ERP083 - What is badass IT support?

If you succeed in a way that helps the business, then everyone cheers for you. You know, I won a bunch of awards from the IT industry. It's very nice, but really when I swell with pride is when I get an email from one of my customers and users. or someone who is like, wow, like I miss working with your team. We got so much stuff done. It's so hard to get anything done without your same IT team here. And when you empower the business, that's when you're doing it right. Welcome to Evolved Radio where we explore the evolution of business and technology. I'm your host Todd Kane. Drop suite provides backup, archiving and recovery solutions delivered at scale to power your business defense of cloud services. Award-winning, safe, secure and scalable, as well as trusted by top channel partners like Pax 8 and Sureweb. Drop suite protects Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and email from a full range of threats, accidental deletion to full-scale cyber attacks. All with an understanding of what MSPs need to be successful and compliant. Interested, learn more right away at dropsuite.com. Today on the podcast, I'm joined by badass IT guy Ben Brennan, founder of Qstack. Now I call him badass because he did write a book called badass IT support. That idea of delivering top shelf badass support forms the basis of what we talk about in our discussion on the podcast today. We talk about Ben's experience rising up in the ranks of IT and what it taught him about IT that led him to develop his own customer satisfaction software called Qstack. Ben is also a trained therapist, so his perspective on the psychology of work is an area that we really connected on. We also talk a bit about Ben's journey as an entrepreneur starting a software company. There's lots to get in here, so I'm sure you'll enjoy my conversation with Ben. If you enjoy the show, please consider leaving a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. It really helps to spread awareness and bring more listeners to the show so we can share the message with more of the community. Now, on with the show. Ben, welcome to the Evolved Radio podcast. Todd, it's really, really good to be here. Thank you. So, we're going to get into a bunch of awesome stuff around customer survey scores and starting your own tech company and all kinds of crazy stuff. You don't come to IT from a traditional path. Do you want to give us a bit of your background and and how you found your way into the technology space? Yeah, definitely. First of all, I really do appreciate coming on here. I love your pod. I'm excited that you're going to be on my pod. That'll be coming out soon. So, um, thank you for this. It's interesting. I always thought my when I started that my path was so kooky and crazy and weird. and IT until I like wrote a book and started speaking and meeting other IT leaders. And what I realized is it's actually really not that special. It's shocking how many people like when I give conferences very often I'll uh, you know, say how many people is IT your first career? And less than half of the the hands go up, you know. And so you've got like cops and nurses and baristas, stay at home moms, you know, engineers, everything. But my kooky career, to answer your question was my first career was in psychotherapy. which is you get a masters in psychology, it's really just to figure yourself out. So if your friends study psychology, just know they feel crazy inside and they're trying to figure themselves out. So that's what us psych majors did. I can relate to that. Not a psych major, but definitely the same path. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, we all end up in the same place. But for that reason, I was just a true seeker trying to figure things out and I was grew up in Texas, which is a little bit of a conservative place, so I ended up spending a year in Germany working. And then I spent a year in South America going around and just like playing guitar and writing a mediocre novel that will never see the light of day and just trying to figure out life. And I I ended up in the Bay Area with like, you know, 16 bucks and no real plan. I was dating somebody at the time who because it was the Bay Area just happened to be like an executive that was really rich. And so I was like, oh man, I got to, you know, I got to figure out something, you know, it's getting really embarrassing to be like, oh, listen, one beer's enough, we really shouldn't go to that. No dessert, I'm not in the mood for that, you know, like, and so I got to I got to get a career. And my buddy was in IT and he told me that I should work in IT. And I googled it and if you Google IT, at least back then, the uh, you get the Stephen King book, it. And so I was like, I couldn't even Google it. I was like, I don't know if I can I I don't even know what this is. He's like, just just show up. And so I uh showed up and just this weird combination of really poor, so I was really hungry and a really hard worker and I was a kooky creative and I just happened to work at these cool startups that were okay with me not knowing what I was, not being a traditional IT guy, but just running around and and fixing things and just having a blast. And I didn't know any better and I just I thought it was just going to be a day job and people kept on saying, Wow, this is you're really good at this. And I'm like, okay. And then, you know, my next job at at this company called Jabo and they were really small at the time, they promoted me really quickly to like management and then I was managing a global team and I'm like, whoa, like, wow. And all these people were like, whoa, you know, you're, you know, this is the best IT we've ever had. And I was just like, really? And what I realized it was my ignorance and stupidity of not knowing traditional IT that kind of freed me up to just do more common sense like helping people out. And, you know, fast forward 13 years later or whatever, I ended up, ended up being a really good career and I was really lucky. And now I help other people have bad ass IT at their firms. So, wild ride, but uh definitely thankful to have it. It's a lot more fun than, you know, having to make up excuses because you can't afford a beer for your date. So, uh I'm very lucky. I guess, right? So, you mentioned badass IT support and that comes from the book that you wrote, similar name, badass IT support. What is badass IT support in your in your mind? Like how is it different than what is typical in the industry maybe? Well, the answer is kind of in the question actually. So badass IT support, it doesn't matter what's in my mind as an IT professional, it's what's badass according to the people actually using support, right? This was the reason that my IT was quote-unquote better than these other big companies. It wasn't because I was like like outstanding, I was still growing as a leader, it was really just because the in my opinion, you know, you can definitely argue, but IT leaders and the IT industry wasn't really given a fantastic set of tools to really accomplish this end user experience. And so IT just had a bad reputation in general. And so for me, I showed up and I and I did what what I thought was right. You know, I did what I thought was the good thing to do and I just listened to people and that I guess all that psychology, all that psychology really came into play because really what I did more than anything else was I listened and I advocated for end users. And, you know, I had some other blessings like I didn't know you weren't allowed to um talk to executives or like I would, you know, get real excited about everything and think everything was an emergency, so I'd have a really good sense of urgency, but at the end of the day, like the real problem is there's a disconnect between IT and the business, right? So the business, meaning whoever we're supporting end users, they're just not good at explaining to IT what we need, what they need. And IT is not good and has a hard time understanding the business. And so it makes a lot of sense if you don't understand each other, you're not going to be able to provide badass IT support. So really, badass IT support is really it's just like human center design, start with empathy. What what is badass according to this company? Maybe badass is just as cheap as possible and then go home. Great. Maybe badass is super, you know, white glove service and and touch all the time. Maybe it's a hug when you walk in. Maybe it's a like a check-in kiosk where you don't talk to anyone. You know, you got to really understand the humans that you're supporting. And once you do that, you just do your best to make that happen and that's badass IT support. I think you nailed it. Like it's the the missing element in in IT support in general is that human factor, right? And I think that that's often overlooked. And you know, we suggest the technology industry is actually a service industry primarily, you just happen to be servicing people around technology. And that that's I think the the missing distinction in this is that the technology usually comes first before the people, and in some cases, the people is not even really a consideration. When and what you're suggesting is it should be first and foremost. That's what differentiates great support from, you know, mediocre support, right? Everyone expects that if you call the support desk and and say something is busted, can you fix it, it gets fixed. But the process of how that happens and how the person, the people interact in the in that circumstances is drastically different from from place to place, right? I always like to and I'm I'm annoying like that because I always like to step back and think about like why are we here? Just ask an existential question, but I would always do that even weekly team meetings. Like, let's review before we get started and three years passed and we haven't really done anything special, why are we here as IT? And I can tell you as a business owner myself now, when business owners hire an IT department and they spend all that money on it, they're doing it so their business can succeed. So, I think what went wrong and I think why I was so good at the beginning is I wasn't, I didn't know enough about IT to be to be focused on how do we create this badass IT, which for most people is a humming network with zero users. End users are a bug, not a feature of the network, right? They're like, the network's great if people just would quit logging in and messing everything up, you know? Yeah, no users, no problems as I say. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, you know, we just and we don't really there's a lot of reasons for that. It's not IT's fault, you know, this was handed down. But because I had I I was self-taught, you know, I never learned that. So to me, I was like, I would just ask, hey, CEO of my new company, what do you want from IT? I want this. Dope, I'm on it. And then so my goal was to, you know, make the business succeed. And I think if you quit focusing on what you're doing and you start to focus on the big picture, then all your little micro decisions kind of start going towards that mission as well, and then you're aligned. And then when you succeed, it's not like now where you can succeed and, you know, hit all your green metrics and people still think IT is trash at some companies. Like if you succeed in a way that helps the business, then everyone cheers for you. You know, I won a bunch of awards from the IT industry. It's very nice, but really when I swell with pride is when I get an email from one of my customers and users or someone who's like, wow. Like I miss working with your team. We got so much stuff done. It's so hard to get anything done without your same IT team here. And when you empower the business, that's when you're doing it right. And it also like from a psychology point of view, like an old hack, like a life hack for depression. Holler all you depressed people out there. Holler. I'm just saying that because I'm like crazily, you know, off and on depressed too. Uh but uh, no, like it's depression, an ultimate hack I learned as a therapist is focus on other people. You know, are you depressed and you can't even muster up a phone call, like muster up five minutes to call the dentist today and that's your entire day and you can't even do that. But if you go help someone in need, like, let me go help you work on your house for free or let me go help you move, you go do that, you feel good. It's a human thing. You know what I mean? And it's kind of like that for IT, like if you can have like metrics and and and really just focus your team around empowering the business, not quote-unquote doing IT well, then everyone's just happier. Like you feel good and the pressure's off and then you're on the same team. You're not a you are in the service industry to help, but you're you're not hired help, you're a partner, even if you're a a managed service provider, you're a partner helping your partner succeed at their jobs. It's amazing. I think you you kind of sort of touched on this earlier is your your sort of ignorance to this and and lack of technical capability at the at the early stage of this was actually in a way a superpower because you had to focus on other things that ultimately made you more successful than if you were just a great technical resource. So, does that sort of lend to the idea and I've seen this from from place to place that strong technical people tend to struggle when they move up into management because they want to focus on the things that they're good at. Whereas if non-technical people in a leadership position actually have a level of influence and a level of perspective that is is actually very useful. What are your thoughts on that on on sort of non-technical versus technical leaders of IT? Yeah, I mean it's it's it's really counter intuitive on both sides, right? So some of the best leaders I know from IT and there are, you know, there are no hard and fast rules. Of course. I worked really hard over the years to become as technical as possible and and you know, you know, with that disclaimer aside though, the best leaders I happen to know are from outside of IT and they always had imposter syndrome thinking like, oh, I come from marketing or whatever, like I can't do this. But really that outside perspective brings really the word I want to focus on is common sense. It really is like if you've been trained to do things a certain way and you know, IT, we do things this way, this way, this way, the business has changed, the world has changed, technology has changed. And a lot of times what the business needs from IT is a, you know, not a faster horse but a model T, if you know the the Henry Ford example, right? He said, I wouldn't have invented the the automobile if I listened to everyone because they they all wanted a faster horse because that's what they knew. So that ignorance actually allows you to to think if you have the the the courage to ask, which is hard with imposter syndrome, but if you have the courage to be like, sorry for asking, but is there a reason we do this? And when you get past the we've always done that way or we've tried it other ways, they're like, I guess not. Yeah, maybe we should try it. And so I think there's a lot of power in that. Another thing is is is more of a cliche that in IT we do a really bad job of training managers and we tend to promote the best technicians as uh people managers. And I think a big failing on our part is we don't give a tech ladder or a career ladder. Where if you're a software engineer, there is a or at least there used to be, I'm sure there still is now, a clear tech ladder. You start, you're level one, level two, yada yada yada, all the way up to systems architect. You can be a um, you know, an architect and make $800,000 a year and not have a single direct report, you know? But in IT, it's like you can fix computers, sys admin, but pretty much, you know, like we consider success when you go into people management. And so we hire these technical people that, you know, it's really hard to be really technical and really empathetic. I mean, people leadership is a brand new skill. You can learn it, but it's, you know, you got to really, really change a lot of paradigms in your brain if you're if you're if you're super technical to be to be good at it. Yeah, couldn't agree more. So you in this this journey, you started to develop some tools and some measures around how you actually qualified if you were doing a great job. So I I assume you started with something different before you started to create what became Qstack. I assume you kind of went through the gamut of uh of the the the typical tools. What was what was it that you identified was either missing or what was the motivation to build Qstack as a brand new sort of way to view your success in IT versus what was already available? And I guess I guess ignorance as always plays a part in so much of that. I think the first two jobs I got, again, just like, you know, through friends I knew like like on literally if you're from the Bay Area market street, the same street in San Francisco, my first like three or four jobs were all there. And I would just, you know, walk to work. And so my first job was at pivotal labs and then at Jabo and they were both so small, you really didn't need metrics. So basically, it was me running around like a madman, like fixing things and then when I had a team, like we were just doing cool shit. We put art on the walls and we were like playing music and just having fun and really just making it up. And, you know, we were really smart, you know, you have to be really smart, you have to be able to fix things, but we were just it was so small, it was easy to create those experiences. But at scale, what I realized because I went to Twitter and then they like quintupled in size while I was there. I realized at scale when you really do have to be data driven, you can't just stand up and ask everyone at the lunch table how everyone's doing, there's not a good way to measure that. And yeah, so, you know, you had CSAT scores. Again, like it's I hate it because it's a touchy subject, but let's be real, like CSAT, we know for a fact that CSAT is not correlated with with business value. You know, it's so easy to get a 99 on CSAT. Like there's so many problems that I won't go into it unless you really want to geek out about the like the survey science of it. But suffice it to say like there are plenty of teams that have like 95, 99 CSATs, but when you talk to people in the business, they're like, oh yeah, IT is trash. And what I knew from just psychology and just and just talking to people was like, you have to, if you want to know what people really think and what their real experience is, you have to be scientific about it. And luckily I had, you know, years of, you know, social science training. So I was like, okay, first of all, it needs to be anonymous, you know, like CSATs are typically tied to a ticket, right? It needs to be anonymous. You're and you got to think if you're not in IT and IT is the team that can control when you get a laptop refresh, control how fast you get, you don't want to piss them off. It's like at a restaurant, you don't want people spitting in your food. So you're not going to get an honest answer. Like and also what we find and I'm lucky enough to get read through like tens of thousands of uh reviews for IT teams every quarter really, people tend to like IT. You know, and so they'll be like, they're like, listen, I want Jen and and Jeff at the IT desk. I want them, I like them. They're really nice people, but it makes it really hard to get my job done because of some of the systems, right? So what I realized is there just needs to be a better way than CSAT. We tried NPS, but NPS just wasn't actionable enough. It was really the math was actually way better than CSAT, but it wasn't actionable. You're like, great, well, you know, we have this as a net promoter score. So what does that mean? And then, you know, we we tried everything else and I just, you know, for sheer tyranny of will, decided I'm going to come up with a way to actually like quantify experience in a way that matches the end user sentiment. Because what I noticed, like and I was kind of a non-nerd coming to IT, so what I was impressed by, we're a very geeky industry. And so we're very competitive. We play games. If you give us a metric to hit, we will smash it. And so we had teams that would just smash every metric, so we'd be all green, but people still weren't happy. And I'm like, okay, we need a new metric that actually resonates with the business. And it sounds stupid at the time to just come up with a brand new metric if you've only been in the industry for like five years, but I was stupid and over educated and and obviously like a creative at heart, you know, and I wasn't really living the punk rock lifestyle at the time. So I'm like, I don't know, let's try it out. And I was lucky enough to meet a CIO who trusted me to do my it was that box later to trusted me to do my kooky thing. And we stumbled on a way to, you know, actually remove that disconnect and, you know, get the real experience that people are having, communicated to IT in a way that they can understand. And, you know, it's not sexy again, I'd rather write a cool rock opera or something else like that, but I'm really proud of how uh of the effect it had and I'm really proud of the results. Like it really made IT better at a lot of places. We talked a bit about the numbers. It's maybe an aside. I I would like to dig into that. I'm not sure how long it would take. Well, let's do it. Yeah. I'd love to. Yeah. So like let's maybe do a bit of a a segue on on CSAT and NPS. I've I've personally never been a big fan of NPS because I just feel like I I find it curious that you say the math is actually better because that's part of what I always struggled with is like we're really like we give a scale of 10 and people really only vote like the occasional one and then everything else is 7 to 10. Uh and you you kind of throw out some of these numbers, but you know, I I never found it super reliable. And again, like you said, it it doesn't tell you anything, whereas like CSAT, it's actionable, but it's also very transactional. So I see them as as useful in different contexts, but you know, never been a huge fan of NPS. So maybe just a bit of more detail on on kind of how you view both of those metrics. I'd love to hear that. Well, there's a great and I I'm sure I won't be able to find it, but there's some podcast I listened to the founder or the the person who invented the net promoter score actually in retrospect kind of regretting a lot of things that he did for those same reasons. So, um, you know, it's nice to hear hear that, but NPS, if you don't know how it's calculated, it's basically it's a customer loyalty score where you ask, would you recommend, you know, Nordstroms to a friend? Which, you know, is problematic at the beginning because like, would you recommend IT to a friend? Like, I don't know, like is there is there a choice, you know? Yeah, it's such a strange question in context, right? So we are kind of like when I tried to do NPS, we did it did feel like we were like cramming that into, you know, we spent like more time wording that question than we did could anything else. But, you know, how likely are you to recommend it? And it's like from 10 to one and there's uh words associated. And basically, if you give like a 10 or a nine, you're a promoter. And if you give like a eight or a seven, you're neutral, and then six or anything less, it's a detractor. And they actually subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. So you can get like a negative 98 if you're really not doing good in that promoter score. Uh, what I liked about it is it was really geared towards badass service. Whereas like, you know, when you're talking about like badass IT support, support that people are like, oh, that these guys are badass. You're not going to get that if you're it's just like a smiley face. You know, you don't get enough from saying like, are you satisfied or how satisfied are you? That's not even that even the language is problematic to me, you know, for CSAT. And so, and also what we found is like, that's not a very high bar. Like what percentage of people are satisfied? Like that's like, how many people are blown away? And and and what do you do about that? And like, it's just like, what's what are you trying to get? So CSAT is really good for if you don't have a lot of visibility into like problematic employees and interactions, you know, it's kind of nice, but for a strategy perspective, I really, I just haven't seen it correlate with amazing badass support. And, you know, the reason we took Qstack on on the road and made it a product is it gave the kind of insights that actually resulted in change that moved the needle for, you know, the end users, for the business. And to me, that's what IT had been needing. Once you do that, IT kicks ass. Like we have gotten so good at operations and running IT. We IT has developed so much. There's just this tiny little piece that we we missed and it's unfortunately the most important one, which is how is all that service landing? We're really good at being efficient at what we do. But we're kind of in the dark about how's that landing? You know, like go to any or any IT leader that's listening now, can you tell me exactly how the experience of interacting with your team compares with other teams in your industry? You know, can you tell me exactly where the problem areas are at a glance and, you know, what the action items are to fix that? You know, can you tell me you know, in English, what it feels and articulate the experience of interacting with IT, so my technicians can really understand the business. And and the answer is no for for almost everyone. I think that's it, right? Like the the experience is is the sort of the central word around this. And you know, like NPS, it's like, are we doing good or not? It's it's kind of a binary answer and you don't get a lot of information beyond that. Whereas CSAT is is operational, it gives you great insights around maybe who is not providing the support that is expected and what is the the level of engagement that we have, you get some data. But I agree, like like, you know, if it's not great, okay, then what, right? So it still requires a hell of a lot of digging, whereas if you can actually get more experiential data from the end users, then that feels a lot more actionable, I guess. Yeah, one 100%. One one thing that I want to just throw on top of it that really just kind of blew my mind and and gave me an aha moment when I realized it, another thing with CSAT is we do these after ticket surveys and intuitively, because the truth is also often counter intuitive. That's just how it works, especially in in IT. What I realized is that intuitively, IT leaders, we think, okay, well, I want to know all my numbers I wanted to associated with an incident or I wanted to associated with a ticket. We're still thinking about how we're doing IT. In a transactional form? Correct. But when you're when you're focusing on the business, what are you missing out on? You're missing out on what we know from tons of research that says that most people, if at all possible, will avoid IT like the plague and not interact with IT. So, if you really want to empower the business, you don't just find out what's happened to the people that reached out to IT. You figure out with with the people that are doing that have work arounds, the people that avoid IT. You know, my wife worked at a a hospital forever that she's changing jobs now, but their IT sucked. And at every nurse's station, there was like one nurse that was in charge of all the sticky notes for IT work arounds, so you didn't have to call IT. So basically, they just created their and that's where Shadow IT came from. We're like, oh, Shadow IT, they're doing their own thing. Because they got to get stuff done. Right. And so the big aha moment I had was, and you have to argue with internal comms a lot to get this to happen at big companies, but it's so worth it, you need to be measuring the experience of IT and technology for everyone in the company, not just the people that interact with IT. Because let me tell you, I will do anything I can not to interact with IT if if I have to, right? I want to get my job done, you know? So, I think that's the key too, yes, you know about these bottoms up approach of CSAT is great, but what if you just like take IT out of it and say like, what does the business in general, every employee, what is their experience with IT? And then you start finding out the insights you didn't know. And then you're like, oh, and then you make changes and then those people start coming to IT because they trust IT, shit breaks less and everyone's happy, you know, like it's just a uh that was a, you know, an earned insight after years and years, but does that make sense? Yeah, like maybe if you could give us a couple of examples, like you you've you've seen a ton of this data in in the companies that you're working with. What are what are some of the examples of the type of feedback that that companies received and went, oh, wow, I actually had no idea that this was the problem or a problem. You have some examples of that? Yeah, tons. I mean, that's really that I mean, that's what Qstack delivers more than anything else. I think the reason as I studied, you know, I was late to IT, so I studied, you know, the history of IT and everything else. And what I realized is our best practices were originally created in the way that we did, you know, IT was created in a good way to be like a cookie cutter. Like nobody knew how to implement technology. So we're like, we need a standard way that businesses use computers for work, you know? And so we created these best practices and we we continued to implement it. And we got really good because the business, what they needed at that time, we needed to know how to use these computers at work. I don't know how to do it, you know, nobody had done digital transformations, everyone was like confused by it. Now we have a tech savvy workforce, what they need now is actually individual. Because everything we do now runs on technology, IT and technology affects every part of the business and it really determines how successful you are. And so IT is more important than it's ever been before. And what I realized was people just didn't know what they didn't know, right? Because our tools were designed to measure the service but not how it landed and it just doesn't pick up on the nuances. So I can't write a book that says here's what to do, but I could make a tool that says, here's how you find out what the unique needs you need. So, for instance, Qstack, by the way, is an acronym for quality, speed, technical knowledge, approachability and communication. Those are kind of the five dimensions that at a high level we measure it. It came from a bunch of research, yada yada yada. But why that's interesting is when those results come out, the first baseline, like I remember at a Yahoo, I had it was like the second place that we used Qstack. And I'm clear to talk about this by the way. I've talked about this a bunch of comments. They were a very gruff, you know, kind of grizzly but very technical, like high Linux knowledge team. It was a 20-year-old team, so tons of tribal knowledge. But their what they saw themselves as, listen, we're not the friendliest, but we are super uh, you know, technical. And they got their scores back and the T, the technical skill score was actually low. And and it was like, whoa. That's, you know, first of all, you know, you go through the stages of anger, denial, whatever, you're like, this tool's broken, whatever. But then you look at why the score is low, you you clicked on it, drill down, it shows you what people said and it turns out they were technical about the wrong stuff. So they knew every kind of Linux distro and like Apache servers and all this really cool stuff, but they didn't know, they'd never logged into Salesforce. Nobody knew about Adobe tools, like several people like didn't even know like what the new two factor like setup was. And it was just they didn't have the knowledge that mattered to people. So all of a sudden like to change your technical skills, you're doing it in the eyes of the business, not yourself. And when you do that, then people are stoked. So it was the super easiest thing in the world. Like we basically like, okay, well, let's have a brown bag and teach people about that. And it turns out that T went up, started going up. And people are like, oh. And slowly the team started to get because it was a big team where we're supporting 17,000 people and the team was like, oh, like we just didn't know. Another great example from that same company in a different office, kind of like our main office is the only one that had this problem. Their approachability was actually low even though they were our flagship office and it was like that forever. Well, what does that mean? They're like, well, no, you know, we try to do white glove service. You know, we take that very seriously. And every company every team will tell you that. Like, you're in the service industry, you take it seriously. But they got their asses handed to them in approachability in the A. And so, again, the tool's broken. Okay, no, let's let's drill down. Let's see what people are saying. You know, they, remember, it's not me that's giving you the score. It's the people that we love and support. So let's find out. It was just a tiny little thing that you never would have known. Because when I walk into the help desk and it's like a big like walk up window, everyone's like, oh, Mr. Brennan, hey, blah, blah, blah, you know, like kissing my butt or whatever. And talking shit about me when I leave the room, right? That kind of thing. But if you're not in IT and you went in there, the experience that we read over and over again in the Qstack results was like, people were not greeting them. They're like, I walk in and nobody says hi to me for 20 minutes. I don't even know if I'm in the right room. And when I I brought this up and they were like, no, no, no, like we're at this office, we're super approachable, we're always like that. And what we realized and we brought in my friend Parissa, shout out to Parissa, who was in HR at the time, and we did a training, what we realized was people are so they were so focused on their idea of great service, which was like, I'm giving you all my attention regardless of what's happening around here. They were ignoring everything else, not realizing that it's scary to go to IT and while, you know, you had my attention while I was fixing your computer, 20 other people were getting completely ignored. And so we just did a training. It wasn't a brown bag training, it wasn't a technical training, nobody had to get permissions access. It was like, let's practice saying hi. Okay, you're working with somebody. Somebody walks in. Hi, how's it going? I'm working with Steve, but I'll be right with you. And we literally practiced that. It seemed silly, yes, but guess what happened? Boop, scores went up. And so it's it's that kind of thing where you don't know. Like I can't tell you what your end users need without really finding out from them, but the thing is you have to understand that you can't either. You know, and if you assume that you know how things are going, that's a bold assumption. You know what I mean? But, you know, just really being able to find that out, you you learn these new things. I mean, the examples are endless. Like the communication for instance, like communication is the C and Q stack and you know, that's pretty by design, a very vague term. Because you're like, okay, communication, what does that mean? The beauty of it is, we don't know. It's what are the communication issues that matter to your end users? And so what we'd find is like, oh, it turns out like, you know, people aren't, you know, we've all heard this, like people aren't, you know, confirming that an issue is resolved before you close tickets. So easy. But sometimes it's like, oh, there's a service now. I don't want to be annoying, but there's a service now automatic email that, you know, goes at me five times whenever you mark a ticket as like won't fix or whatever, you know, and it's all these bugs that you don't know. So it's like to sum it up with just the Mark Twain quote, like, you know, it's not what I don't know that scares me, it's what I am positive I know that's that's really not the truth. You know, like and so I I I think those are those are the best examples, but I mean, it's different for every company and it is always surprising/ painful to really find out. You're like, oh, good to know. I I have to assume so much of this hinges around exactly that is that like I I I talk about this a lot is that value is in the perception of of the holder, right? Like it doesn't matter what you think about the job that you're doing, right? Like maybe from a self-worth standpoint, you want to think that you're doing a good job. But that bears very little relevance as to whether or not somebody else perceives the value that you're trying to provide and it requires that validation. And you know, a bit of a bit of bruised egos and some rough marks of yeah, you know, I didn't think this was true. And I maybe I don't think this is true. And that's another thing that I think is incredibly important is if you're going to ever ask people for their feedback, don't tell them that they're wrong when they give you your feedback, right? But that's such an initial reaction of like, no, no, no, they don't get it, right? Like, no. Like what you said, sorry to interrupt, but just what you said was so important. Your self-worth. I think that is like the nugget in this entire conversation. I think that is so close to the root of the issue, you know, not that we'll have time to unpack it. It'll probably take, you know, it's like therapy, it takes a long time. But it's like, do you take your self-worth and like, nothing feels better, nothing is more self-actualized than coming to work and really being proud of what you do. Like I killed it today. And finding your self-worth in like like being like good at IT or best practices or or things that are IT-centric is going to be problematic, right? Because it's not necessarily, you know, it may or may not be be good for the business and then you're just not going to be happy, which is the case in a lot of orgs. If you can find your self-worth in again, the the service and not what I'm doing, but listen, it's about the business succeeding. You know, like it's, you know, I did IT, you know, for like a lot of growing companies, I was more excited about, you know, we went through like three successful IPOs, you know, I think like Twitter and and Box and then well, now Qstack, we've had a couple more that have done it as customers. That's what's exciting when the company succeeds. You know, and it's a small detail, but like where is your self-worth? When you reward your team? Think about your performance review. Do you reward your team like if you showed your performance review to someone who was not in IT, would they understand it or would it be gobbly good? If it's like if if you are measuring your people on how well did you impact the business? How did you impact the bottom line? What did you do? Do you even know the the your role in the bottom line of the business? Like that's where we need to get and um we're a long way from it, but I I do feel I don't know. Do you feel I feel the industry is definitely changing, even MSPs, like MSPs are now reaching out to me for the first time, like really interested in experience. Like, can I ask you what you're seeing because I I don't want to call a revolution when it's not, but I feel like people are on board with learning the real experience. Agreed. Like I I definitely feel the tide is turning. And I I it's funny that I would actually ascribe a big part of this to commoditization, right? Like there's just no way to differentiate yourself in a technical capacity. It used to be that like people would say, well, we're a a VMware platinum partner, we're a Microsoft gold partner and all of those things made a difference. Like, oh, they must know something because they have these these sort of technical qualifications. That feels a lot less relevant to me because again, like most of this that that that sort of differentiation from a technical perspective is commoditized and it's not how a client views your your capability. Certain projects perhaps that's that's the case. But certainly from a service standpoint, it's much, much, much more about the experience. And and people are starting to recognize that that you can actually engender a ton of client loyalty by just making people feel good about what you do. The technical component of that is an expectation of just what your service is. The the quality of the service makes a huge difference. Yeah, yeah, and and and and the impact. Like I think of just from being a uh, you know, a wannabe tennis player back in the day, the word service always makes me think about that and that's really how I differentiate between service and experience. I've even gotten to calling ITSM, I just call it ITXM now to remind me, like IT experience management. I like that. Uh I did a talk recently on IT like experience versus, you know, service and the way that I just think about it like tennis. Like service, if you think about service, it's like a, you know, kind of like an action word, it's a verbish, you know, well, it's a noun in that case, but you get the idea. Like I think of tennis, you're serving. And I remember learning watching Pete Sampras for the first time and then going home and uh or I mean then going to the court and like practicing the serve and like when I practiced it in the living room, I was getting the mechanics down. I was watching it. I had like the VCR with the pause and the, you know, VHS or whatever, watching it over and over again. But the perfect serve, like boom, like in IT, we've gotten really good at service, at delivering this stuff. So boom. The perfect serve is awesome, but you don't become a champion unless that serve lands in and lands in with the right spin. We need to pay attention to how our service lands. And I think service is what you do and we're awesome at measuring service. We're awesome at measuring what we do and quantifying that. Experience is how that lands. And we need to get better at defining experience as not just taking service metrics and and throwing the experience label on it, but saying service is important, but the experience of how that lands, how that service is received, that is a key element that we're that we're missing. And once you start measuring that, it's like the missing link and you're just you really see the full potential of your team. Like it's if you're if if IT is a rough job, like try the experience method, try really focusing and finding a way to measure how that experience lands and understand the people. A little empathy will go a long way. Spoken as someone who my wife will tell you is struggles with empathy. I was a psychotherapist, I still struggle with empathy. It's fucking hard as a human, it's hard. But it's what's missing and if you want to be badass at IT, like you you owe it to yourself to do it. 100%. Couldn't say it say it better. It's that is the missing element of sort of the future of of IT support is is putting yourself in the seat of the person receiving the support is is a fundamental component and and often a missing component to the the service being provided. We're we're too focused on the metrics on on the back of the house and need to understand this from the position of the person in the chair for sure. This has been great, Ben. So if uh people wanted to check out Qstack, any places that you would direct them to to follow up with you? I would say that uh oh my lawyers would like to say because we'd like had to pay a lot of money for this trademark. So Qstack with a C. There's no K. Qstack with a K is a fantastic company based in Iceland that is not us. So it's QSTAC.com. Head there, um you can click schedule a demo if you want to hear more about it. I think we're going to be, if you're familiar with HDI, that's a Help Desk Institute. Yep. I think we're going to be the metric of the month in a couple of months, so look out for that. Jeff Rumberg writes a column. And I actually just started a leadership series with them, so I think every month, if you, yeah, hopefully you're not sick of me because like every month I'm having a leadership article come out on HDI. So you can find me there, but I would just LinkedIn or QSTAC.com. Check it out and we're here to help. It's a passion project. We're not like any other tool. And we help people if if you can't afford a tool, call me anyways and we'll find some way to help you just because we have such a chance right now. With experience kind of trending and being in the nomenclature to really nail this. And there's also Roy Atkinson, like my first podcast guest was actually, he really said this well. It was like, he's so worried that we're just going to co-op the word experience into just another buzzword that doesn't mean anything. And like this is our chance to make IT the coolest department in the company if we really can understand experience. But if we just say like, oh yeah, we know the experience. We see how many people log in and, you know, check into jam every week. That's not experience. Get to know people, it's more fun and shout out to Todd and thank you man for this time. I know I ramble like a madman, but to be honest, like if no one enjoys this podcast, I guarantee you I will listen to it five times and enjoy it because I I just think you're the best and I really appreciate you uh giving me a platform to ramble on. No, I appreciate you coming on. And also, we'll have links in the show notes page, also to to your podcast as well, IT after hours, which is fantastic, a lot of fun, lots of lots of cool guests and and interesting topics as well. So be sure to check that out. Ben, been awesome. Thanks, man. Todd, it's it's a real pleasure. I really appreciate it. We'll see you next time.