131 | Transforming Customer Experience: Sprinklr's secret to success

Jon Busby: So welcome again to another episode of the tech marketing podcast I'm very pleased to be joining the virtual joined in the virtual recording booth today by Michael mass senior vice president Europe for sprinkler who? He's had a really fascinating journey in technology So Michael welcome to the tech marketing podcast.

It's a pleasure to have you here

Michael Maas: John, I'm honored to be part of this podcast. So really looking forward to our conversation.

Jon Busby: No. So let's, Michael, let's start by, we were talking to some of our prep calls about your really quite impressive career in tech. What's your memory of the, those early days that you had maybe at Veritas and and good technology experiences that helped you learn how to build successful teams.

Michael Maas: Yes. So so my experience of early adoption of technology for the workplace myself was like you got a laptop. I remember those days and then from a laptop you got a smartphone as in which was a Blackberry actually at the time. And then to later on that you have various applications and can do things very seamlessly and set up a Zoom call or you can have Remote contact, a way more easy to connect with teams so that, of course, all of those evolutions I saw at the workplace but I was very clear to me if you want to help organizations, you need to listen more than you talk,

Jon Busby (2): you want

Michael Maas: to help organizations and you work as a cross functional team, you can make 10 times more impact because it's a cross functional team, typically, who really Understands the customer challenge to capture that in the right and connected to the right use case to be able to transform whatever topic may be.

Sounds maybe very generalistic, but

Jon Busby: that's, this is something that I've learned over the last, and there's so much I want to unpack there, by the way, Michael but this is something that I've really learned over the last few years, especially with AI. And I'm sure we're going to, we're going to come on to discuss artificial intelligence in a lot more detail in a moment, but that, that piece of change, like managing technology and managing change through an organization, I think is actually one of the biggest challenges.

Biggest gaps that I see whenever anyone tries to deploy something or improve the customer experience have you got any what would be your advice on how to manage that change? Because it's something that I'm, personally we're struggling with an organization. I see many of my customers and clients struggle with as well.

Michael Maas: Yeah I think if I go very fast and answering your question is, do you acquire technology? That's interesting, but how do you. Embed a change in the organization and the technology is just the enabler, right? So it's the embedding into the organization in the work style, because there's a lot of a situation I've seen where the workforce rejects the solution and then it fails.

IDC did a research on that person. I know very well that 25 percent of business transformation projects are successful and it fails when people don't adopt the change and are on the journey of change because we say oh wow we need to change and change is cool but we typically reject against it's in our dna that's how we're wired so i think coming back to the initial point of listening saying what's your organization structure what is The thing you want to drive.

What is your organization culture? In what ecosystem do you operate? Understanding that better working as a technology company with partners is essential to, to understand that even better and to scale out. So not sure if I'm really answering your question right there, but I think what I've seen is again with the listening, understanding the customer's environment and the challenges, but also going more personal.

John, what does mean to you? get so much more into relationship than anything else I've seen.

Jon Busby: Yeah, I would completely agree. And I don't think there is an answer to the question. It was a, it's a difficult, it's a difficult question. I think it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a difficult question to ask because I think it.

Evolves around or revolves around things like culture, which is a very nebulous term. What does culture actually mean when it comes to change management, but I think it's you. Just to reiterate the point you just made from the IDC research there, you think you said 25 percent successful, which means that means three quarters 75 percent are not, which I think is a huge figure.

And when we talk about. I can extrapolate that to many different ends. If I talk about the B2B buyer journey, that means three out of four projects that are sold in fail. Which could impact someone's career. That means a lot of thinking about the amount of time that is wasted trying to implement these solutions that ultimately act drive no business value.

So it is, I think one of the things I've learned is technology is just one third really, just a part of what needs to play to improve that experience.

Michael Maas: Yeah, you could slice it up in three parts saying you have the technology, the process and the people side. But I think honestly if I talk to C suite and we do, and I do and I feel fortunate I can the skepticism they've all been overpromised and underdelivered.

It's confirming what the analysts are saying because they notice because they're interviewing the same people and they said, what business transformation do you want to drive? What front office transformation do you want to drive? How do you want to embrace AI? And here's the skepticism. There's a lot of people talking about it.

Little is being materialized, right? Monetized.

Jon Busby: Yeah.

Michael Maas: John, let me go back in time. A long time ago, 2008. You remember the financial crisis. I do, right? At that time in technology, what were we talking about? Green IT. Do you remember? Yeah. Everyone was like, oh, green IT. There was a crisis outside and inside.

We're talking about green IT. And everyone's yeah, well, it's everywhere now. We're doing it. If I go further back in time, year 2000, internet bubble, bursted. I was there. Everything the industry spoke about has come to life, has happened. All the visions and the strategy happened, but it normalized a little bit, I think.

And then we'd start to pick up, I think, on green IT. It normalized and then it started to pick up. Where are we now? What's the hot topic in town? It's AI now. How do you implement? Where do you start? Where do you start? Where do you start? So I think that's the beauty. I think of technology.

We are into phases and how do you embrace and adopt it? It's,

Jon Busby: It's a tale almost as old as time, right? We've seen technology adoption. grow at an ever increasing pace, right? I think I is the fastest adopted technology ever. There's always something that seems to break new records there.

And I think we were talking just in our prep call beforehand, like a CTO. My job's been really quite relatively easy up until about. Two years ago when open AI came to the scene and really showed us what is possible with some of this new technology. And now everyone is clambering to go, how do we, how are we going to implement this?

So how does it fit in? You mentioned, you just mentioned a moment ago, like, how do you bring AI into your business?

Jon Busby (2): Yeah.

Jon Busby: So let's dive into that for a moment. Obviously Sprinkler started its life as as a social media management company. It's actually expanded a lot more than that from what I hear.

Like, how are you bringing. AI to transform your business and your customer's business.

Michael Maas: Now, I love to talk about that. So let me go a little bit back in time to connect the dots on AI where we are today. So we founded 15 years ago and a company was founded by Rajeev Thomas, who is our CEO, co CEO and founder.

And we celebrate the birthday last month of 15 years. But what we've been doing is listening to 36 social media channels. And we have platinum relationships with all of them. We have very tight relationships and based on those listening exercises we had to do that in and we are doing that in more than 100 languages.

So what are we listening to? We're basically listening to conversations and those conversations, John, they don't know it's you and me, but they do know there's a confident conversation going on between you and me about something. And that topic could be AI, which just spoke about. So we're dealing with a data lake of unstructured data every day.

So what we've done is to our customers is we're giving listening's results back. So if you're like a popular coffee brand and you want to know how you're doing in Saudi Arabia, because you just opened up a practice there, we can hear that. We can give that feedback. And then we evolved into a marketing and ads.

sort of domain. And we said, okay, how can we help our customers not only to listen, but to find their marketing and estimate in the target community? They want to reach. How can you be on brand? How can you do that across region in 100 plus languages seamlessly and measure the impact on the listening side?

That's the second step, right? And then from there, we started to drive the sale. So if you drive a pipeline, we can transact now. Mhm. Think of your Instagram. You see an interesting product, you want to buy it, or you communicating with one of the vendors you'd like to communicate with to buy something. You can transact nowadays on WhatsApp,

Jon Busby (2): right?

Michael Maas: And then what is a sale without service? So we moved into the contact center, a 40 year old legacy domain, where we now can transform and disrupt that, which we are because we read sentiment. Because of that sounds like a cool story. And it is, but it's residing on one platform, one data model, one architecture, but we couldn't cope.

Our use case to build our own AI started seven years ago. So seven years ago, we build our own AI as an engineering company, which we are, and that own AI helped us to automate and go faster through data. So just to give you an idea we're listening to about 14 15 billion conversations every day, and we applied machine learning so that if we someone is from Manchester or somebody is living in Houston that we know nuance the language that learning happens.

Okay, we injected machine learning and then AI really made us go faster on our own data to read it and to give it back. So don't think of long language models, but that's the purpose why we build AI. And that made us really dynamic, flexible and strategic because we're learning so much faster.

We actually productize that and we're giving that to customers now. So AI sits in everywhere across one platform, one data model, one architecture, and we're giving it to our customers so that they can connect it to the long language model of choice. And they can talk back on their own data now.

Jon Busby: Like all of a sudden you're providing someone with a magical experience.

And I think that's the difference. It sounds, I've been thinking a lot about this recently. Because I think that word magic, tends to get applied when technology comes together in a way that people didn't even realize it was possible. Exactly.

Michael Maas: And that's giving me goosebumps.

If I go to fast forward into what does it mean for the contact center, right?

Jon Busby (2): In the contact center,

Michael Maas: it's a traditional 40 year old legacy domain. And here comes a spring for a 15 year old company who a couple of years ago decided to enter this market. So what we're doing is we're going in agentless.

We're going in omni channel

Jon Busby (2): with

Michael Maas: our AI. So what does it mean if you would do this in your contact center and you would work with us? We would connect to all your systems of records and we action that data and make it like the sprinkler service We call it and what it does is the following We because of our social capability we read sentiment John We were listening to the words you select and if you are on the chat We could see if you raise capital letters and the words and the grammar you use we analyze you before you call We know what you're doing Because you're in Leeds and the weather condition we can correlate saying John is not too happy

Jon Busby (2): because

Michael Maas: we don't chat.

He didn't get an answer and there's not the contact center agent reading you. It's the platform reading you. We also read the contact center agent and see if he or she is mature or senior or not. And then we monitor that real time. So you see real time CSAT scoring. We are not asking you to do a questionnaire.

We have it real time because we've been reading sentiment for 15 years. And that's mind blowing to see.

Jon Busby: But what you just said there is what I think is really important, which is it's not just around the customer experience, but you're matching that with the employee experience and making sure the two are in sync, which I think we often don't tend to think about, everyone in an organization has different skill sets and different strengths and different weaknesses.

And actually, if you can marry the two up with the customer, then, you do get magic coming back to it. So I think that's a really interesting point.

Michael Maas: Yeah. And also think about this. You're driving on the M four motorway. You're speeding maybe a little bit too much. You lose the connection.

So you're like, let me give another example. You're calling and you don't have data signal. And nowadays data signal is more important than the voice signal almost. So if you don't get your data signal, you connect with the help center. Let's say you are able to still do that from the same phone and you're on the M four and a little bit annoyed because your message is not coming in.

How nice would it be that the call center employee knows okay, there's switch outages. John has this profile. He's a ten year long customer with us. He hasn't renewed his contract for five years. He's using an iPhone 13, which has some challenges as well with connections. And that when you call, you hear the sentiment.

I M4 motorway. You're thinking, why did I bring it up? You're speeding maybe a little bit too much and the connection drops and you just did your whole story and then goodness gracious, I need to reconnect and tell the whole story again. In our case, now we captured it and it may be go to another employee and the contact center.

But we start where we left off

Jon Busby (2): because we

Michael Maas: have your whole profile. It's not the person typing quickly. It's because of the system, the platform takes care of that. Then you reconnect the employees, sees all your products and services and says, I'm sorry. You don't have to explain it again, John. Our switch problem has been solved, but there's one more thing.

You're using an iPhone 13 and I know you're a 10 year old customer of us. And we're really proud of that. I actually can renew your contract, lower your costs per month. And if you do that for two years, I can give you an iPhone

Jon Busby (2): 16.

Michael Maas: If you're interested, I can make that work. Let me go one more level of complexity.

Then the billing, he or she needs to confirm your credit card detail. But that's not a policy of the company because that's secure information, which can't be asked in a, in, in, in a real time conversation. Then you shouldn't give it. You get flagged immediately as a contact center. You can't go here and it diverts in the talk track, how to re go get back on track.

Basically with the conversation, the supervisor gets informed to monitor with you to see this behavior. And if we really corrected that conversation so that you're staying compliant, you're getting your new iPhone shipped. You're lowered. You're. Your sort of your cost per month and you have a totally different experience.

So here we say we move the contact center to an experience center and the only way to do it. If you can deal with fast majority of data connected in different systems and we're leveraging AI end to end. So we're doing our contact center is like agentless omni channel. And with AI embedded, we only could do this because we had this 15 years of history,

Jon Busby: Let's bring this back and come back to a kind of almost our change management piece that we talked about a moment ago as well.

So I'm going to use the IDC comments or quote that you mentioned before, which is only 25 percent of these transformation projects are successful and what we've just, what you just talked about here is really a transformation project. If you were implementing some of this inside of business.

So what's the best practices. That you can share on how to if you're wearing a marketing hat right now, or even a sales hat or an operations hat sort of business, what do you need to start changing to get your business ready to adopt something like this?

Michael Maas: Yeah. So I think the fact that on change management, if you work agentless and you can connect to.

Systems of records, it makes it already a little bit more easy. It becomes a workflow type of environment, right? So that's a big benefit. But of course we have a blueprint saying these are the best practices and the reference architecture. And based on that, you say, okay, what connections do we have to make?

But we typically start in like listening. What are your biggest challenges? Tell me how your setup is done. How is your environment looking? Maybe you're outsourced. Many cases they're outsourcing involved as well. What do you want to achieve? And then from there, we'd say this is the reference architecture.

And then we would demo. We would say, is this what you want to see?

Jon Busby (2): We

Michael Maas: do this in the company look and feel to give an even better experience. So you can test a bit. And then based on that, you can go to an MVP and then scale out further. Or you can pick up on one country. And say we do it there, depending on the organization set up, of course.

Jon Busby: So if I'm making sure I understand that, because, and this is the technology hack coming on here, right? You mentioned a couple of points there as best practice. One is know your system of record, which I think is always quite a challenge inside organizations. You've got to know where one way your system of record is and might potentially where the, source of truth.

And those two things are different. So I'm not gonna go into the now, but I think you can understand like where data lives like the CRM, right?

Michael Maas: That's where we track everything.

Jon Busby: Yep. You also mentioned going into an MVP or pilot, and I think there's quite a few different ways to segment things down there.

Like you can do things by country, you can do things by particular group or set of employees. What's the other best practices to make sure your business is ready for that kind of transformation?

Michael Maas: The other is how you engage with your employees, right? It's like the change and what does it mean?

And so you need to have a seamless like experience back to what we spoke a bit earlier in our conversation. And again that inspiration is given by showing. So we can talk a lot. Let me show you. And if you have done the blueprint that reference architecture, you made the design, you then said this is the path to implement and implementation is not a transformation, right?

The implementation is installing the technology and then the transformation starts. So we have very strategic partners who are helping on this front. Think of. It's a local partners. But Accenture by example Deloitte. It's an entity. And then we have like in regions, various partners. I'm not doing justice.

We have a big landscape of them of our current partner landscape, and we're growing that we launched a partner program a year ago. Globally, we've hired a leader, Jim Nairn, and in EMEA, we hired a lady called Virginia Matassa. Who came out of this space and running this at Salesforce, by example, for a decade to say, okay, how do we make those real connections with partners to scale out?

We also have our own implementation team who can roll out and do the implementation itself. But again it's not an implementation, John, it's a transformation. And then you need to bridge to the end user.

Jon Busby: I think actually I'm going to steal that phrase from you, which is implementation is not transformation.

Because I think that's a really important distinction to have. And it's a phrase that I use in my teams at the moment, which is like use partners and consultants because they're like and I'm actually going to quote a famous YouTuber here who's going to remain nameless. But if you go and look this up, you'll know who it is.

But like consultants are like cheat codes. If they help you shortcut to get to those end results. And same thing with partners, right? They help you understand some of the pitfalls that you might hit a little bit sooner and some of the things that you can use to, to accelerate this platform.

And I think quite often businesses, especially in the, in this kind of medium type space, we tend to try and avoid using those cause they add cost. But I think it just increases the risk of failure of the project really.

Michael Maas: If you're

Jon Busby: not careful.

Michael Maas: And typically, if you sometimes or some many cases we're seeing, you're already dealing with them, so they know you better than we do.

So actually, we build on to that knowledge of culture, how you operate, how you drive change and say, because we know that, hey, this is a seamless transition. And an extension of the relationship. Just thinking of concentrics as well was a partner. I think the other element I think is how we're seeing the evolution.

Cause we have many customers. We're a market leader in space where we started in the social listening and the marketing and ads domain. And it's in that evolution where we're seeing like, yeah, actually we didn't talk about the contact center,

Jon Busby (2): but that's,

Michael Maas: Because they don't dare to change it because it's very legacies, even this, even a lot of on Prem still there of applications.

I thought we were that was behind us, but it's still there, so it's old. It's challenging because if it's too, you can't disrupt it too much as in outages or those things because it's a direct connection to your bottom line and your growth, your top line, so you don't want to damage that or impact that in the negative.

But so I think. That makes it interesting that let me bring it back to what you said. Transformation implementation. Yeah, this is on my mind a lot, because in the past, if you just look into social listening, marketing and ads, it's an implementation. And then the marketeers, the CMO team can go fast.

What is the voice of the customer? Are we how we're doing in our community? And I think many companies know exactly what they sold because they report on it. They somewhat know. What deals they lost, they somewhat know, but they have no clue what their potential was outside those two categories. And we're giving insight and we giving visibility to that.

But if you give the marketing, listening and the the service side if you look into that landscape, yeah, we we can give a totally different experience. And We just had another conversation yesterday about a customer and they told us that they think because they're very transactional, they think they could automate 60 percent of their business process optimization, their BPO side.

And I was blown away with that number because that's involving a lot of people.

But because they're very transactional and it's not a very complex environment, they yeah, they could, they think they can give a totally different experience and I agree with them. But it's very impactful what AI brings.

Jon Busby: Yeah. I saw a similar figure actually quoted for, I think this was a US bank where they took took the cost of acquiring customer from 12 to 12 cents using AI. Now I'm going to be slightly cynical here, which is, About five, six years ago, there was a lot of research that said that as customers, we didn't want to engage with chatbots.

We found them impersonal. Now, to be honest, if I come across a chatbot, I can solve my problem using that. I'm going to prefer to do it because I can do it quicker, faster, without having to speak to people. So with the new gen, Gen Z entering the workforce and being now becoming decision makers, I'm going to look at this more from a B2B angle than B2C, but with them entering the workforce, they don't want to call someone.

They don't, they'd rather text someone or they'd rather interact with some kind of bot. So it's, I think. Even though it feels impersonal to say you could automate 60 percent of your BPO, as you mentioned, I think we're on that trend already, which kind of comes, actually comes onto a question that I've been really eager to ask you, Michael, the whole way through this, which is, we've both got young families.

I've got a son and a daughter at the moment, they won't enter the workforce for quite a while, but you talked around Kind of back in 2011. You had to access everything from the office, you know back in 2008 We had the financial crisis and that's when I started. My career was actually in 2008 in this space and it you know made me reflect on just how much has changed over the last 15 since sprinkler started like how much has really?

shifted beneath our feet and it's almost a bit like a Lobster in a pot like the heat's been slowly getting turned up, but we haven't probably realized it yet. What advice like when we're thinking about our families and when they might be entering the workforce. How do you feel about it? First, what advice would you give them to make sure that we're everyone's remaining relevant?

I think that question makes some sense, but it's something that's going around my head a lot.

Michael Maas: Just to just so just to make sure I'm on track. Yes, we both have young families and the impact. Sprinkler started when Obama was appointed. When Obama was appointed as a president, that's when Sprinkler was founded.

And that's a long time ago, but actually, right? It's not that long. 15 years. And a lot has changed. But let me go to another change element in our lives, right? Not the favorite one to talk about by Covid. COVID do we suddenly start to build a muscle, a digital muscle to do things like setting up a zoom and a teams became the standard and remote working suddenly was possible.

That said it was made possible because we had great CIOs and CTOs who really equipped employees to work. remote. Not if you're a blue collar worker, you had to go back into the office. Sorry, into the factory or the the office location. So not for everyone. But I think digitization has evolved tremendously in the past decade, right?

And that's at the beginning of our conversation. This is the exciting part. The A. I. Adoption and adoption of new technologies where we are now are the fastest ever. I've seen. So I think just before we joined this conversation, I was telling you I was back in Stanford. During my Stanford program, we spoke about adoption of technology and chat.

GPT has been the quickest adoption in the history of technology.

Some people don't even search on Google nowadays. They only consult jet GPT because it's so seamless. So let me talk about, let me talk about and try to address what you're asking me. I think if technology is seamless, it's intuitive, the adoption is way higher.

Jon Busby (2): To make

Michael Maas: it seamless and intuitive is the hardest thing ever. That means you need to be able to cope with complexity, diversity and in our case, unstructured data to make that structured and seamless and in the language of choice. And ideally, Where it becomes a conversation. And yes, we are. We are getting there.

But I think digital literacy, I think, also will change dramatically if it's so seamless, because it's not about implementing an application. I come from the days, and John, you know those days as well, where you would say there's a new application being implemented to do expense management. I just make one up, right?

Where we say, okay, that's a program of a year, because we need to get to server capacity, we need to install the OS, we need to provision maybe, or we're next level. Virtual machines. We had to implement the application, stress test it. Then we need to do education of the employees, and then we had to distribute software to all the PCs and laptops.

And then there's this training facility again, and then we hope the adoption was there. Today, you go to the App Store, install an app, and it's activated, but even that is a challenge. I think that will go away. Our founder, Raji, he's a strong believer of the conversational economy. So if you look into the stack in the middle, since the core CRM, then you could say there's a messy middle of old middleware applications, which can all different systems, the ring outside of that outside the missing middle, you could say is where the conversation happens.

That's where this CX edge sits. We have been listening to the CX edge for 15 years and we have platen relationship because everyone is on a mobile phone, on a website, in a mobile app to transacting and having conversation B2B B2C with their customer. And we're able to make this messy middle connected to the core, a structured way of doing business and drive that transformation.

I think this is pretty awesome. And I think again, back to our, Two daughters they want to have seamless experiences. It needs to be easy and it's not controlling them. They want to control their lives. It's a little bit what's happening in all of our lives. Let me go very holistic now, but I don't see my daughters buy a car.

They probably get a meaning of transportation they need for that moment. And look at what Tesla just done with a self driving car, what they announced. It's confirming the point. Banking, same way. We don't want to go to the bank. I think governments are the next one to go fully on that on that journey.

If you need a passport or a driving license or any of the documentation, you don't want to make that a visit to the city council or town hall or the municipality. needs to be digital. They want to get closer to the

Jon Busby: civilian. I hadn't even thought about governance, actually. You're exactly right.

So I recently had to re renew my passport urgently. And it was a very long journey to go into an office where they looked at me for about 30 seconds and press the button on a computer and then it got printed. And you've got to wonder, surely there must be a better way to do this. Then requiring me to travel halfway across the country to be able to achieve it.

But you're right. I think government's the one next. But the key element that you mentioned there, Michael, which I think, you're thinking about my family and everyone else listening to this, probably in a very similar situation, is digital literacy. I think, just listening to your story about how we used to implement applications, and, in the enterprise space, it's not too different to how you described it.

But, And bringing it right back to the beginning, change management is, training people on those new applications is one of the biggest challenges, but I think that's going to get shorter and shorter as digital literacy improves, you could, we'll be able to roll out new applications, new ways of working faster and faster than we ever have in both the enterprise and the personal space.

And I think it's important, Our families and our future generations to be ensuring that they are keeping up to speed with that digital literacy if they want to remain relevant. Yeah,

Michael Maas: But and then if you break it back to the from that to the enterprise organizations and you're so so just to give you an idea sprinkler sold to the top 100 largest companies in the world.

They're all using sprinkler. We having globally around 2000 customers. And what you're seeing, if you're selling into multiple countries or you have multiple brands, we see those as well. So you have multiple brands in multiple countries. You have to set up your front office multiple times.

How do you do your marketing and ad strategy on points rolling out globally and then with the right sort of semantics reaching the right audience? How do you connect the contact center? Let's say and you're working for Nike. You're in Greece. You don't want to get an answer in English. You would like to have a Greek answer, right?

Or if you're living in Italy, you want to get an Italian response. You want to have a conversation. And that's what we're offering. That's what our standards are in the seamlessness, in the disruptiveness. And leveraging all the knowledge we had and building our own data and AI model which we'd done seven years ago ourselves.

.

Michael Maas: And then, so a friend of mine is responsible as a a product a product manager for Vertex, the AI platform of Google. So we are partners and we are leveraging vert vertex. I think the other holy grail to seamlessness is having interoperability. With the ecosystem you're operating in.

And I think I just said that earlier because you should listen well, understand the environment, but make a blueprint. But also, you need to have an ecosystem to offer. Connectivity. This is beyond having partners who can help implement and roll out and transform. That's another, I think, key success ingredient.

Jon Busby: I think there's that element of, and this is a very technical term of like how you couple your systems. We talk about loosely coupled and tightly coupled. And in today's world, things are moving so quickly that you need to be able to have that flexibility and lack of locking into one particular platform in order to make sure you achieve that.

So it sounds like you guys are doing that at Springfield as well.

Michael Maas: We did decoupled from language from social media channel, from device. We and actually to some extent, we're decoupling from the dependency off the employee because we're assessing the employee and helping him or her to level set, and that's what we're doing.

Jon Busby (2): And then

Michael Maas: we're connecting to the systems of records as well. And we have very strategic relationships. Many of our strategic relationships, our customers as well. And so that, so the Microsoft and the Google, so this world are big and the Amazons are big Customer and partner. Completely

Jon Busby: agree.

Michael, it's been a real pleasure having you on the tech marketing podcast today. It's been fascinating to hear some of your journey. In fact, I think you might've mentioned, you've talked a lot about listening today. I think you mentioned one of our previous calls, two ears and one mouth, which actually wrote down at the top of my notepad.

So thank you for giving us that wonderful advice and for taking us on the journey that you've had in technology it's been a pleasure.

Michael Maas: John, so special to to get to know you. And I'm really keen to meet up again. John, thank you for your your opportunity and to get introduced.