Latest / The Tech Matchmaker / Predicting Attrition Before It Happens | Andrew Cook (HeadsUp) on Employee Engagement & Retention
Transcript
- Gina Gibson: Hello everyone. Today we are chatting with Andrew Cook, who is the CEO and founder of Heads Up. it's such an honor and a pleasure to have you with us today. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to the Tech Matchmaker, the show where contact center challenges meet their perfect tech match. I'm your host, Gina Gibson, and in just 15 minutes, we serve up the smartest, coolest innovation shaking up the contact center industry. Whether you're searching for your next solution or just love staying ahead of the curve, we've got the insights to keep you in the know. Let's dive in and discover what's next. I promise you it's going to be fun. Thanks for hanging out with us on the Tech Matchmaker. I hope today's spotlight sparked some fresh ideas and real solutions for your contact center. Want to dive deeper into the tech we featured? Hit up the show notes for all the links and extras and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if there's a challenge you want us to tackle, don't be shy, reach out. I'll catch you soon with more innovation, more use cases and more ways to keep your business moving forward. Andrew: for having me on, Gina. Nice to be here. Gina Gibson: So let's start with the basics, Andrew. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Andrew: Yeah, sure. I am a boring accountant by trade. I studied accounting and learned very early on that it definitely wasn't my calling. And about 18, 19 years ago, I came across the... Gina Gibson: Stay curious, stay bold, and keep exploring what's next. Andrew: the need for better measurement of customer experience across various industries, contact centers, retail, banking, telecommunications. But there wasn't an effective way to measure and understand customer experience at that time. So I started a software as a service business back then straight out of accounting articles and really just automated platforms to measure and understand customer experience. And that's what I've been doing for the last 17 years I ran that business. just recently stepped down as the CEO there and now pursuing a real passion of mine which is engagement, something I believe ⁓ the true driver of business success. So I a business now called Heads Up and focusing on measuring and understanding employee engagement in large organisations. Gina Gibson: And I want you to give us your elevator pitch on heads up, but I have to say I've never knew about your accounting background and I never would peg you for an accountant at all. Andrew: rather many other stories at the bar. Gina Gibson: Can you give us your elevator pitch for Heads Up, Andrew? You mentioned employee engagement. Talk to us a little bit about what the Heads Up does. Andrew: Yeah, so for sure, Hits Up is a workplace engagement platform. It helps companies understand and improve then also predict employee engagement in real time. It AI-powered pulse surveys, predictive analytics, and personalized learning to uncover what's really going on with the people on the before it becomes a problem to organizations. Our major focus is we're trying to help companies reduce attrition, team performance and build stronger cultures. Heads Up puts employee on rails so that leaders know where to focus and what to do next. That's really what we do as an organization. ⁓ Gina Gibson: When you say pulse, sorry, go ahead. was gonna say when you say pulse surveys, talk a little bit about that. What does that entail? Andrew: Yeah, it's interesting. So traditionally when people are measuring employee engagement, they do it through an annual or a biannual huge survey. And the issue with that is it's just not effective. Somebody takes a huge amount of time to put that survey together then to do the analytics on that insight. And the back of that, then people start to make decisions, but they're making decisions of historic data. They're not making decisions of real time data. So our methodology a one question pulse survey to an employee every week. companies really large organizations we do it every second week and a simple question ⁓ that made up of the forms the foundation of our methodology Which is up of 12 questions and everybody gets one question a week And then that information gets aggregated on a weekly basis so that a company can understand the holistic view of what's going on So every person doesn't need to complete every single question every week, but as an aggregate the company sees everything that's going on. Gina Gibson: I love that. mentioned, you know, the attrition and everything. Are those, what are the core elements for effective employee engagement strategies? Like, so our listeners are saying, okay, well, I think I'm effectively engaging my employee. What would that look like from a heads up perspective? Andrew: Yeah, I think the first thing is, Gina, is people make a lot of assumptions when it comes to employee engagement and what the real drivers are around employee engagement. So I think having an effective listening strategy in place, one that harnesses the voice of the employee, but then also looks at operational data. You know, what is looking like in the organization? What is attrition looking like in the organization? What demographics biographic factors are more likely to contribute towards an engaged person in your work environment. those are the sort of things where I think people get quite superficial about it. And they just say, you know, my employee promoter score is X or ⁓ I'm comfortable with the level of attrition in my business. ⁓ There's many other things that should be considered. And I think just in ⁓ world of now, it's so easy. There's so much ability for you to be able to capture all of the relevant data at once and make informed decisions on it. So it's not just about listening, it's not just about understanding operational data, it's about taking all of these elements of your culture and your business into consideration as a unique entity and making decisions off the back of that. Gina Gibson: I like that and you kind of mentioned you know some companies are like ⁓ we're covered or whatever how do you handle resistance from employees or different companies around employee engagement like as far as educating them and helping them understand why they would need that. Andrew: Yeah, it's a good question, Gina. ⁓ listeners will help us come up with better sales pitches. I'm not the world's best sales person. I think I truly believe that it makes a difference. I think ultimately really just about showing proof points to clients. We've got number clients across various industries, so sharing those proof points. A lot of our are ⁓ our... Gina Gibson: you Andrew: are our strongest advocates. just leveraging them to help sort of speak to industry peers makes a big difference. But not just bringing it down to engagement as a score. That's a mistake that a lot of people have made in the past, to say, ⁓ you my engagement score is X. It's not about a score. It's about what that score means to your business and to your bottom line. Things like and unplanned absenteeism cost companies in all industries millions of dollars every year. they understand what that is actually costing them as a business and what simple percent reduction in that is going to lead to a bottom line impact. It to make a difference when you're not just talking about a smiley face or an unhappy face in ⁓ the center seat or on ⁓ retail Gina Gibson: Love it. And what would you say Andrew sets your heads up product apart from your competitors? What's your competitive advantage? Andrew: Yes, I think the difference of ours is that we combine a number of data sets to put into an AI model. So as I say, we're not just looking at a survey results. A lot of companies there are saying, let's just measure your employee with a survey or a piece of feedback. That's great. And there are a lot of them have got amazing methodologies. But the fact we bringing in operational data, we bringing in biographical data, we bring in information. Just out of interest, know, for some of our retail organizations and our contact centers, things like number of dependents, distance that an employee works from home. are factors, you educational level. Those are factors that are contributing towards the likelihood of somebody to be engaged or disengaged. ⁓ not just about a question that they're asking. And then using advanced mathematical approaches to understand what is really driving the engagement. So it's not always just... question with the lowest score. So sure, everybody gets a very low burnout score. It doesn't matter where you measure that, everybody's going to give burnout scores as being low. But that doesn't necessarily mean that burnout is the biggest driver of low engagement in your organization. And our system is able to bubble the right elements up to the top, whether it be leadership's style, whether it be the way you're recruiting for your organization. There's so many elements in an employee journey. Gina Gibson: Mm-hmm. Andrew: that could be impacting how likely they are to be engaged. And Up considers all of that. We're not just taking a point in time or taking one data point into consideration. Gina Gibson: And I think the whole like how how employee engagement has evolved over the years to your point it was just this one single snapshot of a point in time we're measuring it on a weekly basis what other changes have you seen over your years in the contact center space as far as employee engagement is concerned I mean the fact that we're even focusing on it now I think is is shift right because it always used to just be about bottom line but that's what have you seen out there? Andrew: So interestingly, Gina, a lot of it is still just about a bottom line. And I think people are now realizing that engaged drive bottom line performance. And I that's been the biggest shift is when people have realized, well, I haven't just got somebody on my or somebody in my retail space or somebody in my organization that is just somebody there to a job. That they're actually driving the bottom line performance from a customer experience point of view. They're delivering the end results to your customer. So I think people have to realize that also then truly understanding the cost of replacing an agent and cost of an agent not showing up for work tomorrow and having seats in your workforce planning not working out exactly. think so ⁓ a lot it just really candidly still being driven by a bottom line when it comes to the big decisions that are being made. But I also think a huge demand for talent at the moment ⁓ and there are so many opportunities. Some companies, some countries have unemployment rates, but ⁓ most developed markets at the moment, the unemployment rates are exceptionally low. So the or the real sort need to attract and retain top talent is growing. And this whole world syndrome that we're in now too, where ⁓ I can be employing somebody any continent in the world because of connectivity. home and people being able to do a job from anywhere, so suddenly your your rush and need for talent is not just coming from your hometown, it's coming from city four five countries away from you. So ⁓ that to deliver great experiences and working opportunities for their top talent is really... ⁓ Gina Gibson: That's excellent. you share a success story with us, Andrew, from one of your clients that's used Heads Up? Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. Let me use a contact center example. I think that's relevant. contact center is a big BPO that's been using us for about just under two years now. And the attrition rate across the various sites, they had a number of sites across Asia, across Africa, and then sort of Central America. And their attrition rate was exceptionally high. Sort of on average... Gina Gibson: you Andrew: average about 80, just over 80 percent a year, you know, and that was costing the company millions and millions of dollars in recruitment, upscaling, nesting periods, and they had a huge issue with early absenteeism, you know, of early churn, so churn within the first sort of 30 to 90 days of employment, which is the worst time to start losing employees, you've just invested in it. And we implemented heads up, through getting immediate real-time feedback during onboarding, then also starting to understand biographic and demographic information as to what of employees were at highest risk of attrition in the early days. They ended changing some approaches, which was very interesting because a lot of companies don't have the ability to self-reflect that way, so that was great. And then they also at where and how they were recruiting and the makeup and the of... profile of the person that they were recruiting and they ended up changing that recruitment process too. Their attrition rate within the early attrition rate within the first 18 months reduced by just under 19 % and over the entire period of two years reduced by 12.5 % for the entire state. if you just convert that to anybody who understands the cost of replacing an agent in a contact center, you run those numbers, it was unbelievable. success. Gina Gibson: Absolutely, that's fantastic. And now Andrew, a little bit of a serial entrepreneur. And so I love asking founders the time machine question, like if you could go back in time and give yourself one piece of advice when starting either your first company or this company, what would it be? Andrew: Surround yourself by the best possible people you can find as early as possible. in the early days I thought I could do everything myself and I thought there was nobody who could sell better than me, who could design product better than me, who could engage a client better than me, run the taxes. And just realized over time and as I started to mature and I suppose become less egocentric, that is absolutely not the case. And there are unbelievable people out there that find the jobs that you don't love doing fun and interesting. And if I could have surrounded myself with more of those people early on, think my would have been smoother. Gina Gibson: Excellent. I so appreciate that. just to wrap things up, Andrew, I've always been a fan of James Lipton. So to end the podcast, we do a little bit of rapid fire. So what is your favorite word? Andrew: Okay. Favourite word, now you're going to tell me rapid fire and favourite word. I'd say fight. It's strange, but we can get to that. Gina Gibson: What's your least favorite word? Andrew: mediocre. Gina Gibson: What excites you the most? Andrew: friends. Gina Gibson: And Andrew, somebody wants more information about Heads Up, who should they reach out to? Andrew: Gina, think it's best if they go straight to you. They can obviously find our website and go and have a look at the website, But think it would be best if they come through you and ⁓ we set up time to meet with them together. Gina Gibson: Excellent. Andrew, thank you so much for joining us and sharing about Heads Up with us and your amazing success stories around attrition. always a pleasure to see you and I appreciate it very much. Andrew: So good to see you too, Gina. Thanks for having me on.