In this episode of The Support Automation Show, a podcast by Capacity, Justin Schmidt is joined by Lee Roquet, Chief Customer Officer at Yellowfin. They discuss why an organization that adopts support automation needs to find the right balance between the company and customer needs to succeed.
Listen now!
Justin Schmidt: Welcome to the Support Automation Show, a podcast by Capacity. Join us for conversations with leaders in customer or employee support who are using technology to answer questions, automate processes, and build innovative solutions to any business challenge. I’m your host, Justin Schmidt. Lee, good morning, and welcome to the Support Automation Show. Where does this podcast find you?
Lee Roquet: Good morning, Justin. I am located in Ketchum, Idaho.
Justin: Ketchum, Idaho, where is that in relation to Boise?
Lee: We’re a few hours from Boise. If you know where the Sun Valley ski resort is, that’s where we’re based.
Justin: Got it. My marketing operations manager is based in Boise. She just moved there and says it’s beautiful. I’ve heard a lot of good things about Idaho but it’s one of those states where unless it’s Boise and I remember where that little star is on the map of state from the states and capitals lessons as a kid, not exactly sure where a lot of other stuff is there. Well, welcome to the Support Automation Show.
I understand you’re the chief customer officer at Yellowfin. Why don’t we start off by telling us a little bit about yourself, your journey to being a chief customer officer at Yellowfin, and then a little bit about what Yellowfin does?
Lee: Great. Thanks, Justin. My journey to my current role as Chief Customer Officer, I’ve been with Yellowfin for about seven years now. I’ll talk about that journey in just a second. I’ve always been in the last, I forgot, 15 years in the customer space focusing on the customer journey, customer success, client services. I’ve been at mainly software companies focused on selling software, enterprise little packages as well as some hardware to customers in North America.
The move over to the current role I’m in, the chief customer officer at Yellowfin was a big and exciting move for me. Yellowfin is a business intelligence software company. When I joined, there were 30 employees based out of the office in Melbourne, Australia. The goal was to grow and expand the company globally. I came on board and it was super exciting to be employee number 30.
Over the last seven years, we’ve grown the company to five offices globally and 165 employees. We are in a very tough competitive space being in business intelligence, but we have been fortunate enough to be recognized by Gartner and other analysts as an innovator. I’ve been in the Magic Quadrant for six years now and we’re super excited and passionate about what we do, which is really allowing customers to take their data, visualize it in eye-popping amazing ways for their end-users and customers and really drive a different approach to what data can do for a business.
It’s really about the collaboration and action around data. A lot of BI organizations just present a dashboard. We’re all about the action behind that dashboard. It’s been a really fun seven years. We’re actually just positioned to evolve and double the company in the next couple of years. It’s an exciting time to be a part of it.
Justin: That’s awesome to hear and congratulations on that growth. You mentioned the Gartner Magic Quadrant. If I were Gartner, I would send out a little placard or those little tombstone award things for every– you get one at 5 years and a gold watch at 10 or something like that. This show, we talk about automation. We talk about bringing automation into organizations to allow people to do their best work, to create a seamless, more favorable, faster experience for customers.
We run the gamut around all things support automation but that topic gets started by one question. It’s the same first question I ask everybody and that is, what does the phrase support automation mean to you?
Lee: It’s a good question. On top of mind, I just always think about automating process to speed delivery of insights to internal teams. My focus is I’ve always had an operational mindset on the careers that I’ve had in other organizations. I’ve always found early on just from an operation– a COO mentor I had he’s like, “If you want to really drive change, own the systems.”
I’ve always owned either building or being the admin of our CRM, the telephony programs, things that I could help integrate and provide. I’m big passionate about a one-click to a resolution. Looking at how tools and process can improve the team experience. My goal is always if I can improve the team experience, then I can improve their ability to spend more time with the customer.
For me, it’s really about looking at how do we improve and reduce friction between the customer and our teams? How do we get insights to customers and teams as quickly as possible? Either to deflect a customer finding an answer so they don’t have to reach out. Which I think is the ultimate goal of trying to make something automated. Then on the flip side, it’s just allowing the teams to find what they need and share and collaborate without having to cause more steps in their day more focus on, go spend time with customers.
At the end of the day, for me, I always tell my teams we’re people helping people.
That means you’ve got to spend the time with the customers and learn and have empathy and be able to help solve their problems. That’s why we’re in business.
Justin: Exactly. I love your phrase thereof, one-click to resolution. This is a particularly relevant and salient point for the topic of support automation because one of the core tenets of it is to provide that self-service. That level zero support as it’s called, shift left and you pick your buzzword to describe it. Ultimately, what you’re doing is leveraging technology to start out trying to get the easiest possible problem solved with automation.
Then build on that to try to solve more and more complex issues in at least an automated or semi-automated way. That in the event something breaks through and you need to get on the phone with somebody or start an email exchange or whatever it is, the person on the other end of the line actually, really both are equipped mentally and ready for that conversation and for that to be productive.
The classic example I always use is your customer support rep at, I don’t know, Best Buy is going to be a lot more energetic, fresh, friendly, helpful on the phone if he or she hasn’t answered 700 questions about return policy or something, and instead is working on larger issues that require more forethought to get through. One thing that I also wanted to touch on with you because I find it fascinating with what Yellowfin and BI in general does is companies buy BI tools to feed all their data into this platform, which then turns that data into something that business leaders can make actionable decisions from.
Whether that’s simple reporting stuff or even helping them tease out second-level analyses out of those reports. That means that there are companies and Yellowfin probably eats its own dog food in this way, too, but you’re reporting on KPIs that get better or worse depending on how the automation downstream from that is implemented. In your experience, what’s good advice for a leader looking to get automation or span the use of automation inside their business and how to build the KPIs around that automation to make it useful?
Lee: That’s a great question. That’s a million-dollar question. [chuckles] Oh, God, what we struggle with. I think anybody who’s leading teams or especially support organizations, there’s so much data. There’s so many KPIs that you could be looking at and there’s the best practice, which I always tell my team, “That’s great. That’s best practice but does it work for us?” You have to find what’s the best practice for your organization, going to your goals.
I think what we find we’re helping customers with is– again, there’s so much data that a company has when you go from you’re really trying to roll things up into actionable dashboards that cover a horizontal view of all your departments. It can be overwhelming. I think a lot of people go into things like, “We want to measure everything.” Yeah, but then what’s the outcome of measuring that? Is it something that’s actually going to drive your business?
I think the recommendation is one, really start small and really focus on the things that are going to help you actually action. Because just having dashboards with all sorts of metrics and things that don’t mean anything to the organization and that’s really where we have found in our own organization and you said it perfectly is, we full-on eat our own dog food and we have built an amazing product just from our own use case. It still blows me away some of the things that we have been able to do because we look at data differently. We look at data on how do we empower the end-user to action it?
For us, we have data coming in across the whole organization, but we focus it down to giving the people not just a visual view of data. Because, what I struggled with, as far as I talked to a couple of friends of mine who are at large organizations and they’re just like, “Yeah, people send out dashboards on these presentations and nobody has a clue on what the data means.”
What’s it mean to the organization? That’s the piece that people struggle with and so being able to put some context around the data like, “What’s it mean? What’s the red versus, green versus? What’s the pie chart mean that you’re trying to get the message across and what’s the action that follows that?” Really being able to step back and go, “Do we need to measure 500 things?” No, probably just five or six, but we got to be able to show the organization the impact.
Just an example, yesterday we just had our quarterly business review where we get everybody on a session. We run through each department and we all have our key metrics that we share. We really focus on how does everyone’s role in the organization link to those customer success metrics, or the renewal, or churn metrics. We can really then have people take back and go, God– I mean, QA, I don’t really ever talk to any customer, engage with customers, but the quality of my job and what I do in the output helps us renew customers. Being able to tie all that together is I think super important when we’re putting together what you’re going to share.
What are the key metrics? How are you going to tell that story?
Justin Schmidt: Yes, I was just going to say this is a storytelling exercise ultimately.
Lee: The storytelling is just amazing. What’s really exciting in our space and there’s a couple of companies doing this really well is, not only are you building these dashboards with some KPIs and everybody’s got their things that they’re getting measured on, but then being able to tell that story. The next piece is everybody’s driving with AI engines, we’ve got natural language query. We’ve got other assisted insights that are happening across these toolsets that really allow you to look at your data in a way that helps you find anomalies or trends that you’re not even looking at in your standard dashboard KPI.
It’s really an exciting time because systems are actually starting to help people see what they don’t know, right?
Justin: Right, yes.
Lee: That’s where I think automation is going to really evolve and for all departments because you’re going to actually see the things that you’re not even looking at and be able to drive some action and change around that. As you know, with COVID, nobody saw that coming and the impact of businesses and how we work and how we engage with customers and empathy. Those are the things that you want to be able to quickly be able to pivot and your data can show you that if your data is set up right and your system is set up right. To help you actually get some actionable insights as quickly as possible.
Justin: One thing that popped in my head while you’re illustrating that point is that I’m not going to give the whole Rumsfeld quote, but the part of that famous Donald Rumsfeld quote, we talked about the unknown unknowns. AIML set loose on data helps surface the unknown unknowns and that’s where you can drive real innovation from. The other thing that came to my mind as you’re talking there relates back to the topic that we were talking about a little bit when we were booking the show and that is, you mentioned focusing too much on what is best for the company and not the customer and how that can lead to a poor experience.
When you’re collecting data when you’re telling that story that you mentioned in your QBRs or your board meeting or whatever it is you’re using data to tell a story. There is an opportunity to bias that data towards the story you want to tell. I always think of Apple’s big presentations and they show a chart of how their product goes up in the right and then the competing device doesn’t and there’s no label on the Y-axis and it’s like, “Guys, come on.” Anyway, shout out to Apple’s marketing department, they’re the best in human history. Who am I to criticize?
I would love to know how you feel organizations can manage that balance between making something that’s maybe better for the company than the customer? How do you execute on figuring out the balance so that what is best for the company is also best for the customer in the support automation realm?
Lee: I think that’s a really important question because one thing and I was thinking about this is as we’re trying to schedule this out. Is even the automation piece–I think we’re at a point where, and I’ve just experienced it for myself just trying to get support from large cell phone carriers. When you call in to get support and you’re just stuck in these automated circles where you can’t ever talk to anybody, you can’t get any help. None of the phone systems can actually understand you.
Justin: Pressing zero doesn’t take you to an operator?
Lee: God, that doesn’t work anymore. I think the piece that I look at is, look, automation is awesome and I think getting efficient and making sure everybody has what they need and if the customers can solve their own problems, great. I think the problem that I’m seeing and I think it’s starting to swing back is that we’ve got so excited about automation and making it all about self-service that we actually push the customer further away back to people helping people. Cutting companies they’ve woken up because of either customers walking or the survey scores coming back negatively is that, you can’t just force every customer interaction to self-service.
I think that’s that balance where it says, “Yes, super awesome for your company, because you can get efficient, you can reduce staff. You can try to automate everything,” but the quality and value that you provide your customer is going to take a hit. For me, I’m trying to scale our global support operations and really looking at how do we improve the relationship with our valued customers, with our customer success management team. It’s really coming down to finding a good balance. We just did a full re-do of our customer journey and all the friction points and just getting feedback from user groups and our own teams.
Which are people aren’t spending the time with their front line teams asking how they can make their front line teams days better? [laughs] You got to start doing that, but really looking at where that balance is, and I think you just have to gather the information at both sides and figure out get your CES storing going and feedback from the customer. You got to talk to your customers like, “What are you doing in driving to not only make your employee day better but what are you doing to make it easier to do business with your customers?”
It’s not easy, you’re going to have to give and take and find some happy mediums, but I think if you go in with that mindset– Anyway, every week I swear I have to remind people, yes, just because that makes it easy for finance. That means it’s really hard for me to put together a renewal package for a customer who’s struggling through COVID. We got to find that fair balance. What keeps them excited and using our product and finding value and we can move forward and run our business.
I think it’s not easy, but I think if you put a cross-functional team together who then has a mindset of looking at the data, sharing that, coming up with an action plan, and then really just checks and balances. Are the customers’ feedback positive? Is the team feedback positive? You just got to balance it.
Justin: Yes, one thing I’m just looking on your website on yellowfinbi.com, and under the support tab in the website. You guys have stuff in here that I don’t often see other businesses put into the support tab. As someone who builds websites for SAS companies for a living here, you can arrange things however you want, but I think there’s something telling about the approach Yellowfin and yourself takes the support by how things are architectured here. I want to see if my hunch is right.
Inside a support, it’s not just the support center and documentation. You guys also have Yellowfin University, you have a community forum. You’ve got the integrations, the page so to speak, and marketplace and then this evaluation guide which is, shout-out to your content marketing team here on this, this is extremely well done. What I’m getting at is that there is all sides of the customer journey represented under what you guys are calling support, and that doesn’t seem accidental, right? You’re ensuring that the customer is educated throughout the buyer’s journey so that when they do become a customer, the support that you are offering and that you have to give, both parties are coming from an educated place, which I’m sure makes those interactions a lot more beneficial.
Was that a conscious decision to bundle some of this early customer journey stuff into support?
Lee: First off, thanks for checking that out. Yes, for us, seven years ago when I first started and we got together and were like, “What kind of customer experience do we want?” It was pretty grim when I first started. We were basically a product company that just sold software. We would find a customer, sign a customer up. Honestly, we would not have any engagement with them until the renewal. When we started stepping back and going, “To be a global company and to really set things in place, how do we want to be treated?”
I think as we did our journey mapping and started talking to customers, and really got their feedback on what they needed, it built out the emotional journey that we want to focus on. We’re all about culture and having our teams really passionate about what we do. For us, it was building the comfort resources for each step of the journey. What we found is definitely what we intend to do, and what I always have been promoting, we have our CSMs come in early in the sales cycle to really talk about, what does it mean to be a partner with Yellowfin?
What are we here to actually help you not just buy software? We’re here to help you along the whole journey. Really, once people sign up online, you’ll always have buyer’s remorse, “Oh my God, what did I just do? By signing my name, am I going to look like a rock star, or am I going to be the one that’s left holding the bag for a really poor decision?” We want to make sure that that feeling is just as early as possible as just a one-day deal. It’s about our onboarding. It’s about our partnership.
It’s about our long-term investment in customer success. We’ve spent the time qualifying picking the right individual, and we want to make sure that everyone on the customer’s team receives the insight of the data within their organization we feel that we’re a big part of. Most of our customers are software companies looking to embed our products so that they can offer an analytics package and not have to be analytics experts. For us, it’s like, “Man, if they’re successful and they can knock the socks off their customers, then that is our ultimate success metric for our teams.”
It goes on that way. We’ve got our university program. We’ve got our community program. We’ve got our knowledge sharing. We’ve got our technical document that we’re always improving. All of that goes to ensure that the different people at an organization, from the product manager, the technical team, the buying team, they’re all taken care of with what they need, and we’re here for them. Thanks for noticing that.
We have a lot to do and we always need to be getting better, but we feel that with the focus on how do we add more value at every touchpoint, that’s where we start our day.
Justin: You guys are definitely doing a great job of it, at least from someone who clicks around on a lot of websites and tries to reverse-engineer how people are thinking and what I can do to incorporate some of that into our own marketing. Definitely doing a great job. The piece of what you just said there that really stuck out to me, you talked a little bit about bringing teams together and whatnot. This leads me to a question that I don’t often ask on this show, but I think given your career and the things you’ve done, you’re a really good person to ask this.
That is, if you could go back in time to when you first started scaling your team, or if you could meet another leader who’s in the same position you were 10 years ago or whatever, and you could give them a piece of advice about structuring their support organization so that it scales properly. What piece of advice would you give them?
Lee: From my own learning, if I could go back and talk to myself [laughs] 15 years ago, or just someone who is just starting out and looking at their team depending on, let’s say, they’re responsible for everything post-sales and it’s the success team and support team. For me, the area where I’ve learned the most is really taking the time to understand the customer and the customer need and objectives. Depending on the time, it can take a lot of time and it’s really hard to get cross-functional teams to buy in, but doing the journey mapping.
Really taking the time to outline the personas and who and what are the outcomes? I think for us, we’ve spent a couple of years now trying to perfect our customer success plan, and really looking at, what is it that we have to do to ensure the outcomes of the customer needs to be successful? At the end of the day, we’re a business, we’re trying to be profitable and we want to pay all our people to stay around and all that. At the end of the day, we have to deliver the outcomes needed so that the organizations we work with see the value and they’re validated within their organization and their customers.
The time spans and now we’ve just finished our second one. I think every time that your strategy or business changes and it seems like we’re always having to be pivoting and things, is really going back to that base of just confirming that you understand what the customer is needing throughout the whole journey. Why are they coming to you? Really clearly defining that and then pass that and get that validation all the way through. Make sure you’re, again, spending time with your customers, because if you don’t understand what keeps them up at night, you can’t help solve their problems.
That would probably be in the beginning. I probably wish I would have had better mentorship or that was a better driver 15 years ago. I think for me, 15 years ago, I solved everything with systems and tools and process, and we put the training things in. I was very, “What’s best for the organization?” In my early days, through just stubbornness and getting to the end of it. Always came out okay in the end with regards to just what I was trying to build, or offer our customers with universities and communities and all of that.
I think it would have been cool to start that within the organization, is getting the organization across the board customer-centric versus, I would say, probably also very silo-focused 15, 20 years ago in the companies that I’ve worked at. Just because I don’t think there was a really clear industry or global view of the value of a customer. It was always just about new sales and then we would just fill the bucket and not really worry about the holes in the bucket.
Justin: It’s fascinating, this topic on– I always tell people, because my last company, I was about employee number 30 and we sold a private equity firm for just under $1 billion seven, eight years after I started. That was an awesome wild journey, and very grateful and fortunate to have been a part of that.
Lee: I like that story. [laughs]
Justin: If I ever catch you at a conference, we’ll have a beer. I’ve got some doozies of stories from those days.
Lee: Awesome.
Justin: I tell this to young people who I mentor or just other people in different stages in their career or whatever. In the moment, you always feel you’re flying the airplane or building the airplane in the air. You need to have some grace with yourself. Look, a successful business is hard. If it was really easy, the fail rate for new businesses wouldn’t be 95% or whatever it is. You know what I mean? We would just see a lot more early seed-stage companies go through multi-billion dollar rises, but it’s just not the case.
At the end of the day, you’re right, that in a modern worldview, customer support, product engineering, sales and marketing, HR, finance, operations, are not seven unique buckets. Those are all more or less the same thing and none of that stuff works without customers. Your customers are your best source of product roadmap. Your customers are your best source of ad– Like the best marketing in the world. The marketing that I would pay for it with blood if I had to would be the free word of mouth stuff you get on delivering an awesome product to customers. Especially in high touch complex B2B sales, like what you and I do for a living.
You might run the best ABM campaign and have the best account executives on planet Earth just shepherding that thing through, but the person on the other line is going to talk to their friends in the industry. They’re going to fare it out with another person that bought your product that you didn’t recommend them for a referral. They’re going to find out if your product is crap or not, right? That sacred relationship with the customer is extremely important. Even in a world where we’re automating everything that we can, and we should, because as the doctrine of capitalism as such to extract more value as you can, but you still have to have that connection.
Any automation you bring into the organization still needs to maintain and at minimum, and preferably build that connection. I’m getting a little bit into a philosophical rant there.
Lee: No, I think you’re right on. Yes, two things. The one thing that I think we’re all getting sick of and I guess part of the automation piece that I struggle with is the amount of spam, what’s being sent out that seems to be like, “Yes, it just doesn’t seem to be adding value.” I think the bullhorn shotgun approach, I think that’s just it. I don’t know, I just see people getting sick of it.
To me, it’s the outbound reaching out and going, “Hey, I was looking on your website and I have some ideas, would you have a couple minutes to talk, and things like that.” Where you spent the time to look at something, you’ve got some wisdom to share with me. That to me, I think is where, especially for audit, your marketing automation needs to go. I think on the second piece that you’re talking about there, the customer is why we’re all here, right? The way you can organize your organization around that customer feedback is so important.
I think there’s the other piece of that is also balancing out your team. As a leader, your team has to also be aligned to, of course, the mission and vision, and purpose of the organization. They have to be able to tie their role to the success of the customer, and the metrics around that, in some manner. If you can get those two pieces working in harmony, then you have a company that is focused on helping to drive customer success.
At the end of the day you can lie in a whole bunch of your business, but if you’re not retaining it, whether if you’re SAS or wherever you’re doing, your revenue model, you’re not going to win. Like you said before, it’s the word of mouth that is just amazing. Which is pretty awesome. This year alone, I know, we’ve had six deals where someone has worked with us went and people were moving all over the place, went to another organization, and brought us into their organization.
That’s the hugest testament and success metric I think you could ever have. That you did such a good job that someone was willing to go somewhere else and bring you in because they know you can help drive value for their organization.
Justin: Yes, hi, I’m new here. I’d like to recommend a five [crosstalk] investment software. You know what I mean? You have to really have that down. My second to last, my penultimate to use an ACT word question for you is, what’s the one thing that you see CX leaders not doing today that they should be doing today?
Lee: I think it’s just to keep in mind with some of the stuff we’ve been talking about it’s really spending the time with the front-line team, getting the feedback from your team, and also the customer. I think just spending that time gathering that information. Then I think the next thing is making sure it’s getting shared across the organization because as you said earlier the customers help us drive product, marketing sales. They help drive everything and validate everything around your strategy and the direction of, I guess defining what success is for your organization.
It’s one thing too, and this is I guess one of the things that I see companies do and you go, and then you read the Gartner surveys, and no one’s doing anything with the data. Don’t just collect a whole bunch of data and not do anything with it, because you’re wasting everyone’s time. If you’re making everybody do 10 surveys a year for your customers, but you’re not actually taking that to drive action, don’t do it. I think that’s probably the biggest thing. Have a method around what your outcomes are, and really make sure that if you’re going to measure it, do something with it. If you’re not, then don’t-
Justin: Don’t measure it, yes.
Lee: -don’t measure it, because you’re just wasting your time and your organization’s time, and probably your customers and your front-line team time.
Justin: That’s a great nugget, if you’re going to do something with the data point, measure it. If you’re not going to do something with the data point, don’t measure it. Love that. When you think about the future of support automation, Lee, what is it about that future that excites you the most?
Lee: For me, I want to give back to the action of people helping people. I think all of us are a bit frustrated with some of the ways that maybe companies are offering solutions. I’m hoping that automation can find a balance again. I think we’ve swung so far to self-service that it’s really tough to have a personal relationship with– You can’t have personal relationships with every company you work with. I think for key B2B partnerships, the value of the partnership has to fit into the automation, in the sense of, don’t make me have to struggle to get help.
I know, it’s one of the things that I’ve seen over the last few years. I don’t know, it’s just the age of people. We’re so used to everyone just texting and not calling, people are afraid to pick up the phone and talk to people these days. I always have to be reminding my teams, it’s great that you can have 10 emails back and forth with the customer, but you can tell after the third one, they’re frustrated. Pick up the phone, just say, “Hi, how can I help you?”
That to me is where I’m hoping there’s a balance coming. We get back to people helping people and we make the automation not at arm’s length barrier to that personal touch. We actually make it so it’s easier to get the solution you want or someone to help you. That would be where I hope the technology is going. It’s cool, there’re the Chatbot things I think could be beneficial and get you to the next step quickly. I think the promise of a quick solution or the tool sets or the systems again, it needs to drive the outcome as quickly as possible for the customer, not the company.
Justin: Yes. Love it. Great way to book the entire discussion there. We’ll end with a quickfire round here. What is the book that you most often recommend to people?
Lee: Oh, right now, I would probably go with Effortless Experience, is probably top of mind. There’s so many great ones out there. I’m actually reading a cool one right now called The Transformational Leadership Compass and it’s by Benny Ausmus. He’s a global consultant who helps companies do massive shifts in strategy. He’s basically compiled all the companies he’s worked with and come up with this fictitious person, John, who’s the CEO.
He writes the story in the way that he’s like helping John through the process. It’s just insightful because when you start looking at the list of things that John comes to Benny for, you can see yourself in either your customer as a company or you’re your own company.
Justin: Or yourself, yes.
Lee: Yes, because at the end of the day, we’re all trying to do the same things. We try to make money. We try to have great teams. We’re trying to have a great product or service. I don’t know, it’s been a fun book to read.
Justin: Yes, shout out to Benny Ausmus there. It will link to that in the show notes. In terms of any website, blogs, Slack community, LinkedIn group et cetera for customer leaders such as yourself, what’s one that you would recommend people to check out?
Lee: One thing that I look at in the mornings, just what that hit me, Jacob Morgan, The Future of Work, and I know there– I’m going to forget her name, but the other Morgan [laughs] who focuses more on customer success. Those are the two that I tend to scan because the articles are really well put together and really tend to focus on things that I get insight out of every day. Something to be either a better leader for myself or something I could share with my team.
Justin: Love it. If there was one productivity tip, productivity hack to use my least favorite term for it that you’ve picked up over the years that has stuck with you, that you’d recommend to people. What is it?
Lee: [laughs] I know I’m still trying to find it. [laughs] It’s funny. I think every couple of months I go, “Okay, I’m going to move all my stuff for my notepad.” I’m still pretty old school to one note or whatever. I still can’t do it. I got to check stuff off every day.
Justin: Writing things down on pen and paper is not, that’s nothing to sneeze at. The physical touch of holding a pen and the tactile response of placing that down on paper and having your thoughts turn into words and then going back in and literally scratching that stuff out is–
Lee: That’s the rewarding piece.
Justin: That’s real. I do a webinar on productivity tips. We do it every year, we update it. We’re up to the 2022 edition if it’s going to have, I might have to break it into a three-part series. It’s got so much in it. One thing I always tell people is, do not underestimate, go out and get yourself a nice pen. Not some big pen you pick up at a conference somewhere, go spend money on a pen, understand the difference between a gel pen and a rollerball.
Get nerdy about it, get a good paper, and start writing down your thoughts and journaling and using paper and your brain will thank you for it. Lee, this has been a phenomenal conversation. I really can’t thank you enough for coming on a Support Automation Show. Before we go, if anyone wants to learn more about you or Yellowfin, where can they go to find it?
Lee: Main website for Yellowfin, yellowfinbi.com. I’m on LinkedIn, just LinkedIn. [crosstalk] to connect. Justin, thank you. This has been really fun Justin. To wrap about automation and experiences and so thank you for the opportunity to share.
Justin: Absolutely. I’ll see you around.
Lee: Okay. Thank you.Justin: The Support Automation Show is brought to you by Capacity. Visit capacity.com to find everything you need for automating support and business processes in one powerful platform. You can find the show by searching for Support Automation in your favorite podcast app. Please subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes. On behalf of the team here at Capacity, thanks for listening.