B2B Net Promoter for Mid-Market and Enterprise With Involta

Lukas, what do you like best about your CX program?

You know, I love the fact that we have CX everywhere across our organization.

Hi, I'm Adam Durrell and I'm the host of the Account Experience podcast. If you're a regular here, you'll know that in every episode I like to catch up with inspiring industry leaders or thinkers who help us share best practice and tips to help you develop your own B2B account experience program today. Well, think of us as being at the, I don't know, the co location of Fiber Speed Customer Experience and the in depth storage of B2B account management. That's of course why we call it Account Experience or AX for short. And well, that rather tortured metaphor should give you a clue as to the industry my guest today comes from. So I'm really delighted to welcome Lukas Mistelski today. He's VP of Client Experience at Customer Gauge Client called Involta, which is an enterprise class infrastructure partner for IT and it provides advanced colocation. The clue was in the thing before hybrid solutions with superior data center experiences and connectivity. And he's been with the company for 12 years and I believe managing two Minnesota data centers and so on until developing infrastructure service for the company. And I'm really excited to find out more about Lucas Program today in the company.

Thanks for having me. Adam.

Hey, Lucas, Welcome. Great to have you on the podcast. Thanks for joining.

Great. It's great to be here. Thank you so much.

Now, we're calling you today in, I think it's in Duluth, Minnesota.

That's correct, yes, the Northland.

I had to look it up on a map and I, you know, Midwest. Describe for everyone who's listening roughly where you are.

Yeah, thanks for letting me do that. We have a sense of pride here in Minnesota. A lot of times people view us as sort of that flyover region from the coasts of the United States. But here in the Midwest, especially specifically in Minnesota, we have a beautiful outdoor scene. We are positioned right on the tip of the world's largest and greatest of Great Lakes, the world's largest freshwater lake, Lake Superior. We're just on the tip of Lake Superior in the Sawtooth Mountain range and it's a beautiful little city. If anybody ever has the opportunity to come visit, I love to host and tell you about all the great places you can come and get great food, great beer, great libations and have a great time.

In Duluth, you just ticked out for everything in my list and I can see on the wall behind you've got a bunch of Great guitars. So Lucas, if I ever come, I'm picking them up and we're gonna have a damn session.

It would be great. Yep, we can have a fire right around the fire pit. It would be wonderful.

I'd love to hear that. So thanks for the introduction. About that. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the company? Did I get it right or can you tell us maybe what's special about Envolta Solutions?

Yeah, yeah, that's great, thanks. So in Volta, what we do is we really serve the mid to enterprise class and we serve this colocation industry in this data center segment that is just absolutely growing in demand with just the constant requirement for more data. We are more data hungry as we continue to evolve as a society. And that data has to live somewhere and as you know, it has to be readily available. And companies are struggling to continue to have plans about how they expand their IT infrastructure. So for us what we do is we provide very sound solutions, very cost effective, but world class solutions for our clients. And that encompasses everything from privatized cloud environments where clients can choose to establish their applications and have it in a private way with a known entity. And then also, you know, if they want to operate their own IT infrastructure, we post that in our world class colocation facilities. And we have 12 facilities across the country and we are US based. We'll continue to expand our footprints and expand across the country as we do more M and A and green build, greenfield build designs.

That's great. Thanks for the introduction of the company. I'm going to come back to a little bit later about that, about the customers. But let's hear about you. So how did you get into this? How did you get into this business?

Well, I'll tell you, I have to be. I have to admit I was the typical nerd back in high school in 1993, carrying a laptop around in my social studies classrooms. And at the same time I played all the sports you could imagine. I played four varsity sports through high school and so it was a very interesting thing for me. Technology always just seemed easy. College was wonderful. I learned a lot about all the sociologies and anthropologies and geologies. Those were all fascinating to me. But at the end of the day it was just easy. So I determined that I was going to make a career in it. And I had this wonderful opportunity to work for a manufacturing company right out of college where I got to understand that not only could I take my technology skills, but also I could build things. Right. You could have Something tangible with the products. We actually built skateboard parks, ramps, half pipes. And then we established two other companies out of the byproducts. I think now companies call those co products. We established an international brand called Epicurean Cutting Surfaces that is now owned by Victorinox. And we established sort of a lifestyle brand of outdoor modern high end design furniture called Wall Designs. And that really for me, it helped me understand not only can you be in technology, not only can you build things, you can also be entrepreneurial. And so that spirit really landed me at involta in 2012. And I started, as you mentioned, as a data center manager. Operating data centers and learning how to do that and interface and this critical, critical assets. But over time I just grew to more in the leadership positions and took over sort of our client experience segment by building out different strategies for our different client bases.

Oh, that's really cool. I mean from what I know about data centers, you know, of course we're data centers at Customer Gauge. But it's not just managing the hardware, but it's managing the processes around it, isn't it? It's a huge process thing to do with security and quality standards.

100%, yeah. I mean our clients expect us to be very specific in how our processes that we follow. We follow a standard framework. It's the ITIL framework. The ITIL framework for how we do incident management, change management, change control, security management, infrastructure management. I mean it's a. There's a litany of processes that we could talk through.

Well, I'm going to get into customer processes and I don't really want to, but it's interesting because you know, it's. I know you've just got to keep upping your game the whole time. It's really, it's a moving target, isn't it? Security and you've got to keep getting better at it.

That's right, yeah. And you know, I think it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when at this point sort of in the world we live in. And it's really how you respond. And I think that's true with a lot of things in life. Bad things happen, challenging things that catch us off guard. Not just in business, but also in personal. I think it's all about how you rise to the occasion and respond that really dictates your integrity as a person and as an organization. And I think that's something that Involta has always done. Well, just a quick story if I have time for it. I mean in Volta was really born out of a natural disaster in 2008. Our corporate headquarters is in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, another flyover state. We had an event in 2008 that put 10ft of water in downtown Cedar Rapids with flooding that occurred and significant devastation. But that in that moment in Volta and our operations kept our downtown data center operating through all of that. I mean literally carrying gas cans through the skywalks to keep generators filled. And one of two entities, including the National Guard that were allowed in this natural disaster space. I mean it was a significant trial by fire. But the reason I tell you that story, Adam, is that's sort of the spirit of this integrity like you, you do what you say you're going to do, you're going to keep your clients depend on you and you show up. And it's not if something happens, but it's how you respond when it does.

Well, I love that. And that really gets us into the topic about clients. So maybe you can also. Can you characterize some typical types of clients that you have at Invalta?

So we serve typically that mid market and enterprise space. So when we think about that, it's, you know, anywhere the Fortune 500, Fortune 1000 type clients. And what we really have honed in on are some key vertical industries that we have identified over the years that we excel at and we tend to match our skill sets as an organization up with their needs very well. And that's it. Manufacturing and in healthcare and in finance. Yeah, so that's, that tends to be the space where we excel and we do the most amount of focus, effort and really deliver to meet those industries needs.

And what are the needs of those customers typically? I mean we spoke a little about data center, but to some extent, you know, data is a commodity or rather, you know, but you're doing something else, you're providing a solid backbone. So what do these companies value about the relationship they have with you?

Yeah, I'll tell you the probably the number one thing that each of them has is they have requirements around compliance. So how they are stewards of the data. And if you think about healthcare, they have what's called PHI or the protected healthcare information. And PHI or in, you know, in transactional world of finance, you know, it's PII or PCI compliance. You know, you have all these different compliances that are really required to their operating requirements for these entities. All of those come with controls. There are control objectives that need to be met in order for that data to be protected and secured. So they have these objectives to overcome what we do just by the nature of. We talked about process, we talked about facilities and operations. What we do is we help them solve for those compliance requirements. That's not just a value add. It's kind of one of our core services. Right. When you put your trust in Involta, we help you achieve your compliance requirements. That's the biggest thing, Adam. I would say the second biggest thing is really around resiliency. I think of one of our largest clients. They deliver a piece of software to hospitals, to clinicians that helps them operate their clinics and hospitals on a day in and day out basis. You're a consumer of healthcare. I'm a consumer of healthcare. If you walk into the front desk and you can't get into your appointment because their application isn't available, or if you can't get your prescription from the prescription that you need filled, I mean, that's a significant health safety impact. So we take that very seriously.

Oh yeah. And you're just talking about kind of like a sort of a scheduled appointment. I imagine the urgency going to be involved. It's got to be.

You're walking right into our world we live in. That's exactly it, Adam.

And so who in the organization are you interacting with? Is it. It's the IT person there or there are multiple people in the business. Give me a sense of your, what we call a dmu, you know, decision.

Yeah. What's interesting about that question is it's actually evolved over the last four years significantly. If I go back and I'll use kind of pre Covid and post Covid maybe as an interchangeable term here. But pre Covid we were typically dealing with a vice president of technology and infrastructure or maybe a cio. We have relationships with the CEO and the CFO as this kind of the decision making team. As you mentioned, we're helping the CFO understand the cost value benefits that we provide the CEO, we're letting him sleep at night. Right. By the resiliency and the ability and then solving problems for that CIO about how to help their team become more cohesive and not have to worry about the things that we provide. Right. We can worry on the more mission critical aspects of their business. Now post Covid, we really see a lot of engagement all the way through boards of directors. I mean, we're having presentations go all the way up past the CEO into the governing boards of these entities to really make these decisions. So we're seeing a lot more involvement, a little elongation of that sort of initial reach. And acquisition phase of the customer experience lifecycle. But yeah, it's just a different way of operating for us. You know, you're exercising different relationships. We're still interacting with the CIOs because at the end of the day, we want to help solve the challenges that they're faced with. I mean, these are real challenges of how they're bringing their technology infrastructure forward. Think about AI and the advent of that just, you know, and the exposure of that just recently on businesses. And they're trying, CIOs are trying to understand real time, how they can take advantage of these new tools that are available to them to bring their business forward. And so we're just trying to solve some of that, the back end infrastructure challenges that go along with that. So they're really our client. The decision making process really goes farther into the organization.

Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say. That we also see that it's not just the IT people, it's a business need rather than an IT need. And you know the old joke we used to say about IT managers or CIOs, where they were server huggers, you know? Yeah. It's like they cared how many servers they had on the premises. And that is completely flipped, I think. I mean, it's really, you know, now it's the ability to scale up massive computing resources on demand is really what CIOs value these days.

Yeah, you know, I mean, the CIO position in general has been elevated to the executive table. I mean, there really are, like you said, they used to be server huggers. They used to just keep, you know, the email servers going and things like that. But no longer. I mean, the technology is such an integral part of business operations now that, you know, it's almost like the electrical utility company. You just turn the switch on and you just expect it to be there.

You're right. You're right. You don't have a generator on site if you can help it. You've got to get this up, plugged in and it's more secure because you guys are managing it as a professional service rather than doing it as a side job. Well, let's flip if we can. You mentioned the word, the magical words, customer experience. So how about leading us down that path, Lukas? Tell us what you consider to, to be important to customer experience in your world and then we'll get into how you're delivering that.

Yeah, sure. So I think for us, when we think about customer experience, we think about it in every phase of how we interact with clients. And what I mean by that is it's not just the folks that are delivering the day in and day out transactional support mechanism. It's truly the entire life cycle. And in fact, last year we launched sort of a phrase. Is CX everywhere. CX isn't just in a segment or in one small population of our business. It's really CX everywhere. And when you think about it, I'll just walk you through some simple examples. When our marketing entity, our marketing organization puts out a publication, there's perceived experience from that by the viewer or the reader, whether it be on LinkedIn or social media channels of other sorts. That's an engagement with either existing clients or potential clients. So that reach phase is really important. How our legal team, you know, you think illegal. Oh, it's this back office thing. No, our legal team has a mission of trying to streamline paperwork and make sure that they're easy to work with. And, hey, let's just get on a call and solve a problem. We don't need to send red lines back and forth a million times. That's not our goal. Our goal is to be easy and efficient to work with. And then obviously all the way through our sort of that acquisition and conversion phase, and then through our retention and loyalty phase. I mean, we think about client experience even as someone walking through the front door. It might be a server hugger that's walking through the front door now to walk into the data center and they want to see their servers. For whatever reason, they have a reaction to those servers not being under their desk or wherever they were before. You got to interact with them. You got to meet them where they are, provide them an experience that is, you know, it's not a digital. This is a physical experience you're providing. Hey, do you need anything to drink? Do you need a bottle of water? Can I get you soda, cup of coffee? I mean, it's everything like that. And I'll tell you, there was a quote, and I'm blanking on it off the top of my head, and I'll remember it here through this conversation. Adam. But at one point, there was a book that I read that was talking about flowers and the importance of fresh flowers in the office as a point of liveliness. And it's so funny. I've had this conversation with several of our ops team members. And, you know, I love the ability to walk into an office and you have something living, whether it be a plant or a flower. We have these really concrete, sterile, secure. All of this technology but there's a part of humanity that we all see. And having something living that meets you and greets you is really important.

I'd settle for some of the people being in the office, I think these days. Kind of an example of something living flowers hours is on top. And I would. If that's what's going to take, I'll do it.

Yeah, that's good.

That's a really nice analogy. It's almost like to be a bit trite about it, if you're trying to sell a house, you have the smell of fresh bread they talk about. But there is something about that because things like that, details matter. They say, you know, that's a really interesting part of a customer experience. I had never thought of that in the context of a data center.

Yeah, yeah. And it's fascinating because we do a lot of our work remotely. I mean, just like this podcast. Right. I mean, we're halfway across the globe and we're connecting real time. Amazing. But we still, as humans seek to have this tangible connection. Just like you just mentioned, even seeing people in the office, it's a wonderful thing. Those relationships are important, just like our relationships with our clients are important.

So let's talk about that. I mean, you've touched on many things there, but culture seems to be one of them, picking up from what you said earlier. So let's think about how you're measuring and instilling that measurement into the CX everywhere culture that you've got.

Yeah, well, culture in and of itself is really. You know, I love this quote, and I'm going to give this one to you just a couple times here. But culture is really the sum of what you permit and what you promote. And we kind of rattle that off often because it's easy to forget it's the sum of what you permit and what you promote. So thinking about the behaviors or the interactions that you permit, it's really important as a leader in the organization to ensure that you're establishing good boundaries and guidelines for the types of behavior that you permit and then also how you promote behavior and interaction. People learn by observing, they learn by listening, they learn by reading. And the types of communications that you share and how you interact with clients is observable. And so I think for me in my position, that's really what I try to share. I try to share a culture of how we interact with clients and how we interact with each other and care for each other in the business, because that will continue to transcend through long beyond. When I'm at Delta when you and I are no longer doing podcasts, that will continue on long past us. So I do think culture is an important part. You asked an interesting question about measuring that. So for a number of years, we've measured internally our sort of employee sentiment. And just last year we converted that into an actual employee Net Promoter score. So we've actually taken it to an enps, and right now, I think just launched last week in our 2024 survey cycle. So I'll be able to report back to you about how we're performing this year as leaders in the organization, how our company feels. Last year we were an ENPS of 44, which is in the upper quartile, and we were very happy about that score as an organization.

Congratulations. And you know what? I want to dig into more of the NPS stuff right back after this break.

This podcast is sponsored by CustomerGage and they're the experience leader in the CPG market. And let me tell you why. They're contacting more people in the independent trade and modern trade than any other customer experience company out there. And you'll know the brands that they work with. We're talking Coca Cola, AB, InBev, Heineken. Just E takeaway. They're literally pulsing millions of contacts around the world in more than six 60 countries multiple times a year, delivering those insights to thousands and thousands of frontline employees in those companies. But you know, it's not just the CPG business Customer Gauge is famous for. They're ranked number one for B2B customer experience by Gartner. However, if you're in the CPG business and you have not contacted Customer Gauge to understand what is going on in your business, you're seriously missing out because we know there are other people out there just doing it once a year. Well, Customer Gauge gives you customer insights 52 weeks a year right to the front line in real time. It's going to absolutely transform your business like nothing else. But don't take our word for it. Listen to the podcast and they'll tell you exactly why.

Hey, we're back with Lukas Mistowski talking about his Net Promoter program and involt that. So, Lucas, we said we could get into this stuff. Let's get into the weeds of how you're measuring the customer experience for your customers.

Yeah, I love it. Well, I'm going to unfold a few things for you, Adam, so I hope that's okay. Really. When we think about our client sentiment, there's a few things. Obviously we're watching our revenue Growth, we're watching our churn. I mean normal business analytics, those types of things were watching from financial performance of our business. But really when I think about our client sentiment, the most important thing that we get out of measuring it is really the feedback. And I mean it's the single biggest value driver that we have from our program. Yes, we have analytics, we have informatics, the trends, the blind spot awareness, that's all good too. But for us it's really assessing that health of our relationships with our clients. It comes in the form of feedback. And so we have a multi pronged approach to receiving that feedback. And I can get into the weeds here, but we have the Net Promoter Score. We do client satisfaction surveys, our independent third party entities that help us with more industry specific and partner specific surveying. And we do product evaluations and seeking feedback on our products and services that we offer. And I think there's another thing that we do internally as well where we do a process called lessons learned or postmortems, where we have something occur and we stop, pause, think about how could we have done things differently to achieve a better outcome or a better result. So these are all feedback mechanisms for us. So when I think about the mechanics of those, Adam, I think about client satisfaction surveys. We do those through our regular support interaction tool. We have a mechanism where we ask clients that are submitting cases with us once a month. We only bug them once a month. At a maximum, we bug them once a month and ask them to give us feedback on that transaction. It's really a transactional response. How did we perform in the moment? We collate, we aggregate those scores, we get some, you know, probably what you would expect, 1 to 2% response rate, not a ton. But we do a lot of transactions. So it ends up being a volume that we can really garner information from. And we put those into a heat map view so we can understand where our scores are coming across and where we may have some blind spots. And then really doing, just recently we started doing more text analysis scoring where we're actually taking the text from the feedback and we're more codifying that and we're scoring the sentiment using some different AI technologies to say, what does this wording really tell us? So that's really interesting. Think about Net Promoter Score, right? What we leverage Net Promoter Score for is really that overall relational survey. I mean that's really what we're asking our clients, like how do you feel about us? How is the relationship doing? We operate that twice a year right now. I think our Goal is to get to quarterly so we can get closer to that real time feedback. We're inching that way. We did the first few years of launching the program. We started on an annual basis really to get our feet under us and understand how to do it. What are the processes we need to do internally? Who are we asking about the relationship? Because you know, I think. Who do we want to understand how the relationship feels from? Because it feels different to different people in our client organization.

We were talking about that. That's like, you know, people in the, in the decision making unit. It's.

That's right, yeah, yeah. So how do we survey those different levels and how do we aggregate that feedback? So we've gotten to the point where we are operating pretty effectively on a twice a year process and we've had wonderful scores over the years that we're very proud of. But I will tell you, I'll go back to this. The feedback, you know, the feedback for us is really the most important data that we take away.

Well, let me drill into that because it's great to have a net promoter school. It's a really nice thing to track. But I do agree it's what you do with it. I'm going to ask the question that many of my listeners ask about, which is how do you return value from the program? You spend money on this, you spend effort on it. It's not cheap to do these things.

Yeah.

So how do you turn it into concrete value? Tell us some examples of where you've had a win as a result of really listening to customers.

Yeah, no, it's great. I mean, I think first and foremost for us with the customer gauge platform, like what we really appreciate is that kind of close the loop mentality for us. It's a lot like all of our incoming casework that we get as a support organization anyway, so it's not all that different. So I'm proud that we have a really rapid close the loop rate because it's just part of our DNA of who we are and what we do on a regular basis. But what that does for us. I can give an example and I don't recall if it was one or two surveys ago. I feel like it was maybe two survey cycles ago. We had a client who had some very, how do I say, this? Very frank feedback. It wasn't bad, it was great. It was wonderful feedback. Literally asked two things, made two suggestions. Hey, is there a place where I could store a lunchbox and a water bottle? Because you can't bring water into the data centers, right? I mean, makes sense. You don't want water in a data center. We don't want food in there. No pictures. He just asked simply, hey, could I have a shelf or a place to place my lunchbox? Simple request. He also asked, you know what would be really helpful in the data center is just a small stepladder or a stool. Those two things, Adam, we did that day and I called the client back and I just said, listen, I mean lots of problems are very complex, right? You understand that this is not complex. We can solve this afternoon. And that was just to me, when we read those feedback, we read every single comment that's written to us. And that for example, was one where I just called the client back. They weren't a big client, but that doesn't matter. It's how you respond with the data. Those are the types of things, Adam, that I think are just are ways that we take and we modify based on what our clients perception is. One other point you brought up, that I'll stop talking for just a second and let you ask another question. But monetizing, right? Monetizing is something that everybody wants to understand how to make a return. Well, I will tell you, watching our net promoter score coupled with our churn rate over the years has really stabilized and really allowed us to not just keep a consistent churn rate, but also to drive that churn rate ever lower. I think that's a key indicator or a key performance indicator of how the program is working. But one thing you always are looking for is new top line revenue as well. So something we started instituting a little over a year ago was collecting the feedback that we get from clients where we ask them the one question, hey, would you be willing to recommend us to a business colleague? If they say yes, well, let's call them and thank them for their score. And also who might that be? Right? So it's been a great experiment. I think much like anybody else, we have to get better at tracking that through the system and how those calls go and what becomes of that. But those are the initiatives I think that make the world of difference.

Carl, first of all, I just want to give some kudos to you. I love the first story about putting a stepladder in. That's just basic brilliant.

So simple.

I know certainly other clients did that. That is what you get from customer feedback, isn't it? You know, you would, it's not obvious, people might not volunteer it, but that by the way, you should put the battery, your other customers say look, tell us out. It's a way of reinforcing that mutual feedback loop. But the other thing I'm going to touch back on is about the referrals. We call this earned growth. We're very much a follower of Fred Reicheld on this. And so I've been doing a lot of work in this. Do you know, Lucas, only 10% of companies have considered they've got a good referral program. I mean it's so rare to do this and many companies don't measure it. So I'm really pleased to hear you're doing that and I urge you to so see if you can figure out where your business comes from. By the way we worked on us, we have 70% of our businesses referred and I bet you you'd find it's a very high percentage as well with you.

So yeah, I know that we do, we do a lot of repeat business. So once a client is a client, I mean we have almost 80% of our incremental growth comes from existing client base. So that's a sentiment that they one, not only trust us with their business, but two, help us continue to expand our business through more interactions with our clients. We almost need to continue to focus on the referral portion so that we can get net new clients in so we can continue to grow the diversity of our client base. But it is wonderful. I mean, we love the relationships with our clients that we have. We truly want to help them solve their business problems. And I think that comes through in how we present and how we interact with our clients.

Well, let me just drill down. I'm just going to go a little bit further on that because the way you describe it, listening to all that feedback, acting on it. Look, I know how difficult clients find it to sometimes act on that. There's a certain fear in the organization of getting that feedback. How did you. I'm going to come back to culture again, Lucas. How did you get over that? How do you drive that welcoming of the of feedback in? I'm fascinated to hear how you might, you know, what tips you can pass on.

Yeah, well, I will be frank. I am a blue. If you're a colors, you know the personality testing. I'm an emotional and empathy type person. So that feedback, it's challenging for me to hear and to read. But you really have to have a mindset of the feedback really drives growth. Right. It's a growth mindset of if you don't hear the bad things along with the good things, you never have the opportunity to see the blind spots or really take action on the areas that you really can improve. And that's where growth comes from, is taking action on the areas where you can improve. I think Adam, that perpetuates across the organization. We have even our employee sentiment or if you go out to Glassdoor or you go out to Indeed and you see feedback, people are welcome to put anything out on the Internet that they want to. And you have to take that all in stride and look at the macro trends. What is in general, what are people saying? How can we continue to improve our services? Again, we're not perfect. Right. We never have said that we will be perfect. But it's about how you respond to those moments of difficult.

Yeah. And as you say, you have processes in the rest of the business and this is about how you can maybe improve the process. And then what about how do you then report back to your upper management? How do they deal with the information?

Yeah, yeah, great question. So we do a few things. So internally we share performance from our net promoter score, most mostly from our net promoter score. We share that internally through we do all operations calls, we do team calls through our exec team meetings. We have a process that we call education series. So every Tuesday we have a 30 minute education series is all on wildly different topics. But it's wonderful. It's just a way to continue to share knowledge across the organization on a repeated schedule. We share it on that all company calls. So we're we develop kind of our standard reporting metrics that we have. Benchmarks are really important because everybody wants to know, oh yeah, well great, we got a 60 on our network. What does that mean? Right. Shouldn't we have an 80, you know, lots of questions like that. Right. So it's important for us to use the benchmarks which we leverage from the customer gauge platform. We have almost a million surveys to compare and contrast data sets against which is in from our perspective, it's tremendously valuable to see where we are benchmarking against other people in our industry or even other industries. Our performance, our response rates. So some of the more detail metrics we more collate into our client experience group. How can we improve our performance of our survey? And then those macro KPIs is what we're sharing with the rest of the organization. Here's how we're performing, here's how we're responding and then even up to the board, you know, we're summarizing that data set into smaller graphs and more easily digestible information. But we do share that on an annual basis of how we're performing.

Right. And what's next for the program? Lukas?

So what's next for the program? So really what we identified back a number of years ago, we identified some needs in our support organization to change our structure. We've done that. We've executed on that, you know, great. You see the results in our scoring. What's next is more thinking about that client experience life cycle, that loyalty segment, you know, where it kind of wraps back around through the. And it closes that life cycle, the loyalty segment. For us. We're going to really be focused on building out that organization, that team, which will focus on specific books of business, churn management, churn reporting, retention, service quality, and interaction with clients. We're building out this program, part of that program. We had to start with how do we think about our client base and how do we build more as we scale and grow? All things can't be equal to everyone. We just don't have the resources. Right. So you have to think about how do you tier clients in a way that is like, that's logical. It's how they want to be interacted with. Well, that took us down a whole process, Adam, where we had to really re envision our product sets. So we established a whole new framework for how we develop products so that we could meet our clients where they wanted to be met while still yielding standard products. So it kind of like it snowballed into this whole thing where we had to really look at our own everything from our products up to how we interact with clients. And then most notably, and finally in that whole client lifecycle is how do we work with our major accounts and what are our major accounts? Right. So we established a major account management program last year. It's really neat. It's really in depth. I won't bore everybody with it. But, you know, you think about it just like most organizations, you have 80, you know, 70 to 80% of your revenue comes from 10 to 15% of your client base. And they just have a different level of expectation. So how do you help them? How do you continue to solve their business challenges? How do you serve them well? So we're really trying to balance all of that at the same time. Adam. I know that sounds like a lot, but that's really how we think about next steps and just improving our performance for clients.

Fantastic. And I'm going to make a note that we. We make sure that we put a cohort or a segment in your program so you can figure out different measurements for the big, large clients or smaller clients? Thank you so much for sharing the details about the program. Lucas, before we go, one of the things that caught my eye about your bio, you said you really like to give back in terms of education, so I just wanted to get back to the STEM program you run. Tell us a little about giving back.

Oh, my gosh. Okay. So all of my friends and family and people in the community will have heard me say this a million times, but I had the fortunate experience of getting introduced to a program called Starbase. Starbase Minnesota is a nonprofit entity that operates here in Minnesota with two installations, one the Minneapolis St. Paul area and then one here in Duluth. And I currently reside as our advisory board chair here in the Duluth program and sit on the. The proper board in Minneapolis St. Paul program. And this, Adam, I have to tell you, everybody that walks into the program, you and I, we would walk in and we'd go, oh, my gosh, why didn't this exist when I was a kid? I mean, that's exactly what people say. It's an immersive STEM education program that takes the students from the public or private schools that they're attending, and it brings them into this technology rich immersive experience where they're simulating missions to Mars and they're keeping. They're doing real programming on robots and rovers and they are doing. They're using real functional cad, Computer Aided Design programs. They're not like little kid versions, they're the actual version. They're learning how to do all these things. They're 3D, printing these rockets and these models, and they're running experiments. They think, the students, they think it's like a field trip. They call it a field. We're going on a field trip this week. What they don't know is they're getting immersed in these educational programs that are supporting the educators in the school systems. Like, they just don't have the resources to be able to provide this rich of an experience. So for me, it was like, jump in two feet, hands raised. This is what we need and ultimately what it feeds for the community, Adam. It's building that next generation of workforce. It's getting underrepresented youth excited about their career potentials in STEM fields. It's teaching young children that they too can have a career in engineering or biotech or pharmaceuticals, or you name it. I mean, it really is opening the eyes of our youth in this region. I'm so proud of it.

Oh, thanks for sharing that, man. That's really nice to get back in that environment. So, Lucas, our time has come here. We need to wrap it up. Thank you so much for sharing details of your program with us today and about how Involta is really succeeding in making Net Promoter part of the way that they deal with clients and also the EMPs and the other things that you shared. I really appreciate it.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. This was a great conversation.