Fernando Duarte, Director of Support at Odyssey: Cultivating Continuous Growth

Scott Smith: All right. I’m excited to welcome Fernando Dwarte, who is the direct he’s been doing customerf facing roles for over 15 years. And one of the things I have really been impressed by with him is that he describes his love of problem solving and making his customers the hero. So, welcome, Fernando. Awesome.

Fernando Duarte: I’m excited to be here. I’m looking forward to a conversation.

Scott Smith: I think we both have a similar love of Legos. so it sounds like you love building Legos with your kids.

Scott Smith: And has that been kind of a lifetime thing? Did you get into it more recently?  Yeah. Heat. Whoa.

Fernando Duarte: is it’s a lifetime.

Fernando Duarte: I love organizing chaos and that’s what Legos are. They’re bags of my favorite two sets are very complex sets. There’s a Nintendo entertainment system with a little TV that you crank at and it moves the animation on it. I sat down with my daughter who was eight year olds at the time for 10 hours at a table to finish the whole Same thing with my son. We had a fully articulated R2-D2 and it was about 10 But it’s 10 hours that I’m sitting with them.

Fernando Duarte: All my whole job is to pull out the next pieces for the next page. if they made a mistake, I let them make that mistake. And when we get three, four pages later, it’s like, “This is not fitting.” I’m like, “Okay, what are you going to do?” And then they start back tracing. here’s where the mistake. Great. Now you found it. Let’s do this. But it’s not about me building it. is watching them,…

Scott Smith: That’s cool.

Fernando Duarte: understanding, making mistakes, allowing them to do that and end up with an outcome that is all organized from the mess that was originally there.

Scott Smith: I think it’s especially cool because you’re kind of overseeing the chaos and you’re overseeing them patiently as opposed to I don’t know. I have four kids and sometimes I have trouble jumping in maybe too early to try to help.

Scott Smith: And it seems like your method is very chill. So h how are you getting your brain to be so I mean has it always been that way? Are you that kind of guy?

Fernando Duarte: No, no.

Fernando Duarte: I need constant stimulation, constant feedback. is one of the few times when I’m sitting with them that in order to keep calm as they’re doing this task. I’m concentrating on looking at their me reactions, facial expressions as they’re thinking, how they’re approaching a problem. So, I’m analyzing what they’re doing and that’s how I’m feeding myself rather than just sitting there doing nothing.

Scott Smith: So, do you ever build your own Legos? like you you do it on your own.

Fernando Duarte: No. Yes.

Scott Smith: What’s your favorite? Do you have one that you can most me remember? Okay.

Fernando Duarte: My whole office is full of Legos.

Fernando Duarte: They have a Star Wars series and the ships are too big to put everywhere, but they have helmets. So I collect the helmets. So yeah, it’s just having a display. Okay, it’s done.

Scott Smith: Yeah. It’s blurred,…

Scott Smith: but behind me I have a Batman cowl like his mask.

Fernando Duarte: Yep. I have no I have no Yeah,…

Scott Smith: I have a big Batman frame and in the office of Mark Zuckerberg when I was working at Facebook my wife and I brought over it wasn’t his office it was like a conference room that he used but we built the Lego Batman tumbler like the Batman mobile from the B Christian Bale Batman movie. It’s Dude it’s so cool right?

Fernando Duarte: it is. Yeah.

Scott Smith: 

Scott Smith: That’s so cool. And do you find that working through these kind of helps in addition to the sort of patience methodical cha chaos does it help you I don’t know take a moment from the normal ordinary chaotic working with your customers  Right there.

Fernando Duarte: When you work in support it’s chaos everywhere. I mean that’s the nature of the business. This is something that I know I will have an outcome. I know what the outcome is. It’s predictable.  there’s a pattern when I’m building especially you talked about the cowl that you have on the back there’s one side is going to be the same as the other side you have parallel things so when they showing me we’re going to be building this ear at the same time I’m building the second ear I’m trying how do I make it more efficient at the same time so build efficiency on the p discover the patterns do that yeah it brings me home my wife knows that

00:05:00

Fernando Duarte: That’s why she allows me to spend my last order was $600 out of Lego.

Scott Smith: So beautiful.

Scott Smith: I love it.

Fernando Duarte: And she’s like, “Do you want them all?” “Yes.” Like,…

Fernando Duarte: “They’re all yours.” Because she knows that when all the stress from everything gets together, I’ll just sit down on a table and I need an hour and I’m like, “Okay, I’m back to normal. I decompressed.

Scott Smith: It seems a little bit there’s these mindfulness practices that people talk about or…

Scott Smith: yoga meditation. building Legos for me as well is very very much that way. one thing that you pointed out or…

Scott Smith: you mentioned that’s pretty interesting is you talked about completion with the Lego versus work where I think in a lot of ways work is never complete. It’s never ending. There’s always something more to do. And so sometimes it feels like you’re never going to get to the end, I guess you probably have to look at the work you do every day more like milestones mini jobs or something just like you might with the Lego. Is that fair?

Fernando Duarte: Mhm. Yeah.

Fernando Duarte: So, I want to know you brought something to my mind. I was rereading a book from Simon Synynic and he’s talking about the infinite versus the finite game. If you approach anything at work as a finite thing, you’re going to lose because there’s no winners or losers. It’s just about continuing the game.

Fernando Duarte: So any interaction that you have with a customer I finished this I closed the ticket that’s not the game.

Fernando Duarte: Continue playing keeping that relationship going. So this is a infinite game whereas Legos is a finite game. I know what the end is and I won when I finish the deck. There’s a clear milestone when everything’s over. Sorry.

Scott Smith: H. …

Scott Smith: it’s much more profound than I was expecting, but I love the finite versus infinite. That’s a really cool book. Do you maybe when we’re done I’ll have to grab the name of the book from you, but that sounds very cool. so, as I mentioned earlier, you’ve been working customer success, customer support for 15 plus years. looking at your LinkedIn, it’s like 10 different companies, a lot of great names, exciting opportunities and challenges. Everyone seemed very different. I’m super curious though how you got started. so we can go as far back as you want but did you work as a grocery store shelf stalker in customer support helping people? Did you work in customer support in a summer job?

Fernando Duarte: So I’ll go far back.

Scott Smith: Where did you have your first interaction with this kind of experience? And how did you know that you wanted to keep doing it?  Okay.

Fernando Duarte: I moved to United States to study computers. I was video gamer. I wanted to make games. That was the reason I moved here. So I learned programming and I did retail. While I was going to school, I discovered the love that I had for training and selling and I became eventually a district manager, a national trainer, different companies.

Scott Smith: Nice.

Fernando Duarte: One of these companies, I had a problem with IT team because they didn’t know what they were doing. So, I would stop on my way home from one of my stores. I would stop by headquarters and give him a lesson on what they did wrong.

Fernando Duarte: the CTO get here hearing this and he’s like why don’t you come and run my team instead I’m like okay sounds like a plan I know all the stores I know all the managers I know what they’re going through I know technology let me do that so I moved from retail front end to retail back end doing IT support build a team we had 300 stores awesome thing it was a photo photography company so we converted the 300 stores from film to digital.

Fernando Duarte: That was a phenomenal transition.

Scott Smith: Wow.

Scott Smith: There’s a lot of different things here that are really interesting. Sorry. Keep going.

Fernando Duarte: That company got sold and moved to Texas. And as much as I love their barbecue, I wasn’t going to move from California. So, I went to a big retailer, Mvin, California.

00:10:00

Fernando Duarte: the open big box and I build a support team 247 365 technology I wrote some software for them as well while I was there and then the 2008 crash happened Merbans went bankruptcy and I had the opportunity to go to another big box retailer but it was a 45minut drive from my house same time I interview

Fernando Duarte: I interviewed with a little startup that I was a 7 minute drive from my house. Big box retailer came with a very nice offer. I calculated commute cost and everything and told my wife, look, I’m expecting an offer from the startup. If they come within this range, I will go to a startup. They gave me a hard offer at the bottom of my range.  But I’m like, this has to be based on data decisions that I made. So I took a risk and I went to a startup and once I got there and the speed, the fact that you can wear many hats and you can make an impact on the direction of the company got me. That initial startup was also a good lesson on learning what not to do.

Fernando Duarte: that one end up liquidating assets. But shortly before that, my manager jumped to another little startup at the time.

Scott Smith: Okay.

Fernando Duarte: She started calling me on Monday. It’s like, get over here. Let’s go do this together. That was Sora. We build a team from at the time the company has 60 people. I was there five and a half years. I left when they had 750 because it went from I was learning, I was making a difference to I start watching what feet not to step on whenever something needed to change. I couldn’t stir the ship anymore and I wasn’t learning. So I decided to take a year off on sbatical. But as we already learned, I don’t have a long attention span.

Fernando Duarte: So two months later,…

Fernando Duarte: I went to work for an LLM company that Go ahead.

Scott Smith: Interesting. Okay.

Scott Smith: So there’s a lot of interesting things that I thought really jumped out to me. So, you kind of highlighted a few different ones that I’d like to go back to just really quickly. So, you mentioned you’re a video gamer. what kind of games

Scott Smith: 

Fernando Duarte: I was a PlayStation guy for a long time.

Scott Smith: All right.

Fernando Duarte: I love the handheld of the controller. Wasn’t a PC gamer until my son, but yeah, I every single one of the PlayStations is still connected, is still active. I had over 300 games on PS1. Yeah.

Scott Smith: 

Scott Smith: Okay. the other,…

Scott Smith: a couple others were you mentioned working for a company that went from phys I think I understood it correctly, but physical photography to digital photography. Is that right?

Fernando Duarte: Yeah. Mhm.

Scott Smith: So, presumably, we don’t have to get into details of names or companies or anything, but that’s a big shift, I would assume, for a company to try to manage and change too. It’s kind of like right now where there’s a lot of even software companies implementing AI where it’s a big jump, right? how did you find that? was that hard to get the old school way to update the new or was it pretty easy for them?

Fernando Duarte: We realized the company was about you would go to the mall with your family and you were able to get your pictures in about an hour. So they had the lab on premise printing everything processed within that. And as revenues start dwindling our number one en enemy was digital cameras.

Scott Smith: number one enemy.

Scott Smith: Nice. Right.

Fernando Duarte: Yeah, there…

Fernando Duarte: because people not could take those pictures at home and get the immediate reward. So we did research on cameras, computer systems, servers, and it was about rolling it out.

Scott Smith: And you also mentioned providing customer support 24 by7 365. I at least a lot of the based that are smaller. They have this 9to5 customer support a little easier to manage.

Scott Smith: But yours was 365 24 by7.

Fernando Duarte: gun continuous communication,…

Scott Smith: What’s that I mean you have to take so many things into consideration presumably at that scale like translation of documentation in your help center. I may be having some folks on your support team who speak different languages. What are some of the challenges there? Because I would imagine there’s a lot right.

00:15:00

Fernando Duarte: transparency, clarity, and culture building. Those are your biggest challenges. you got to have autonomy because I cannot supervise people 247.

Scott Smith: You seem like you have enough energy to do it,…

Fernando Duarte: You gota as far as Yeah.

Scott Smith: 

Scott Smith: but maybe you shouldn’t. ouch.

Fernando Duarte: I mean, for a while at another company, I had a team in the US and a team in India and I would have meetings at 6:00 in the morning and 11:00 at night.

Scott Smith: Okay.

Fernando Duarte: Yeah. My wife wasn’t happy.

Fernando Duarte: That’s why my office is separated from the rest of the house.

Scott Smith: As is mine. Very smart. I like that.

Fernando Duarte: But yeah, it’s all about setting up the right expectations,…

Fernando Duarte: building that culture, and making sure that people know what our end goal is. That’s okay.

Scott Smith: Sorry, my wife text me about kid pickup.

Scott Smith: So, okay, very cool. And I think the other thing that really resonated with me there was just the aspect of kind of feeling I don’t know what the right word is but fatigued or not as energized or excited as the startup grew. it’s so funny because you go to a startup…

Scott Smith: because you want to help build it into something big and substantial and awesome and then once it’s there it’s kind of like actually this wasn’t the part that I wanted. I liked the beginning formative kind of building stage. Is that fair to say? Was that kind of how you looked at it?

Fernando Duarte: Yeah, those are my Legos.

Fernando Duarte: Once I got to build, why am I going back and rebuilding it? I need a different set. Nice.

Scott Smith: I need a different set. Okay, that’s super cool. That’s exactly how I feel. It’s like where are the Legos? I guess later on as the company gets bigger, you have one Lego and you kind of have to make sure that Lego is well taken care of. I just realized I forgot. I have these guys sitting next to me, which is the Lord of the Rings action heroes. But, when I look at those guys, I’m like, “Yeah, it’s hundreds of little pieces that I put together. Super fun.” awesome. Okay. So, we talked a little bit about kind of the transformation stuff. I would be curious, from your experience at all these different companies, maybe there’s a project or an experience that kind of helped change…

Scott Smith: how you approached work. what was a big challenge that you helped facilitate building through and towards? Yeah,…

Fernando Duarte: …

Fernando Duarte: let’s go. Every single company has changed me. Let’s start with that part. Joe, I need to put a P on this as my CEO is calling. Hello Joe.

Scott Smith: no problem.

00:20:00

Fernando Duarte: Sorry, apologize about that. I don’t know if you’re familiar what Odyssey does. we are third party administrator of state funds for the education of underprivileged kids.

Scott Smith: No worries.

00:25:00

Scott Smith: A little bit

Fernando Duarte: So states put on a program where they’ll give educational savings accounts or microrants. So if your kid is in an under underperforming school zone, you may qualify for some money from the state to pay for the private tuition or pay for supplies for school if you’re going to homeschool them.

Fernando Duarte: So we manage everything from the application process, the parents problems, the school registration, tuition payments, an e marketplace with returns,…

Fernando Duarte: damages, exchanges, all of that is my team. So I have B2C and every state it has complete different rules. you’re muted, by the your audio went out because you’re on a Mac and your Apple your iPods love to take it over.

Scott Smith: That’s tough.

Fernando Duarte: Let’s see. Let’s try your audio. yeah. Hold That’s on me. Try. So, you were gonna say something. Sorry.

Scott Smith: Audio.

Scott Smith: You hear me now? Okay.

Fernando Duarte: Yeah, not only did I mute the mic, I killed my speakers when I was on the phone with my CEO.

Scott Smith: Any pool of states you guys cover at this point?

Fernando Duarte: So, to make this better, today we launched one state and tomorrow we have another one. Two states are launching their programs. One today, Wyoming, and tomorrow, Utah with three programs. So he’s like,…

Scott Smith: Okay. Yeah,…

Fernando Duarte: “There’s all these things that I’m like, I got this. I know what it is.” If I had had a concern, I would have told you, “Hey, Scott, what? I need to drop on this. I have a phenomenal team. We got this.” And I’ll show him what we can do.

Scott Smith: that’s awesome. I saw your LinkedIn post that you were hiring in Utah So, do you guys have anybody here already or…

Scott Smith: will that be part of the new product roll out?

Fernando Duarte: So there was a program in two firms in Utah,…

Fernando Duarte: the SEP and the UFA and they were administered by three other companies. We signed a contract last Monday and we got to go live tomorrow. So we don’t Yeah.

Scott Smith: All right. Okay.

Fernando Duarte: So we don’t have all the data from the previous people. There’s a lot of unknowns. So it’s about putting the communications together, get the team on what to do. And yes, part of what we do is the moment we get a contract at a state, I hire workers there.

Scott Smith: Yeah, that totally makes sense.

Fernando Duarte: So I open an account at Handshake at BYU and I had two people hire.

Fernando Duarte: I got the okay to hire on Wednesday.

Fernando Duarte: I had two people hired on Friday and started Monday. We did 17 interviews in two days.

Scott Smith: Very nice.

Scott Smith: right. You need some Lego time.

Fernando Duarte: Yeah,…

Scott Smith: Maybe.

Fernando Duarte: I actually have Tyler Ren waiting for me.

Scott Smith: Amazing. going back 45 seconds, you mentioned you have a great team.

Fernando Duarte: …

Scott Smith: 

Scott Smith: Tell me a little about that. how are you building a great team, hiring and recruiting people? Do you have any tips? I don’t know, best practices. I mean, it sounds like you know what you’re doing.

Fernando Duarte: if I were to brag about anything in my career is in 16 years I had only one person resign.

Fernando Duarte: when I hire people, I hire somebody somebody’s going to work for me. My description is I develop the team while running the business, not the other way around. So, I’m committed to anybody that comes to work for me that I’m going to scale them up.  So tips is whenever you hire if possible have two people start together. Never one Couple of things on that. If you have a single person is more expensive on your training team. When you have two people start together, they have somebody become their buddy that is going through the same problems as you are, right?

00:30:00

Fernando Duarte: if you’re starting with them and you don’t leave your body behind. It’s nature of humans. also very first thing I asked him I said welcome to the team you have your first project in two weeks I want you to tell me that my baby’s ugly.

Fernando Duarte: I said what do you mean? I’m like, I want you to find every single hole when something doesn’t look right, that is ugly that you think we could have done better.

Scott Smith: I love that.

Scott Smith: And you’re giving them permission, so it’s not like they have to be careful.

Fernando Duarte: No, no,…

Scott Smith: They can just come right to you.

Fernando Duarte: I want to know everything that’s wrong. as we talked earlier, I celebrate failure. I celebrate when things are wrong because I cannot fix if I don’t know that’s wrong.

Fernando Duarte: So everybody from the beginning they have ownership and they know that they can change things that reporting a mistake is okay. I will do this. I’ll be on a meeting and I’m like, “Hey guys, remember what I told you?” “Yeah, I was wrong.” What do you mean? Yeah. Look,…

Fernando Duarte: on me. it was a mistake, right? We make mistakes, we learn, we grow. That’s all it is. So establishing that trust is it makes a big difference.

Scott Smith: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Scott Smith: I have a seven-year-old who also in ADHD kind of all over the place crazy guy and he loves to play with and touch. He has no impulse control, but he’s the greatest kid in the world, but he will move everything. And so yesterday I came home, I was looking for something specific and it was just gone. I could not find it. And I said, Aiden, where did you move my thing? And I was looking around for a few minutes and I realized I moved it. So I had to very quickly apologize to him. And I think it’s interesting because the number of mistakes and problems that we find and then also mistakes that we make. You kind of have to be willing to be okay with those mistakes. But at the same time you want to be working with people…

Scott Smith: who are humble enough to say I made a mistake or I screwed up, not because you’re going to hold it over them, but because they need to know that they did make a mistake, as a manager, how do you balance the h you screwed up? I mean, you’re probably not saying that, but how do you provide that feedback when they do make the mistakes

Fernando Duarte: Awesome.

Fernando Duarte: I’m glad you asked. one of the things that I just did is I created a 10-week leadership training for my managers. So, every Friday instead of what went wrong and everything, we talked about leadership. So, I have a program that I’m building with them. And one of those trainings is focused on system versus person.

Fernando Duarte: So if somebody on your team makes a mistake, automatically assume that the system is broken. It’s not the person. Why did they fail? They made a mistake. Great. was the policy there? in this case, somebody missed a policy. it’s Where is it documented? How easy is it to find? it’s on this document here. How big is the document? 50 pages. What page is it at?

Fernando Duarte: page nine. How big is this thing? Is it bolded? do you have a specific explanation or what are the consequences of missing this policy? No. Okay, then it’s on It wasn’t clear. It wasn’t there. We set him up for failure. So, the system is broken. So, every time you find a mistake from one of your employees, figure out how the system is broken and how we’re going to prevent somebody else. That’s a gift that he gave you by making that mistake.

Scott Smith: Do you find that I think part of that methodology that you described you get to a point…

Scott Smith: where you identify the process and then you identify maybe that the process wasn’t documented but you also know that that was somebody’s responsibility So once you get to that point,…

Fernando Duarte: Yeah. Yeah.

Scott Smith: is it more about helping them see that they need to fix it? I mean, I think some people I have friends whose CEOs, they use guilt and shame and all these kinds of other things to embarrass. I’m not sure that those are very helpful. Typically, I think they kind of just shut you down, right?

Fernando Duarte: I’ll ask him why do you think he missed it? Right. Have him give him.

Fernando Duarte: Do you understand the importance? everything I do and happens to be another Simon Synx book. Start with why.

Scott Smith: Yeah. …

Fernando Duarte: When people understand the reasoning behind why you’re asking everything else is easier.

00:35:00

Fernando Duarte: You said, it’s so somebody had to write that policy. Somebody didn’t put it correctly. And I’m like, do you understand why this person missed it?

Scott Smith: That’s cool. and that could potentially be the end because maybe they just don’t know and they’re the wrong person for the job.

Fernando Duarte: I guess for that.

Scott Smith: Yeah. Yeah.

Fernando Duarte: And that’s my job as the leader, I take the blame for whatever is wrong…

Scott Smith: Right. Right.

Fernando Duarte: because I didn’t give clear enough instructions or set up an expectations on what I needed to be done.

Scott Smith: I love that. let’s by the way just to pause for a second. I know we’re ended at 4:45, right? Do you have a hard stop? Do you want to start to wrap up?

Fernando Duarte: I’m okay. I also took some time my wife would with that phone call.

Scott Smith: I think the CEO is understandable. so, we’ve talked a little bit about building teams, hiring them, making sure that they’re doing a great job, holding them accountable. are there areas that you’re seeing the development of,…

Scott Smith: resources, technologies, emerging trends that you’re either implementing in your products or your team that you’re really excited about and that actually seem different for the first time.

Fernando Duarte: Yeah, let’s go with the hot topic,…

Fernando Duarte: right? Yeah.

Scott Smith: Hot Topic. Yes, it’s everywhere.

Fernando Duarte: AI, right? So, God,…

Scott Smith: It’s so hot right now.

Fernando Duarte: I was at a VC pitch competition last night and out of 11 competitors, 10 were AI. So that everybody’s doing AI. I see AI is not going to replace my agents. AI is here to augment my agents. They will not take their job.

Fernando Duarte: I’m old enough to remember 1985 Excel was coming out and they’re like, ” my god, this is going to destroy all accountants.” And accountants didn’t lose their They lose their job to accountants who know how to use Excel. Same thing is going to happen here. There’s two things I seen on Support agents are not going to lose their job to AI.  they’re going to lose their job to support agents who know how to use The skills that I’m hiring for now are much different than the skills that were before. I don’t need to hire you for hard skills. I need to hire you for soft skills. Whenever you reach support, there’s two type of interactions you may have. A transactional, how do I do this? Can you just reset my password? How?

Fernando Duarte: or a relational AI will be able to handle most transactional interactions. That means what gets to your support is the relational part. So it’s more about work on empathy. I told you we’re taking over this program where there’s ambiguity and unknown and people are frustrated because they’re moving from one vendor to another. So the very big advice I tell immediately it’s like okay if somebody reached out to you that means they don’t have a problem that the AI couldn’t have solved. What they need is an ear to listen to the frustration they’re going through.

Fernando Duarte: So listen, paraphrase, empathize,…

Fernando Duarte: and have them sign up for a communication slide, but don’t interrupt.

Scott Smith: I think they don’t interrupt is very valuable advice as well as the empathy part.

Scott Smith: This is kind of a personal example but I had a sibling pass away two months ago and she had booked a bunch of flights for a trip that she can’t go on,  And so I called on behalf of her and I remember going through the support tree on the phone and just being overwhelmed and worried that I was going to talk to a robot who wouldn’t be able to help me or I would talk to somebody who just said no and then I would be really annoyed that they at least didn’t kind of work with me or try to empathize. And it was actually Southwest and they had incredible customer support.

Scott Smith: this woman as you described very empathetic I’m sorry and I’m not there to have a sort of therapist situation but she was so kind and so helpful and…

Scott Smith: she resolved my problem but with empathy and for me it’s like that helps build that relationship with that company and that brand for quite a while and I’m going to talk about it here right so I think that’s probably another part for you yeah the relational part

Fernando Duarte: And that’s that relational.

Fernando Duarte: Yeah. Exactly what it is. It’s going back like a good comedian, It’s about She played the infinite game. It wasn’t about here’s your refund or…

00:40:00

Fernando Duarte: no you don’t get anything. we win you lose. That’s a finite game. She’s like I will listen I’ll build a relationship. This is going to go a long time. So try

Scott Smith: Yeah, very true.

Scott Smith: Very true. I mean, the rest of my life I’m going to probably continue to be a customer. So, yeah, you’re totally right. Infinite versus finite. It’s so cool. I have maybe two more questions for you, but you’ve worked now with a lot of different great companies and it seems like you really align with talking to the customer, empathizing with the customer, listening to them. tell me about what the difference is from your perspective of building a great customer experience and…

Scott Smith: building a great product versus maybe not like how do you build a great product? What sets you apart?  How do you think about that?

Fernando Duarte: is problem and…

Fernando Duarte: I see this with a lot of the companies they’re building a great product on their perspective. It’s not a great product on the customer’s perspective.

Scott Smith: Yep.

Fernando Duarte: You are building it. You think that their interaction the user experience is it should be obvious. Yes, because you designed it. what every button does. That doesn’t mean that it’s obvious. I’m like but if I click here doesn’t do this.

Fernando Duarte: but why would you click there? So it’s more about being on the perspective of the customer. the voice of the customer programs are great. some of my favorite things that’s any bad seesat that I was product related and I can come back to sees that in a moment.

Scott Smith: Start and…

Fernando Duarte: But it is a gold mine of information.

Fernando Duarte: every time something went wrong once again celebrate that it’s like wait that wasn’t intuitive to them so getting that perspective yeah you don’t have to go put a panel of customer panel that will tell you…

Scott Smith: 

Scott Smith: a enough to tell you, right? Yeah.

Fernando Duarte: because then you’re narrow to just those particular views besides your customer panel is usually your top customers

Fernando Duarte: the rest of them. So, you’re catering to a small percentage of your customer base. one really simple one, especially on SAS, most SAS products are going to give you some kind of insights and reporting. almost every single company the reporting is based about how good they’re doing of a job. what their product is doing for you. So,

Fernando Duarte: If you were to give me a report or insights, hey, look, we closed on AI particularly. We did this many containments, you sold this many tickets. I’m like, okay, what does that mean to my CFO? How many man hours did I solve? What is my ROI…

Fernando Duarte: if I was a product A report that gives an ROI to the user goes to the person who’s going to pay the bill. you’re making the retention much easier, but the reports are in your perspective. Look how good we are. I’m like, and the CFO is like, okay, I’m glad that they’re good and they’re doing this thing. What does that mean for me?

Scott Smith: I’m very guilty of this in our product too.

Scott Smith: That you’re saying this, I’m like, shoot, we’d have nothing that helps the buyer, the admin, the CFO, the management team think that our product is worthwhile at all. This is a very good point.

Fernando Duarte: So sorry so this is what I’m looking I’m like okay this is what will make a successful product something that is if this is the person I’m selling to somebody else on the company’s paying the bill what is it that’s going to make them look good to the company how I’m going to make my buyer’s job easier to sell internally because they’ll be your champions and they’ll tell all their friends it’s like guess what I don’t have to do all from all this data to here to prove an ROI. They gave it to me.

Scott Smith: Very cool. I love that. I think you said you wanted to come back to CESAT,…

Fernando Duarte: Yeah, I have an approach on sees and…

Scott Smith: but always if you’d rather not.

Fernando Duarte: this is why I was mentioning seesat I consider a vanity metric because everybody on the outside wants to go what is your customer satisfaction sees is not a customer satisfaction is measuring how good your support team is doing ces is better to me but on seesat is a binary question. Did we answer your question? Did the agent take care of you? Yes. No. a great sampling rate or response rate would be 20%. let’s say you have 20% response rate and you have a really high seat of 95%. Which I’ll brag because I’m out of that, right?

00:45:00

Fernando Duarte: So that means 5% of your response rate. So 20% of your customer base is upset and you’re looking at you’re working to get that 5% above is not making a dent on the 80% of your customers.

Scott Smith: All right.

Fernando Duarte: You have a very small sampling rate and it’s only people are very polarized that go to one of those ends. you upset him enough or made him happy enough to give a response. Now once I have that data, I want to make the best out of my data. So I use what I call the three Ps. Any system that comes in, I’ll classify it into people, proc policy or product.

Fernando Duarte: By default any positive cesat is people you help me thank you because your product did it so No you took care of me or your policy is great let me send you a response on that. No. So everything that comes on the positive is the agent did their job. on the negative. There’s a lot of times that your agents will get nicked because they say, ” on your case, your example,…

Scott Smith: Yeah, exactly.

Fernando Duarte: I’m sorry, but we cannot help you because we can only help the person who did that.” The request for cancelling those flights needs to come from the email of the person who originally booked. That would have been a policy and I would have got the agent pretty much telling you, I’m not empowered to help you.

Fernando Duarte: So that’s a policy issue. The other one is, hey, I tried to do it, but the system won’t let me. Now we have a product issue. So your gold is finding policies and products to fix negatives. Sure, you may get some errors on your agents. It’s a coachable moment, but you have gold mine on where your policy is failing, your customers, and where your product is failing.

Scott Smith: Super insightful. Thank you. that was super cool. I like that a lot. Okay, so final countdown. young Fernando,…

Scott Smith: older Fernando, but You got a lot of great experience. what’s one piece of advice you’d give to that 18, 19, 20-year-old kid who’s looking for something like to get to where you are? What would you say? Okay.

Fernando Duarte: finished college.

Fernando Duarte: On the school of harness. I love learning. I encountered that a lot of my teachers didn’t know they were following a textbook and following a pattern. They didn’t know deeper questions and I got the solution with college. I wasn’t learning from a person. I’m like if this is what you’re going to teach me, I can read the book on my own teach myself which I did.

Fernando Duarte: most of the programming most of the time as I’m an avid not reader because of my short attention span I’m an listener so every time I go for a walk I have a book at either 1.75 or two times the speed and I’m listening to books all the time but yeah it’s like there’s what they call the paper ceiling if you don’t have a degree you not consider prolonged jobs.

Scott Smith: Yeah. …

Scott Smith: All right.

Fernando Duarte: That piece of paper opens more doors. Did I get where I am? I would have gotten here much faster had I not given up a year before I finished.

Scott Smith: That is a great suggestion. Thank you. All right, Fernando, thanks for your time and thanks for hanging out, answering questions. love love having you on today.

Fernando Duarte: It was a pleasure.

Fernando Duarte: I’m happy to have more conversations. I’m looking forward to giving your team a little more feedback on a product.

00:50:00

Scott Smith: Perfect. …

Fernando Duarte: Yeah, wood getting there. I’m looking forward to next Friday’s release.

Scott Smith: That’s All right, I’ll finish the recording and then we can chat for a minute.