SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome! You are listening to the CRM Success Show, where you will hear from CRM executives who have overseen some of the most interesting and complex CRM implementations. Your hosts, David Mossri and Kiro Whitey, will be bringing you real stories, real insight. Follow along on social media for updates on new episode releases, exclusive content, and much more. Enjoy the show and thanks for listening.

SPEAKER_02 0:29

Welcome to the CRM Success Show, where we deep dive into CRM success and failure, delivering real stories with real impact. I am Dave Massery. And I'm Tiro Whitzi. And today we're talking with Rob Lajwet Lajounesse, senior director at Angie. I hope I didn't put your name, Rob, but uh welcome.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Thanks. Yeah, it's good to be here. And uh no, I've heard much worse butchering, so uh great job.

SPEAKER_04 0:55

Let's start with a proper pronunciation, Rob. Come on, put on your French accent. Tell us how it's done.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

Uh Rob La Jeunesse, which um I'm sure French people would also have proud of me, even though it's my own last name. Um, but my favorite story about my last name is that whenever I talk to a French person, they are first excited because it's a French last name, but then they are basic they basically tell me that my name is boring because it's the version of Young or the Youth. So I'm basically Rob Young, which is relatively boring in English terms. So, you know, it's a little bit of a mixed bag.

SPEAKER_04 1:24

You can't win them all. Um so Rob, thanks for thanks for joining us today. Uh just to start with giving our listeners a little bit of an overview, please, of your background, which we'll dive into detail later on in the show. But your background, your current title uh and position with energy, and um a little bit more about kind of your time there.

SPEAKER_01 1:47

Sure. Yeah. Um so kind of going back to the start of my career, I actually thought I was gonna do investment banking coming out of school. So I went to a small school in Cleveland called Case Western Reserve, majored in finance, and was like, I'm gonna go do investment banking and I'm gonna go do the whole Wall Street thing. Um, so I probably interviewed about five or six investment banks, and I had an old neighbor that worked at Deloitte doing tech consulting, and he said, just come on and talk to us and have have a conversation. And if you don't like it, that's fine, go do go do what you want to do. Um, I ended up really being interested in sort of the variety of the skill sets that I thought I could build in consulting and just really enjoyed the conversation with everybody, like just hearing about their experiences and traveling the country and traveling the world and getting to work with all these different sorts of clients. So ended up interviewing, got that job at you know when I came out of school. And the first thing I did was probably about the most boring technology work that you could possibly imagine. Apologies to anyone out there who's like an SAP ERP stan. Um, but I was kind of doing these big backend implementations where I was working on a really, really small piece of that system. Um, so I kind of did everything that I like everything in my power to sort of move over to something that was more customer-facing or like customer impact, which is kind of where I wanted to get. And that was where I got some of my first exposure to Salesforce. Um back like about two or three years in my career, and I did a project for a big life sciences company in Indianapolis where we were basically building out a uh platform for them to deliver business applications on App Cloud at the time, for those who remember. So basically using the Salesforce platform and creating custom applications. Um after that project, which I was on for about two and a half years, I applied and went to a sponsored program that Deloitte has where they paid for me to go to grad school, which was huge and um amazing. So I moved down to Austin, Texas, and uh did two years at UT and kind of dove into the entrepreneurship scene. So when I was there, started my own company, got really involved with startups around Austin and worked for several of them. Um then I also helped with a student-run venture fund on campus too. So got to work with a lot of students to actually go through the deal flow evaluation process and work with a lot of these innovative entrepreneurs that were building really cool things in their time in undergrad. Um, the risk tolerance for the company that I was working on was a little bit too much because I was about to get married. So I went back to consulting and took that kind of sponsored offer and helped to build a practice called Experience Management at Deloitte for about zero dollars up to, I think, when I stopped with the practice building and moved back to client work, we were at about $50 million in revenue for that practice. So the entire principle was uh kind of a play on the operate model for the entire customer experience for our clients. So we covered everything from customer data management to layering AI engines over top to make decisions on that unified source of customer data to then proliferating those decisions out and delivering experiences across all the touch points in the customer experience from top of funnel all the way through to like customer care. Um so once I helped build that practice, then I kind of became the primary tech strategy person that was going out and trying to sell deals. Um we'd go in and do these like kind of high-level executive workshops to sketch out what are all the use cases you want to do to deliver a more personalized and relevant customer experience across all your touch points. Um, and then we would kind of say, here's how you need to adapt to your tech stack, and here's the approach that you would take. Uh, and then we'd actually go through with that implementation. So what led me to Angie is that I felt like when I was doing that, I was kind of talking a lot, but I wasn't doing a lot. Um so I was like most of the time handing off to delivery teams, and so I'd work with clients and get excited about what we were gonna build, and then I'd be off to the next one and doing the next thing. So at Ang, I kind of took a role that was much more like operational, um, where I was owning sort of end-to-end like operations in our customer experience department for one part of our business. Uh, so that included the analytics, the technology, as well as the external vendor relationships for our BPOs. So these are like the organizations that have our outsource agents. And that was for when I joined a group of about roughly 600 agents across two different BPOs. So started one section of homeowner, expanded to all of homeowner with that same scope, then all of homeowner and pro, then all of sales and care. And now I'm kind of in a position where I'm focusing more on the technology, and I'm really focused on delivering value at Angie globally for our operations tools and making sure that we have the right sales and care technology stack to help our reps do what they do best, which is help our homeowners and pros.

SPEAKER_04 6:26

Awesome. Great, great intro. Um, so Angie, I read 200,000 members, delivered 300 million projects. Tell us a little bit about Angie, what they do, what the business model looks like, and how would a consumer know Angie? How would how would me you, Maz, you know, kind of engage with Angie as a as a business?

SPEAKER_01 6:53

Yeah, so we talk about Angie. Many people always ask me, what's Angie? And I say, Oh, you know, Angie's list, and then people know what I'm talking about. So Angie is Angie's list. It's also um two other major brands that kind of came under the same brand about I think it was five or six years ago that we went through a rebrand. So it's really Angie's List, Home Advisor, and Handy Technologies. So the main thing that we do is like at its core, we connect homeowners to highly qualified pros to get their home projects done so they don't have to do them themselves. Um we do this in primarily two ways. So we have what's called kind of a marketplace experience for homeowners where you can come in and submit a project request, and then you will be matched with many pros, which you can choose from. And then sometimes what we'll do is we'll offer a services experience. This is what we call it internally, um where it's basically like a fixed price project where you know, if you need someone to mow your lawn every two weeks, you might have an option to see that done through Angie, and then we would assign a pro out for you. So it might be a different pro every week, but Angie would take care of assigning the pro and then you would pay us and we would fulfill the service. We also do that through a lot of retail partners too. So Wayfarer, Walmart, Lowe's. Um, if you go buy a TV, you might see an option at checkout to have like a handyman help hang your TV that you bought just bought. Uh, that's another way that you can engage with this as well. But really what we thrive on is making sure that we are creating connections for our homeowners to get their home projects done safely and reliably. And then for our pros, who are ultimately the ones who are paying for the service, and I can talk about that in a minute. Um, we want to help people build their business and build their dreams. Like some of the pros stories that you hear about people building their businesses from nothing and being able to support their families and pass that on to family members or to grow from just them doing projects to like semi-retiring because then they have enough success where they can send a crew out. I mean, it's it's amazing to hear about those stories. And I think that's part of what continues to give me the drive to do the best that we can to serve those pros and when they have issues, try to resolve those as quickly as we can.

SPEAKER_04 8:55

Just uh goes to show American Dream is still still a thing, right? Um, with the right partnerships, businesses supporting technology, driving those opportunities, it's still out there. Want to pivot slightly before we talk about your background from consulting to SaaS uh and and startup space. You moved to Austin, you're in Austin currently. What is your opinion on the tech startup scene in Austin 2025 versus when you were there 2017-2021 in the startup space? Because there's a lot of noise and media and postings around. Is it still the tech herb that perhaps it was pre-pandemic? Some people will say, well, it's thriving, others will say it's become a little bit stagnant. You're on the ground, you've got contacts in the space, you're in the city. What's your opinion?

SPEAKER_01 9:53

So I love Austin. And one of the reasons is I think exactly what you laid out, but there is exact there is some, I think, merit to what you're saying in terms of like there's been a shift in probably the last five or six years. So if you think about like even just when I moved back to Austin, which I think I've been down here for about nine years, like if you look at the city's skyline back then to now, it's so different. Um, like I think that you know, the tallest building in the city is probably the 12th, maybe 15th tallest building now, as like a lot of the tech giants have sort of moved uh headquarters or just like major locations here. So it's funny because like kind of the journey that it's been on is almost like a startup journey in and of itself. Like Austin was like very small for a long time and sort of like this scrappy startup slash like music scene with like a lot of kind of quirky, interesting areas that the people were exposed to. Um, and so when I was like kind of there during grad school, like some of the meetup events that I would go to were all like smaller places. So there is one place that I spent a lot of time at, which is called the Capital Factory, which is still a great place for anyone. If anyone's in Austin and a budding startup, just go spend some time at Capital Factory. It's a great team there, and there's a lot going on in that space. Um, but really like that's the way that people were connecting. Like you were meeting through meetups, and when you go to those, it's like mostly founders and like people are just there on the ground and want to be a part of that scene and like helping others. And that was that was really, really cool. When COVID happened, I think that there was a little bit of a shift because we had like a couple of things happening. Number one, like some of those natural sort of meeting places became less common because of like the controls that were you know kind of in place around COVID and people were nervous. Um, but then also we had a huge influx of talent from Silicon Valley and like the Pacific Northwest and people looking to move out of these like you know higher property tax, more expensive states down to Austin where there's like no property tax and also like a lot less regulations in the way that you do things generally from a business perspective. Um, so I think that's what caused a lot of that talent to move down. It caused uh a lot of companies to sort of reconsider and move headquarters down there. And so I'd say we kind of move like Austin, kind of move from like a seed stage, super scrappy startup, like homegrown thing with all the founders and like their you know first hires to then we're like maybe a series A or series B. And it's like you're starting to get some more of that like influence and pressure from like the investors or your biggest investors that are coming in, and so it is like changing some of the stuff on the ground. So there is still like a lot of places where you can still like get great meetups and meet a lot of great people, like everything just feels a little bit bigger now, I would say. Um, and I mean, one of the biggest things that I I sometimes tell people about that's like representative of some of that growth is have you have y'all ever been to Austin before, by the way?

SPEAKER_04 12:41

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 12:42

Okay. I don't think so.

SPEAKER_01 12:44

Well, yeah, Kira, did you ever spend time on Rainy Street when you were here? Do you go to course? Okay, yeah. So Rainy Street, like for those who have not been to Austin, Rainy Street is this like it used to be a little residential street, and they turned all the houses into bars. And so it was like super cool and super unique, like very Austin, where you could just go down the street and you're basically walking into these houses that have been converted into bars, but it feels like nothing else that I'd ever been to. Now, if you go down to Rain Street, everything is like completely built up and like everyone's had success. So now it's like totally different, and it kind of feels like almost like Broadway or like a version of Sixth Street that's in Austin now as well. And so I think that's like a lot of what's happened. And so there's still like amazing tech talent here, there's still amazing startups activity going on, and I think that it still has like some differentiation when you look at you know Austin versus like a Silicon Valley, but it certainly has changed and like definitely absorbed some of the influence of some of those bigger tech companies moving in.

SPEAKER_04 13:36

For sure. It's worth noting uh Q1 2024 2025 this year, Austin startups raised 3.4 billion, which was spread across 86 different deals, which was a record for Austin. So that stat alone would indicate still growth. I think perhaps the rate of growth from 2018 to 2021, 2022 versus 2022 onwards to present day has obviously slowed. Um, and interestingly, I think uh Scottsdale in Arizona is now taking some of that market share as well from what we've kind of heard and seen. Um, which will be you know, maybe that'd be the Austin in 10 years from now, right? Where they're having similar teething problems, but who knows? Uh, bringing it back slightly to your background, your journey. So two stints at Deloitte. There's a few questions there, but tell us a little bit about the differences between enterprise SIs or GSIs and startup because typically you don't see a lot of people that will go from one extreme to another, right? Um, so tell us a little bit about your experience of that. How did you even pull that off, right? Um, to get that opportunity, uh, remove some of the stigma, well, you're an enterprise background, you know, you couldn't possibly thrive in a startup environment. Some of those observations, big, big, big moments that you were like, Oh, oh my, what have I what have I done here? Like, you know, just tell tell us a bit about that journey, processes, what you observed.

SPEAKER_01 15:22

Yeah, I mean, I I think I think what you're alluding to is that like with especially with an enterprise SI, there's just such a massive safety blanket of like people that have been there and done that. And so, like a big part of my job early on was like not necessarily like how do I solve a problem, but like, how do I understand who else has solved this problem and has like gone through the trials and tribulations and like experience of success or failure, and then transfer that insight to my clients because like that's what people are ultimately playing paying for. They're paying for like the breadth and depth of Dublin to ensure like we hire, I would say we like when I was at Dublin, we would hire like talented people. Um, but a lot of like what you're bringing is like the tech and tools and processes and frameworks and stuff like that, and like you know, that's kind of what what we're selling. So I I think for me, like a lot of where I saw that applied though, was probably more so like up front in the process. And so if you think about like how most of these like large SIs deliver, you kind of have like those delivery leaders who are really involved up front and they'll throw all the SMEs subject matter experts at you in the world as they're trying to sell you these big deals and make investments up front to do like the small pieces of it. And then over time, like you'll see those people start to like go away because there's potentially like less to sell, like once they sell the large deals there. So um I think that that's like some of the things that I observed. What that prevented presented an opportunity for me though, on some of my projects is that I was able to be around long enough to see through multiple phases where there was some of that like safety net that started to step away. And so like I just kind of had to learn things myself, which I think was part of what interested me in getting into startups. So, like I'll never forget this um, this one experience I had in my second year when I was trying to get over to something that was more customer-facing. And I did a project with a um, they like make like multi-functional printers and fax machines, and we were doing like a pricing analytics project to try to figure out like where are you having leakage in your business in terms of like how you're pricing across all these different geos and to all these different types of customers. And we were using a tool that was called Vendavo, which is a pricing analytics tool that works with SAP, and we brought on some guy to do like the ETL mapping between the SAP source systems and this pricing analytics system as we designed, like I was basically on point to work with the business to understand what are all the different buckets of pricing and discounts and like different things that can happen that impacts what someone ultimately pays. And at that point, like we had sold the deal, so some of the top-level leaders were away, and we didn't have the right person to like do the ETL. And so we hired some like external contractor guy, like a freelancer, and he came in and like just like didn't do anything, like it was it was crazy, like he just didn't do the work. And so I'm like sitting there talking to the business, and I like asked him to present something, and then like there was just nothing there, and he was like, I haven't figured it out yet. And I was like, Oh no, I'm like my second year out of school, and I was like, What do I do in this situation? So I talked to my manager after that and I was like, Can I just like take this over? I think I understand how to do this. And like I basically taught myself like how to do like ETL logic and mapping and like understand all the different tables of SAP so that I could just figure out like how to accomplish this thing for my customer because like I wasn't getting what I needed, and so like I think there's kind of two routes when you kind of grow up in like a big four firm, like you can sort of spin your wheels or like go make it someone else's problem, and like I feel like a lot of what made me successful is I just chose to like dive in and solve problems and teach myself. And so I feel like that's a skill that I've now been able to carry with me and like apply in like a post-consulting role, where now like I hope to bring the same thing to my teams where it's like if you have a problem in front of you and you didn't get specific training on it, like try to figure it out as best you can. And now it's like a force multiplier with all the LLMs that you can use to help you solve problems. Um, and so yeah, I don't know if that 100% answered your question around like the enterprise, like uh the enterprise big four type. Um, but I think it kind of helps nudge me into the like I want to do something that I can bet on myself and like really show you know the ability to learn, flex a new skill set, that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_04 19:27

What did you find?

SPEAKER_02 19:30

No, I was gonna say that's that's generally more of a startup thing, but maybe you took it from your startup experience too uh to Deloitte. I I did want to ask is what Kira was alluding for previously, that the larger firms look at coming from a startup as a positive? I would think that they don't, that they look at it from a negative. I know startups often look at coming from a big firm as a negative. They they both of them seem to think that the culture is just so different that it's either you're a startup person or you're you know a structured corporate person. Um so I mean you clearly live both. So like what was your experience with that? Is there some truth to it? Did it cause you any problems? Or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 20:18

So I I mentioned that like I went to into a sponsored program with Deloitte, and so like I came when I came out of undergrad, I didn't have any like necessarily startup experience. And so like I had worked for them for several years. And part of getting approved for this sponsored program is you had to pitch a business case on yourself. Like, why should you pay for Rob to go to grad school and like invest you know a good amount of money to then do that and give them an offer on the way back? And my entire structure was around like exactly that. Like, I'm gonna go spend two years literally just being in the startup ecosystem because I want to be like on the forefront of innovation to bring that back to my clients and then help them innovate. And so, like the path that I kind of got to there was a little bit strange. Like I didn't go and do startups that were in like customer data platforms or like customer data management or even like directly in AI or like multi-channel marketing, which is sort of the skills that I flexed on the back end, like the second stint that I did post-grad school. Uh, but I would say that like the things that I learned in terms of like being innovative and like driving forward and thinking about experiences in a completely different way. At time in the startup ecosystem really helped me, and I did apply that in a lot of ways, like post-startup experience. So it wasn't really like a conversation with anyone there to say, like, hey, this startup experience is there's not going to be helpful. But like I was able to apply those skills pretty successfully. I think that your counter, the other points around like the startups being wary of big corporate experience, I had a little bit more like mixed feedback with that. Um, like it was definitely a little bit more so like in the startup ecosystem. And I kind of talked about like a lot of the meetups in Austin that I was in. When you're talking to their founders and you talk about your background, like you don't get a lot of, I was at a big four, like big consulting, and now I'm going to do startup land. And so like you're talking to a lot of people. Who are like, you know, doing their own thing because they just have had this passion and they just like spun this off and they wanted to do this, or they're on their like third or fourth startup because they've like worked for startups or started multiple companies before and now they're on their next one, and like that's all they ever want to do. And so with some of those conversations, I think it is a little bit harder to connect. And it's also a little bit of like startup experience is much different from their perspective than someone from corporate. And so it's like if you come in and you're saying, like, hey, like let's build a standard operating procedure or like let's build a rules and responsibility matrix to understand who does what in this, they're like, no, just get stuff done and get it done as soon as possible because we have our next investor milestone to hit. Um, and so like I did experience like a little bit of that as well. Um, so it's interesting, sort of the dichotomy between the two. But I would say, like, from my perception, and this could be different based on anyone's experience, typically going like big company to startup is a little bit harder than vice versa. Um, just because like I think that the pace is also a little bit faster than startup world.

SPEAKER_04 23:05

Was there a something it doesn't have to be, but but what or it could be many things, but what were was there anything that you felt okay, this is surprisingly a lot easier in a startup versus enterprise, whether it's company politics, whatever. And similarly, on the flip side, what was more difficult, specific, like anything specific about what was more difficult about being maybe it was lack of resources, right? You have a team of people, for example.

SPEAKER_01 23:32

Politics for sure, 100%. Like in and like I mean, even even when I came to Angie, like the sort of space that I was working in when I came to Angie, and like I'm sure we'll get to some of this experience as well. But the area I started in, we like when I started, it was a temp and an independent consultant that was like on a temporary contract. I had zero team. They're like, part of your job is to build this team. And we had this Zendesk instance that is probably about six years old. No one who had built it was around to support it. And so they're just like, fix this and do this. We had a workforce management tool that was sitting on the shelf uh called Playbox. And they're like, we are now nine months into the contract and we haven't even set it up properly. Fix this or we're gonna get rid of it. And so, like the ability to sort of just like step in and just like say, okay, great, I don't need to answer to anybody except for like what the results are to this. And I'm just gonna build the thing and I'm gonna make it work and I'm gonna go at the speed that I want to. Like, you can't do that in a large organization with dependencies, and it's for a good reason, too. Like, I mean, that sort of type of building isn't necessarily sustainable for the long term. Um, and it creates problems in terms of like tech debt. And if you don't have the right person in the seed building, like you can build the wrong thing or the wrong thing in multiple ways, and then you leave yourself open with like the more complexity that you build, you know, it makes it really difficult to support that for the long term. But like the ability to just execute, much, much easier as a startup. Vice versa. I think the resources one is 100% true. Um, but even at like some large organizations, unless you're talking about some of these like tech companies, like major tech companies that just like print money, even still, like most of the time I find myself at Angie delivering more with less. And like we try to stay relatively lean. And I wouldn't say that I have like bottomless resources to get stuff done. I think that I definitely have like a bigger supporting network of people that can get stuff done and like defined areas of ownership. And so I can kind of count on them to take care of things that in a startup sometimes there is no logical owner, and I think that makes things like kind of hard. Um, so I think that's like a little bit of my experience on the main difference between the two.

SPEAKER_04 25:32

If you had to start your career again, would you do it the exact same way, i.e., enterprise to SaaS or startup, or would you do it, would you prefer to do it the other way around if you have the choice?

SPEAKER_01 25:43

I do it the other way around, to be honest. It's quite easy for me to say. Like, I mean, I think, you know, in a lot of ways, like I'm fortunate to be in the position that I am. So it's maybe, I don't know, strange for me to say that. But I think there's always going to be this feeling for me of like, what if I would have done a startup early on in my career when I had like less other stuff going on? Like when I was in grad school, I was engaged, um, I got married during grad school. And so, like, when I was working on a startup, like that was all considerations in my bachelor's of like, what do I do with this? Because I had like a different level of risk tolerance. I kind of almost wonder, like, what if I just would have gone it and done it when I was young? Like, even if I would have failed, who cares? Like at that point, I would have had plenty of time to recover in my career. And so I think there's like always a part of me that will always wonder, like, what could have been um if I would have just like kind of done startups early on and like kind of got into that space.

SPEAKER_04 26:33

You say it like you're like in your 50s, 60s. I mean, you're still young, you still got plenty of time, um, and you still feel back on your feet if if you did fail, if um I got two kids though, so that's that's even a little bit harder. So I hear yeah. Um all right. Um going back to a former employer. You they say you should never go back to your ex, right? What about from a business perspective? Again, great and a great time there. You owe a lot of your career to your experience gained there. Any regrets going back? Should you have gone back? Is it best to just kind of make an exit, move on, go somewhere else? You know, what were your thoughts?

SPEAKER_01 27:11

I guess it depends on everyone's experience. And like at a at a big firm, like there's there's so many different types of experiences that people have. But like it's sort of like everywhere else where your network is kind of what makes the experience for you. Um, so like my experience when I came back is like the first thing I did is I reached out to my own network, and like a lot of it was in sort of the life sciences area, and I wasn't interested in like doing life sciences stuff for the long term, but I wanted to like see what they were working on to sort of help get my foot in the door, um, you know, elsewhere. So uh the one thing that I like did is I reached out to someone and kind of got my first project. That's like kind of the first major thing, like get on a first project and make sure that you're staffed immediately so that you have that protection and you can start to rebuild your network and basically buy some time. And then I reached out to uh someone that I used to work for, her name's Natalie Groff, she's amazing. I don't know if she's gonna listen to this because she's I don't know how much she works in the Salesforce space anymore, but uh shout out to Natalie if she's listening. Um, so I reached out to her, and that was how I got involved in building that experience management practice. And so, like, that was a tremendous opportunity where you know she was like looking to shift a little bit away from like client delivery to like internal, and she said, Hey, I have this opportunity. Do you want to like start help working with me on this? And she I worked with some like great partners, um, you know, who are like the most senior people at the firm and sell and own the business. Um, and so like she kind of pulled me over into that initiative. And then once I started networking there, like that opened up a lot a lot of opportunities for like senior level people to understand like the value that I was providing, and then eventually put me in these positions where they're like, you know, we're gonna have Rob and these other this other team of like a couple other people that were you know similar age and like make up to me of like we're gonna go out and we're gonna be sort of like the face of this along with these other senior managers and partners to sell and deliver some of this initial work. Um, and I think that like that plus the combination of uh sort of experience that I got like pitching my own business when I was in school helped to develop a lot of confidence in me to like kind of grow up as a leader really quickly and sort of communicate a little bit more effectively. Um, so I think that like from that perspective, the platform and like opportunity for me to like get in front of senior level stakeholders, develop like my executive skills and sort of polish. Um, I don't know if that would have been possible if I would have gone to like another firm or like started cold. Like it takes some time to build some of those connections. It also takes some luck to like basically connect with the right people who actually like care about your career to like push you up because you know there's all different sorts of people and leaders out there. Um, and so I in this case, like I think going back to Deloitte was an accelerant for me to sort of get into the position that I got in.

SPEAKER_02 29:52

Yeah, I I somewhat agree with you. I did the same thing, I left the company, went back to it. Um, I think the stigma around that comes from the never accept the counteroffer stigma, but I think it's two very, very different things because one, all of the reasons that go to like not accepting a counteroff, oh, they're desperate, they need someone, they're just scared, they're gonna use you and then let you go. All of that goes away when you've already been out for a year, right? Um two, you already know what you're going into, you probably already have the good relationships there. Um, they reached out to you so they know your worth. Um, it it it it can it tends to work out very well, assuming you have those good relationships in place. Um, it's almost like you know, getting hired at a friend's firm, let's say, right? You you you know the people, you know everything. There's a lot less unknowns and a lot less less uh risk there, I would say, than even a generic uh job. Um so yeah, I I I think going back to a firm that you worked for, particularly one that you were happy um but happily for whatever career progression and whatnot is generally uh a solid um like I said, it's done as solid. Um so yeah, let's move it back to uh to Angie. Um I found it interesting that you talk of them as if they're a startup. I believe they're a web 1.0 company, though technically. Um why is that?

SPEAKER_01 31:22

Well, I think that it's more so like the pieces of business that are startups. So if anyone like follows Angie or if they haven't, I guess this is this is the way to do it. Like I said, there's kind of three primary companies that came together Angie's List, Home Advisor, and Handy Technologies. So Angie's Listen Home Advisors, 1,000% not startups. They're like older companies with longer history and sort of like the first iterations of the web back when there was the list. And you know, you see Angie Picks, our care one of our charismatic leaders, uh, kind of out there talking about the lists for where you find a uh find a pro. The area that I started in was Handy Technologies uh when I had came on. And that was um, I don't remember exactly when that company was founded, but it was like I think after 2010, if I remember correctly, um, or like right around there. So it was sort of like handy got acquired. There was a lot of like the early stage people that were sort of exiting, as sometimes happens when companies get acquired. But actually the handy CEO at the the original handy CEO was then stepping up to be the Angie CEO. And the person who was, I think he was like the um like the chief customer officer or something like that, he was like then stepping in to be the chief operational officer. So we had like a lot of like handy momentum or like services momentum that was going on, but it was still sort of like Angus Anges and Home Advisor had come together somewhat, um, and then like handy was sort of bolted on at the end and also ran like a little bit different business model where we were selling to homeowners, not really pros as much. Um, and so like it was kind of off in its own little area, and because there was like then a lot of turnover for people coming out, like there was a bunch of fresh eyes looking at things and like a bunch of fresh talent that was looking at things in a new way. And so it sort of felt like a startup because like everything was like, oh, this is great. Like we've got this stuff running, but we think that there's so much that we can fix and do better. And so, like, there was just like a lot of momentum to say, okay, great, like let's just go fix it, let's solve these problems and like let's continue to grow the business or like advance what we're doing from like this startup perspective. And so now what's happened is like a lot of those people that were involved in like some of that growth and like innovation early are now supporting like broad spots of the business. Like, I kind of talked about my journey and going from that piece of CX to all of Homer to all of Pro to then Sitz and Care. Um, and so like that's happened to several people, I would say, as like we've kind of uh delivered some solid results on that services side of the business and that start mentality.

SPEAKER_02 33:47

Well, I get that, I get the mentality, but at the end of the day, right, all of the things you were talking about before, you know, racy charts and SOPs and architectural review boards and process, right? That stuff is still there at the corporate level, right? And you've got to you can't just say, yeah, well, we're a startup division, we do what we want, right? They got you gotta you gotta no?

SPEAKER_01 34:11

It's I mean, it I I would say it's it's a continuous work in progress. Like when you talk about like how MA happens, like there's this sort of promise of how MA happens where like the you know companies merge together and then like it's like magic cultures come together and processes and tools and like all that stuff, right? In reality, like a lot of times it doesn't fully happen like that. And so I would say like up until like a year or two ago, it was almost operating like there's a home advisor business, there's an Angie's list business, and there's a handy business. And we're all under this Angie umbrella, but there are like different teams for everything. And like I give like uh, you know, our leader now is uh Jeff Kim, and before him, Joey, who's uh CEO of IAC, um, you know, before our recent spinoff, we were under IAC, Interactive Corporation. Uh, those two leaders have like made a lot of intentional investments to like stop doing that, bring the business together so that we can like really build and sell one set of tools to like one set of customers. Um, and like that's I think really important for us to unlock innovation and like stop some of the like silo disjoint experiences that that we've had in the past. But I would say that it's like still a journey. Um we are we're still working on getting all those like tools and processes to achieve alignment across the business in place. And I think that we've done a lot organizationally to get the right people in the right seats and like break down some of those silos. Um, but I think we still have like a little bit of room to go in order to like optimize those processes and like make sure that we're we're running efficiently and sharing the right patterns across the business.

SPEAKER_02 35:43

Okay, so um fascinating topic. Um particularly in the merger and acquisition stuff and merging groups, unfortunately. So I think it's a little bit too far from our our uh let's say the CRM topic. So let's pivot let's pivot back again. So I know you I know you're currently working on um, I think you said service and acquisition. What with it the the the division you were in with now? What was it called again?

SPEAKER_01 36:08

Uh so yeah, now now I'm across all of sales and care. So like basically all of our operations tools. Yeah. So like I now the responsibility kind of rolls up to me for all of our sales and care operational tools. So anything that supports like the rep experience that delivers, which we have across all of our groups, probably about like 2,000 reps that deliver homeowner and pro experiences, both on the sales and care side. And then as well as like any of the self-service tools. So think like help centers or any of those processes, like all that stuff is now kind of rolling up through me.

SPEAKER_02 36:37

Okay, awesome. So sales and care, um, we're thinking customer service. Essentially, uh, I believe we recently had a service cloud rollout. Um for the purpose of this conversation. I hope it's okay. We're gonna refer to customers, meaning your um I I I guess the the uh the I don't even call them technicians. What do you want to call these guys? The the hands. Yeah, service professionals. The service professionals, right, not the not the uh end consumer side or the homeowners. Right. Um yeah, so tell us tell us a little bit about um you know what you're building, how you've rolled out, I believe it's service cloud.

SPEAKER_01 37:21

Yeah, so we like when we the sort of first piece to move is when uh we were on Zendesk when we originally started. So like when I started with sort of the handy line of business, we were on Zendesk. And uh like I said, we were able to kind of move a little bit faster in terms of innovation and building things net new. And we kind of took this strategy of moving to like a chat first type methodology where we were trying to push self-serve and delivering some early iterations of chatbots in order to uh decrease costs as well as like drive initiatives around rep efficiency, so getting them to solve things faster and move through things faster. Um, when we kind of made the decision to move off Zen Desk for a couple of reasons, um, we moved into Salesforce and we did bring on a third party to help us, but it was basically me and this other guy on my team that were sort of setting out the strategy for like what did we want to do? And so, kind of the principles that we had sort of built on were number one, we want to build like a modern, flexible architecture that would allow us to sort of build into this, like first, we want people to self-service if at all possible, and we want our tools to be able to help direct that self-service. Second, if they're not able to self-service, then we want them to either have some sort of automation or like walk through to advise them on how to go get that service or deliver them to a channel that is what we think like a lower cost option or better option for them to manage that over time. So chat was like really important for us to like kind of push because of the asynchronous nature that you can have for chat, the ability to channel switch. And generally it's a little bit more resilient to things like wait times where you can kind of set expectations. And third, we wanted to make sure that we set ourselves up for when we do need to have complex value-driven conversations that we can let the customer choose the right channel to interact with us in and provide the rep with the best possible tools to understand how to get the best outcome from that conversation and how to understand where that pro or customer has been in order to drive that best outcome. And so for what we were building, we kind of started with a couple of major components. So, first thing is obviously like core of service cloud. So we said, okay, we're gonna try to build Service Cloud, obviously, in the most optimal and flexible way that we can. Um, from an efficiency perspective, we really focused on like what are the right routing rules in order to make people able to channel switch as well. So, especially on the services side, like we have all of our chat and voice agents are also eligible to take like cases or like emails. Um, and so when there's uh idle time in the queue for voice, if we happen to be a little bit overstaffed, they're working through an email or case backlog. And then on chat, they're either handling two chats at once or they're handling one chat and also an email at the same time. And so with that flexibility, it gave us a lot of uh ability to um staff and forecast a little bit differently and really like optimize that like balance between cost, performance, and like customer satisfaction. So we really focused on that core service cloud build and making sure that we were building the right thing. We also decided to make a couple of investments. So we invested in like, let's say, improved voice technology. Um so we moved over from like Zendesk Voice, Zendesk Talk, over into Genesis, but we chose to use uh the Service Cloud Voice product from Salesforce for the primary reason of giving us more optionality in the future to utilize those transcripts that we're gonna be flowing in to do things like next best action, AI powered call summarization, more intelligent routing, various things that we can do in order to take that context and really make it a value add for any future conversations that would require like information about the full context of what someone has done in the past. Part of this was influence because like a lot of feedback that we had, especially from like escalations agents, team leads, things like that, there was really an there was always an appetite to like listen to voice calls before they would like call out or they would like go through recordings and like understand what was going on. And so we knew that this was like kind of a key unlock for us, not just in like understanding for the rep on the phone right now to have like the actual transcript going, uh especially when we had some challenges around data and like we couldn't always do like dynamic customer lookups very well. Um, but also for like these key moments in uh customer support that happen after an interaction to actually close it out or deal with something that's escalated, we just have like a much better visibility into like what exactly happened in all of our previous interactions and therefore can serve our customers a little bit better. So core was service cloud, service cloud voice was layered on top of that. Um, we then also brought along a couple of additional tools that like we sort of had hooked up to Zendesk to supplement the capabilities of Salesforce. So we brought on Playbox, which I mentioned for workforce management, which covers like real-time adherence to like schedules to make sure that we were staffed appropriately, real-time productivity reporting to make sure that when people were staffed, that they were actually working and working efficiently, and then staffing and scheduling to make sure that we were staffing the right people at the right time to reduce idle time as much as we could. We used Maestro for QA, so quality assurance, making sure that was good. And then we also layered some customer satisfaction technology on top of it that we used previously.

SPEAKER_02 42:37

So you were operating this like a call center, fairly traditional call center. Uh yeah. Yeah, like how many reps would you say?

SPEAKER_01 42:46

So uh when I had started, we were about 600-ish uh reps on the services side. With some of the workforce management improvements, we actually were able to trim about 25% of those just from like doing better staffing and scheduling. So it's pretty significant savings. Um customer service reps. Yeah, it's pretty pretty big operation because we would do, I mean, at that point we were fast growing the services line of business was a really fast growing part of our business. Um, and so we had we had a lot of uh we had a lot of bookings that we're going through, a lot of partnerships growth. And so yeah, we needed uh to handle a lot of those those issues.

SPEAKER_02 43:26

Wow. So so yeah, so I I I know I know I'm gonna get it for this question, but I'm gonna ask it anyway. Any anytime I ask someone who's dealing with call centers um the question, it always blows up in my face, but that's okay. I'll I'll I'll I'll risk it anyway. I mean, again, don't take this the wrong way. But like you're essentially passing leads along. Hey, this guy needs his house fixed, we'll build it for you, right? Or they have this issue. Well like what help can they possibly need outside of like a password reset? Right? Well like What's driving this call volume?

SPEAKER_01 44:03

Yeah. So um let's talk about our services business, which was the the biggest like part of our line of business. Um, for services, most of ours is stuff that is self-serviceable, but people don't self-service, which is a huge opportunity. Um, and part of that is due to like I would say overall demographics on our user base, like skewed towards like the slightly older, mostly because of home ownership, but also just because of like finding pros and stuff like that, and uh just a little bit difference in like networking and things like that. So a lot of people like can self-serve things, they just choose not to. But I also kind of mentioned that we do a lot of work with like our retail partners, so like Wayfair, Walmart, et cetera. And so if you go through a checkout flow and then you like book something, like you're thinking you're buying something through Walmart, and then someone's happening to do a project for you. And so we'll send you an email with booking details, but it's not like you're going automatically to the Angie app and you're saying, Oh, now I'm gonna manage this whole booking here. Like, I just want my TV and I want someone to hang it. Like, I don't want to do the whole like sign up with Angie thing. Yeah, so there's like a lot of stuff there, and then we have a lot of other like bigger areas where like, you know, we do sales motions to pros to get people engaged on the platform. Uh, we also like follow up on homeowners who've maybe submitted service requests but didn't follow through uh with pros and like contact them. And so we're trying to see like how else can we help you uh to make sure you get your job done because we want to make sure that people that are coming to the platform like are coming to provide a good experience for both sides that like they're actually legit leads and that pros actually take them and then follow through on them. So um we kind of try to play a little bit more of an active role to make sure that the marketplace is being successful.

SPEAKER_02 45:44

Yeah, so um tell us a bit about the product selection. So Kiro, I don't know if you remember the names of the people. I think I think we had on a previous podcast someone who said they loved Service Cloud but couldn't stand voice, Service Cloud voice. They had to go with the competitor's product. I don't remember who it was. Um but you do remember that statement, right? Um I'm not sure. I'm not sure exactly. There was there was some component maybe with core routing or something. Um and then we also had someone else who I do know who it is, but I'm gonna not bring up names, who said Zendesk is just superior to uh service cloud. Um so yeah, so tell us a little bit about you know product selection from your point. Um and if you want to, I don't know, comment on those other two counter opinions, let's say.

SPEAKER_01 46:34

Sure. Yeah, um, which one do you want to start with? You want to start with the Zendas sales person or the service.

SPEAKER_02 46:40

No, either or so cool.

SPEAKER_01 46:42

Sure. All right, let's start with the voice stuff. So um what we knew we had to work with when we kind of said, hey, let's go forward with service. We had two telephony providers that were sort of like legacy home advisor and legacy angelists. So we use Genesis Cloud and Nice across the business. Now, we knew that Genesis was integrated into Salesforce, but for the version that most of our reps that were live in Salesforce before we moved over, they're just using that basic like CTI connection where it's basically like a window into Genesis and it's not actually doing doing anything in Salesforce other than like creating a task when there's a call. So we were kind of the first ones that came in and said, hey, we think we can do a little bit better, and we think that there's value in Service Cloud Voice because of the ability to self-serve, to process those transcripts, to provide recommendations live on calls, like different things like that. Um but what we were given from our technical team at the time was we don't want to maintain two phone provider connections into Salesforce. So if you're gonna do this, you got to use Genesis. So when we made this decision, it was in like I think it was October of 2023. And Genesis's bring your own telephony solution with Service Cloud Voice was slated to come out in like a month. So I'm pretty sure we were one of the first ones using Genesis's CS Cloud with Genesis and Salesforce solution on Service Cloud Voice, and the documentation was like almost nothing. Like we had very, very little to work off of. So it was a little bit bumpy at first in terms of like getting it set up and getting everything running. Um, but we did work through a lot of the issues with Genesis. And when we went live in April for like the first big group that was cutting over from Zendesk to Salesforce, um, we were successful in doing so and starting to use that service cloud voice pattern. Now, most of the things that we liked about the tool were correct, and we've gotten a ton of value out of the transcripts, we've layered AI over top, and so like that part has been a huge win for us, as well as having like this consistent voice call record as like the structure for that voice interaction versus just a generic task, and we relate everything to cases, and so it's like very helpful to have sort of that voice call record list related to our cases or accounts and be able to show that in addition to the task with transcripts. Um, the one thing that is the biggest pain point about this is that there's no ability for us to basically create that voice call record at the time of hitting the queue. So the only time that Salesforce then becomes aware is when that tries to get assigned to an agent because that routing is inherited from Genesis to Salesforce. Now, I've heard that potentially, and this is the I'm sure I'm not even on the tech teams, but they would tell me safe harbor, safe harbor, safe harbor. Um, sometime in roughly Q4 or maybe early next year, they are going to change that and create a different mechanism where you could then create the voice call at the time of basically hitting the queue, which would allow us to do things like better controlled productivity reporting or better centralized productivity reporting in something like Salesforce. But right now, for our voice queues, Omni Supervisor is like basically useless from a like queue monitoring perspective because we never see anything. Because when they're in the queue, you would have to go monitor in Genesis because the voice call isn't created until it hits Salesforce. So that has been the biggest pain point in terms of like centralizing routing in Salesforce because our voice routing then has to happen upstream in Genesis and like being able to see productivity reporting. But once the actual voice call hits, we have seen good value and using the transcripts in Salesforce. And that's the foundation for a lot of stuff that we're doing. And for most of our lines of business that have now come in and like that are on the pro side, we are super, super voice heavy. Like talking like 95 to 98% of interactions are voice driven. And so this becomes really critical for us in terms of like thinking about not only how do we like make inbounds more efficient, but how are we actually going to do outbound campaigns with voice and potentially experiment with like auto-dialers in campaigns where connection rate is like sub-20% in order to increase the efficiency of those interactions and have spent reps spend more time on the phone talking to pros versus leaving voicemails and hoping that someone will get them back? So those are my thoughts on service.voice. Any other questions on that one?

SPEAKER_04 50:57

Um, a couple of quick quick questions. How would you rank your implementation out of 10?

SPEAKER_01 51:07

Uh based on how we approached it.

SPEAKER_04 51:10

Just overall satisfaction and you know happiness compared to Zendesk, you know, in terms of results and output, like the overall experience.

SPEAKER_01 51:21

I would say overall I'm at like uh seven. That's reasonable. I think that there's like always opportunities for improvement, but like it maybe we get into that too a little bit about like the Zendesk versus Salesforce thing. Like when we were on Zendesk, so I think it was probably about a year and a half. The first year and a half I was at Angie, we were on Zendesk. And um I don't being in consulting and like having a decent amount of experience working with tech vendors and like understanding what good looks like, especially because I worked with a lot of the enterprise grade tech. Um, there was a lot of frustrations around like Zendesk maturity, both from a product and a like operations product release perspective as well. Like one of the biggest things that I remember, I was, I think it was like a VP on the product side that I ended up getting connected to because we were like in this enterprise success program. And so like they ended up connecting me with this like product VP because I just kept like going after them in these meetings to say, like, I don't know when any of this stuff is coming. Like the biggest pain point for me was roadmap-wise, I would almost never have visibility until like days or weeks out for what was coming. And for startups, like maybe that's easy. And like for me for a little bit, that was easy. But then when I started to have to like do this like more robust planning, and also like I was relatively lean as my scope started to expand, it was super hard for me to like adapt in that environment to like not knowing what features were coming when, because I couldn't sequence any of the work. And I was managing like five or six different tools with like a very small team. So even though that was the core, like product maturity and like roadmap was like a big challenge for me. Okay. The other, the other thing that was like a real challenge was like some of the like telephony integrations and the ability to like manage that. Like we were on Zendest Talk and there were some options where you could bring like a third-party provider, but there was nothing like a service cloud voice where we felt really solid about saying we think that we have flexibility here to like build with a very robust telephony system that's also going to work seamlessly with the sort of core CRM piece of it and be able to apply all the AI that we want to on those interactions. So, like there's a couple of concerns there just around like some product maturity. And then um, I know that that team and heard constantly from me about their analytics tools, but Salesforce like general reporting is not good either. So that's also one of the things that's bringing me down from you know two to seven. So yeah, just a couple things around maturity.

SPEAKER_04 53:44

Okay. What about advice to another director that's leading a team and leading implementation, or whether it's Zendest to Service Cloud Voice or another competitor? One bit of advice you would pass on?

SPEAKER_01 53:56

Yeah, I would say like whenever you're making a major system switch, it's a tremendous opportunity to reevaluate like what are your core workflows and do they all still make sense? Like there are so many times that I think I talked a little bit about this in the lightning round too, but like there's so many times when you know, from a product and engineering perspective, the business will come with a request and someone says, Oh, great. I they'll say, I need a button built. And then someone goes, Okay, great, yeah, I can build you this button. But then what they don't they don't think about is well, I already had a button that did something similar. Why don't I just build off of this button and then just build another branch so I can make it more flexible in the future? And so, like, there's I feel like for any organization, it's really, really tough unless you have really good structure in place to be really good about that in the long term. And so when you make when you have this opportunity to then like switch systems or make a major change, it's a tremendous opportunity for you to understand like what are the core workflows that drive the most value for my customers and for my reps or managers and let me focus on those. Anything else can and should be on the chopping block to reduce complexity. And then if it's needed, you can then build it at some point in the future. But that'll allow you to go quicker to build like an actual minimum viable product and then build the things that are actually needs for the business now versus what might have been the best needs for the business back then. And I think that like, especially if you think about switching systems, it's a tremendous opportunity to just basically like wipe out sections of tech debt and greatly simplify what you're doing.

SPEAKER_02 55:26

So um I believe using Einstein, right, for Service Cloud. So I'm gonna be honest, don't know much about uh that product, it's relatively new. Um, you want to tell us a bit about it and and how you guys are using it?

SPEAKER_01 55:39

Yeah, so we started experimenting with Service Cloud Einstein about a year ago. Um it's kind of crazy that it's been back there. Uh when when we started experimenting with it about a year ago, it was relatively limited, like out-of-the-box features that you couldn't tweak or customize a lot. And so, like the example that we had like started to try is like the first thing we pilot was something that was called reply recommendations for chat. So uh basically what it would do is like you would go into the back end of Salesforce and you would start by turning on Einstein and then you had to turn on grounding. And grounding was basically just saying, I'm going to turn this on to read my knowledge base, and that's going to be the grounding for the AI models that are going to produce these responses, whether it was for summarization or whether it was for like things like reply recommendations. So I kind of mentioned like for some of the business model for services, which is where we started doing this, we do uh basically jobs through ENG. So you can get it if you like do just a project request on ANG.com, but we also do it through like Wayfair, Walmart, Lowe's, like all these different partners. And our knowledge base is built out where like the policies for how you handle things based on partner is actually different because there's different policies around like refunds and like the types of jobs that are being done and things like that. And so we turned on grounding and we tried to do some editing to our knowledge base articles to like make it clear on what was supposed to be with what. Um, but what happened is like our reps were basically just getting recommendations from all over the knowledge base because it like couldn't process the context of, oh, I know this is a lows booking, and so I need to look in the lows section to understand what policy to apply as an example. And we had zero ability to customize it and say, just look in this field, and then you know like what kind of booking this is, and therefore this is how you know how to go to the knowledge base. So we did not have success with that, the out-of-the-box reply recommendations, nor any of the other tools that we just tried to deploy purely out of the box. When we started to have success, and like this is you know, credit to Salesforce for evolving their tool set here, they basically have now supplemented the out-of-the-box Service Cloud Einstein features, which you can still just like turn on and use, which will work in some use cases, but they've supplemented with two tools to really supercharge those workflows that we use a lot of. So, number one is a tool called Prompt Builder. So this allows you to basically go in and sort of build, test, and iterate on prompts that takes uh data that's related to specific objects or records and then produces some sort of output. When you pair that with flows, and there's now a flow type called uh the prompt template, I think it's a template trigger flow. Yeah. So you can basically like grab information in flow, you can assemble it, and then add that as prompt instructions. So I actually just finished building one of these the other day for uh a pre-call summarization prompts where we're basically trying to give a streamlined summary to our account managers around the entire history of the account in like the last 90 days, including all the cases that have been submitted, all the times they've called in, again, using those voice transcripts from Service Cloud Voice and any other relevant data that we might be able to pull in so that they don't have to go search for it and dig through a bunch of cases. All they do is just see this one summary. And so the way I did that is I basically just built a flow that goes, says, give me all the voice calls in the last 90 days, cap it at five, grab their transcripts, loop it, and put it in a string. Same thing for cases. I grabbed the recent case information, the last email, which should give me the whole email thread if there were emails that went back and forth with the pro in that case, and then any internal comments, and again, loop it and put it in a string that I specify. And then there's a piece at the end that says like add uh prompts template instructions, and that just adds to my prompt that I generated that basically says, you're an AI agent trying to help an account manager to get a summary of an account, and then it basically adds those instructions with the strings. And so when you feed it through there, we were able to basically completely customize both the prompt and the output and like test and iterate on it to make sure that it is highly relevant to our account managers. So we've done that for like that sort of scenario now, and we're we're gonna launch a pilot soon with a version of that. Um, but where we've really had success to is like post-call summarization. So we've basically been able to develop specific prompts that are different for different lines of business to put the summaries in the right format, whether we're helping homeowners or pros or whoever else to get the right set of information to accelerate the call notes uh and completion for our for our reps and make them more efficient.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:05

Awesome. What about um just consider the time? So um I know you're doing loads of cool stuff with um you know agents, AI, etc. Um, and you kind of touched on it with an example. Any other examples of how you're leveraging AI currently within Salesforce or just in general uh for your team work stream?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:28

Yeah, so the other area that we've looked into but we haven't used yet is like I think most people are really excited about the concept of L and like chatbots or like external facing experiences. Um we're not chat heavy enough to use those yet, and we don't think that the voice solutions are ready. And so like we've evaluated those, but we're not at the point of really using those yet because we don't think they're ready. I have heard that AgentFour's voice is probably gonna be out like later this year and maybe around Dreamforce. So we're excited to see what happens there, but not using that there, we're just in evaluation mode. The other area, though, that we have started to use AI, and like I kind of mentioned this, I think, as well as in the lightning round, is I think it's a tremendous like development accelerator and like documentation accelerator for how teams deliver. So um, in terms of like writing briefs about features, um, in terms of doing design and making sure that we're designing in the optimal way, in terms of designing flows, like I've found uh the tools in Salesforce, like I haven't played as much with, like, they're now coming out in this new release with a new version of basically like a flow draft tool using using LLMs. Um, but I've just used like the sort of corporate Gemini that we have as well to like solution through some Salesforce problems. And I think it's greatly impacted our ability to solve problems and solution on the Salesforce platform. Um so I think that that's the other really interesting space that like I think people are really focused on these customer use cases, but you know, there's tremendous ability to upskill and enhance how your team does work by just using LLMs for your internal developers, admins, or whoever else to like understand how Salesforce works and use it to the best potential.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:02

On the topic of upskilling, uh, what advice would you give admins, in particular BAs, developers? What advice would you give them to upskill with AI?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:15

I would say if you're not learning how to use those tools, like you're falling behind, is sort of the easiest way to put it. Um what I'd recommend is like, you know, these models also thrive on context and learning. And even if they're not learning from you and sort of the core training of the model, uh, what you can do is like I just have basically one thread going with Gemini, where over time I've continued to build out various use cases and I develop a way to reference those with Gemini. Um so I will sort of tell it things about our org and sort of the way things are set up or certain design patterns that we've built, and then I'll continue to use that thread in order to ask about new design patterns or new things that I'm thinking about building. And so obviously, like that's constrained to me in this case, but I think that you can also manage that in sort of a team sort of context to basically come up with a structure of like, you know, if someone builds something out, you can add to sort of like a shared document to then provide that context so that you know that model is going to have that context moving forward. And so there's also tools out there that you can make this a little bit more formal as part of like a DevOps process. And so I'd really like recommend being a thought leader in your team for like how do you bring these tools to bear in order to make you more efficient and like really just like upscale your knowledge on the platform so you can like apply your problem-solving ability, which AI is okay at, but still gets stuff wrong on top of what the recommendation is, and it's really an accelerant versus a complete replacement at this point.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:38

Love it. All right. Uh, very quickly, uh, what's next for you, both in terms of you, your role, uh, and what's next for Angie in terms of its Salesforce org?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:50

Yeah, so uh what's next for me is like I think we've gotten a lot of work now. Um, I'm formerly taking a rollover on the product side of what we're doing on the Salesforce organization. And uh our kind of next objective is to figure out how do we bring this sort of tool stack that exists across multiple lines of business and multiple shores and build it into one tech stack where people are doing similar sorts of things or at least leveraging similar design patterns so we can really focus on like pressing the gas down on like innovating on these experiences. So I feel like we spend so much time like getting the data right and getting the foundations right right now that like in our spare time, that's when we're doing some of this like AI experimentation that we want to do. But I think the pace at which we can sort of like pilot new things and sort of innovate is gonna just pick up tremendously if we can start supporting less and like simplifying experiences and doing more shared things. And then that'll just sort of increase our ability to scale those experiences across these teams that are doing similar things as we see success. So I'm really excited to be a part of kind of solving that problem on a global scale and like figuring out what else is there from a global perspective. Uh exciting. Yeah, I would say in terms of Angie too, like it's it's a big part of also what we're focusing on uh moving forward. Like the goal is uh selling and supporting one product with a one set of pros on one platform, and so it's the same sort of thing. Like, I think just from a core platform perspective, we have a lot of opportunities to like get the foundation right so we can really start innovating and uh you know do what we do best, which is matching qualified pros with homeowners and building that trust on both sides to make sure that they want to come to Angie uh is the place to sort of source their pros.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:32

Any um always curious, any any expansion into new verticals or uh countries or or anything interesting that you can share. I don't know, maybe not, but um any any other uh other investment areas that you're looking at as a business?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:49

Yeah, um nothing probably yeah, nothing that I can probably share. I will share that in the next couple of weeks we'll probably have uh an earnings call for for our Q3, or I guess that'll be in a little bit over a month, actually, uh earnings call for Q3. And so yeah, I'd say like Angie, right now, like you can also hear from previous earning calls from our CEO, Jeff Kip. Like, I'd say we're definitely like a turnaround story right now. Like, you know, it's um I think a lot of things with the rebrand and like sort of how we position ourselves as a brand have like caused some short-term disruptions. Um but there's a lot of like things that we're doing, I think, to continue to build confidence that we're heading in the right direction and you know, chasing long-term sustainability versus uh some of the short-term milestones. So um yeah, excited for what's to come.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:31

Awesome. All right, well, uh with that, uh, we would just both like to say thank you, Rob, for giving up your time uh today to be here with us. Super insightful. Um, and we really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:44

Awesome, thank you all for listening.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:47

Pleasure. Uh, for our listeners, please do not forget to subscribe to the CRM Success Show for more stories, like Rob and Angie, and uh you can follow along on LinkedIn uh for exclusive updates, including the rapid rounds. Um, and uh we hope to uh listen have you listened to episodes like this again uh in the future.