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🎙 Welcome to Rarified Air: Stories of Inspired Service, a podcast that takes you on a journey into the DNA of InterSystems. I will be your guide as we explore how our unparalleled commitment to customer service fuels limitless human potential.
🤝 Join us as we dive into the culture of InterSystems and share the stories of the people who make it all possible - our customers, partners, and employees. From helping healthcare providers improve patient outcomes to powering the world’s most important institutions, we’ll show you how our dedication to customer service excellence is in rarified air.
Welcome to rarefied air, stories of inspired service. In today's episode, John shares his insights on scaling up high touch support, the importance of automation, and how being proactive unlocks great customer relationships. Here's John.
John Paladino:So we had a customer in the Middle East, in, Dubai, and they're a small customer compared to others in the region, but they were calling us 5 times more than our biggest customer in the region. And we took the time to really understand what the calls were about. Now it wasn't really about the specific of the request. They call us and ask us to help them with a report. They ask us to help with data migration or importing data.
John Paladino:It seemed to be all over the place. I sent a team in to talk to the customer, put everything on the table, and understand from their point of view what was happening, and it turned out to be very simple. In the Middle East, there's a lot of competition for talent. In this case, it's nurses and doctors. And they had a high degree of turnover because they were one of the smaller systems.
John Paladino:So people were leaving and going to some of the other third competitors in the region who were calling us less. So all the experienced people that knew our product were going other places. We had a training issue. It wasn't super complicated. And understanding that they had a challenge with continuous training, we're not gonna solve their attrition issues.
John Paladino:We're gonna have to help them onboard new people and get them get them up to speed as fast as possible and give them the ongoing in-depth knowledge they need to do their job effectively. So we started rotating support staff through on a weekly basis, and we still do today. That drove down the volume of requests significantly. And they dropped down well below the biggest customer. They drop down to where they should be for a customer their size.
John Paladino:So it's extra effort on our part. It's a customer need. It's an ongoing need. But it's an example of how we get ahead of the game and reduce the support workload. So it's interesting because the manager the support manager who reports up to me in the region was working on budgets at the time, and he was projecting that he needed essentially double the headcount to be able to deal with volume, with new customers coming on board, with demanding customers like the small customer I mentioned.
John Paladino:And I said, no. We're not gonna double the size of support. I wanna understand what's driving the volume. And that started these interesting discussions, including the small customer. By driving their volume down, we didn't have to go out and hire as many people.
John Paladino:Before I started, it was just Terry and Charles. A real startup situation. When I joined, I think I was the 3rd support person. The company had 17 people at the time. Today, the company has about 2,000 employees worldwide.
John Paladino:We have many hundreds of people in support, and we didn't grow overnight. In terms of hiring people, we're pretty picky in terms of bringing new people in. If I have a need for 20 people, I'm gonna find the best 20 people I can. If that takes longer, that's okay. Our attitude may be different than other companies.
John Paladino:If I need 20 people, I don't need them in seats in 2 weeks. I would like to hire the best. And if it takes longer, I'm quite okay with that. And in terms of hiring top talent, I think we're gonna have this on another podcast. But just to quickly summarize it, we look for people with a high degree of initiative, really smart people, high degree of aptitude, people who are passionate, have a high degree of energy, and professional enough to impress a customer.
John Paladino:Yeah. And it's harder to get into intersystems than it is to get into MIT. We had a smaller scale up. If you're building a call center, that's totally different than level 2 and level 3 support, which is what we do. So just to clarify for listeners, level 1 would be more like help desk.
John Paladino:I forgot my password. I need some help. I need help with the printer, that type of thing. Level 2 is more solution support, supporting an application. There's something in a viewer piece of data should be there.
John Paladino:It's not there. Can you help me figure out why? And 3rd level support, I mean, it's more like back line engineering level support. So 3rd line is actually shoulder to shoulder with development conceptually. So they tend to be engineers that can do really deep investigations.
John Paladino:They can fix bugs. They can advocate for customers in terms of features and how things are working. But level 3 is what we started with, engineering level support. Today, we have level 2 and level 3 because we have some solutions, health care solutions that we support around the world, and we have level 3 for all products. For a couple of customers, we do level 1 as a service, but I'd say that's really not the core of what we've done historically.
John Paladino:And level 1 support's probably not the thing we're gonna offer for a lot for our customers in the future. They all tend to have their own level one support. So the way we've scaled up level 3 support, was through a few different principles. One was automate as much as you can. The whole idea is to free people up to do more.
John Paladino:We've also hired new people in. I'm gonna go into each of these in a little bit more detail. And then we've looked at reasons people contact support in the first place and try to address that. People call level 3 support typically when something's not working right, and that's not good. To the extent, we could help avoid that by making everything work correctly.
John Paladino:Or if there is a problem, help have it self diagnosed or self heal. Those are all good things. But it's not just hiring people in. You have to do the other two things too. Automation and understanding what you can do to prevent issues from coming in.
John Paladino:So there's a 4th one that support organizations know about. Not all of our listeners might, so I'm just gonna mention it for background, which is called deflection. Deflect people to documentation. Deflect people to some other resource other than a human being. Go to the website.
John Paladino:Go take this class. Go look here on the documentation. Go to a knowledge base. So the deflection approach is one that a lot of organizations use to reduce the human support workload. I'm not gonna talk too much about that because, frankly, I'd rather have them speak to a human being than have to go to another resource.
John Paladino:But those other resources have to be there because sometimes customers will choose to go there first. If I look at my children, they'd rather not talk to a human being. They'd rather find an answer on their cell phone. That's okay. Those digital resources need to be there too.
John Paladino:Automation. I continue to invest more and more each year in automation, not just in product support, but in release engineering where we build products, in development processes, in corporate IT, in product quality, I would be happy to pay for more automation so that I don't need an army of people to do work that they consider boring. I think automation is absolutely key in order to scale up. And you have to focus on where the automation really counts the most. You can't automate everything.
John Paladino:But where it's going to save a lot of people a lot of time, that would be a high priority. So you have to be cognizant of what's happening within your client base too. If you're going to be able to stay ahead of it and avoid overscaling, you have to really be on top of these things. Maybe it's unique to InterSystems, I'm not quite sure. But one other thing we've done in terms of scaling up is being ahead of the need to scale up.
John Paladino:I forget when it was. It was, I don't know, 20 years ago. The director of support came in my office to complain about recruitment. Recruitment's not bringing in enough people. And I said, what do you mean?
John Paladino:We had a long talk about it. And I realized, a couple of things. One is I need to spend more time and more focus and make it a priority to bring in top talent, bring in good people. But the second thing I realized is we should never be on our back, never be on our heels when it comes to being sufficiently staffed for support. One of the nice things here is people are allowed to move around the company.
John Paladino:If there's somebody who works for me in support and they wanna move into sales engineering, I can't stop them, and I think that's a great thing. The director of support freaks out every time it happens. But the internal attrition is very low in terms of people leaving the company. But if you look at it in terms of transfers within the company, it's pretty high. So I went to the CEO, Terry, and sat down and said, I know we've been through the budget, and we're gonna budget again for next year.
John Paladino:But I think to do a better job, be more responsive to customers, and to be in a position where we're always ahead. I wanna overstaff essentially, and I wanna overstaff by 20%. Now being a privately held company, it's a lot easier conversation than other companies, I'm sure. But we agreed. Just in that one conversation, I had permission to go out and overstaff by we ended up at about 15% overstaffing, and that allowed the internal attrition to happen without having really an impact on customers.
John Paladino:So that was an important lesson learned, an epiphany for me in terms of how to scale up. By doing those things, for the last 20 years, our support volume, I'm talking about our level 3 support volume, has been absolutely flat. Now, I've added people and I've had to add people because the complexity of the environments we work in continues to increase. So that has an impact on staffing. Our products have become much richer in terms of functionality.
John Paladino:Of course, that affects complexity. The solutions that people are building now include things like machine learning, multi languages, including Python. That adds to complexity. So the complexity factor has really been what's pulled us up in terms of the need for hiring more people. What's made it easier for us to avoid the need for scaling up has been offering a managed service.
John Paladino:We've been doing hosting since 2007. We offer services in the cloud where we operate the environments that people are using. And a lot of our customers are moving to that at an increasing pace. It's really accelerating. You would think that requires more support, and it does in terms of operating those environments.
John Paladino:But in terms of product support, it doesn't because all these environments are deployed in a very consistent manner. There's a lot of operational reporting to understand issues that might be developing. A disk is gonna get full, simple example, and allows us to react before anything bad actually happens. So having that consistency and that higher level of service and taking that off the shoulders of the customer allows us to operate more consistently and therefore avoid more issues that require level 3 support.
Female Narrator:Thanks for listening today. If you have any questions or wanna hear from a specific guest, email us anytime at inspired service at inner systems dot com. And when you're ready to unlock the potential of your data and experience the transformative power of support done differently, go to innersystems.com.