commerce, like I said, I put them rate them higher than any of the other likes of Shopify, Magento. It's got phenomenal little features out of box that, like I said, is easy to set up. And then fully integrated behind the rest of the applications so that, you know, it's very easy to do things like an abandoned basket. You know, when a customer comes through and searches and drops out, you can take that drop out and put them in through a marketing campaign with the marketing automation tool in Odoo. You don't need an engineer to come in and tell you how to integrate two applications together. It's there. It's out of box.

Amy Caroline Downing: 38:28

Right. And we can also integrate with other platforms as well if absolutely

William McMahon: 38:34

We've done that as well. We've done integrations. The app integrations between Magento and Odoo and which usually is a transition plan of course, because my point to clients is always as well, you know, consolidate your technology stack. There's no point of having duplicate applications that do the very same thing and then you're kind of complexity is trying to do these integrations or maintain these integrations because as an implementation partner of Odoo, if a client says, well, I've got a magento website that I want to maintain here, our first question will always be is, Well, who maintains your Magento website? Who maintains your application? We don't run it. We don't support it. Our advice would be to put it all under the same system so that we can then support everything for you under Odoo.

Amy Caroline Downing: 39:36

Right. And then of course, as we upgrade and improve, it's smoother for them for the ultimate experience, let's say.

William McMahon: 39:48

Exactly that. Yeah. You keep getting much more new features, you know, as you expand out with Odoo, you don't have to be worrying about connecting breaking between different applications. You've got central support. You know, you've got people who understand odoo, you know, it makes customers' life a lot easier.

Amy Caroline Downing: 40:08

Absolutely. So I want your opinion on something and this is completely your blog, online payments, etcetera, etcetera. Which one is your favorite?

William McMahon: 40:24

On the website?

Amy Caroline Downing: 40:26

Let's well, we'll keep it to website for the topic of this episode.

William McMahon: 40:33

I do love the live chat feature. It's again, I'm an early advocate of live chat from God. Many years ago when I first implemented another live chat application for a client. A live chat I think is one of those communication channels that nearly every customer expects. You know, I think I myself personally, I hate picking up a phone to ring a call center to wait on hold. Et cetera. I'm sitting at my computer of my choice is, yeah, I could send an email, but then. You know, I'm anticipating when I send an email or submit a form for an inquiry to a store, maybe I'll get a reply back in 24 hours, maybe 48 hours, depending on how good they are. Live chat. The great thing with it is you can be working on alongside and then just be chatting to an agent. What I love with Odoo's live chat is the chat bot facility that you also get out of box that you can set up your automated chat scripts so you've effectively got the AI features into it and you can actually integrate it into chat GPT if you so wished. And it just gives customers that kind of real-time customer experience that they expect. You know, is that from an agent's perspective? Likewise, agents can then support multiple customer chats at a time. It's, you know, it makes everyone's life easier. I think like even when I implemented live chat many years ago, when it was kind of first come to market, the customer support team that were using it, they absolutely loved it because they could do five times the amount of work. They could manage five different chats at a time, supporting five different customers and just keep continuously flick between them. It's a great feature. Very, very easy to set up as well on the website. So yeah, it's a quick win, easy to easy to use, easy to have.

Amy Caroline Downing: 42:49

Well, that's something that you and our CEO Fabian have in common because he is He absolutely loves it as well.

Speaker3: 42:57

Oh, that's great. That's great. Great. Nice chat.

Amy Caroline Downing: 43:01

But the concept of live chat.

William McMahon: 43:03

There's nothing worse, I think, than a telephone call. Like it's great to be able to talk to people. You know, don't get me wrong, but it's the whole waiting was only on a call yesterday, actually. And like that was on hold for about five minutes while they were trying to transfer me to another department. And I think live chat gives you that personal piece of experience, but you're able to, you know, manage the conversation as well. You know, I think a few people find it difficult to confront, you know, when they have a problem. But, you know, in or over a call, it's a lot easier to raise your concerns by message, you know, and then wait for the reply.

Speaker3: 43:53

Yeah, absolutely.

Amy Caroline Downing: 43:55

So we are starting to run out of time now. So I will just ask you one last thing. What is the future for Gravetai? Do you have anything you would like to share before we close this episode?

William McMahon: 44:08

Oh, absolutely. Well, Gravetai, we've been operating now ten years where we partner and now we've discovered Odoo. We're growing our Odoo practice. We are seeing that the future is definitely with Odoo. We see a lot of potential with clients that we are going to continue expanding our operations. We will always kind of continue in an agnostic approach with clients, so we look at what our clients' problems are and what technologies are on the market already makes our lives a lot easier because it has everything out of box, makes it a very easy to demonstrate to the customers. So we're going to you know, we've grown tremendously over the years. We have a great team behind us. We're about 50 plus consultants working full time. And we're seeing that the market now is growing, certainly here in the UK and Ireland. I certainly want to get more into the Irish market. We have a number of customers out there. We want to grow that market a lot, a lot more. I think for all of our listeners here, I think certainly link in with me, follow us on LinkedIn, on Twitter, and everything else the young kids these days are searching on. But also, yeah, keep abreast of any news that we have on Odoo. We're certainly advocates of it. We'll continue driving that message. We've locked in for a long-term commitment in our technology stack here at Gravetai that odoo is not going anywhere from us.

Amy Caroline Downing: 45:54

You much for joining me today. It's been a pleasure discussing with you.

William McMahon: 45:58

Definitely my absolute pleasure and thanks again for having me.

Speaker3: 46:01

Absolutely. Cheers.

William McMahon: 46:02

Thank you. Bye bye.

Amy Caroline Downing: 46:03

And that's all for today. I hope you enjoyed hearing from William from Gravetai. And I hope we shed light on how You can optimize your website through best practices and with odoo at minimal cost because a website really is at the heart of any business or organization. In case you want to stay with us a bit longer, be sure you catch up on our last episode if you missed it. And otherwise, we hope to see you next time. Don't hesitate to share the show and subscribe. Cheers and see you soon.