In this episode of The Support Automation Show, Justin is joined by Craig Soelberg, Senior People Success Manager at Chargebee, a subscription billing management software. Craig talks to us about the challenges of having employees spread out across the globe, shares his thoughts about support automation for employees, and discusses how human resources and employee engagement, combined with automation and AI can improve the employee experience.
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Justin: [music] 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. Good afternoon, Craig.
Craig Soelberg: Hi, Justin. Good to be with you.
Justin: Thank you. Thank you. Where’s this podcast find you.
Craig: I am in Spanish Fork, Utah, just about 45 minutes south of Salt Lake City.
Justin: Beautiful part of the country. I’ve driven through Salt Lake a few times. Haven’t had a chance to visit though but I would like to. It seems like a very beautiful place.
Craig: Yes, there’s a lot of hiking, camping, outdoor activities that you can do. It’s a lot of fun.
Justin: Excellent. Full disclosure, Chargebee is a customer of Capacity but we’re going to spend this time not talking about Capacity but really talking about support automation for employees and how HR and employee engagement, People Success, teams at companies can leverage automation and AI to make a better employee experience. Craig, starting in that realm, when and why and how did you first get into People’s Success in HR?
Craig: Yes, I didn’t go a direct route into HR, I got a bachelor’s in psychology and I did some operations management, small business consulting while I worked on an MBA. Then after I graduated with my MBA, I had the bright idea to get a Ph.D. in organizational behavior and HR. We moved to Texas for that. Two years into the program, I decided that academia wasn’t for me. I was looking for something more practical and hands-on so I did gain a lot of skills and knowledge through my courses specifically on the analytical side but I wanted to do work for a real organization with real problems. I left and I got into HR for a couple of different companies prior to joining Chargebee and I joined Chargebee in February of 2020.
Justin: Awesome. Tell us a little bit about what Chargebee does and the market they serve.
Craig: Chargebee is a subscription billing management software and the industry is growing like crazy. There’s a ton of companies who have either tried to figure out their own solution or just do it in-house but really because of the complexities of the different subscription plans that you can make available to your customers and the different currencies if you have global customers, different tax laws, it’s really hard and complicated to do it all by yourself. We help companies to automate that process and so that they can focus on just their core business and growing their business. What’s really fun is, as our customers grow and have success, we have, we grow and have success. We’re definitely invested in the growth of our customers.
Justin: It’s interesting because every business grows with our customers but Chargebee is a SAS company that helps other SAS companies. There’s a real one-to-one relationship as that growth happens and with growth, you have things like team growing, maybe you’re opening new offices. The internal operations at the business gets bigger and more complicated, et cetera, et cetera. In your role within Chargebee what types of technological hurdles have you crossed using tech and technology to help with that scale as Chargebee has grown?
Craig: Yes, to provide a little bit of background in the growth that we’ve experienced since I started. I started in February of 2020 and we had just over 400 employees globally. We had about 18 or 19 employees in the US, I was the first HR employee hired into the US and now we have about 675 employees globally. We have 74 employees in the US. We have employees in India, different parts of Europe, Australia, US, and Canada. There’s just been a lot of growth and a lot of things to do and so we are not there yet as far as having all of the technology that we need. One of a couple of the issues that we face is the recruiting and the onboarding process is changing so fast. New positions are added, our recruiters are talking to so many different people and we have people joining all the time.
There’s a lot of different paperwork that’s required depending on the country and where the employee lives. There’s the Chargebee paperwork agreement and then there’s also regulatory statutory type requirements that are necessary like the I-9 in the US. It’s a lot of work to try to manually keep track of all of that information. One of the challenges that we face is we have payroll systems, multiple payroll systems, depending on the geography of where our employees are located. There’s a lot of work that goes into multiple hands touching to make sure that employees, new hires, they are entering their information into the right systems. That all of the information is taken from the recruiting team from the HR team to our HR operations team that does a lot of the system’s work and communicating back and forth with the candidates on, “Here’s the systems that you need to add your information into, you need to sign up for, to do a background check,” et cetera. When you add the volume that we’re hiring at, it’s a lot of manual work.
Justin: Yes, pardon the phrase but there’s the death by 1,000 cuts so to speak. When you go through this process, 250 times or whatever it is that you guys have done in the last year which is amazing by the way. Not only do you have an opportunity to try to make that– not only do you have an opportunity to work to make that experience as seamless as possible on an individual applicant basis, once someone comes on board, you also have just the onboarding and the knowledge sharing and people need to know. [chuckles] It’s funny in a mostly distributed work environment, learning where the coffee machine is–
Craig: That’s important.
Justin: No, it’s not quite as important but there’s still the virtual equivalent of that and then of course, obviously in the office, there is as well. One of the things that when we look at support automation, the three pillars of it that we like to talk about include: answer, automate, and bill. Answering is, under answer rather, you have FAQs, the knowledge base, employee policies, what vacation days we have, how much PTO, all that stuff. These are all questions that people have that using technology to help standardize and make that stuff available is really important. When you look at all the onboarding and the growth and the acceleration of the amount of people you’re bringing in, what has been once people are inside the organization and have joined the team. What’s the biggest challenge in getting people up to speed at that scale?
Craig: I think it’s just like you mentioned. The information about the different policies and procedures, who to go to for what? One of the nice tools that we have rolled out is, we have an intranet. It’s a simpler product through Microsoft, I believe, and it connects with our HRS systems. We have employee data that’s fed into that so you can look up a specific employee and the org chart so how they fit within the company. That’s super helpful if people have their pictures on there so you can put a face to a name but that also houses the different policies that we have. We still need to drive adoption towards using that platform but I think generally the most difficult issue is just making sure people know who to contact about what. Usually, as I’m doing the onboarding for employees in the US, I’m the immediate contact, and then I’m able to help filter people to where they need to go.
Justin: That’s one of the great things about the digital age, is that you can create the repository of all this information. You can give people access to it. They can go and find a lot of the answers to the questions they have so that when it comes time to reach out to you directly it’s something that is, I hate to say worth your time, but worth your time, because with as much growth as you guys have had you can’t onboard 75 employees or whatever it is that you’ve hired in the United States yourself, right? You need technological help to do that. One thing that I am always fascinated by with the recruiting process is, and this is completely unrelated to a lot of what we do at Capacity but I still think it’s valuable for any listeners out there who are looking at automating internal support especially in the recruiting side. Is have you leveraged any technology to help screen candidates or narrow down the applicant pool?
Craig: Yes, so we’re currently evaluating systems to switch to a new ATS or applicant tracking system. Our current system doesn’t necessarily have the AI capacity to evaluate and say, “This is a good candidate or this is not a good candidate” and that will be super helpful but there’s also the human element that for me we want to make sure that those candidates who may not fit the typical profile.” and we want to make sure that those individuals are considered because with diversity and inclusion is super important. At our company and we want to have people from a variety of different backgrounds because we have customers from all over the world and if we’re not representing our customers and we’re going to miss out on how we build and how we sell or service our product.
Justin: Yes, that’s a great point. When I was at the HR tech conference a couple of years ago, last year’s got canceled, but we go to some of the HR tech shows and just saw all sorts of great innovation on screening and ATS and all the recruiting and hiring process. All this great technology layered on top of that. Core to every single one I think this is good for anybody in Craig’s position where you’re out shopping for this stuff is really press the vendors on what they’re doing to ensure the wrong bias isn’t getting into any of the algorithms that they’re using or you’re really embracing that diversity and inclusion ethos and that the tools that you’re bringing on board are enabling that and not standing in the way of it.
This leads me to a question that I always like to ask people in the HR space and that is, whether it’s at Chargebee or just throughout your career, talk to me about any apprehension you’ve seen from employees when automation, scary where I’m doing scare quotes for those of us that can’t, that aren’t under Zoom here. Things like automation and AI are brought into the operations. What’s some of the apprehension that you’ve heard and some good ways to assuage those concerns?
Craig: Yes, in my past company we rolled out, just as I was leaving to move to Chargebee, we rolled out a people analytics platform that looks at the metadata of employee data. It doesn’t look as specific conversations. One of the things they use is Organizational Network Analysis but it doesn’t actually look at the content of those conversations.
Justin: Just who talks to who kind of thing.
Craig: Exactly, and people and managers have a concern that if you’re going to use this tool, then you’re going to be a big brother and monitor what’s going on when we in reality we don’t see or have that data at all. One of the concerns from an HR perspective is how much privacy are we giving employees? There’s that concern. As far as the automation process I think generally people like things that are–
Justin: Done [crosstalk]
Craig: -coordinated. Yes. If it’s not automated and it looks like it’s simple and it should be then they’re wondering what’s going on? What’s wrong with you and the company?
Justin: There’s a thought leader in digital rights and privacy policy space that I would recommend everybody listening if you haven’t followed her Christina Padnar. I believe that’s how you pronounce her last name. I’ll put her Twitter handle on the show notes. She writes and speaks a lot about stuff and it’s super, super important. Craig, you hit on the key here, which is you just have to have those open conversations with people. Good driven, high potential people that are committed and want to join your team and are bought in. People are reasonable and intelligent and you can steer people through some of the concerns and some of the stuff, you just have to be open and have the conversation.
That’s ultimately what we try to tell any prospects we’re talking to or just as we try to create content out in the marketplace. Ultimately automation is welcomed. I like not having to manually set up schedule and send emails to our prospects. I like having Marketo work and do that stuff. Shout out to Adobe. Marketo do that for us and that’s a myopic example as a marketer but in anyone’s line of work, there’s plenty of that opportunity. One thing, Craig that really interests me about this process is, in terms of onboarding and growth you also have offboarding and you’ve got people that work their way through the organization. What do you think is the key to creating a smooth offboarding process?
Craig: Not talking so much about the actual process but the experience. I think-
Justin: Good point.
Craig: -leaving on a positive note where they don’t have that bitter taste in their mouth because of something that happened within their last few weeks. One thing that is unique to me since I joined Chargebee is we have employees across the globe and the notice period that employees have to give is typically longer than it is in the US. In India, it could be a month or two and in the US that’s typically two weeks. As a company, we have the opportunity to make sure that employees leave with the right experience where they can leave on a positive note.
I think that’s high level but down to the specifics I think it’s important to collect feedback from the employee and hopefully, we do this, but hopefully, as a company, you are collecting feedback throughout and you’re not just waiting until the employee is leaving and walking out the door. One of the things we do is, we do an exit interview verbally. In the past, I’ve done it just through surveys, electronic surveys, and I think there’s pros and cons to each. This is one thing at my last company that my manager was really good at was when you have those exit conversations before someone leaves and you walk through some of the admin details like what’s going to happen to your pay and your benefits et cetera. You spend time at the beginning to have a conversation to show your appreciation to the employee and what they did for the company. Then you can collect and solicit feedback.
Justin: I was just going to say, it’s interesting hearing you talk because at the end of the day, we like to talk about AI and automation and everything on this and basically wake up in the morning, have my coffee and think about automation but at the end of the day, there’s human conversations here and just principles of basic human decency and just standard, good citizen behavior that’s expected. Every growing company also as you net grow that means you get more people. You deal with more people issues, it’s just the way humans work.
There’s something really nice about being able to leverage the tech stack you have so that more of your time is spent doing more meaningful actions. That’s one thing, I tell people all the time. If buying the software, buying tool, buying the widget, enables you to have deeper work in whatever your core charter is then it’s a good investment. In your line of work, it’s providing these good experiences. The team members at Chargebee flourish and happy, productive employees lo and behold creates a successful business. It’s great just hearing you double-click on that.
Craig: That reminds me of the performance management process. Whether you have annual reviews, quarterly reviews, my philosophy is it should always be about the conversation, the feedback, both ways. From the manager to the employee, from the employee to the manager, and it should never be about the process or the tools that you’re using. Sometimes people can get stuck with the process or the tools. There’s different tools out there to help you with the performance management process to make it easier for the employee to solicit their feedback, the manager to solicit feedback. I completely agree, especially on the performance management process, that the focus is on the conversation. Not on following a rigid process or being limited by the tools that you use.
Justin: Just speaking from my own experience, we use Lattice at Capacity for a lot of this stuff, and shoutout to Lattice, great product. But you have to set that thing up to work the way your culture and your business works. It’s very easy to get trapped in the bells and whistles. Very specific examples. Lattice is there. They have a little feedback survey, little micro feedback survey thing you can take. If you do that, plus they’re one-on-one plus [unintelligible 00:23:23] you end up just in this Byzantine layer of software that you forget what the core of the whole thing is, which is just let’s make sure we have these conversations with the direct reports and let’s document everything.
We had to work through as we’ve grown, stripping that down and rightsizing it to us. This is really good stuff. One thing that I always like to ask HR leaders is what if any of the technical support do you guys deal with? At Chargebee if I have a computer problem or I need a new monitor stand or something like that, is that all IT or does some of that fall into people operations as well?
Craig: It’s typically all IT. You can submit an email that’ll create a help desk ticket or you can do it via Slack. One of the unique parts of my role in the US is we don’t have an IT person here. I’m not helping people figure out what’s the issue with their computer but if they do need a new computer or when they– [crosstalk] Yes, then I send them, I have some laptops just underneath my desk that I can send them. We have our HR operations team that handles the payroll. They have an automated support ticket system through email to help automate that process.
Justin: It’s going to be fascinating to watch Chargebee grow because you guys are already an international company. I assume that growth is going to continue all over the world. It’s not just going to be in one place or another. You guys are very quickly going to get into the big global conglomerate challenges, not necessarily have 50,000 employees but even several thousand just spread across the globe like you do is going to present some unique opportunities. Have you found that the onboarding and employee engagement and the People Success experience has changed drastically in the last year due to everything that’s going on? Do you think it’s being an already distributed business, you guys were ready for it in a way that maybe others weren’t?
Craig: It’s a great question. I think as a company, our leaders are very focused on people so we pride ourselves on being a people-centric organization but I think this last year has forced us, for better, to have more frequent one-on-one conversations just to check in with people to see how they’re doing. One of the things we started when the world shut down with COVID and everyone moved to working from home, we did weekly check-ins for a while with employees. We had a team of us who would reach out and have phone conversations or Zoom calls with people just to check-in and see how the person is doing. That’s something I’ve been doing with the US employees, is checking on them on a quarterly basis to see how the person and the employee are doing. Then that’s something we’re going to be rolling out globally. We’ll be checking on everyone on a quarterly basis.
Justin: That’s great. Pulse survey-type stuff. Love it. As we wrap up here, one thing I would love to know. If you are going to give a piece of advice to another person in People’s Success in HR who is just getting started on bringing in some automation into the people operations at their business, what would it be?
Craig: I would tell them to focus on the recruiting and onboarding experience because that’s the first taste of how they experience your company. You don’t want to have them start off on the wrong foot. Plus there’s a lot of paperwork that goes into onboarding and you want the experience to be simple, seamless so that they can maintain that excitement of joining a new company.
Justin: Great stuff. We’ll end with our, I don’t know, I haven’t branded this segment yet and people tweet me @ [unintelligible 00:28:28] if you have any suggestions but little quick fire round. The famous five, the fabulous five.
Craig: All right. Let’s do it.
Justin: Let’s do it. What is the book you recommend most to people?
Craig: There’s a lot of great books. One of the best books I’ve read in the last year or two is No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention it’s by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer. It’s a fantastic book about the culture of Netflix. I would definitely recommend it to any business leader because they go against the norm. If it doesn’t make sense, then don’t do it. It’s very intuitive but innovative.
Justin: That’s a famous company famous for culture. I’m sure that’s a fabulous read. I’ve had it on the wishlist for a while but have not made my way to it yet but you might’ve just helped me move it up the priority list there. What’s the best productivity hack you know? The reason I ask this is every year we have a big running listicle of productivity hacks that we keep track of and I hear some awesome ones. I’ve started asking people this question on the podcast because you get some great answers. The number one most useful productivity tip that you’ve implemented for yourself.
Craig: There’s probably a lot that I could learn from other people on this. One of the things that I do, and this is something that I do to help onboarding, is I– This isn’t very impressive but there’s this standard email that I send to new hires at the end of their first day. It contains a bunch of different information. I’m just basically copy and pasting it from one new hire group to another, just make some tweaks here and there. I think you want to have the individual touch but it takes too much time to do that when you have a high volume, I think that’s what I have found now. The new hires are going to know that maybe it’s not as personable, as attached as I thought and that’s worked for me.
Justin: No, there’s definitely value too if you’re a Google Cloud company or O365, both Outlook and Gmail have templates and snippets and whatnot. I have got tons of them because I’ve, like you, found that I was sending the same email often and there’s nothing wrong with using a template. The information is good and the information is something that needs to be repeated, this is exactly why these things exist. Don’t sell yourself short. That’s the kind of thing people can take away. If you could recommend one site blog, Slack community, LinkedIn group, et cetera, for People Success, professionals, what would it be?
Craig: There’s a guy named David Greene. He’s based out of the UK, he’s a people analytics guru, thought leader. He collaborates on a monthly basis, all of the people analytics articles on LinkedIn or on the web and he puts that under one newsletter. I think that’s where HR can really add the most value is the data that we bring instead of just being relying on your gut intuition. His monthly newsletter is super fascinating.
Justin: David Greene, that’s good stuff. We’ll look it up and make sure we put it in the show notes. Finally, if there’s one person in your field that you could meet for coffee, or a cocktail, or lunch, depending on the time of day and the vibe, who would it be?
Craig: Patty McCord. She was the chief people officer at Netflix. She’s now doing consulting. She actually spoke at one of our Champions of Chains conferences at Chargebee and it was super fascinating. I love just the practical approach that she has towards HR, it’s if it’s not working, why do we do it? She has some really innovative thoughts about pay, performance, and other things.
Justin: Good stuff. Well, Craig, I really can’t thank you enough. I appreciate you taking time out of your day to chat with us. For our listeners, if they want to get in touch with you or follow you, where should they go to do so?
Craig: LinkedIn is the best. They can just reach out to me on LinkedIn at Craig Soelberg, S-O-E-L-B-E-R-G.
Justin: Thank you so much, Craig. Really appreciate it and we’ll talk to you soon.
Craig: Thanks, Justin. Appreciate it.
[music]
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Thanks for listening.