Unleashing The Power Of Military Spouse Talent | Liza Rodewald & Erica McMannes

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #242 we welcomed Liza Rodewald, Founder & CEO and Erica McMannes, Founder & Chief People & Community Officer at Instant Teams based in Southern Pines, North Carolina.

Instant Teams leads the way as a CX talent marketplace committed to the financial well-being of military families while providing companies instant access to remarkable talent.

Liza Rodewald is the Founder and CEO of Instant Teams, a CX marketplace that connects companies with military spouse talent. She is a 4x entrepreneur and software engineer with over 16 years of technical experience. 

Erica has been a leader in the military community for more than two decades, holding various roles within the Department of Defense and private sector. In 2016, Erica founded Instant Teams with Liza Rodewald. 

In this episode, Liza, Erica and Adrian chat through the Four CX Pillars: Team, Tools, Process & Feedback. Plus share some of the ideas that their team thinks through on a daily basis to build world class customer & marketing focused experiences.

**Episode #242 Highlight Reel:**

1. Leveraging the power of USA military spouses living across the globe
2. Building a market place of CX talent & coverage across a variety of industries
3. Integrating with customer tech-stacks & building customized playbooks
4. Providing a whole new approach to BPO offerings 
5. Using employee feedback as fuel to drive innovation & customer success

Click here to learn more about Liza Rodewald

Click here to learn more about Erica McMannes

Click here to learn more about Instant Teams

Huge thanks to Liza & Erica for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring their work and efforts in pushing the marketing, customer experience & customer success space into the future.

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Transcript

CXChronicles Podcast 242 featuring Instant Teams

Adrian (00:00:00) - All right, guys, thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CX Chronicles podcast. I'm super excited for today's show, guys. We have two awesome guests joining us from a super, super cool company called Instant Teams. Erica McManus and Liza Rodwald, welcome to the CX Chronicles. 

Erica (00:00:24) - Thanks. We're excited to be here. 

Adrian (00:00:27) - So guys, number one, super cool company that you built, awesome team that you're building in just such a needed space for so many companies to be able to have another outlet or another partner or another resource during times of peak or during times of when things get crazy out of nowhere and it's hard to grow a team or expand a team. I would love for both of you guys, number one, before we even get into all the pillars and all that, let's do some basic, some quick introductions. 

Adrian (00:00:53) - But how did you guys kind of even think about starting a company like Instant Teams or how did you find a space or how did you find this idea of being able to leverage all of the incredible military spouses that are across the world to be able to bring this team of people together that can help all these different companies? I'd love to just kind of start off with understanding how the two of you sort of even realized that this was a space in the world that you could kind of build and start crafting. 

Liza (00:01:21) - Yeah, I'm happy to kick us off there. Erica and I both are military spouses. So that is our identity inside of the community and the brand and how we, you know, approached it from the very beginning. So we both have different backgrounds. I actually have a background in technology and became a military spouse myself. And every spouse I would meet would say, like, you know, how are you working from home? How are you maintaining your career? How can you help? And so Erica and I met along that path and journey. 

Liza (00:01:52) - And so we really had a desire to help the military spouses find remote work and be able to maintain their careers as they moved, oftentimes every two to three years. When I became a military spouse, I moved six times, seven years. 

Adrian (00:02:05) - Wait, Liz, where were you? What were a couple of your leading spots? 

Liza (00:02:09) - So Clarksville, Tennessee was our first spot. So Fort Campbell, right in Tennessee, Kentucky line. And then we went all over the place. So I've been up to Fort Drum. I've been down, which is in upstate New York. I've been down in Florida, Hawaii, Virginia, North Carolina, all in between. 

Adrian (00:02:25) - That's amazing. It's one of the benefits too, guys, like of just being able, like, this is a group of people that literally gets to see the world, our entire country. They get to live in different places and get to know different regions, different people. Like that's a major benefit for building an army of CXers that can take care of customers and manage customer relations on a daily basis. 

Liza (00:02:44) - Yes. And we didn't realize that at first, right? So we started off to solve the problem of, you know, giving the military spouses jobs. 

Erica (00:02:50) - And then once we started working with employers, we realized exactly what you just said. 

Liza (00:02:54) - There are high levels of empathy, resiliency, multiple languages spoken, US citizens located in every time zone. And so that natural fit into CX just started evolving before Erica and I really even knew what CX was. And we were building in that space. And that's what we realized, okay, this is the product market fit here. And this is what we can scale. 

Adrian (00:03:14) - That's super cool. That's super cool. Erica, why don't you give me some like a quick sense of sort of like how you and Liza kind of met and how you kind of, some of the stepping stones for how you got involved in this or wanted to kind of help with building out the team. 

Erica (00:03:29) - Yeah, along my military spouse journey. So I moved 14 times in 23 years. So I won't give you that list. It'll take up the whole podcast. But, you know, that's a challenge to build a career and stay in a career. So we ended up actually out in Monterey, California for a bit of time. And, you know, it's kind of the bed of Silicon Valley down there at the bottom. And I was introduced to veteran startups. So people who got out of the military were in Silicon Valley, you know, building companies. And this was back in 2011. 

Erica (00:03:58) - And just found it fascinating that you could have an idea and a passion for something and build a business. I have a background in business. I have human ecology degrees. But I just took that opportunity and like worked with that company and learned in real time. And I was building pods of military spouses for companies who were looking to take products into market or into communities, because I knew people in every location across the U.S. was also looking for work. 

Erica (00:04:22) - So it was a model I did for a couple of like different venture firms and portfolio companies till I just was kind of like, there's like a scalable model here. Like if I can do this as one person, like what would a business look like? How could we scale this? How could we make bigger impact? And I had met Liza along the way. She was like the only other military spouse I knew at the time that was kind of in the startup space, was a software engineer, kind of had that tech interest. And so I just, we met online. I pitched her the idea online. 

Erica (00:04:50) - So we've stayed very true to our remote work nature over the past eight years. And she was really passionate about it too. She's always been passionate about women in business and women in tech. And it was just a really cool opportunity for us to say, all right, let's try this. And literally within three days of like, hey, Liza, I have an idea. We were working on a branding palette, what an MVP would look like, how we could launch it. 

Erica (00:05:13) - Yeah. 

Erica (00:05:13) - And it's just grown from there. 

Adrian (00:05:15) - That's super cool. So wait, a couple of immediate questions, guys. Number one, just when you mentioned building the pods or you mentioned building out, what were some of the ways before Instant Teams, before you were able to start building a company, before you were able to start figuring all this stuff out over the last several years, what were 

Adrian (00:05:33) - How would traditionally different military spouses communicate or connect or how would have, how would you even know to start assembling pods of subject matter expertise across this huge group of people that is literally all over the world? Like, how did that even start to even be able to find the infancy or the beginning seeds of what instant teams have grown into? 

Erica (00:05:51) - Yeah, the military community is very tightly knit, right. You've moved so many times. You're one degree away, usually from somebody who knows somebody, and at that time it was mostly like word-of-mouth, but then also online, you know Facebook groups that it was kind of the only platform then where kind of group by location or by experience, different units. So that's really where I started. If I knew one spouse somewhere then she would know three others or he would know three others that could not in that location. 

Erica (00:06:21) - So just kind of a very organic, natural like hey, so we're doing something kind of cool. Would you like to be a part of it? 

Adrian (00:06:27) - That's super cool. Let's jump into the first pillar of team, one of you guys to grab the mic. But I'd love to just understand as the business as you started the business as you started to find customers that you could actually serve and you could help and you could support. How did you guys kind of think about what the team would eventually need to look like? What were some of the different roles or some of the different departments or some of the different focus areas? 

Adrian (00:06:49) - Give us a sense for sort of like what, what, what the instant teams team has sort of looks like today. 

Erica (00:06:56) - So as a marketplace, we are a little unique, right, we have consumers on both sides, so we have customers, and then we also have employees or career seekers as we build out our, you know, A talent database. So we're nurturing both of those at the same time and obviously they have to work together. But they are very different audiences. 

Erica (00:07:13) - So when we think of teams, we think of our corporate team, that the people that are running the company with lies and I on the day-to-day, but also our customer facing teams, that was, our teams, who you know are on each customer account, working in the day-to-day, becoming, you know, ambassadors of the brands, of the organizations that they're working for, and so there's a lot of teams. We're instant teams, we're building teams. 

Erica (00:07:34) - It's our, our business model is teams, and so if we're not doing that right on the customer or the employee side, we're gonna start to have some problems. 

Adrian (00:07:43) - So very cool. And then, in terms of just, I guess, like what I, what I, what I just heard through that too, is like you've got, you've got like a two different things going on. You've got like the, the, the demand side right, which is gonna be all these companies that need help during certain times of the year, whether it's peak or whether it's rush or whether it's whatever. 

Adrian (00:08:00) - And if you think about it guys, like think about during the holiday rush, for example, like half of the companies on planet earth see a tremendous, a tremendous peak in q4, when all of us are getting ready for the holidays and there's all these things going on and there's more tickets, there's more phone calls, there's more email, all the stuff right. So you got like the demand side for the cut, for your, for your customers. 

Adrian (00:08:19) - But then you've you've really built this supply side niche to of being able to literally figure out how to curate a group of individuals that can literally help those companies lies you already mentioned earlier- just people all across the planet, people to speak different languages, people that are educated in all these different fronts. So kind of a pretty cool little supply, supply and demand side of that did. Did you guys know this in the beginning or when? 

Adrian (00:08:41) - At what point did you start to realize now we got, now we we're seeing sort of how this thing is going to evolve and how this thing's going to take shape. 

Liza (00:08:48) - Well, I think we've always focused in the beginning, from building the community side, making sure we're building things for the military spouses that they feel connected to instant teams, they feel connected to what we're doing. We're providing tools, resources, things for them. Um, and I think that's what's unique about some of our tools and how we've gone about building things. So, as a So, as a software engineer, of course I always want to put some tech into the company. Right, what can we build that's cool on the technology side? 

Liza (00:09:15) - And so we focused on really creating a front-end experience, so a place where military spouses can come, connect with each other, they can get upskilling, they can have access to resources, they can connect locally and globally with one another and have access to all of our job opportunities. And so that's what really makes our process and some of what we do super unique is that we build the warm audience, and so when we have a customer that has a peak season that comes in, we already have people warm, queued, engaged with us. 

Liza (00:09:44) - Yeah, we funnel into those opportunities, versus like going out, posting on, indeed, and trying to source people. That way we've done it. We've done it the opposite. So we focus most of our technology and our tools into this front-end experience and then leverage other pieces of existing technology that we know we can never build like big ats systems, right, there's companies that pour millions and millions of dollars into those single year. We can't compete, right. So where, where do we build our proprietary technology? 

Liza (00:10:11) - And so we've kept that part on the front end. 

Adrian (00:10:13) - I love it, and so it's you really focus. So you guys focused on building this company. Was building the on-demand army, right, for lack of a better term- of people that are ready to go, started to figure out that demand side in terms of how you could apply or how you could distribute that army to the different types of needs that you were actually seeing on the on the above side, seeing on the on the impound side, that 

Erica (00:10:32) - Yeah, we actually launched the Military Spouse Community like six months before we ever launched B2B, which probably sounds backwards from a founder or a startup standpoint. But we knew, again, I mentioned the military community is very tight-knit, like we had to build a brand, we had to be trusted, or the model was never going to work, right? 

Erica (00:10:49) - So we started in the community space, built that database up, showed up to the places, you know, met people and really put a lot of time and effort into there so that when the business pipeline and leads started to come in, we had trust and people were going to be willing to work with us. 

Adrian (00:11:05) - I love it. I got to ask this, did you guys get any support or was there support or was there any type of push or just positive reinforcement from the military with seeing what you guys were trying to do to leverage all these people that are directly related to the people that they need every single solitary day to run the military? Was there any type of support that you saw or was it, did it take a little bit of a while to get that or to get some of that attention or to get some of that interest from some of our different military branches? 

Erica (00:11:36) - It's kind of a yes and no answer. So we have done like pilot programs, we've tried things with the Air Force, with Army, so those have been great and they were successful opportunities. From just like a day to day, there's so much red tape, right? Military bases are protected for many reasons, which are good. So as a for-profit, even though we have a strong mission and we're serving the community, we can't just walk onto the installation and be like, hey, we're here. 

Adrian (00:11:59) - You're not walking door to door on the bases, right? 

Erica (00:12:03) - No, we're not doing that. I mean, the concept of the support is there, right? Everybody is very focused and very dedicated to getting military spouses employed. It helps the active duty retention, it helps the financial stability of military families when there's dual income. I mean, all of those things are talked about nonstop. So the port of our mission is there, you know, that direct, you know, we can bring you business, we'll bring you onto the installation just because of the structure of the protective measures there. 

Erica (00:12:31) - We've had to learn other ways to kind of work around that. 

Adrian (00:12:33) - We love it. Last question to you guys, and I'm just curious, but like before instant teams or before awesome people like you were thinking of creative ways of leveraging this literal army of incredible people that are just ready, willing, and able to do all different types of work, what were folks doing before? What were military spouses doing before? Like what were some traditional paths that military spouses were taking when their spouses were protecting and serving their country in all these different places in the world? 

Adrian (00:13:00) - Was there a handful of things that traditionally were being done or have you kind of found out what some of the different things are or the most common items were that folks were doing before there was opportunities like instant teams? 

Erica (00:13:14) - That's an interesting question. 

Liza (00:13:16) - I think a lot of like education, certification, a lot of spouses when they were in remote areas and couldn't find job opportunities just went back for other degrees, which is why the population is very educated that we serve. And finding remote work was tough. One of the things that I did when I became a military spouse and I saw that people were struggling so much was like teaching how to contract and do like 1099 work, remote work to companies. That was early pre-COVID, right? 

Liza (00:13:47) - So everybody's trying to figure out the remote work, how that actually works. Are there legitimate job opportunities in there? And so one of the big pitfalls we've seen is that spouses say, I want to work remotely, but they don't have an actual discipline to work in, right? They just want a job that's remote. Well, there's a lot of jobs that are remote, right? There's a lot of career path opportunities. And so I think us doubling down on CX gives them a lane. Like here is a spot where you can learn, you can grow, develop your skills. 

Liza (00:14:17) - There's a whole career path here that you might not have known about that really lends itself really well to remote work, right? So finding those areas and introducing them to the community has been one of our keys. And I think something that was missing in the early days for spouses just struggling to figure out where to find these opportunities and how to plug in. 

Adrian (00:14:35) - I love it. And then the other thing was you're saying that it makes me think about is too, like this is a group of people that was already even pre-COVID, they were already used to this notion of remote work. They were already used to this notion of just calling in or just logging in or just being able to like, that was normal already. Even outside of the pandemic and outside of those handful of wonderful years, the whole damn world had to deal with, this is a group of people that was already ready to rock and roll. This was like normal already. 

Adrian (00:15:00) - This is so easy to just ramp up, easy to get cranked right into something, easy to be able to work with multiple different opportunities, to your point, Liza, but like they were already used to having to deal with almost a campaign mission type of style appointment. This is what like a lot of like that term didn't really become popular until like COVID when there was people that started to realize, outside of this group of people that were doing it traditionally for a long time, but like, wait, maybe I can go work for three, four companies. 

Adrian (00:15:25) - Maybe I can have three, four contracts. And then for some of this really good, all of a sudden, you know, five years later, you've got a hundred contracts that you're working with, you've got a business on your hands. But for other people, it was a way that they could remain engaged, make more money, oftentimes work less or have better control of their schedule, I should say. 

Adrian (00:15:43) - And then on top of it, like the thing that I've learned from building CXC and then just with all the incredible customers we've worked with is like, you get to work with a bunch of different companies at the same time. It's a superpower. It's like a superpower. Like you get to work with five different companies at the exact same time. It's not like working for one Google, even you get to see five different smaller companies or venture companies doing five completely different.

Adrian (00:16:05) - Sets of things in different spaces, in different places. Like it's just, you can ramp really quick, you can pick up on trends and themes of both good and bad. Like it's a superpower. It enables you to really kind of be able to do incredible work across all of the different accounts or all of the different employers that you have. This is awesome, guys. Um, I'd love to jump into the second pillar of tools. 

Adrian (00:16:23) - Um, how have you guys kind of thought about as the team grew, as the business grew, as you started- because you guys work with some incredible customers- um, how did you think about sort of how you were going to make investments in terms of your tech stack? And then I got to imagine, with some of the companies that you work with that are on the website, I got to imagine they've already got some, some pretty robust tech stacks. 

Adrian (00:16:43) - Spend a couple minutes just kind of talking about how tools and technology kind of had to work and sort of, um, what some of the investments that you've had to make and maybe some of the tools that your team is leveraging every single day as the business has grown and as the business has scaled? 

Liza (00:16:57) - Sure, so one of the premises we kind of started off with is we didn't want to build um any in-house telephony systems and so we've tried to stay away from that. We've tried to stay into the model of our team's plug and play to our customers existing tech stacks, which makes them kind of dedicated resources. So our model does work a little bit different than some maybe other traditional BPO's to where um they're working on multiple accounts and working in our own telephony system. 

Liza (00:17:22) - So we very strategically did that um so that we could be light on that side of the technology and we could put our technology investments on the more front-end tools building the community side on on that. So although we don't run our own systems there, we do do a lot of integrations. So we spend a lot more time on our tools, integrations, making sure all of that is seamless together and then building the front end of what we do for the military spouse community. 

Adrian (00:17:48) - What are, Liz? What are some of the big challenges? So like, if you've got a okay, different, different clients have different technology, different clients have different expectations of how that technology is used, then you just mentioned a big part of your game is trying to figure out how do you connect these different systems to be able to make a more scalable process to be able to enable the instant teams team to be able to to serve these customers every day. 

Adrian (00:18:09) - I guess what are some of the big challenges or what are some of the common themes that you've detected while building the business around? How to kind of manage that is there, like, are there similar tools that are being used by the bulk of these, or is it similar just practice or exercises that they're using that enables it? Like, what are some of the common things that you're kind of seeing, regardless of the different technology that your clients are actually using? 

Liza (00:18:31) - Yeah, so one of our big totes of being successful in working with instant teams is the speed to proficiency. Okay, yeah, and that is because our talent pool is so highly educated and diverse in experience and so most of them have have touched pieces of technology in companies across the board, right, so, okay, vast range of experience, and so when we work with a customer, we learn what tools they're using. You know what slas we have in place. 

Liza (00:18:58) - We kind of do a deep dive on that and then we have a train the trainer approach, right, so we send our training team through their training process to make sure we really understand what the tools and technologies are and then we pull that into into ours and we do the training, or some of our customers train our people as well, because they're so fully integrated that that makes that a little easier. But most, most platforms are pretty similar and pretty easy to pick up. 

Liza (00:19:23) - So as long as we have, you know, the playbook in place of, these are the things we're looking for, these are the types of roles and that we typically stick to, then we can plug and play into those systems pretty quick. 

Adrian (00:19:33) - I was, i was literally just i knew you were going to say it, but i was thinking i was like this: we're gonna have to jump into the process pillar, because it sounds like a big part of what you guys have gotten excellent at is building playbooks, being able to take, um, uh, just the, the, the, the utilization experience that your team already has using all these different things. That's got to be a big part of it. 

Adrian (00:19:54) - So, like, on the process front, um, and then when you just said speed to proficiency, so like you guys are really really good at coming in understanding all of the different intricacies of the system: the team, the needs, the tickets, the calls, all the things that are going on. You curate a playbook super, super quickly. 

Adrian (00:20:10) - You uh distribute that playbook to the instant team teams and then you guys just master that playbook, do you continue to edit and kind of continue to add on to the playbook for your clients as you start to get into the weeds and you start doing calls, doing tickets, managing different resolutions and you start to see different paths forward. And that's another part of kind of what you guys are doing. 

Liza (00:20:28) - Yeah, I think you said superpower earlier and it made me think of this, like one of our superpowers is Erica and I did not grow up in the space. And so we're, we come at it at a very different lens, right? Completely innovation when we're looking at something because we don't know how it was done before. We built that into the company at first. And then we get to a stage where we're like, okay, well, we could use some experts, like how has this traditionally been done? And then where is the middle ground between those two things, right? 

Liza (00:20:58) - And so after building and raising our series, that's when we went out and we're like, okay, we're getting these big customers, these big, we need some people who have operated at this level to really operationalize some of the innovation that we have. And those two things together make it really unique and strong. 

Adrian (00:21:15) - It's funny, I hear this so often from the awesome guests we have on the show, but like sometimes not knowing certain things or not knowing the granular stuff, that's what allows you to just like tackle the problem from such a different space or from a different mental view or just like this nevity like just allows you to build in a different front that traditional, oftentimes antiquated industry leaders don't do because they're just busy building moats and controlling whatever market they've already got. And guys, I got to call this out. 

Adrian (00:21:45) - We talked about this a couple of weeks ago when we were catching up, but guys, I said to Liza and Erica, you guys should have been at customer contact week in Las Vegas because there's some of these big, massive, multi-billion dollar a year BPOs that they haven't gone about it this way. They've gone about building teams offshore, which is fine. Nothing's wrong with that. I'm not saying that anything's wrong with that, but there's a bunch of key differences that you guys are laying out. 

Adrian (00:22:13) - Number one, they don't necessarily always speak English fluently or English isn't a first language or a primary language. Number two, time zones are challenging. Even if you've got a fantastic team offshore, you've got one team offshore, so then you're stuck with all of your capacity being in one area that's X number of hours out of your potential key peak and demand times when all the customer comms are coming. 

Adrian (00:22:36) - Number three, there's something really interesting and what I love about what you guys have built is this having, and even if it might be more expensive, but having a really educated, diversified group of individuals instead of constantly leveraging just more technology, add-ons or tech, because let's call it what it is, guys. 

Adrian (00:22:57) - At CCW, the whole conversation before was all about AI. What's funny is for venture companies or for emerging companies or for growth-focused companies, part of mastering CX early is having smart people that can understand the entire journey. They understand all the touch points. They understand all the intricacies of where the journey is shifting from awareness all the way through loyalty, and they can build playbooks. All that stuff has to happen before AI can come in and do anything. 

Adrian (00:23:28) - All of these PPLs are talking about AI, and it's like, cool, I get it. I'm all about AI, too. I promise you. We've got all these incredible guys that are changing the world with their AI technology. You still need smart people to do stuff manually in the beginning to figure out logistically how you're even going to apply some of that logic at scale or apply some of that logic to be able... I love that you guys built that, and you started to build this incredible team around it before even really knowing about what some of these... 

Adrian (00:23:54) - It's a game-changer, I would argue. 

Erica (00:23:57) - Yeah, for sure. It's been interesting. Part of that solution-oriented, I'll steal one of Liza's quips in that we're not married to the solution, we're married to the problem. We've been building for a community that we wanted to build a solution for along the way, and we're learning those different tools. AI is definitely a hot topic, and all the conferences we're going to this fall in the space, the CX space, there's panels, there's lots of conversation, but it's that human touch. It'll never go away. 

Erica (00:24:28) - There is still, as a human, consuming a product or consuming a brand, there are situations or just certain preferences that people want to connect with people, and you can use tools to make that process better and more efficient. But that human-to-human contact, I think, if anything, post-COVID and remote work has taught us is that that is still a very big staple of successful business. 

Adrian (00:24:53) - I totally agree. Guys, I literally have the pleasure of talking to all these incredible customer-focused business leaders every single day of the weekend. I am still one of those customers when I do need to call in for something or when I... It depends on what it is. If it's something simple and I can do it on the website, of course I will, but I'm still one of those people that, operator, or let me talk to a representative, because there's so many... 

Erica (00:25:13) - Yelling into the phone. 

Adrian (00:25:15) - And I help companies build IVR solutions and phone trees and all this stuff, and there's sometimes, number one, that I can hear right away that it's going to be easier just to talk to somebody. You can literally hear, by the way, that their initial IVR is set up. 

Adrian (00:25:28) - Number two, you're right, where sometimes it's just like, whether you're filling a pharmacy script or whether you're trying to ask a question about your cell phone bill or services or Sometimes it's just easier to just talk to someone for five minutes than screwing around with a solution that these companies have probably spent too much money on to try to build to be able to aid their scale, and they don't work, or they're not as easy, or they're not as good. Whereas you can pop on with an awesome guy or gal for five, six, seven minutes. 

Adrian (00:25:55) - They resolve your problem immediately. Then you have a good experience because you just talked to a human that you associate with the brand, and then it's like a good... And I just... I think... And no offense to any of our listeners that are tech-heavy, but there's a ton of us out there, guys. There's still a ton of us that just want to talk to somebody. We do not care about the technology that you can build. 

Adrian (00:26:13) - We just want to talk to somebody, get it figured out really quick, have that feeling of like it's sorted or it's been managed, and then hang up, right? And then go back to our lives. So I love that. Guys, I want to jump into feedback, but I want to take extra time on feedback today because of kind of, number one, the way that you've built... You've got...

Adrian (00:26:30) - Customer feedback and you've got all these incredible clients that you're working with. You've got the employee feedback because you've built this army of incredible people that are helping to manage your client communications every single day. Let's let's break this into two parts. Let's start with customer feedback. As the business has grown, as you've worked with more businesses, what have been some of the key ways that you guys have really tried to get in front of getting and acting upon your customer feedback so that you could actually continue? 

Adrian (00:26:59) - Number one, just to continue to scale the business, understand what people like, what they don't like. But what are some of the ways that you've kind of gone about really kind of trying to dig into customer feedback? 

Liza (00:27:07) - As you've built in some teams- you want me to take this one- I'll take the employee side. Okay, awesome, well, talking to customers is my favorite thing to do and so you know I'm still very heavily on the sales side and on the on the back end, on the service side, with the customers that we have. 

Liza (00:27:29) - So I think there's nothing better than having conversations- like we do have automated NPS scores and things that go out our quarterly QB, ours and all of those things- but just asking for honest feedback and building that true partnership is how we've gone about building instant teams, like, when I talk, I know the customers, they know they can call me, I can call them. We have a calm, honest conversation. How's it going? Like, what are the problems that you're seeing? Yep, how can we help? 

Liza (00:27:56) - You know, do better, and there's been customers that have been been challenging. Right there we're. We're not doing a great job and we've had to figure out, okay, what is it that's missing here? You know and really dig into those and you do that really by listening and not not taking it personally, right, when stuff isn't going right or when there's not quite quite a good fit happening. Not taking things personally, but really diving into the feedback and listening and making sure that we're responding. And that's one thing we've done really well. 

Liza (00:28:25) - Like we're quick to respond, we're quick to solve a problem and, like Erica said, we're not married to the solution that we've made, we're married to solving the problem. 

Erica (00:28:35) - What is the problem? 

Liza (00:28:35) - And then, where do we need to adapt, where do we need to refine? And sometimes it's not on our side, sometimes it is on the customer side. Right, and say, okay, we've developed this process because this is what really works and you guys are doing it this way and that's causing challenge. And then having that relationships where you can ping-pong that back and forth and and really partner to solve the problems instead of just one side being completely responsible for it. 

Adrian (00:28:58) - You know lies when I hear you say that you, that is literally building a strategic partnership right there at the ping-pong, or the back and the forth, or the open, honest, candid dialogue, back and forth, two-way street of communication, information, updates, etc. That's a strategic partnership. That's not just a transaction. That's a strategic partnership that's learning about each other, that's understanding how to support each other. That's essentially helping each other grow right. They give you good feedback about things that you're not. 

Adrian (00:29:23) - You're not doing so well and you can actually start to figure out how to get the fix or the solution going to the problem, not that to the- to the problem, not the solution. Like you said, that just goes. It helps every other client in your customer portfolio, every other account that you've got. You can start to take some of those learnings, those findings. You, you plan them before you know it. Now you've just become a strategic partner to the other ten accounts and now you're looking a lot better to everybody and there's a. It's a game changer. 

Adrian (00:29:46) - The other thing is this: every one of us, I'm very similar to you guys. I love my favorite part of the game is absolutely working with customers and absolutely learning and doing discovery with, with potential customers around. What's, why are we even talking? Well, what are the problems, what are the challenges? What do you need help with? What do you think you need to make investments on? But, like that, learning and that, that, that, that, that, that communication. 

Adrian (00:30:05) - It does let every one of us get a little bit better at our games and it does allow for information exchange and just just, just, just just just tribal knowledge sharing. I love it. Before we jump off this, couple questions. You mentioned QB ours. You mentioned a PS you, which is, he said, at what points in the game did you guys have to start insert some of this? 

Adrian (00:30:23) - Like meaning, like, at what point in the company lifecycle did you start realizing shit, we gotta start throwing out QB ours because we got to make sure that every 90 days we're actually reporting the math and science, the good, the bad, the ugly, all that jazz out to our customers. 

Adrian (00:30:37) - Like, do you remember at what point you started inserting some of these different themes and it didn't start off right out of the, out of the beginning, or was there certain like milestone moments that occurred or feedback that you got from customers that made you realize shit, we got to start. There's different things we have to start doing to elevator game and elevator reporting side. 

Liza (00:30:52) - Yeah, I think to. One is probably after we raised our series seed and we got to start reporting these kind of metrics to the board and just want to know: right, yeah, like well, we got to get a little more sophisticated gathering this data. 

Erica (00:31:05) - Yeah, yeah. 

Liza (00:31:06) - And then the second part would just be like the scale of our customers. So we've landed some really big contracts early on. And then we're like, we get these contracts with, like SLAs and all the stuff in it. We're like, oh, like this is new. Yeah, five, ten, twenty at that time, you know, and then we went to you know 200, so that was a leap. So then, oh well, we need to make sure that we're reviewing, and so one of our bigger customers actually did them with us, switched and we took over. 

Liza (00:31:38) - So they basically kind of taught us along the way, like, oh, this is how this should go monthly. And then those turned into quarterlies. And then we started implementing those across the board, across all of our customers. 

Adrian (00:31:49) - That's amazing. Guys, I want you to stop and rewind and hit, re-listen to what Liza just said, because like, if you're not taking the time to think about how your customers can literally show you a way, show you a new path, show you how to elevate your game based on, number one, that just proves the trust and the strategic partnership that's being built, because let's call it what it is, customers that ain't feeling that way won't take the time to do that with you, number one. 

Adrian (00:32:10) - But number two, that is amazing that, like, that's the power of what CX and EX can do, guys, with scaling and growing the business, where you get the opportunity, you get the privilege, the benefit, the fortune of working with some of these companies that are way ahead of you when you're small or off. You could learn so much about the things that have allowed them to mature and to evolve and to get to that place. So that's incredible that you were able to see that early, Liza, and just kind of put it in the bottle and run with it. I love it. 

Adrian (00:32:36) - Erica, what about the employee experience side? So you guys have built this army of military spouses all over the globe. What are some of the things that you guys have kind of learned, or what are some of the things you prioritize or really kind of been doing to not, number one, just make sure that you're building those incredible employee experiences, but number two, to get feedback, right? Because oftentimes the employees, the guys and gals that are on the front line, they know everything. 

Adrian (00:32:56) - They know the top three things that we should be focusing on, they know the top three things people love about us, hate about us, but how have you guys kind of thought about the whole EX front, the employee side of Instant Teams? 

Erica (00:33:05) - Yeah, I love that we're like rounding the four pills with the feedback because the teams, the tools, the process, as we discussed, like we have grown learning that in real time and all of those have grown and evolved based off of feedback. I mean, exactly on the employee side, you go from two employees to 10 employees, that's a very different situation than from 50 to 200, 300, 400, 500, like that change management is a huge learning curve from communication patterns, expectations, just around benefits and learning those things in real time. 

Erica (00:33:35) - A staple that we have done from day one, whether it was two employees or 500 has been a feedback survey. And I know a lot of people roll their eyes at surveys, but what I have found to be the secret sauce is acting on the feedback from the surveys, right? There's a healthy continuation loop. You ask people, we set it out anonymously. We ask questions that like, sometimes you don't really wanna know the answer to, right? Good, the bad, the ugly, like what's happening. Because sometimes people in the front lines think they know everything. 

Erica (00:34:04) - Sometimes we think, oh, we're doing fabulous. Like we have customers and we have employees, everything's awesome. And no company is that ever true 100% of the time. So I always tell my people operations team, if feedback and surveys could be a love language, that would definitely be mine as a founder, because I love seeing where we're not doing well, especially in a remote work environment. It's not like we can walk through hallways and kind of like hear conversations or see people's countenance day to day. 

Erica (00:34:33) - So that feedback survey and building it so that people know, okay, we watched the trends, we watch if something shows up as a trend, we're gonna address it, whether that's building something new into a process, whether that's different communication patterns now that we've scaled out of a certain team size. So that has been a very consistent part. We actually just launched our Q2, Q3 survey on Monday. So we'll have a whole new set of metrics here pretty soon to look through. 

Adrian (00:35:00) - Okay, the question, so then you just, so you're doing quarterly assessments and asks for feedback. So every 90 days you're getting a whole new batch of good, bad, and ugly? 

Erica (00:35:09) - Correct, yep. 

Adrian (00:35:11) - And then when we talked about team earlier, you've got your corporate team, and then we've got our army of people that are helping to manage our comms every single day. Do those people have different types of, or let me rephrase that question. What are the different types of feedback points that you get maybe from the corporate side to the frontline side? Just out of curiosity. 

Erica (00:35:33) - Yeah, I mean, the baseline, like our core values, experiences, employee, like they're the same, and they are separate surveys, right? We have one for corporate team, we have one for account-based teams. So the foundation of like our culture and our ethos, like those are the same questions asked every time. Differences in those employee bases are very different in the day-to-day as a corporate team working with kind of the same 30, 40 people on the day-to-day departments. We know who does what. 

Erica (00:35:59) - That's a very different experience than a brand new team member coming into a brand new customer account and learning a brand new process for the first time, right? There has to be trust and channels open. And a lot of that comes back to, you know, our customer success managers and our people onboarding and getting these teams deployed for our customers. Those channels of trust, where they're just verbally like, hey, this is not going well, or hey, I've done this three times now in a certain way and it's not working. 

Erica (00:36:26) - I have a recommendation and not being fearful of that. One of our core values is intentional curiosity. So like, oh, is that like, well, how can I make this better? Or why is this not working? So that day-to-day, but then also those surveys just give us a very deep wealth of insights every quarter. 

Adrian (00:36:45) - I love it. And that comment you made about like the insatiable appetite for curiosity, honestly, some of the most incredible customer-focused business leaders that I've met, that's one of the biggest trends right there. It's like, but why? But why? But why? And not to steal Simon's, you know, wise, but like, it's true. Like the people that ask, but why? 

Adrian (00:37:05) - and just try to keep on peeling the onion and just going a few layers, you oftentimes do get to a place where from your first Y to the fifth Y or whatever number of Ys you're going for, you do learn things. And then the other thing is this, when you start to ask different groups of people those Ys, and then you start to be able to kind of aggregate all of the different, you find a nice little middle ground that sort of, number one, appeases most. 

Adrian (00:37:29) - You're never gonna make everybody happy, it's impossible, but you appease most, and then you typically find the most sound, reasonable, and then frankly, deliverable type of route that you can build some scale upon, you can build consistency upon. So I love that, I think it's amazing. You know, real quick, with most of our clients at CX Chronicles, one of the first things that we do when we start to engage with our new clients, we literally start with our CX scorecard audits and assessments to get to the lay of land from the people. 

Adrian (00:37:55) - And now obviously, just like you guys, oftentimes the executive teams are the ones that are hiring us or asking us to dig in. And when they find out that the first thing that we do is we go ask for like a poll from your people, they're like, well, wait a minute, we're talking about customers. And we're like, yeah, no, but we're gonna talk to your people first because they're the ones that literally talk to your customers more than you do. 

Adrian (00:38:13) - And no disrespect to any of our executives out there, it's just the people that are banging out 50 tickets a day or 25 calls a day or, you know, doing 10 QBRs every night, they just have a different pulse, feel, and sense. 

Adrian (00:38:29) - And then here's the other thing, oftentimes what so many executive leadership teams miss out on is if they just had a little bit more of that color, a little bit more of that information, a little more of that substance to work with, they can make better decisions in terms of what to prioritize or where the investments need to go or what types of additions need to change or how to maybe change the way that you're, or pivoting the angle for how you attract more demand. 

Adrian (00:38:50) - It's really, that's the beauty of the power of like investing and actually paying attention and spending time to your CX and your EX. Guys, this is awesome. Before we start to wrap up, a couple of things. Anything that's coming up or any events or anything that you want the CX Nation to know about for things that you guys are gonna be doing the upcoming months that we can kind of call out? 

Erica (00:39:11) - Yeah. 

Erica (00:39:12) - We have a full fall lineup. Go ahead, Liza. 

Liza (00:39:16) - Go ahead. We're definitely gonna be out and about in the fall. So we've got a couple of places that we're gonna be together. So Erica and I, we have built the company completely remotely. So I know that was kind of pillars in the beginning. Even when we started eight years ago, we've never actually lived in the same place, building and running the company together. So we are gonna get to be together at some of them. So we'll both be in Palm Springs, California for the CRS Summit in September. 

Adrian (00:39:42) - Nice, okay. 

Liza (00:39:44) - Just why I'm polishing up my pickleball skills because we're gonna play in on that. Erica will be at CCW Nashville. 

Erica (00:39:53) - Fantastic. 

Liza (00:39:53) - Our sales team will be at Money 2020 and ICMI. And then Erica's also be at Inbound. 

Adrian (00:39:59) - Very cool. And Erica, you and I need to talk about Inbound. After tonight. 

Erica (00:40:03) - We might be doing something fun. 

Adrian (00:40:05) - Absolutely. And then guys, and then most importantly, for folks who are listening today, where can people reach out to either you, Liza, or you, Erica, or to your team if they wanna learn more about Instant Teams, or they wanna learn more about the incredible things that you guys are doing for your customers today? 

Erica (00:40:22) - We're both very active on LinkedIn. So definitely find us there. We love that pulse of what's happening in the CX space, what's happening in the military spouse space. So both very active on LinkedIn. And then instantteams.com. We've got a great website there that speaks both to kind of the customer discovery, what our solutions look like, and the forms and the different models that they take on. And then also information for anybody that's looking to have a remote job, whether you're military connected or not, or military spouse centric. 

Erica (00:40:48) - But we are a EEO fair hiring compliant company. And so if you qualify for a skillset, our database has non-military connected as well. 

Adrian (00:40:56) - That's awesome. All right, well, Liza, Erica, thank you so much for joining the CX Chronicles podcast. It was an absolute pleasure having you guys on the show. I'm super pumped, number one, to continue our relationship into the future, but to see what you guys are doing, this is an incredible idea. I think people hear it for the first time, they're like, wait a minute, yeah, it makes sense that there's a bunch of military spouses all over that should be helping me grow my business. 

Adrian (00:41:14) - Like, cause guys, you keep getting out there and you get into the world. Like if there's an option as to like BPO or like a company like Instateams that's literally leveraging like all these incredible people, like it's kind of an easy, even if it costs more, it's like most people are gonna be like, wait a minute, I'm at least gonna try to, and then think about it. So we CX and CSers, we're already using blended models. We're already doing AB tests on a regular basis. 

Adrian (00:41:35) - You're already vetting which partner is going to be the strategic partner that you were talking about, Liza. So like, this is gonna be exciting to see where you guys go. And I look forward to keeping in touch along the way. 

Liza (00:41:46) - Yep, sounds great. 

Erica (00:41:47) - That's great. 

Erica (00:41:47) - Thanks much, Adrian.