The past few months has been transformative for myself and the business. There were a lot of lessons learned.
The self-induced pressure to meet crazy deadlines took me into deep water, in many different aspects, and I think I am finally starting to come out the other end of it all.
It has made me question why I even do what I do. It has pushed me to a point that for the first time, made me physically think I could not continue. It has probably also knocked a few more screws loose.
At the end of the day... As I take some time to reflect on the progress that was made, I have a sense of fulfillment and gratitude, that I think I strive for by doing these sorts of things.
It really is never about the money, or what you get by achieving a goal.... to me, it's who you become by achieving it.
When you focus on the process, the outcome happens.
One day, this will likely be as Ray Dalio says, "another one of those" that I had experienced over the course of my life, but today I'm going to take some time to reflect, but more importantly leave it somewhere on the internet for me to reference one day.
When people speak about their business, often we hear about the "customer experience". It seems to be the latest trend to "delight" your customers.
We do these cool things, like send out surveys or try to gather great customer testimonials.
We cite examples like Amazon, "the most customer centric" business in the world.
I think this is a great metric to track, because at the end of the day, your customers are why you are still in business.
Where I think we may sometimes be lead astray is when we fail to remember that the great reviews, NPS and CES scores are all lagging indicators of something that I think is far more important....
The employee experience.... this is the leading indicator!
How do we double down on the inputs, to get greater outputs? The EX!
Company culture, technological resources, and overall... creating a business that is not only lucrative, but enjoyable to work at!
Our company culture has always been close knit, and I'd say for the line of work we are in, our office is unique.... One thing I did strive for however, was taking a hard look at how our tools were being used and if it was set up in a way that was convenient and clear for our team to use.
These, along with many others, were questions that I asked myself as I worked to carve out this project.
This is a "roadmap" that I was using to build things out over the past few months.
“CLIENTS DO NOT COME FIRST. EMPLOYEES COME FIRST. IF YOU TAKE CARE OF YOUR EMPLOYEES, THEY WILL TAKE CARE OF THE CLIENTS.” – RICHARD BRANSON
As I had mentioned a bit earlier... we focus on the cool customer facing metrics like CES and NPS scores.... but these are lagging indicators. By the time we've received feedback from a customer, whether good or bad.... its too late!
What took me down this journey, was actually an adversity that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. One of our three team members solely focused on "production" had decided to return to university to pursue a Master's degree.
Prior to this, I was already trying recruiting and looking to add another employee, to give the three of them another set of hands to help fulfill out customers needs.
Instead, I had two weeks to figure out how an already short handed team was going to survive... with just two... and the pressure was on!
Our CES and NPS scores were steadily on the decline.. and it reminded me of the saying "more businesses die from indigestion, than from starvation". We had indigestion... but why?
I knew I had to solve this, but I couldn't figure out how just yet. I needed to analyze, and take the time to see what is really going on. I needed time, and we didn't have it. I didn't want to hire in the wrong person, but what were we going to do?
After spending a couple weeks sitting in with the team and still no clear solution, what I started to realize was a lot of the "issues" being brought up were just symptoms. I was more confused than ever. I thought the production team was short handed, and that I just needed to sit in with them to find "what sort of help" they needed.
To be fair, it's not their job to solve the problems, it's to operate in their roles. It's my job to solve the problems... and the pressure of me not knowing how, was weighing on me.
Our customers need solutions... our team needs solutions... its on me, and I didn't have the answers. The pressure was on, and I was feeling it.
One of my favorite entrepreneurs, Patrick Bet-David talks about the four speeds.... timing speed, expansion speed, processing speed, functioning speed.
So if the issues were upstream, and the symptoms were not the cause, what could I do?
I tracked the inputs... our processing speed, down to the second!
It sounds extreme, but it was really the only way that I could accomplish it. Timestamps in "Unix" format, and a method to calculate and score our service tasks was a starting point to solving our issues.
This gave me a view of where things might need my attention, a team member may be overwhelmed, or where I should invest finite time into training or coaching.
It's like I set up a health monitor on the business!
If our lagging health markers like CES and NPS were lagging.... well what are our SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs?
I created a ton of reports, and starting gathering data. It was a cool experience to be able to track these metrics, aggregate data, and use it to give me better insights.
After I got the health markers on the business situated, I knew that I could use this data to empower the team to prevent fires.
None of them really want an upset customer, or a "fire", and what I found is it's my job to cover them. This comes from gathering the data, and providing them the feedback needed to do what's right by our customers.
As I began to dive deeper, I found myself taking a hard look at our team's functioning speed and how this could be improved to create a better employee experience.
When a customer called, how many times would an employee need to click through our CRM to find a single answer? - I assumed this would create the lowest amount of stress for our customer success team.
When our production team takes a look at their next assignment, how many questions are left unanswered? - This would provide clarity for our production team to... produce.
How many different people are touching the same service task, and is it being performed closest to the source of truth? - This reduces the change of error, re-work and confusion amongst the team.
I had to boil everything down and ask myself, "Why do we do it this way?".
Taking things into First Principles thinking, made me realize that... frankly, a lot of things were done because "that's how we always did it".
This was not the right approach at all! Not if I wanted to empower our team to fulfill their maximum potential.
What I realized needed to happen was that we needed to redistribute tasks to the right people, automate what I could, put the data in places for maximum accuracy and efficiency and create a great user experience for our employees.
After thinking, creating a HUGE diagram to try and understand everything.....
and building over 150 workflows...
I got tired of putting them into my google sheets journal and lucid chart.... and kept building more! lol
At the time of writing this, I think I ended up somewhere around 220 native CRM workflows, and another 50 or so on Zapier.
As I work with the team to optimize what we do.... I continue to find more to build.... and new things I want to learn!
After working 12-16 hour days, for months without seeing any result.... managing the stress levels of myself and our team (and probably hitting a PR).... while questioning everything that I was doing....
The result, are finally starting to show... our scores are beginning to rise up again!
We were able to effectively improve our processing and functioning speeds, and improve our CX metrics, with less hands at a lower cost!
The best part is... our production team told me their job is "fifty percent less stressful now", which was HUGE to me, considering I couldn't even get five minutes of feedback from them just a few weeks ago.
It's a small step... in the right direction.. and that's what counts.
The road map is still full, and this is just the start of a series of big projects.. but for now, I ease off the gas for a little bit, and work at a more manageable pace.
Each challenge, provides me with the pressure I need to grow and seek out the answer.
But I will take some time to catch my breath before the next wave comes.... because it will come.
I think it's time that I "run down hill" for a bit, pursue a few interests, and recover a bit.
It's the closest I can to getting 99 Magic IRL and I want to be a Wizard like Dharmesh.
but more seriously... I think it's a skill that will help me level up my ability to solve our team's problems.
I'm still on console.log() and __str__() noob level... but give me time..
I'll be writing something useful soon!
"There are two kinds of companies, the ones that work to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second." - Jeff Bezos