How This Account Executive Transformed Service Delivery by Insisting on High Standards

Mhm. Well, I think I want to talk about, and this is one where I actually stretched a little bit outside of my traditional roles and responsibilities. This was in late 2020. Um, at that point I was a director and in that capacity had responsibility for, uh, an oversight into the Global sales strategy and specifically was working in Indonesia and Cameroon to figure out the sales strategy there. However, this particular project. Doesn't necessarily have to do with sales. What it does have to do with is the process which comes directly after sales. So, in 2020, what we were finding is that the deployments for our customers was taking longer than expected. Um, so our target from when a customer signs their contract and is through the sales process to when they're live using our application up and running. We were targeting 4 weeks for that, and that was what management, um, who was responsible for that service delivery process, which is what we called it, and also senior levels up to the CEO had identified as being the target we wanted to hit. What was causing, what caused a little bit of concern, first for me and then from other, or rather from the whole team and what got me originally interested in it, um, was that we were taking on average about 20 to 30% over that uh 4 week target. So it'd take 5 weeks sometimes, but there would be also cases where of course it would take much, much longer than that. So Of course this was affecting the sales team because we would get people signed up. But they would be much longer to, it would take much longer for them to produce revenue than we were expecting. That was hurting the sales team because of course the sales team's bonuses, commissions are based off of revenue generated, not revenue books, um, or revenue collected, not generated. So What I then did is stepped over and started working with the service delivery team, and we started by looking at what their current process was and and how they ended up with this 4 week target. And what they were looking at doing is How can we How can we work? Well, I'll pause or step back here. The reason that they had identified that we were going over that 4 week target is because they were having significant challenges getting the proper data from the customers which would then allow them to deploy our customers onto the system, and I can go into what kind of data that is if you'd like,

So, a financial institution has customers, they have loans, and they have deposit products, and all of, there's a bunch of data associated with all of that. In order to get them up and running on our core banking system, we had to get that data pulled out of their core banking system and then uploaded. That part of getting it out of their core banking system is what was taking a lot of time, efforts, um, and slowing people down. OK. That's clear, yep. Cool. So, what they were, the service delivery team was looking at. was how do we help solve this problem, where, you know, getting the data for our customers is such a challenge. That, that line of inquiry probably would have brought us down back around that 4 week target. And this is now, I wanted to take a different approach to it, and we ultimately did take a different approach, and this is where I would come back to the wouldn't compromise component of your question. Instead of looking at that 4 week target and looking at the process of pulling data out of their system, But I wanted the service delivery team to do. was to start to break down. That data set and the data that they needed. Into those three constituent components. So I just listed loans, members, and deposits. Those are the three big groups. Um. And by what I wanted the service delivery team to do is break it down into those 3 groups and see if you can get the data out of our customer system in those 3. Tranches or layers, if you will. They, they actually, to their credit, jumped all over the idea and helped me to push it, um. And ultimately, what we settled on is the realization that getting the member data or the cus consumer data and the deposit data is actually quite easy. You can get that data out of their software. In a matter of a week or less. What that then allows you to do is you can upload just that part of the data, and you can get the customers training using the application moving forward with that limited set of data, while you wait for the hardest parts, the loan data, to come out of the system and to get uploaded. Because you could do that, you could then start to move and work in parallel between the data migration process and the customer training process. Because of that, we actually not only were able to meet that 4 week target for deployment on average, we actually brought that down to about 2, 2.5 weeks as the new average and then the new target. So that's transition or that. New, not compromising approach, saved us up to 50% on our deployment times and got us into revenue 50% faster.

Sure, so maybe in terms of revenue, I'll address that part first. The impact is not so significant. So our pricing model is a subscription. Uh, service fee, and it's monthly. So basically, as soon as you start using, that is the first state that you're billed, but because it's a monthly subscription fee, you're right, 1 to 1.5 weeks doesn't make a huge impact in terms of revenue. Where that did make a big impact is on the service delivery team's ability to scale out and and scale their process. The service delivery team was able to take on, on a per person basis, more cooperatives and handle them more efficiently as a result of this, so they became less of a bottleneck in the process. Ultimately that means you don't have to hire nearly so many service delivery people. In addition, from a customer relationship perspective, and sadly I don't have say a customer satisfaction survey to back this answer up or back this part of it up. You were able to get them up and running on the software significantly faster, and as a result, customer satisfaction went up. It was a big win.

Am I surprised that we were able to bring it from, say, again, 4 weeks down to 2? Well, I suppose the answer has to be yes, um, because It is a little bit odd that You know, somebody coming in whose domain is not the service delivery deployment process, comes in and finds a solution like this. It, that is in and of itself, a bit surprising just on its face, um. In terms of Two weeks itself as an outcome, just taken on its face. I think that that's perhaps not so surprising. If anything, 4 weeks maybe would have, if you were just thinking about this intuitively. Our customers, I should say, are small institutions that don't have, you know, terabytes of data. They have gigabytes of data or metabytes sometimes, megabytes, I believe it is, not metabytes. Um, and so the process of going through this data migration process and the training really doesn't seem as though it should be taking that long, um. So from that perspective, intuitively, 2 weeks seems about right, um. So, yes, I'm surprised that I was the one who found it, but no, 2 weeks is not a surprising number.