People Heroes Rising: Building Community & Delivering Value with Amberly Dressler VP of Brand & Customer Marketing at isolved
Nov 20, 2023Season 2Episode 1
William Tincup
Sometimes building a community is the best way to grow your brand. In this special episode of People Heroes Rising, William Tincup interviews Amberly Dressler VP, of Brand & Customer Marketing at isolved. They dig into the improvements of these roadshows over the years, and how isolved has been emphasizing building a strong community. They manage this with techniques like outreach activities, feedback from customers, and other improvement processes.
Then, they dip into how isolved serves the role of an extension to a companies HR team, due to their efficient support and service teams. It's all about speaking the language of business to bridge the gap between HR and the C-Suite, it seems. isolved doesn't seem to stop growing, what could the future hold for an organization such as this? Listen in to learn more.
Sometimes building a community is the best way to grow your brand. In this special episode of People Heroes Rising, William Tincup interviews Amberly Dressler VP, of Brand & Customer Marketing at isolved. They dig into the improvements of these roadshows over the years, and how isolved has been emphasizing building a strong community. They manage this with techniques like outreach activities, feedback from customers, and other improvement processes.
Then, they dip into how isolved serves the role of an extension to a companies HR team, due to their efficient support and service teams. It's all about speaking the language of business to bridge the gap between HR and the C-Suite, it seems. isolved doesn't seem to stop growing, what could the future hold for an organization such as this? Listen in to learn more.
Ladies and gentlemen, you're listening to the Recruiting Daily podcast, uh, we're broadcasting from iSolve Connect in Palm Desert, Palm Springs, that's JW Marriott, and this is my second Connect, last year I came as an analyst, and it was amazing, Nashville was amazing, the conference was amazing. This year, you've, you've stepped it up a notch, it's, it's, uh, dare I say, uh, at least three times better than Nashville. No offense to Nashville. Nashville was great. This is just different. Do you, have you gotten some feedback?
Amberly Dressler:
I absolutely agree. We just make improvements year over year and the feedback that we're getting from customers today is that they just sense a feeling of community that has just continued to elevate their experience.
William Tincup:
Yeah, y'all do a great job of facilitating the community. Around the product, of course, you know, you don't run from your customers, which I love. You're doing roadshows, like, if people actually knew the insides of the, what, 52, 53 roadshows that you're doing this year, I don't know how you do it, but the fact that you go out to where people are, because they can't travel. A lot of these folks, you know, it'd be nice to go to HR Tech. It'd be wonderful to go to SHRM Annual or something like that, but they can't go. They're, you know, they're, they're, they're working, or they don't have the travel budget, training budget. So I love the fact that you go out and do the, uh, training shows or the road shows. Um, what have your customers told you about that?
Amberly Dressler:
Yeah, so I like that you said we don't run away from our customers because we want to run to them for sure in their different communities. And one thing I've noticed... Here at Connect is that we're recognizing a lot of folks who are at roadshows, but more importantly, they're recognizing each other Right, and so you come to a lot of these shows where you can't afford to send multiple people from your company Even if there are multiple people that you work with for the same initiatives And so there I believe they're not feeling alone because they're recognizing people from the roadshows. They're recognizing us They're recognizing people from the community. And so there's some friendships that are Keep making people feel less alienated and more part of the broader community.
William Tincup:
I was talking to Tom earlier, and because he's been at several HR Tech plays through the years, I was like, this feels different. This feels like a movement. It feels like there's momentum behind this firm that they're, again, it starts with product. It starts with the relationship that you create with your iSolve.
Amberly Dressler:
There is, and the data definitely backs that up in terms of our growth as a company, but we never want to get away from what our CEO, Mark Devil, says, which is being big enough to deliver on what we promise and what they need, but also small enough to care, which we truly believe inside and out from all of us.
William Tincup:
Well, we, I can tell you when Ryan and I did a bunch of customer reviews yesterday, theme one was the... They view iSolve as an extension of their HR team. Like it was crazy, because I mean, customers, you know how they are. We'd always do kind of the, you know, what could you, what do you love? What would you change? They struggled to come up with stuff that they'd change, and I dug into one, one comment where I'm like, well, like, something goes wrong. I get it. I mean, it's software. Something's gonna, you know, something's gonna blip, whatever. What, what do you do? Well, I call my team. I'm like, your team, like, your internal team, like IT or whatever, he's like, no, no, I call ISOL. And my team there, they take care of it. Like, it's just like, they don't think that there's a difference between their own team or tech team and y'all.
Amberly Dressler:
Right. So our success and support teams are a huge part of that. I believe you are interviewing our chief customer officer. Officer Mike Flannery, he delivers on that mantra all the time of being there and picking up the phone, and he's improved things over the years just drastically, and it continues to be improved. One thing I would say is that in addition to the success and the support teams, we also have an HR services team that is stacked with. Professionals who have decades and decades of tenure in, in HR. And so a lot of our customers are using them for augmentation to, to the point where I actually had thought I was emailing a customer one time and because it, you know, had their domain name and everything, and it was an isolved employee and they said, Oh, Hey, I'm actually on the team. But they had been like embedded in this organization for a six month, if not longer period to get programs off the ground. And, and so it ranges from having a full time person. On site with them to, hey, I really just need help, like, developing an employee handbook. Right.
William Tincup:
Well, and so much of it, like what we learned yesterday, is they want more. Now that they've, now that they have, let's say, payroll and time attendance or whatever the, the, the mix of products are, they want more. Which again, is not like a lot of other firms. A lot of other firms are, you know, customers are trying to pare back. They're trying to reduce the footprint, uh, of the, of the, of the vendor. And again, that gets back to the language that people use. No vendor likes the word vendor. They want to be seen as partners, and thought of as partners, and spoke of as partners. Y'all are actually partners.
Amberly Dressler:
Thank you. We believe that. I think the roadshows and we we've talked about it so many times It's it's really part of that. And so I think when we were talking about roadshows back in Dallas a few months ago It was that our customers didn't even know different things that they could get from us, right?
William Tincup:
Yeah, it's, it's, and again, they had the, what I loved about the Dallas show, and I'm sure it happens at every road show, is people come in with questions. They're coming in with their laptops. Like, when we walked in the room the first time, I thought I was in the wrong room, because I, when we really walked in, I'm like, everybody has their laptops cracked open. Jeff's up at the, up at the front, and he's just like, people are like, Coming out with lists like I have a list and here's the thing and here's the thing and he's just like, okay Yeah, let's do this and then the customers other customers Started chiming in and solving some of the problems as well or answering some of the questions. I just like This is different. Yeah. This
Amberly Dressler:
is different. That's the beauty of it for sure. One thing is you hit it on the head when our customers want that. They want more. They want to do more for their employees. A big initiative of ours now and in the near future will be giving them the language to go back to their owner, back to their C suite and justifying what the need is. 100%. Yeah. And I'm. There's just such a gap between the language that oftentimes HR speaks and the C Suite.
William Tincup:
It's got to be the business language. I did a white paper a hundred years ago. It was kind of a funny bit because it was, it was about just a topic, but it was on one side of columns. So in one column, it was, it was finance. So it was written for a chief financial officer. And the other, or the right column was a CHRO. It was written for a chief. And so for the CFO, it was like a paragraph. And for the CHRO... It was like a page and a half, and it was just like a funny bit, like talking to the CFO is, you're not using a lot of adjectives, like it's a different bit, like you're talking about the business, and again, real simple things around profit, cost, revenue, etc., and I think building a business case and showing them, enabling them to build a business case on their own so they understand This is actually about helping the business. Yeah, it's about people, but it's also about building a business case for technology that enables people.
Amberly Dressler:
Absolutely, we had a session yesterday on translating employee experience. We had our CFO, our Chief Customer Officer, our Chief Experience Officer, we had our Chief Security Officer, IT, or CIO rather, and we realize a lot of our employees, or our customers rather don't have those specific people at their organizations, but we're trying to scale down and pare it down to this is what they care about, so if you're going to go out and have a cross function initiative, this is the language that you're going to have to use to speak to them and get buy in.
William Tincup:
So, what's your favorite part of so far, you still got a little bit left to go, what's been your favorite part of Connect so far?
Amberly Dressler:
It's absolutely seeing the customers greet each other, that it's just real tangible proof of the community that they're building and it's so rewarding. So if I told
William Tincup:
you that I've asked that question of every executive, and every executive has said the same thing, would you be surprised?
Amberly Dressler:
No, because I think it's genuine, however, that's really cool to hear.
William Tincup:
Everyone's answering the exact same way. I mean, you know, slight word changes, this, that, and the other, but really the same things. Customers. Very cool to hear. Getting customers together, etc. Are you already thinking about next year? Oh,
Amberly Dressler:
absolutely. Uh, you know, of course, brochures are a huge part of, um, how we're getting in touch with our customers and making sure that they're getting value that they need, and we're trying to decide if it's the same format, if it's the same quantity, and we, we ran a survey of all the attendees, and we thought for sure, um, you know, because they're busy and so on, that maybe they would want, yeah, they want more. Exactly. They want more.
William Tincup:
I'll tell you, one of the things I would add, they asked me this the other day, what, So, what I would add to that bit is an hour of content from a different, from an outside speaker or something like that that does certification credits. So either the breakfast bill. Somebody does that and does an hour worth of credit for HRCI, SHRM, or at the launch period, do a thing, you know, so they can actually get some accreditation, you know, research credits, while also getting all of this stuff. Uh, I know that'd be an added kind of bit, but at the same time, I think you could get more people there.
Amberly Dressler:
Absolutely, I love that. We'll take you up on it.
William Tincup:
Alright. Listen... I know that, I know that you're already in the planning phase for 2024, so I can't wait to see what you come up with, what your team comes up with, but thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you, William. Absolutely. And thanks everyone for listening to the Recruiting Daily podcast. Until next time.