 Thank you. So yeah, pretty much as was described. I'm Madison. I work at Venture IP Australia I am the chief business development officer that title essentially means that I overlook the sales and marketing at Venture IP Australia With that being said, I do Take part in the leadership discussions I'm a member of the leadership team at Venture IP Australia have been for a number of years and I have a pretty pretty I guess my side passion at Venture IP Australia is customer service. I really like The idea of always giving the best possible customer service and finding new ways to improve it. So by running this talk It's really just to take you through what Venture IP Australia has learned over the last five years and Specifically very briefly over the last three and a half years Since making the decision or two and a half years since specifically making the change to a 100% in-sourced local team based out of Melbourne in Victoria. So Pretty much today. I'm going to be talking about Why we made the decision to bring it all in-house? What really influenced this to make that decision? Which was to improve our customer service and quality of service that we provided And why are we focused on one major aspect of that and to improve to go on above and beyond simply bringing it in-house? And that was our staff engagement So I'll talk a little bit about staff engagement today What that means and the areas of staff engagement and how that really affected our quality of service that we can provide so unlike Gallabaris's talk specifically about outsourcing inside Australia when I say outsource I mean that Outside of Australia to specifically, you know your Philippines or India we have experienced with both and a little heads up we found them to be sub par Purely for communication issues and having problems with with the quality of service provided not necessarily for the people themselves They were lovely people and were awesome to work with it was simply that the quality of service was was not ideal So our major focuses were on improving customer satisfaction Improving staff engagement as I said and reducing customer turnover at the end of the day It's all about reducing customer turnover because if we can build a customer base and we can continue to grow So to give you a bit of an idea of why customer turnover is important It was recently found or recently estimated pretty accurately apparently that in Australia the estimated cost of customer turnover Is around a hundred and twenty two billion dollars? So you can already see that the cost of customer turnover just due to negative Experiences with an existing service provider is pretty damn high And certainly I'm sure you can all appreciate if you're in a similar industry to myself Where the services that you provide are? Integral and very very involved in the in your customers businesses and their life how they make money essentially I'm sure you understand that it only really takes a single cast a negative customer experience to burn a bridge and Especially for venture IP Australia When we have to deal with the customer, it's not because they want to chat. It's because something's going wrong So something's going wrong. I Personally believe that we need to be giving a hundred and fifty percent of our capabilities and we need to be showing that we are the Providers that they want to stay with if anything ever goes wrong again So as I said customer service and quality of service is extremely important here So to reiterate what I said about one negative experience Again similar research paper also found that it was just one negative experience when it comes to an online service provider That would see somewhere around fifty five percent of Consumers on average and I believe it gets closer to sixty percent when you look specifically at Millennials We'll go looking for another provider I say consumers will leave because at the end of the day if it is a significant problem and you've made you've exacerbated the issue I'm sure they will leave our personal experience shows that they will Because if they go looking for another provider and you either are a little bit more expensive or perhaps your Services are starting to get a bit dated. You need to upgrade your services If they find any other reason to move on to another provider, well, why wouldn't they? They've just experienced a negative and a negative experience with you So why not take a risk with someone else other than the cost of moving a service, I guess So I guess the the other part that Takes this on is that when we started to look at How can we improve that single negative experience before I talk more so about the specifics of our of our outsource team and and how insourcing fix this some of the things that That we've found have worked across a number of our businesses Certainly some if you go researching some ideas that are provided for SAS providers Specifically or anybody that provides an online service is that you can introduce automation You can also introduce regular reviews with your customers and regular reviews with your staff The other thing is that you can also improve staff engagement now One thing that we have focused heavily on is staff engagement However, what I want to highlight out of those three points is that they cost money Which means that you really want to make sure that when you're making changes that are costing money already So that is you're going to move from an Indian support team the costs about half of an Australian support team You need to find ways to improve the profitability of that team the efficiency and the efficacy of that of that team Otherwise, you're going to be doubling up on your cost because you're going to double the cost of the team And you're then going to take another step and you're going to have to introduce ways to Further improve your consumers quality of service, which is going to also cost you money so one of the things that we really focused on is What is known as? Sorry about that is what is known as staff engagement so I actually found this fact when I was building a case as to why we should be focusing on staff engagement and this was that Customer, sorry employees who are disengaged in the workplace are about 51% in America so 51% of all employees in America fall into the disengaged What that means is is that a disengaged employee is Somebody who comes in does they're nine to five with a glazed overlook and they're literally just beating the clock They don't have any real emotional connection to those who they work with they don't enjoy the environment that they're in and And they really don't feel as though what they're doing is affecting your business so To find a real connection there you need to you need to improve the environment You need to improve the whole workforce, so some of the ways that Again time with what I was just talking about is that you can introduce regular staff reviews as opposed to customer reviews You can focus on staff satisfaction as opposed to focusing on KPIs You can focus on improving a rewarding environment and also the the tools at our staff's disposal so These are things that we have taken Taken a hold of I guess and and some things that I'll briefly speak about as we move forward But I guess that the question that I get Approached with a lot when I talk about disengagement in the workplace and an anecdotally say hey You really should make your workplace fun A lot of people say well, why should we do that you're saying to me that okay 51% of us employees feel Disengaged why do I care as long as they're doing their nine to five? well recent studies have shown that highly engaged businesses Which are defined as a business that is made up of highly engaged employees Find that they are about 17% more productive on average So in this instance you can already see that by introducing a highly engaged workforce as opposed To an outsourced team that may be costing you a little bit less You're already starting to see just by introducing a a local team that work together that are building bonds that are building an Environment that they enjoy and that they feel they're a part of they're already going to inherently start to build a More effective workforce and their day-to-day is going to be more effective so You can understand that obviously by being more more involved in their work They're going to actually go above and beyond they're not going to need to have a manager That's going to be standing behind them and a manager that's going to need to be you know Tapping their watch a get off the phone or tapping there, you know get on the next ticket or get on get on that You know get into that customers wordpress by by knowing that They're having regular reviews. They're getting in noticed for their For their quality of work. They're more likely to be more productive just on an average so another Fun fact is that especially in Australia. This is significant Businesses that are highly engaged Find that they see about 41% reduced absenteeism That doesn't mean that they see 41% it like they're not getting 41% less sick days They're just finding that they're getting a significant reduced absenteeism about 40% of the time so absenteeism is essentially just Unnecessary sick leave or unnecessary absence from the workplace This has a bit of a rolling effect in that if an employee is absent And you've already got quite a tight-strung team The team is doing the absolute most that they already can they're now going to become more stressed They're going to Become disengaged they're going to find that now they've got to do if you know if you've got a team of Say five one of them leaves. They've got a they've now got to do that extra work Just because that employee is not there now This is another another fact as to why by having that reduced absenteeism You can run your team a little bit leaner you can rely on them and they can be they'll be there for one another You're not going to have someone that goes out on Sunday night goes to an after-party. Maybe or Something like that You're not going to have them just take the next day off They're more likely to come in and feel engaged and they're going to have that relationship with their work with their coworkers So they're less likely to just up and take the day off and ask or I'm I don't care what they what are what you know what they feel so the final little fact there that is more of a Less our causal and more coincidental Relationship is that in the same research paper? They found that the businesses that were highly engaged that they defined as highly engaged through their through their tests Actually, we're about 21% more likely to have a greater profitability So whilst I can't tell you why that would be other than the facts the other two facts that I've described You know things like having employees that are far more engaged and a far more likely to go above and beyond far more likely to do more and far less likely to You know to take unnecessary time off There's no there's no real reasoning for this But as a business owner, I'm sure you can appreciate that if you can if you can make more money or be more profitable Then maybe making the move to an Australian team or an all-in-house team is a little more More more reasonable when you know that you're going to be more likely to be profitable So I'll talk about Ventura IP Australia's specific situation And what we did and why we why we really got to where we were so Ventura IP Australia is one of Australia's largest domain name and web hosting providers We're a cPanel web host. We service over 150,000 customers nowadays We have a team of just over 40 in-house now with no outsourced staff. So as I mentioned we we have relied heavily on On a on a on a very strong foundation that's built around automation and ensuring that our team that our customers have a high quality of Service at all times so our infrastructure is very high quality. We ensure that our that our control panels Optimal for our customers and we listen to what our customers want and need and we we've done this since that since day one When Ventura IP Australia was founded 10 years ago The idea was to provide a high quality service in Australia at an affordable price And the idea was to show that you didn't have to go out out of Australia to get that so Just like many Companies in the ICT industry Ventura IP Australia went through a very rapid period of growth about five years in that that saw the technical requirements of And certainly customer service requirements of Ventura IP Australia Exponentially grows. So this forced us to make the decision. Do we want to hire a number of Australians or do we want to hire outsourced? Everybody else did outsourced. So we went the same route. It was cheap. It was easy. Also. We thought so we outsourced I believe many many providers still do the same thing and we introduced a Teared support strategy, which was essentially if a customer contacted us They were put through to our Indian support team as the means of first contact. They were then Escalated up on request or if the Indian support team could not handle the response The problem with this was the customer satisfaction very rapidly dropped over about an 18 month period or their abouts And we found that customer turnover was starting to to grow customer satisfaction was at an all-time low and We were getting a large number of customer complaints. So we had an escalation policy beyond that whereby a customer could then contact our management team We're finding hundreds of them coming through a month and we just simply made we simply decided as a team Something needed to change. So when we did a market review We found that as I mentioned earlier a quality of service as in our infrastructure the software surrounding it the Our male anti-malware our mail Servers everything was was at an industry standard or above our pricing was on the lowest end of the industry Which meant there could be no reason other than quality of service The customers would be leaving because we found that even no matter how hard you try some customers simply when they're a little bit angry They don't want to tell you why they're leaving. So we didn't want to bug them too much so we we came up with two real problems that were identified and the first problem was That we were having issues as I mentioned with our outsourced support We did a very thorough review found almost zero first contact resolution via emails or e-tickets And we found that our outsource training had reached a point Where it was actually easier to replace the staff member Then it was to train them and to put time in to try and retrain them Instead we would replace them and they would continue on their way by following scripts and the such purely because We had spent years trying to individually train outsource staff members and provide them with the resources necessary, but we found that the Cultural differences or the the lack of understanding of what a customer really wanted Was was just too heavily ingrained and that we simply could not train that out of them, I guess and so we we we also Located or identified a connected issue which was our local employee engagement levels were at an all-time low we had spent so much time attempting to train and and Make better the processes surrounding an outsourced team that our in-sourced team our local team Were kind of getting stuck with the the crap end of the stick so they were They were only dealing with escalations. They were only dealing with customers who were calling with a direct complaint And they were only dealing with issues that were a you know very tedious very difficult to to fix and almost every single time a customer had to As stuff about to deal with a customer. They were already 10 15 tickets in Maybe a full day of circling on on the on the help desk and they were pretty much ready to explode So our car our staff were having to deal with that end of it. So they weren't really really happy So we thought okay the first goal was to bring everything back in-house. So as I've mentioned The problem with bringing everything in-house was that it was going to cost a bit of money And then we had to find ways to to hopefully improve this It's meant that for a short period of time our in-sourced staff would have to take on a lot more workload than they were used to fortunately Spoiler it got a lot easier than it did harder, which was fantastic But to give you insight into that our over half our staff at the time, which was about 15 staff in-house back in late 2015 were technical support staff, so We we really needed to fix this quickly We also wanted to improve the management of staff. So as I mentioned very early on we wanted to introduce Staff satisfaction-based reviews that were happening on a regular basis We wanted to introduce a rewarding environment We wanted to introduce to ensure that we were hiring for the team and not just for the role So briefly mentioned that again later so To mitigate the cost Being completely forefront up front here because I believe that anyone that does go through a similar process to this will need to do something very similar and similar to some of the If you were in Adam's talk earlier today, I believe so Mick Adam What was his first name? I'm terrible with memory. Sorry guys He was talking about some of the ways that you can improve You can make money easily five ways you can easily make money next week One of the ones that he said was most difficult was re-evaluating the price of your services And that was exactly one of the first things that we did So we brought we began the planning to bring everything in-house and we actually One of the things was to improve increase our prices for by that 25% We also invested in an additional dev development team members to begin automating mundane tasks that our outsource team were doing network maintenance things like this purely because we wanted to inch we wanted to improve our local staff's satisfaction and engagement We also underwent a retraining of the entire team which involved more just touching up on Taking a step back and doing a review of how we interacted with customers and the mantra that we had with how we felt We should deal with problems And then we input introduced policies to really improve their efficiency and to tighten the expectations So the second goal was to improve their engagement levels And as I mentioned, we needed to reduce their workloads. We use the two other I guess the strategies that I just mentioned We also introduced those frequent one-on-ones as well as middle management So we found staff who were going above and beyond we introduced them into roles where they were essentially leading their own teams We found this not only empowered them and improve their engagement levels It allowed them to provide direct feedback to their staff Remembering that this is on about a scale of eight people at the time So we had about two teams and as we continue to scale we scale that out We also improved our phone support policies because as I mentioned earlier phone support was a little bit of a problem because it was just customers Screaming in our ears for 30 minutes at a time Unfortunately, it was tied in with the improving of our customer service that we were able to fix that so The results were pretty amazing and I know that I've spoken a little bit about some of the techniques that we use and a little bit about some of the Things we had to do and I've probably breezed over it so much that it sounds like we didn't really do much but When we finally did introduce the we pulled away the the outsource support team We announced the price rises. We announced the changes. We our staff would now following a new roster our customer escalations which these are the management escalations not just escalations these are the complaints went from at its peak 800 I should say this is at the time we acquired a company That didn't exactly have the greatest infrastructure and their websites got pulled apart by our anti our malware system when they got him introduced but I digress it did continue to decline and eventually went down to 200 per month I should note that these escalations at this time were purely the result of The inability of our staff to be able to fix policy driven things such as interacting with registry bodies or fixing Any other any other issues that simply are outside the scope of support in 2018? It's probably closer to about 50 so we we have doubled our customer base since this time and we have well far far far fewer Customer escalations, which is fantastic. So you can definitely see that even from a management point of view where the cost of Of our our managers the higher tier employees the higher cost employees having to deal with these problems You can already see that savings right then and there just to just to give it give you a little bit more on that profitability scale Another thing that I have been doing for years is customer survey surveys every year an annual survey that gets at least 6,000 responses. I find them to be extremely Enlightening customers sometimes come out with some pretty crazy things in 2015 one of the first surveys that I performed We had an MPS score of 13 which at the time I remember Doing an air pump. I was like, yes. Yes, we're awesome 13 is amazing because anything above zero is is considered good In 2018 at the beginning of the year We actually had a 67 which is far above the industry average and Essentially means that about 90% of our customers are essentially 100% happy with our quality of service So even from a quality of service point of view You can see that they're extremely happy Some things that I also learned from this is that 85% when we performed at 2018 survey 85% of our of our customers Responded to this survey came from another provider So that means that 85% of our customers Have heard about us through one way or another and have come to us and are still with us with the average I think life length being well the customer life cycle being something like two and a half three years So it's pretty high as well They've actually said that the quality of support the fact that we're 100% Australian and the reputation of our products Are the reasons for them moving from another provider to venture up in Australia. So This is actually, you know, this is pretty significant because we don't spend much money on marketing So we're not trying to tell people that we are a high quality provider We don't offer an affiliate service. This has built a customer base of 85% of our customers that have heard about us through a friend or family that have found a forum found a Recommendation have come to us and are still with us because of the quality of service that we provide So what I recommend from from my time going through this and I did mention them at the very beginning Some of the things that we have introduced very specifically within our workplace is That we have introduced a rewarding Outstanding a rewarding environment that really rewards outstanding performance. So this doesn't mean that we introduced KPIs This means that we find communicated Acknowledgements from customers from managers from co workers are then are then rewarded And that means that we actually introduced company-wide emails So anytime anybody does anything that is going above and beyond the entire company hears about it Which at 40 people there's a lot of emails nowadays We introduced team meetings, which means that on a team-based our entire company works on on an agile framework So every single team has a stand-up every day where people are acknowledged They're the quality service acknowledged. We then have weekly meetings for the whole company every Friday at 4 p.m We do a We do a I guess a team meeting we have we open up the bar We have some drinks for those who want to have a few drinks on a Friday afternoon We do announcements. We celebrate birthdays and we did I've got five minutes I won't I won't explain it, but we do have a wheel of fortune-style wheel that we introduced that has a lot of prizes on it That is a little bit, you know, not everyone gets one every week But it is it's an awesome way to just improve morale and first people to look forward to the end of the week to To really round out that week and and be acknowledged for their going above and beyond The next is that I highly recommend Introducing an environment that builds solid relationships So I've mentioned this a few times and what I mean by that is essentially Find ways to focus on teamwork find ways to introduce peer reviews and and to have co-workers Working with one another as opposed to a direct tiered Management style where you feel as though you're always waiting for your you know for your manager to tell you Did you meet your KPIs? Alternatively You know, you could look at the the stats the one that I didn't quote I think it was that staff who have Relationships in the office. That's not not as in friendships or people that feel that their co-workers are their friends are far less likely to To to leave the company about 45% less likely to turn over so that means that they're gonna hang around They've got a higher satisfaction and higher engagement as I've hopefully explained a little bit in this talk and overall They're more they're more satisfied in their daily work because they're working with their friends So they feel like they're coming in to to have a good time Finally, I always recommend hiring for the team and not the role. I am heavily involved in our onboarding hiring and onboarding process I'm always involved in no matter what department. We're hiring for I sit in on the first-round interview We try and have a really relaxed first-round interview and make the person feel welcome. We get to know the person I think I learn more about what they like to do in their spare time than than I do asking them specifically about the role itself I let the you know the devs or if we're hiring for for marketing I let the market is you know, we we make sure that the first-round interview is a really get to know you session And that really does play on all the factors that I've spoken about because we've found that as we've grown into a team of 40 Every single team is super engaged. They're so happy to be in the workplace They have a desire to learn they have a positive attitude and they really I think if I if you ask any employee in our in our company They would say that they they never go home feeling like oh my god I've got to come back in here again tomorrow no matter how busy it gets because we really have tried to build an engaged workforce so One last rebuttal that a lot of people that I speak to like to bring up Is chatbots and IVR's and look chatbots and IVR's are fantastic But when they go out and ask people in the street, would you like to speak to an IVR to fix your issue? 39% or would you rather clean a public toilet a dirty public toilet? 39% of respondents said that they'd rather clean the toilet So if you really are you know looking at ways to save money I'll implore you if you are looking for the long term and you want to really create an a Loyal customer base through an engaged workforce. I do recommend looking at building a a workforce to be To be bragged about in the in-house. So thanks guys appreciate it