How Effortless Office Unlocked Their Customers Voice with NPS

One of our clients came back and didn't have a great NPS score in our MPS life cycle chart in Customer Gauge, they were in our red zone, right? And they were on the, you know, they're in the 80% of our large revenue. They were a basically big customer in our red zone. And I remember the service delivery manager saying, oh, like that surprises me. Every time I talk to the manager, he's like, oh, everything's great.

Right?

And really. But his score on our MPS was not that high. And so it kind of revealed like, oh, there's. Wow. I didn't even realize that this, this client was as unhappy as they are.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Account Experience podcast. I am here as always with my co host, Ker. Say hello, Kerry.

Hello, everyone.

And today, guys, we have another fantastic customer on the podcast. We welcome Leif Cedarbloom. He is the director of CX at Epilous Office. How you doing today, life?

I'm doing great, guys. Glad to be here.

We're excited to have you. And I know just to dive right in, Kerry has this really great story about, like, our first interaction with Effortless Officen with you. So I'm going to kick it right over to Carrie to tell that story.

It's one of the unique things we're going to do here is start at this point and then tell your whole story. But it's late in December, close to the end of the year, and we get a phone call and it's like, we have a company who needs us, but there's a catch. They need us in a couple of days. And I'm thinking, okay, this is going to be interesting. And I think it was like three days we had, if I'm not mistaken, of a window. But it's like, no, they really need us to send their first survey out by, like, Wednesday of next week. It was Friday. And so of course we're like, we'll give it a shot. But I think what the question all of us are asking is, why the sense of urgency, what happened that caused someone that we've been talking to for a bit though, to say, no, no, we need you by next Wednesday. We'll put our name on that contract and we'll do it. So, Leith, that's, that's where I'm going to turn it over to you. What the hell was going on the third week of December that there was such a quick turnaround and we wanted to get you up and running so fast.

I think it became, it was the Second week of December that you guys got that call from us saying, hey, let's do this quick. And it was the third week of December, we actually got the survey out and got our results. So we have quarterly rocks how we organize our business, right? Our quarterly project goals, we call them rocks. And, you know, I had one of my rocks was to get an NPS score. And honestly, like, going into the end of the year, we didn't have the budget for this, right? So the idea of, you know, the not insignificant investment that Customer Gauge requires was just like. It wasn't in my realm of possibility. So I was literally, you know, I was in the process of. It's like Salesforce had told us you could do it with, you know, you could do customer surveys with Salesforce, and it's the old Salesforce, like, yeah, you could do it on their platform. But if you want to really do it right, you're just. You're buying another plugin much like Customer Gauge and, you know, and integrating it, right. They're a very basic tool for doing surveys, which is what they said would work, right? So I was planning on doing an MVP rollout. And that's when I got a call from our CEO saying, hey, we just got notice from one of our clients that they're leaving. You know, how did we not see this coming? And I'm asking myself, how do we not see this coming? And what it, you know, what it was was, it was a. One of our clients that was, you know, one of these kind of just quiet clients. They, you know, really hadn't been. Engagement had been low.

Right?

And the false assumption is that if engagement is low, everything's good. That's a false assumption.

Right.

As you guys know. And, you know, all of a sudden we're getting noticed that, you know, they're. They're leaving. And. And, you know, when you've got, you know, 100 plus clients, you know, the truth is the squeaky ones get the grease. And so here's a quiet one that just like kind of, you know, overnight was just like all of a sudden, you know, but that, you know, that $4,000 a month client or, you know, with a $2,000 a month clients, you know, over a year. That's, you know, that's a. That's one of our, you know, it becomes a salary of one of our tax. I mean, it's like not an insignificant amount of money. So that's kind of. It's like I had the project on my radar. The. The pain came up and the Cool thing is, our CEO is very customer experience. Like, he. I kind of introduced the language of customer experience as opposed to customer service. But he's always been white glove customer service. I mean, it's just been part of our ethos as a company. So it really came down to just. It became the right timing for. Because he came to me basically saying, how do we get ahead of this? And I had already been talking to Clark for months, knowing that I didn't have the budget, that it wasn't going to be something I could roll forward with. And I said, well, I already have a solution. And it was just, you know, it became custom gauge, made it easy. You know, there was, frankly, there was language in your guys's quote wrapper about, we guarantee it. It's like, if after you guys sign up with us, you're not totally satisfied, you don't have a certain amount of time to pull out of the contract.

Right?

So I made it very easy. It's like that in the fact that you guys basically said, hey, sure, we'll help you, right? And just that first survey, like, immediately after putting out the first survey, as soon as you see the results, the results speak for themselves, right? But it's that whole the. How do you. How do you kind of get somebody to get the results before they're actually clients? Which, you know, I hear it sounds like you guys have actually put together a little strategy like this, where it's like, hey, how can you. How can you just, like, spit out one relational survey? Because, honestly, the amount of effort that it took for Brandon to get us spun up, he was really good. He got us spun up really quick. We got these results really quick. One relational survey alone almost pays for the value of, you know, of a year's worth of service. We were already collecting a customer satisfaction score, which was really a user satisfaction score through our ticketing system. So every time somebody opens a ticket, you know, every time they open a ticket, they get a survey saying, you know, did we do good? Thumbs up, thumbs down. And we were doing really well in our customer satisfaction score. I mean, our customer Satisfaction score for 2020 was 98.2%. Very, very strong from a numbers perspective.

Right.

But it wasn't strong from a learning perspective. You know, that 1.8% of feedback, it's like, wasn't bringing us a lot of feedback.

Right.

So there wasn't a lot of learning happening from that number. It's great number to be able to put out there, but in terms of actually improving what we're Doing it wasn't really helping all that much. So the CEO approached me, basically said, hey, you know, this just happened. How do we. How do we get ahead of these in the future? And that's why I said, well, that's where we should have a more formal NPS program and we should be using a more, you know, an actual NPS software to do this so that, like, these don't hit us out of left field, you know, and the reality is, out of our, you know, 100 plus clients, you know, 100 plus active clients, it's like, what are the. What are the 20% we should be focusing on that are most at risk? We didn't have a good insight into that. And again, our customer satisfaction score, we were getting out of our tickets wasn't a good measure of that. So it was. The quickness came because this is already a rock of mine. We had our holiday party coming up in a week, and part of my goal was to present our NPS results as part of our holiday party. And I think the holiday party is actually an important element of this, of the timing, because 2020 was a. Was an interesting year for us.

All right?

So after. After essentially being cooped up in our home offices for a year, I had gone to the company and said, hey, you know, because part of my role here is not just our customer experience, but our employee experience as well. And I'd gone to the company, said, guys, you know, we always have a holiday party. Obviously, it does not make sense for us to get the entire company together in a bar in Vegas because, you know, we couldn't survive if, you know, more than a couple people were out sick all at the same time. So let's do a virtual party. And of course, everybody's like, ah, virtual party. That doesn't sound pretty cool. I was like, no, we're gonna do something cool. And I worked with. Worked with some folks to put together a party in virtual reality. We held a party in alt space. We rented headsets for the entire company and shipped people, you know, for the weekend, these VR headsets and, you know, had 50 people show up to a virtual reality party. So that was the party we had planned. And I was going to be really, you know, my. My goal was to be. Got to be able to say as part of this, like, hey, guys, you know, we have an NPS score now, and we're, you know, we're kind of. To show progress, right? Like, part of. Part of this, part of a good NPS program is just, is progress over perfection.

Right.

It's like, you know, it's not. The goal is not to get to a NPS of 100. The goal is to continually just show progress. And so I was part of kind of the emotional experience. I really wanted to end 2020 on a bang and be able to say, hey, we got our NPS score. So all of a sudden I had, I had kind of an urgency of timing, both from a. I'm trying to get this project done. We want to roll it out to the company and we could just experience this pain. So it's kind of. There was just this perfect mix of the really of our CEO being able to connect the dots and say, hey, like this is. Yeah, I don't know how we'll pay for it just yet. We'll figure it out. Let's do it. And then the other part of this is that, you know, customer gauge, the way you guys responded, it's kind of like, well, normally we don't kick people off that fast and we'll figure out how to fast track you. Yeah, we'll get you up and running. And then the other part of it was that customer gauge had almost a little bit of a tangent inside point. You know, your guys sales process and just that closing of the sales process, you guys made it really easy. It's like, hey, you know, just kind of sign the dotted line. We'll get you started, we'll get you results before you even put any money into our bank account.

Right.

And the truth is, once those results came in, there was no question of the value of this program. It was like instantly everybody understood the value because that voice of the customer, to be able actually see what customers are saying in their language, hear their pain or hear their pleasure. You know, it really, as soon as you see those results, it speaks for itself. And so it was. You have that combination of factors. And the cool part about the going back to the holiday party, we actually made a little poster in our virtual world. We put up on the wall in kind of our main lobby of our virtual space and it showed our 2019 versus 2020 stats. And for our 2019 stats, for our NPS score, I had question mark, question mark. And for 2020, we were able to put up our first NNPS score of 44. And it was just this, it was a subtle little thing. And honestly at that point, most of the people in my company didn't even know what NPS was. Right. So that was their intro to NPS is like arriving to this one, like totally. You know, we basically Popped a bunch of Evil's VR cherries and it was pretty cool. So I had to arrive and like have this VR experience for their first time and then look up on the wall and see this like custom graphic that was Effortless graphic and you know, and have that be our introduction to mps. It was cool. It was really cool. And the results of that survey, again, just like the wisdom we were getting from our CSAT engagements, that was really a user, you know, a user experience. User experience for people who are engaging with us and having issues actually using us. The learnings we were getting were just not, not even in the same ballpark as the level of learning we got from that first NPS survey.

I want to dive in. There was a lot to unpack there. But I do want to step back just one minute to help everyone understand what is Effortless Office. Tell me a little bit about what it is you guys do. And I think that will help paint a picture when we start answering these next couple of questions and where we're going with the program.

Understood. So Effortless Office is a national managed services provider. So we are essentially a, you can think of this another way, as a IT partner or outsourced IT partner. So companies hire us to do their IT for them. Now, what makes us unique in the space is both that we kind of have a national footprint and that we have essentially our own private cloud. So we have a nationally redundant private cloud, AKA like Amazon's AWS or Microsoft's Azure, where we're able to bring clients. And really the way that technology is transitioning Customer Gauge, I mean, customer Gauge is in the cloud, right? I can log into Customer Gauge from wherever I have access to a browser. That kind of ability to leverage the Internet with local operations is where we have a hybrid approach to IT that allows us to. IT just. It's kind of the new way the IT is going. There's a bunch of benefits. I mean, just, you know, for instance, you know, offsite backups, right? Where whatever data you got going on locally is being stored in the cloud somewhere. That's where we have our own private cloud. So it's really kind of our combination of the technology backbone and technology infrastructure that we invested in to be able to have this capability with our kind of boots on the ground managed services approach and further. I think the other thing that I would point to is a lot of technology companies focus on technology. We, you know, quick tech, best tech, you know, it's like cloud tech, whatever. They're focused on the technology from its Inception Effortless has always been very focused on kind of customer service. We always knew that customer service was what separated us from our competitors. In other words, we're not really selling any unique technology. We are ultimately supporting, you know, really market prevalent technologies. So our differentiator is not in so much the technology as in how we support that technology. That's been part of our DNA. And that's why our name is Effortless Office. Because in our brand we are essentially talking about our number one. My mentor in the CX world calls it do for. What is, what do we do for our clients? Right. Well, our number one do for is we make technology effortless. And so it's just, it's part of our DNA. Like CX is really, it's already part of our brand and, and it's one of the, it's one of our differentiators and it's one of the things that we'll continue to really focus on as our. As how we, as how we deliver excellent service is really. And what's cool is that as this, as our maturity in CX has grown, we've actually really gone from thinking of ourselves as a technology company to thinking ourselves as a CX company that just happens to deliver technology which is such a cool. I mean that's a huge like mental shift. But it's so cool to see happening.

I think anyone who's ever sat at their desk on day one or a new system is rolled out and you know it's not working and you call over the IT department and they treat you like, like you're a complete idiot. It's so nice to have service up front of what you guys do. And again, getting on the phone with anyone from your team or working with you guys, you feel that right out of the gate. So it sounds like there's a service culture that was already in place of what you guys are providing as a solution. Let's be honest. Nowadays everybody needs, you know.

Yeah, yeah. And I really have to give credit to our CEO. He has been, you know, it's been. He actually talks about it from the perspective of he's, he's a really smart guy and you know, he got his mcse, he's you know, basically Microsoft certified engineer. And I'm forgetting the exact, the exact. But he was an engineer. But he talks about like he got into engineering and technology and it not so much because he liked it, he liked business, he loves business and he sees how technology empowers business. So his, that's been his philosophy ever since he got started was it's really not about the technology, it's about supporting the business. And so that's one of the ways we were able to move quickly was that when, when the connection of the pain point and the solution became really tangibly, you know, when it became tangible, like, here's the pain and here's the solution. He already was bought in. That's one of the things that I've noticed in, you know, and kind of appreciating where I'm at. So in a lot of companies, the first step of customer experience is to like go try and make the case for the value spending on customer experience. You essentially having to like start from scratch, say, hey, here's why customer experience is. He already got that. So it's like, honestly, that's one of the reasons we were able to move so fast. We had already crossed that chasm of understanding the value and it was just like pain solution, bam, let's go.

And I'm kind of curious. So Leif, you talk about having that C level buy in right away, which you're 100% right. We talked to a lot of companies and that is the biggest struggle. So that is a very nice situation to have. And you talked about rolling it out very quickly to get it for the party to react to the pin, which by the way, Kerry, we need a virtual fourth of July party coming up.

Yeah, I'm already reaching out to a few companies.

Okay, good. My question is like, with such speed, right, how do you get the rest of the company on board with this? Like, I'm guessing you had sales reps that were getting feedback from certain accounts and things like that. How did you kind of manage that process?

Well, it's actually, you know, so I want to hit on that time the topic of sales reps because really, actually we haven't even rolled this out really to the, to the sales facing side, you know, the pre customer side of the experience. Yet at this point, it's all, it's all, you know, we've done two quarterly relational surveys to our client base. One of the things that makes Effortless unique is how we structure our service delivery department. So we essentially have service delivery teams where each team, as opposed to having every one of our agents have to know all 100 customers, we've broken them up. So now you know each team, each team only has to know their subset of customers, which provides for a better customer experience. So it's. Those teams are headed by a service delivery manager who are actually very high level, very skilled they're almost like virtual CIOs or virtual CTOs. They're very high level skilled folks. They are the ones who are really, I mean we've actually changed their commission structure or their kind of bonus structure to actually weigh their NPS score into this. So we've really put them in the, you know, we almost didn't need to go wide to the whole company. It's like there were a couple people that just needed to really understand this, this process, the tool and you know, to create that value. So those. So that's really where it started, was being able to roll it out to, to our service delivery managers, show them the results. You know, all of a sudden for them to be able to open up their client base. I mean, there's a quote from this, and I remember this distinctly is like one of our clients came back and didn't have a great MDS code in our MPS lifecycle chart in customer gauge. They were in our red zone, right? And, and they were, they were on the, you know, they're in the 80% of our large revenue me. They were a basically big customer in our red zone. And I remember the service delivery manager saying, oh, like that surprises me. Every time I talk to the manager, he's like, oh, everything's great.

Right?

And really. But his score on our MPS was not that high. And so it kind of revealed like, oh, there's wow. I didn't even realize that this client was as unhappy as they are. And so it's been really through our service delivery managers that that's been rolling out. But with now, you know, it's now something that's, you know, almost the leadership of our service delivery teams are being. Their NPS score is one of their top metrics that they're aiming for, for the quarter. And it's what is happening in terms of language. What this has done is it's really started to make people aware of how their little actions kind of roll up to a bigger picture. And at the same time, there's a lot more work to be done here. I mean, that's part of my next steps is really to continue marketing this knowledge internally to help people understand how every little interaction, you know, goes towards, you know, it makes a difference.

But I love that shift and you guys have already done, in my opinion, the hard part, which is shifting from opinions to data. So. And I remember this, I actually hear this a lot because we talk to you like clients like AB and Bev that have this exact same epiphany that is if you ask the sales rep how the account is, everybody's like, yeah, good. No, it's all, all solid. It's locked away. And then once you get this data flowing in, you're like, oh, wow, okay. There's actually some cracks in the foundation there. Interesting. And like you said, 80% of your revenue, if you didn't kind of get that data in, you would still be talking to that sales rep of like, how's the account going? And they would still be giving you the thumbs up. It's all okay. And I think that's, that alone is just a powerful process to go through, not just for you guys, but for many companies out there. Just not even using cg right. Like, just getting that data in versus relying on opinions of people, I think is really transformational sometimes for a lot of companies.

So I want to jump off on that topic real quick because there's a.

Guy who.

I have a lot of admiration for, a guy named W.E. deming, who is like the Godfather bringing Japanese manufacturing principles to the US and kind of lean manufacturing and whatnot. His, his. One of his, you know, basic concepts is the plan, do, act, cycle. And that's where so many of us, I mean, so many of us just do, right? Like we don't even do with a plan. So if you just start by planning and then doing it's gonna be that much better. But we fail, I mean, just across the board to do that check and act cycle, right? It's like after you've rolled it out now, let's go measure to see how it's doing and then let's revise right in that iterative design cycle. That's what the best companies in the world do. And that's where Customer Gauge has really helped us with that check and act cycle. And it's revealing some things that if we didn't have the visibility that Customer Gauge has given us, honestly I'm not sure that we'd be seeing some of those patterns. I mean, I just had a really like low hanging fruit this last survey we just did where somebody said, hey, I'm getting too many emails from you guys when I have an issue and I go to you guys, I'm getting too many emails from you guys. And you know, that's one user pointing out that issue. Well, that's. Every person who's opening a ticket is having that issue, right? The fix was so easy, made like ridiculously easy in terms of how much effort it took us to fix that pattern. But in terms of the ripple effect of what that did for our clients, I mean, it's huge roi, huge ROI from one little comment. You just never know. I mean, that's the thing is I literally go through all these comments and there's like just gem after gem after gem of insights that I just wouldn't have had otherwise. We wouldn't have had otherwise.

But I like the contrast also that you made from earlier, where in the satisfaction score we look like rock stars sitting at 98, and now we roll out this relationship component and there's this whole gap of you're not hearing from anyone. There's like this absence of signal. Fast forward it now to, like, you're getting feedback that you wouldn't have gotten from a satisfaction score, and you're getting all these little nuggets that you can act on. I love that contrast and that difference. And. And who in the hell in this world celebrates going from a perception of a 98 perfect score to a 44 your first time out? And everyone's like, cheering. I love that. So it's real, actionable data, which I think is just an amazing part to hear from you. So let me put this in perspective for a lot of the listeners, too. Most companies come to us, and it takes us as long as it took you to roll out two relationship surveys, usually to get to their first. And you guys have just recently gone with your second relationship survey. So what have you learned? What was the difference between the first and the second one?

Our first survey, just, you know, the data. Our first survey, we came back with a score of 44 and a. An engagement or a response rate of 11%, which, according to Brandon, who, by the way, shout out to Brandon, he's been amazing. Um, you know, Brandon was like, hey, this is actually, you know, like, these are pretty darn good scores, guys. Like, for your first time out, like, this is, you know, this is not too shabby.

And.

And so just the data there, 44 and 11% response rate. On the second one, we came back with a 52 and a 10% response rate. So, you know, what did we learn again? It's like some of those little insights that. What ends up happening, I think, is that at some point, you know, one from kind of comparing it to our old process of the customer satisfaction score survey, right? Like, that happens after every ticket. So in some ways I think people get, you know, like, fatigue, and they just stop, you know, they just stop inputting. And I think it's also that there's a, you know, part of it is that if you look at it from the in, you know, from a customer journey perspective.

Right.

That one issue that I open. So I, it's Monday morning, I open up my computer, something is right. I, I call up effortless and say, hey, I need your help. You know, we've really, really talented agents. Agent fix the problem. Like, awesome. I'm stoked that the problem was fixed. Issue is that problem keeps happening, you know, over a couple weeks. Like, so maybe they've had to call in for the same issue three weeks out of the, you know, out of a month.

Right.

So each touch is a good experience. And the customer saying, hey, thank you, agents. I really appreciate the agents, but really underneath it, they're like the man. I'm frustrated that I have to keep, you know, coming to you guys. There's just a, there's. There's a difference almost between the relational, the quarterly, like the mentality of somebody filling out the survey, besides the fact that the survey format is different and kind of encourages, encourages, you know, both the potentially the drivers of why the score as well as the open comments. But I think it's just for whatever reason, we got more constructive feedback during the quarterly than we were getting from our, from our csat. So, you know, what has it, what has it kind of driven and what have we learned? So one of the cool things is that, you know, now we had NPS's per team. So we set up, you know, we did our survey, we made it so that, you know, we are. We could segment our results by our service delivery teams. And so it was very interesting to see, you know, we had one team, one of our teams, our first quarter came back with an MPS of 71 and like, very, you know, statistically significant results means that they just crushed it on their first survey. One of our teams came back with an NPS of zero.

Right?

Like, not, not where we want them to be. And I think that's another thing that kind of. We really hadn't even our lowest team was still at a, like a very high customer satisfaction score. But then they came back with a much lower score during the nps. And, and there's a couple reasons, I think, again, because one, you have the individual interaction. An individual interaction is help, you know, dealt with. Well, you want to give that, you know, agent thumbs up. You know, it's almost like, you know, the agent is being, you know, ranked on this. You know, you're going to be calling the agent again next week. You want to give them a thumbs up because you might need their help again. But that's where the quarterly kind of reveals some of that. Like the interaction was good, but guys, I'm having to call you too often. And that's been one of our pieces of feedback, right? It's like, hey, like there's, there's almost like underlying things that we got to look at these patterns. But here's the other thing I think is really important to point out. We just had a client come back, actually our lowest scoring team. So in terms of our difference between 44 and 52, all of our teams showed improvements from last quarter to this quarter. And frankly part of that is just straight, straight up saying you're being, you know, you're now being ranked on these kinds of things and you should be paying attention to these kinds of things.

Right?

And so I think just purely the awareness that like this is something that they're going to be, you know, that is going to be going out at the end of the quarter and they're going to be getting ranked on I think was, you know, a part of it. But, but our lowest ranked team, really interesting insight in this last, this last iteration, you know, they went from a zero to a 10. So we're seeing positive direction, right? It's like progress, not perfection. But one of the interesting data points is that when we segregated the results by our job level, AKA our sponsors, you know, it's kind of the sponsors, the VIPs to our customers, aka our managers, kind of frontline. I'm using ITIL terms, which are, you know, computer terms, technology terms. So you've got your sponsor, the person who's paying for it, your manager, the person who's actually kind of responsible for the consumption of services, making people using the services properly your, you know, IT manager. And then you've got your end users for this low scoring team. We, we looked at, okay, well how did we do for, you know, with sponsors versus the managers versus the, you know, end users. And a very interesting thing came back. You know, our end users had a NPS of like 37. You know, it's actually not that bad. But our managers and our sponsors, you know, had a much lower score, essentially offsetting that score. So there's, it reveals to us partly that we have a perception issue. We're not doing a good enough job letting them know how good of a job we're doing.

Right.

And they don't honestly have the internal, you know, it's like in some ways we need to help close that gap for them and show them the data. This happened with one of our clients One of our clients that end of 2020 was like really kind of on fire, unhappy. The very, very high needs client. I'll just put like that and 2021 quarter one. We really have put a lot of effort into getting them stable, making them happy. And the, again, the manager there, the person who's really responsible, spearheading, spearheading on their end has been, you know, kind of focused on the negative. And there's I think a little bit of just maybe a personality thing there where it's just like that's, you know, you're kind of a glasses half full or glasses half empty kind of person. And that's just the way the world and human experience is, right? And I think maybe, you know, maybe she's focused more on the negative. Well, when we actually got our results, the score for that client was like a 55. It was really very positive. Especially kind of given where they were coming to their old IT experience compared to coming to us, the older IT experience of just, you know, kind of fire after fire, fire. So for us to be able to now go to that manager who's been, you know, who's been again, maybe a little more focused on kind of what was working than what was working and be able to say, hey, by the way, though your users really think this is working. We do a quarterly business review with all of our clients. I just got word from the service delivery manager just this week. He did his service, you know, he did his quarterly review with that client. That client came back and we were able to present these results. And that manager, who has been, you know, a little challenging, came back, was like so stoked on, you know, on, on the QBR process, seeing this data, knowing or collecting data at this level. It's like all of a sudden her perception shifted as to how well we're doing because we had the data to say, hey, this is not opinion based anymore. This is, you know, this is now fact. So another, another quote by the Guy Deming that I really love is he said, in God we trust all others bring data. And that's what we're doing. That's what we're doing.

Something tells me it's not the last time we're going to talk to you. I think we're going to be talking to you really soon again to hear where you're at. But I do want to ask this question because you're still kind of new, not only the customer gauge, but this new program. And I'm sure there's a lot of plans, but I Guess everyone's curious, what next? Where do you go now you've done your second relationship survey, you're getting comfortable with the tool and you're seeing the value in it. Where does Effortless Office go next?

Sure. At this point we've been doing our quarterly relationals. Just those alone have really yielded such value. Where we are going next is really getting this tied into some automation. So we recently invested in Salesforce and Salesforce is, you know, it's a, it's not an insignificant undertaking in terms of, you know, what it takes to get that set up and whatnot. And as we are looking at essentially having customer gauge be able to, you know, directly pull that data out of Salesforce as opposed to us kind of manually uploading data right now we realize that we have to go back to our business process. Like basically there's places where our business process needs to be re engineered. Once we've outlined those business processes on paper, kind of again, done the plan and we'll actually implement that in Salesforce so that now, now our customer journey has kind of some more automation in terms of, you know, they're at this step, these are the tasks that get created, you get moved to this step, these are the tasks get created, etc. So our goal now is to really hone in on the, the process of onboarding. So you know, when a client comes on board, you know, there's a intense, you know, one to three month, you know, transferring of their, you know, a migration, basically taking their kind of old solution and bringing it into, you know, bringing it, us getting our arms around bringing it to our environment. And that process is something we really want to go, we want to look at in detail. So at this point we are looking to put in some transactional touch points that corresponds to our onboarding process and really get a sense of right after the sales process, right after the client kickoff call, how are we doing right out the gate, how are we doing? And that's going to give us kind of a reflection looking backwards on the whole sales process. And it's to help us know, you know, right off the bat because it's kind of like in a metaphor is if you're one or two degrees off at first, you don't notice that it's not, you don't have enough distance to notice that being off, right? But at 2 degrees off after, you know, a while, then you're a, you know, big distance off. And so our ability to like touch in right at the beginning and say, hey, are we, you know, Are we totally in alignment and begin to fix things? If there's not perfect alignment right up front now we can kind of tweak it and fix it right then. And, you know, so just really focusing in on our customer onboarding process is where we are in for next.

I think that's smart. Carrie actually had a quote, was it last week, Carrie, that you said something along the lines of churn. Whether it be employee or customer happens, you know, within the first piece of onboarding, it's. It's basically sets the tone for the entire relationship. So I think focusing on that onboarding piece is really smart and I think transactional touch points throughout the process. It's going to provide a ton of data for you guys to pour through, which will be really interesting, I'm sure.

So that gets us the data.

Right.

But the other part of it is the internal marketing of the data to my employees so that they understand.

Right.

And the great part about this is I now have data for our voice of a customer program because I have all these quotes. And so that's. The other part of this is continuing to really systematize this into our culture such that our employees really. There's something about hearing it from the perspective, you know, through a customer's language that really makes it tangible. So that's the other part of this is just continuing to like integrate internally market this through a voice of the customer program and really through understanding our customer journey, our customer life cycle, etc. I'm passionate about this stuff. Like, I think this is just like such cool, you know. Yeah, I mean that's honestly the title Director of CX is like I gave myself that title. I'm doing so many other things. But that's where I said, like, this is what's important to us as a company and that's where I want to be in future. What's awesome is that this data also is, you know, just as a little side story, maybe it's a plant, a seed for a future topic. We committed in 2020. I mean, when this whole. When this whole pandemic hit, our technology, you know, our technology allows people to work from anywhere, log into their computer securely from anywhere. So not only were we as a company able to essentially snap our fingers when Vegas came back was like, hey, we're closing down. As soon as we got news that that happened, we snapped our fingers, said, okay, everybody works from home tomorrow. And it went off without a hitch, like, no, no issues. And all of our clients, you know, all of our clients got to benefit from that same, you know, that same thing. Well, it, we, it became. So we proved as a company we could continue working through a remote work, you know, through a remote work setup. And we actually made a commitment as a company to continue with our remote work. You know, I mean, frankly, you get rid of a giant office building and you downsize it to a kind of an executive office and empower everybody to work from home. We were able to do that and we were able to make that commitment as a company because we have this data. We didn't have this data. There's the, you know, there's the old mentality as a company of like, I could tell people are working because they're in their seats, right. But once you have this data and you just are holding people accountable for results, we actually get to empower this, like this revolution of remote work that I am equally passionate about. So Plagia story for another time. Plenty to see for another time.

Exciting to hear your story. And like I said, I think this is the first installment of multiple times we're going to meet with you and be able to tell your story.

I'd love to be able to report progress, you know, holds me accountable.

There you go. We'll have you back for sure.

You guys are. You guys are partners in my success.

So, Leif, thank you so much for joining us again. Leif is the director of CX at Effortless Office. What an amazing story. Again, I hope you guys got as much value as we do out of these, these stories. Guys, thank you for listening. Leif, thanks again for being here. And we'll, we'll talk to everybody soon.

Appreciate it. Appreciate the opportunity, guys. And really, I'm, I'm stoked for what Customer Gauge is doing for us, so.