#TDSU Episode 261:

⏱️ Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:14 - Why NPS matters more than you think

00:02:59 - The mission to fix healthcare

00:03:34 - Capitalism meets chaos in U.S. healthcare

00:10:15 - Making routine care truly affordable

00:16:09 - The three layers of customers

00:30:04 - Rethinking NPS for complex models

00:36:14 - Finding your fit in customer success

00:42:16 - Careers built on curiosity and connections

📺 Lifetime Value: Your Destination for GTM content

Website: https://www.lifetimevaluemedia.com

🤝 Connect with the hosts:

Dillon's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dillonryoung

JP's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanpierrefrost/

Rob's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-zambito/

👋 Connect with Boaz Maor:

Boaz's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boaz-s-maor-84810b/

[Boaz] (0:00 - 0:23)

Early on in my career, it was all about, you know, what's the most interesting problem to solve? What's the most money I can make? Where can I gain more insights?

And over time, with age, with experience, you know, phases of life, I gravitate towards areas that alongside the personal value I get, skills, joy, money, I also want to add something of value.

[Dillon] (0:33 - 0:56)

What's up, lifers, and welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man JP with us. JP, do you want to say hi?

Hello. Hello. That's the first thing you've said so far, JP.

Thank you so much for joining us, bringing the energy. And we have Boaz with us. Boaz, can you say hi, please?

[Boaz] (0:56 - 0:57)

Good morning.

[Dillon] (0:58 - 0:59)

It is morning.

[Boaz] (0:59 - 0:59)

Good afternoon.

[Dillon] (0:59 - 1:13)

Not for me. Not for me. I'm in the future.

And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young. Boaz, you've been here before, but God forbid somebody did not hear that episode.

Can you please introduce yourself again?

[Boaz] (1:14 - 2:58)

I'd be delighted. My name is Boaz. I run the customer success team, chief customer officer at Redirect Health.

Maybe we'll talk about it in a minute, because I'm kind of getting passionate about healthcare and how we can fix it. But you invited me, and it was a delight to talk here a few weeks ago, I guess, on Net Promoter Score NPS. And I guess when we finished that episode, we kind of discussed the fact that we introduced the concept and why it's valuable, but didn't really go to like the methodology that Sarah Boccino and I presented a few weeks ago, months ago, I guess by now.

And it will be worth spending a bit more time on it. So I am delighted and grateful for the opportunity to present it and people who saw the last episode, you know, listen to it, may be interested in the next step of, okay, let's get into the meat of how to use NPS. Well, those who haven't, you can read the post on LinkedIn or watch this again.

I believe that NPS, when done right, is an extremely valuable tool for customer success teams to understand their customers and take actions on what to do with it. The problem with NPS is that it's often not done right. And therefore, when it's not done right, either you can't benchmark or you don't have enough data point to do an analysis.

And therefore, it's kind of a vanity metric. So we actually researched this, we presented some data in the LinkedIn article for people to use. But again, the bottom line, NPS done right is an extremely powerful tool for customer teams.

And if you don't agree, you know, maybe you should go to another episode of somebody else talking.

[Dillon] (2:59 - 3:18)

Just log off. Okay, let's take a step back because you said you wanted to talk about redirect health. Congratulations on joining redirect health.

It's only been a couple of months, even if we don't publish this for a little while. You know, you said something, man, I gotta dig deeper because you said you want to fix healthcare.

[Boaz] (3:19 - 3:26)

Oh, I just got a very audacious goal. Yeah. Yeah, I read the book.

[Dillon] (3:26 - 3:34)

Yes, yes, yes, the BHAG. So tell us, tell me more about maybe your journey there and the goals of redirect.

[Boaz] (3:34 - 8:38)

Sure. So healthcare, I've been, yeah, it's a, you know, I've worked at many companies. I'm a startup person.

Redirect is the 10th startup I joined. I've never been a founder. I don't have an interest in being a founder, but I'm really keen on joining small companies and help them grow.

And, you know, early on in my career, it was all about, you know, what's the most interesting problem to solve? What's the most money I can make? Where can I gain more insights?

And over time with age, with experience, you know, phases of life, I gravitate towards areas that alongside the personal value I get, skills, joy, money, I also want to add something of value. So I worked at GovTech, right? At OpenGov that provides software for governments, which I found a very fascinating place.

I worked at the FinTech for small businesses because small businesses is a huge part of the economy that is generally underserved by technology providers. And I now joined healthcare, which is, I think, one of the areas that is probably most ripe for disruption and assistance. If you really think about healthcare, statistics for about the U.S. show that we spend, we in the U.S. spend by far more money per capita on healthcare than any other country on the globe. But when you look at outcomes, every measure, we are somewhere in the middle compared to the developed world. Forget the developing world, just compared to normal, you know, societies. So clearly, the system doesn't work.

It doesn't work for us as people. And when you dive deep, right, I'm three months into this company, and I look at statistics, and I look at data, and I look at processes, and it's probably the best example, industry-wise, for capitalism gone wrong. The only people who make money in this industry are insurance companies.

And all of us suffer. Let me put it different, right? We are people who think about customers.

So let's think about yourself and give me one example of one thing you purchased in your life that first you purchased and then you asked for the price. Healthcare. It makes no sense.

We go to the doctor, we have no idea what it's going to cost. Quite often, when we leave the doctor, we don't know how much it's going to cost. We're waiting to get a mail or an email with, you know, a message from the doctor or from the insurance.

Here's how much you need to pay us. After the fact, it makes no sense. Think about it.

Your daughter wakes up with a sore throat or hurt her ankle in a pee or, you know, you went hiking and something happened. You go to the doctor. What's the first question you are asked?

Not what happened to you, not what you feel. What's your insurance? It makes no sense.

It just, it's in reverse. So at Redirect, we're saying let's redirect this whole system. First question we need to figure out is what's wrong with you.

Then what is the treatment you need to get? Once we know the treatment, we talk to you about the logistics. Do you want it at home?

Do you want it in a clinic? Do you want it today or is it okay to call you tomorrow? Do you want it in a pill or in a syringe?

Each one of those has huge implications on cost. So if I know the treatment and I know the logistics, I can calculate what should be the cost. Then we figure out how to pay for it.

And guess what? Most of what we do, we end up advising our members, pay cash. If you go through some kind of an insurance, it will cost you whatever.

If you pay cash, it's five bucks, three bucks, two bucks, you know. So we are offering, what we have done is we developed an offering that enables small businesses, the vast majority of our customers have tens or a few hundreds of employees. We offer them a package that includes not only that insurance component, but the primary care provider.

We actually have doctors on staff. With care logistics, we help you identify providers, specialists, labs, imaging, whatever you need, plus claim management. We negotiate prices for you because, I don't know, I'm a fairly educated, knowledgeable person.

I have no idea how much a treatment should cost, but we have people that do. So we do the primary care, we do the care logistics, we do the claim management, and we have stop-loss insurance to bundle. All of this in a bundle because now all the incentives are aligned and a member can call us, by the way, mostly using, you know, the app on the phone and say, here's what I need, can you help me?

And we just walk to help them. Now, it's not perfect, and there are a lot of issues, and healthcare is complex. I get that.

We don't solve everything. But our NPS, tying to this, is over 60 in an industry where many of the providers have negative NPS, and the average overall is about 20. So we clearly do some things right.

So maybe you'll notice that I'm kind of passionate about this. Yes, we're trying to disrupt and maybe even fix healthcare. At least we can fix it for some people.

[Dillon] (8:39 - 9:15)

You're thinking about it differently, which I think is at least the first step, right? I laughed, not at you, but more with you, because it just, it is an audacious thing to say, to fix, because it's such a behemoth, and it feels impossible to change. I mean, look, we've had presidential administrations try to change it and still got so much pushback.

And it is very different than it was 20 years ago, but it is hard, very hard. And so it is a virtuous goal. So it's interesting to hear about.

JP, do you have anything to add?

[JP] (9:16 - 10:14)

Yeah, I'm going to, there's a lot. There's a lot I could say, but I'm going to try to, I'm going to try to actually try to go a bit back into the customers that you're serving, Boaz. So it's great that you have the passion, which is awesome.

I think that if we're in customer success, ideally we are passionate about what we're working on. I want to hear about, you definitely described the issue and sort of, can you talk a little bit about the customer success side of how you go about making this happen? In your daily, what are the things that you're pushing?

What are the things that you're seeing that you think are these opportunities for us? Give us hope. I guess I'm saying, give us hope.

Damn it, give us hope, man. I'm just going to come out and say it.

[Boaz] (10:15 - 16:09)

Let me, being who I am, I have to start with a humoristic joke to it, right? JP, we're all going to die at some point. Oh goodness.

Yes. Yeah. But we should live well until then.

Yes. Yes. So we're not going, we're not here to fix death.

We're not here, but we all live, we all go to physicians, we all have health issues. And what we are seeing is so many people that don't do routine care because it's either too expensive or inaccessible. You go to the doc, this is me, right?

Relatively educated, relatively smart, relatively whatever, right? You go to the doctor for the annual check, which is covered by your insurance, should be free, no problem. And the doctor asks you a couple of questions and they say, hey, you know what?

I see that you have a couple of immunizations you haven't done. Do you want me to do that? Sure, I'm here, might as well do.

I say, hey, you know, do you want me to also check to see if you have any spot or anything on your skin? I'm like, sure, might as well, I'm here, you do. And before you know it, you get a bill that says, hey, you had two more procedures done and now you need to pay for this, right?

I'm sure it happened to you and mostly other people. This is the way the system works. I don't know if the doctor even is aware, maybe they are, maybe they don't, but that's how the system works and we all get screwed by it.

So what we do, the concept of redirect health is move away from the marketing, which is using fear for all of us to be terrified of the very, very few scenarios of cancer and, you know, big hospital plays and whatever. We are all focused there. You have to have insurance for that.

And by working on all of that, we don't pay attention to 50 bucks, copays and deductible for every time we go to the doctor. And for many people, those 50 bucks across a family of five add up. And you know what happened?

They don't go to the doctor. They don't do their annuals. They don't do routine care.

They wait at home for another two weeks until they need to go to the hospital and to the ER, which guess what? Cost a lot of money. So we are trying to redirect the spend.

We spend a tremendous amount of effort pushing people to do a lot of routine care for free. You want to talk to the doctor, plug in here what you need. There's an app.

It takes, I've done it twice now. It takes about a minute to submit something that you need. Someone gets back to you.

They connect you with a physician. They send you to do the labs. You get the lab results.

You upload them here. A physician calls you with what to do. And this whole thing costs nothing because unless there is a real issue, I need to send it to a lab to do some tests or whatever.

It's free. X-rays are free. Annual checks are free.

12 chiropractic sessions a year are free because we all sit a lot. I mean, the basic stuff should be free. And we make it happen.

Now, from a client management perspective, my role, think about who do we think about as clients? By the way, that's an interesting perspective for people to think. Who's your customer?

We actually have three tiers of customers. We have the employers who are, we call them the clients. They are the ones who signed the agreement with us.

They are the ones who offer the plan to their employees. The employees are the members. They're also clients of ours, customers of ours.

And then this industry, just like a lot of industries, operate with brokers who are analysts and consultants who help employers find and contract with providers. And they're also customers. So Redirect Health, kind of in my view, has three tiers of customers, brokers, employers, employees.

And now we work on a system, who's managing what, what are the interactions among them. With the members, we do daily work. And we reach out to them when, if and then, for example, we have a campaign right now with one of our clients, we looked at all of the members and every member that hasn't submit any health request since the beginning of the year, four months or so, we contact.

Because normally, most people have something twice or three times a year. So four months passed and it's a new customer. So we want to make sure that people are aware of what's available for them.

We promote them to consume more. By the way, the consumption is free, right? Annual test, it's free for them, but it's good for us because it's the service that provides value to those members.

So that's on the member side. On the client side, it's interesting. Redirect is early in its trajectories with respect to customer success, right?

This role didn't exist. The company was all about the members, which is wonderful, but it's only part of what a company needs. So I'm now building a function that's focused on the clients.

How do you do onboarding? How do you do ongoing management? Last week, I ran the first ever quarterly management review with a client.

It was, took me two months to develop because we needed a flow. We needed to get data. The data didn't exist in the formats I wanted.

So I'm building some of those capabilities that many of us, like many people who watch this are like, what do you mean you didn't do QML? Everybody does QML, right? Everybody does from a point.

So we're doing new client onboarding. We're doing client management. We're doing QMLs.

We're developing benchmark data, all of the things that you need in a high maturity, strong customer success function. And it takes time and we are partway through and tomorrow will be better than yesterday.

[Dillon] (16:09 - 17:06)

I want to dig into NPS, but before I do, I think this is an interesting, I want to dig down on the difference between your different tiers of customer and specifically, let's talk about clients and members. Do you charge for, or do you think you should, because the company is relatively new. So maybe that motion hasn't been created yet, but should you charge to facilitate communications with members?

Or do you consider that a value add back to redirects bottom line because of their consumption activity you're trying to promote? Because it feels like that's a, I don't want to say it's not your job, but it feels like the responsibility of the employer to be driving adoption of this program, right? Because it's a service that they're offering to their employees.

How do you think about that?

[Boaz] (17:07 - 20:19)

I love, I really liked this question, you know, so often in this kind of podcast or interviews, right? The questions are cookie cutter from a playbook. This is actually, you spend a little bit of time thinking, I love it.

And that's why it takes me a little bit of time to think through it. It's fine. Look, I think that employers offer healthcare service slash insurance for two reasons and how much weight is there in each reason depends on the individual company.

One reason it's the law, right? The other reason is you want your people to feel good and to be healthy and productive in your work. I think if it wasn't a law, many people would not offer it.

In some industries, people don't care enough about the people. Some companies don't care enough about the people. It's a numbers game.

If this one is often is on, you know, PTO or whatever, then we'll have other people. And then some people are really into building long-term teams with people who care about the company because the company care about them. That, by the way, is in most places way stronger in small companies than large.

Large companies are large companies. You cannot, it's really, I don't want to say cannot, but it's very hard to be intimate relationship-wise in a large company. But in small companies, right, you see some restaurants, you see barber shops, you see, you know, companies of tens of employees.

They are a team. And many of them work there for many years. They feel not just as employees and an employer, but also as, hey, we are the company.

So those people care about how to make sure their people are healthy, happy, and productive. In larger companies, it's mostly the productive thing that makes them interested. They want this service because they want their people to have less time off, right?

They want their people to be more productive. And the happiness and stuff is nice to hear. So we work with all of those, and we try to understand, by the way, in onboarding sessions, I ask the customer, tell me what's most important to you.

And some people tell me, when I ask them, hey, explain to me your business. Are you growing? Are you shrinking?

Is this a struggling industry or not? And based on that, tell me what's most important to you. Sometimes, some companies tell me, look, don't say it out loud to others, but I really need to save money, or we go out of business, or we can't compete, or we need to cut the workforce.

Okay, I got it. I'll focus a bit more on the money saving. Other people say, I'm having a hard time hiring people because they compare me to other companies that offer insurance, and I can't afford it because the regular, you know, I don't want to use names, but the regular insurance companies are prohibitively expensive.

So help me give people a good feeling and a good service, right? Different companies have, at different times, different needs. And if we want to be smart, right, this is to be client specific, to be client oriented, is to listen to what the customer want and try to do that.

And even with the same offering, I can put different emphases on different levels, depending on the customers. That's how I try to tie it.

[Dillon] (20:19 - 21:14)

HOFFMAN This reminds me of my time in, in mortgage technology, where if I sold to a standard mortgage lender, it, we would focus on one metric for the flagship software we sold. But we often sold to credit unions. And credit unions famously do not care about margin, necessarily.

The only thing they claim to care about, I think there are other things involved, is like member satisfaction, member happiness. In fact, they cannot drive profit over a certain number, because that is antithetical to their mission statement to help members. They don't want to take money from their members.

And this feels a lot of the, the same way. I want to get into the MPS stuff. But before I do, JP, do you want to jump in here?

Or maybe you want to ask a question specific to MPS?

[JP] (21:14 - 21:40)

ROGERS I'm actually really curious, Boaz, about what are some of the really important tools that you're using day to day in all this? I'm wondering about, okay, you're at your computer, like, what are some of the, you know, maybe, maybe there isn't as much, but I'm thinking like, not just a rundown of your tech stack, but like, is there maybe a certain tool or two that's been like, sort of crucial in you being able to enact on your vision there?

[Boaz] (21:40 - 23:08)

BOAZ That's a good question. And my answer is, I actually don't know enough. So the medical backend side of the business, kind of the actual operations, you know, we have developed our own electronic medical data center for members, which if you think about, you know, privacy, HIPAA concerns, it is a complex thing to do both, to make both easy to work with and protected and secure.

So there's that. We developed our own claim management system, because claims is a huge area. You go to the doctor, the doctor connect to an insurance, the insurance talk to a TPA, third party provider that helps.

At some point, you get a bill, and it's really hard to understand or qualify whether the bill is right or not. Do they use the right code? Do they have the right price?

As a person, as a member, as a patient, I have no idea. But our people do. So we developed a system.

I'll give you an example. It's shocking. We had a member, a company, a client that joined us in January.

In February, one of the members went to some surgery, you know, had to do with lungs and stuff, not life threatening, but very important. They spent 11 days in a hospital. They got a bill.

Do you want to guess how much? $311,000. How much?

$11,000. $300,000. $820,000.

$1,000? $820,000. That's crazy.

[JP] (23:08 - 23:13)

Hold on. Hold on. This is the start.

No way. So we got into this.

[Boaz] (23:14 - 25:28)

Hold on. Listen to this, right? So we looked into it.

The bill come with a certain codes. What is it for? So we went on the, again, the team that is really professional in doing this, went on a Medicare site.

Medicare, the government has codes and prices for everything. And they educate. Now, you need to know where to look and I would have no idea.

But they went the same thing. You want to guess how much it was? $34,000.

$25,000. Okay. Okay.

Which basically means the hospital charged her 23 times what Medicare said is appropriate. Hold on. This is not even the end.

So our team said, okay, let's figure out how to help this member. So they went into the hospital. Information is now more and more available because the government is trying to push transparency.

So we went into the hospital system that is open and we looked at how much they charge the main insurance providers. By the way, insurance have many different schemes, right? Fully insured, partly insured, high deductible, low deductible, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And we read all of this. We have a spreadsheet of about 30 items. Comparison.

The comparison of this treatment, what this hospital charges or would charge, right, on average across all of these is about $200,000. But when we look inside the different options, it's $45,000 for one group of insurance providers and about $300,000 for another group. So we sent the hospital a letter saying, here's the research we've done on Medicare, what the government says, and what you are doing with other patients.

And based on that, we believe that the fair price, this is your data, is about $50,000 or $54,000, whatever it was. Here's a check for that amount, which we are willing to pay right now in cash. If you don't agree, please sue us.

There's a procedure where the arbitration and whatever to settle these kind of claims. And we said, but this is the data we will show. So we were upfront.

Guess what happened?

[JP] (25:29 - 25:30)

They paid. Of course.

[Boaz] (25:30 - 25:31)

I mean, they accepted.

[JP] (25:31 - 25:31)

They accepted.

[Boaz] (25:32 - 25:58)

Of course. But if I were in this situation, there is no way I can find, I can know where to look, I know how to find. That's part of the service we provide.

Got it. And why this kind of services is so needed. The system is not geared to help a patient.

It's geared to show dramatic prices. So we all get fear and go to insurance companies to say, help us, please.

[JP] (25:59 - 26:08)

So you were able to help this, was this instance where you helped a, like a person, like this was a B2C, correct?

[Boaz] (26:08 - 29:06)

No, no, no. So this is a B2B2C, right? So we have a client that offered our service, which is a combination of primary care claim and insurance to its employees.

One of its employees was a member of our system now. And we want to help them. So now I go back to your questions about tools.

So we have our medical system in the back end for documents and stuff. We obviously have CRMs. We obviously have a claim management system with all of this data that we are capturing over time. Comparison and benchmark, because it's all about benchmarks, right?

If you want to negotiate with a vendor, forget healthcare, anywhere. Benchmark is the best information. Hey, other people pay this, or this is the common price, whatever, right?

So we have that. Then my team is now starting to develop more sophisticated tools to get information from multiple systems, put them into documents that we can share with clients. I've done the first QMR ever at a company last week with a client.

I needed to develop a lot of information, right? Reports and whatever. We identified the needs for some tools.

We have AI in some of our apps and in the back end of some of our care logistics team to quickly identify trends and needs of clients so we can move even faster, right? If you think about it, statistics for many years show that the most common questions people have when they go to the doctor is, how much is it going to cost? Do I need to see a doctor?

Oh, do I need to see a doctor? The main reason people go to see a doctor is, do I need to see a doctor? Now, the vision we have, right, the mindset we have is, imagine that your mother had a medical degree.

You would not call a doctor when you feel bad. You call your mom. And your mom knows you.

By the way, she knows who you are. She knows what your family situation. She knows what your financials.

She advises you based on all of these things, what's the right thing. And what is she normally going to tell you? Take Advil, go to bed.

We'll talk in the morning, right? Sometimes she'll tell you, oh, you need to go to the ER right now or whatever, right? Sometimes she'll tell you, I'm not sure.

Why don't you go and do an x-ray and come back, right? But most things are really easy to solve. The system, in order to get more money, is using fear to push us into extreme situations.

Oh, sore throat, go to the ER. Maybe you're going to die. So we try to simplify this.

And a lot of it can be simplified with, you know, technology, right? In the app, you submit information, we send you to do something, you get back, we solve it. And yes, some situations really require a lot of care.

We have physicians with literally 30 and 40 years experience who are dealing with some of those really horrendous situations.

[JP] (29:07 - 29:20)

Let me tell you something. Let me tell you something. They say sometimes you don't want to know how the sausage is made.

This, my friend, is some of the nastiest sausage I have ever come across. Dillon, go ahead and take it away.

[Dillon] (29:20 - 30:04)

I want to, I want to talk about NPS. Not necessarily all the research you've done that's out there. People can find it and they can read it.

It's really good stuff. How do you, I think you did that research and it was primarily B2B, right? I'd like to understand, how are you now thinking about the way in which you measure customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, now that you have multiple tiers of customers?

Do you measure it differently based on employer versus member? And if so, how? How are you thinking about that?

What questions are you asking?

[Boaz] (30:05 - 32:54)

When we just started and you said, I said, good morning, and you're like, hey, I'm three hours ahead of you, so I'm in the future. This is a continuation of that arc. You're talking, you're asking something that I haven't done and is on my docket to do as I move forward.

I haven't gotten to that point, but that's exactly what we need, right? Metrics, forget NPS, right? All of the work we all do in customer management, customer success, really depends on segmentation, smart segmentation.

As my professor for statistics 101, 35 years ago in undergraduate told me, the average doesn't exist, right? The median exists. There's no such thing as the average, it's just a statistic.

The same thing with customers. If you look across everything, you'll get a number, the number has no meaning. It only gets meaning when you start to segment appropriately.

What you're saying is right. For me to have the right system of understanding customers so I can make the right decision, so I can take the right actions, I'll have to segment. The system at Redirect Health today is only on members.

We get NPS from members and even that, by the way, because of technology limitations is only some segment of the interactions we do. And we started to talk about how we improve that over time. I think we have a good system today, but it's a good system in one place and I want it to be much more broad.

I will probably introduce an NPS because I believe in the methodology and the ability to benchmark and the simplicity of the single question. I will probably introduce an NPS for clients, right? The employers that work with us.

And when I introduce that, it will be completely independent of the NPS that is done with the members on an ongoing basis when they have issues because it's just completely different. I will probably also, but again, this is steps and into the future, try to engage brokers to get their feedback as well. Because if you think about it, the broker is like the consultant, the intermediary.

And if I can see differences in NPS scores between the brokers and the clients and the members, you can start to get insight into what works and what doesn't and where you should focus on. I mean, the level it can influence, for example, I think our product roadmap, right? Hey, product team, NPS tells me that this group is more satisfied than that group.

So maybe we should work more here or vice versa, right? So it's a tool to give us insight that we can then use to make decisions. What you're saying is exactly right.

I'm just not there yet. Two months in.

[Dillon] (32:54 - 33:53)

No, no. But I think that's fine. I'm actually less interested in the answer being yes or no than understanding the thought process behind it.

Because I think the thing we're not saying that we all know, but is probably worth spelling out for anybody watching or listening, is the reason it's so important to measure all of those and to keep them separate is because their success criteria are so different. What they're looking for from redirect health is so different. And so the point you made around whether one NPS score is higher than the other is because if employers is really low, it's because maybe they're not seeing the cost savings they wanted to see.

You've also got to segment it out by what each you mentioned, you might onboard two different clients, two different employers, and their success criteria might be different. Well, if you lump their NPS scores together, you're going to be confused about what you need to work on or what you're doing well.

[Boaz] (33:53 - 34:46)

That's totally right. Right. So again, face forward a year.

Right. I want to segment my customers and say, here are large employers, medium employers, small employers, they have different needs. I have my few large employers, people with many hundreds or few thousands of employees, they really want statistics.

But a client, a restaurant with 15 people, there's no point in giving them statistics. What statistics should we get on 15 people? Right.

So the needs are very different. And what we need is very different in order to service them. That is that segmentation that you mentioned, and I'm totally with you.

There are so many ways you can do segmentations. I'm at this point aspiring to get there and we'll get there, but one step at a time.

[Dillon] (34:47 - 36:14)

I think that is so refreshing to hear, because I think maybe this is just me, but I think you see somebody like yourself, Boaz, and you have made a name for yourself by, at least in my sphere or my viewpoint, which is only one angle, totally understand, as the NPS guy. And that's not good or bad. You're very rigorous in the way you go about your work.

And you even mentioned it here by saying, that's how I'll know how to improve something. I have seen you in public forums talk about NPS, and I think that's a testament to the rigor with which you bring to your work. But to sit here and say, that can't be the way I operate today, because we just don't have the tools or the capabilities, and we've got to do it in a different way, shows the flexibility and the adaptability that I think we all need to show, particularly as we move from large company to small company, or even just industry to industry, it's never going to be the same in the same way that the NPS score is going to mean different things for two different customers within your same book of business. So that's just what I wanted to say before I give JP an opportunity to jump in with questions or comments that he has around the way you're thinking about your customer base today.

[JP] (36:14 - 37:06)

Yeah. I think what I have to say doesn't include none of that, but thank you. I was really, I've been actually thinking about this for a minute.

So Boaz, you've been at Customer Success for a while, and you mentioned something. You said that you really like working with startups. I hope I'm not putting words in here, but I think you had said something to that effect.

Yeah, yeah. Intense startup. So I would love to hear what is it about, because for some people, working in startups in general, or working in startups in CS, it seems to be sort of, it can be polarizing.

What is it about doing CS at a startup that after so many years, you just love doing, that gives you a spark when you're coming into work every day?

[Boaz] (37:06 - 41:27)

I think that is interesting. I've been in this space for a very long time, and I know a lot of people in CS. And some of them work at smaller companies than I feel comfortable, or best at, and some at larger ones.

And there is no correlation between what I just said and the quality of those people, or how much I enjoy engaging with them. Just a fit. What I noticed, and I think there's a lot of research about it, companies go through phases, and each phase has some different characteristics.

And those characteristics require slightly different type of people to be most effective. The very early phase, you need people who are well-rounded and can do a lot of things. Because you don't have departments, the lines are blurred between functions.

I think, for example, when the company is very, very small, 10 people, 20 people, the CEO is your head of customers. He probably walks and knows every one of the customers, the head of sales is involved with every deal before and after it's done. The head of product is probably your support person, because the product is not mature.

You can't put a support person and tell them what to do, because everything is still broken and in development, you need the head of product to be involved. As the company grows, you start to say, okay, the product is starting to mature, let's put a boundary to protect the product team, product slash engineering team, from the day-to-day disruptions, so they can develop the next set of products, I now have a function here. There's enough maturity in product and process, we can actually pull dedicated people with processes to do onboarding of customers, and to manage them ongoingly, and move the salespeople to sell to the next 100, or 1,000, or 10,000 customers.

The CEO is getting to the point where there are so many customers, and they need to go raise more money, manage a larger team. You want that to be their day job. That's the place where I normally like to join.

And what I like about this phase is, you need to look into scaling and say, okay, what of what we have been doing is part of the secret sauce that is really unique and we need to keep? And what are the things that we have done that worked, but will not work at scale and we need to change? And it's partially art, partially science, and I just loved it.

It's a brittle situation. Some people leave because they're uncomfortable with the changes, or they're not ready to take to the next level. Some new people are brought in.

There's a lot of change culturally in a company when it moves from 50 to 100 people, to 100, 200, 300, right? There's a lot of research that shows people, individuals, homo sapiens, can know intimately up to about 150 people. Beyond that number, it breaks.

So, think about a startup. When it starts to get to those numbers, right, you cross the 100, the CEO no longer knows everybody by name. Up to that number, CEOs in many places not only know everybody, they can probably do the jobs of almost everybody.

Maybe even better than those people. When you start to get above that number, it doesn't work anymore. You need to start to hire a middle tier of management and empower them, which changes the dynamic in the company.

I just love that change. And when it gets to, you know, hundreds of people, 500, 700, 1,000, it moves to another phase, right? You start to worry much more about gross margin, right?

Because the numbers at large impact, right? Every little percent make a big difference. It's less of what I'm good at or what I enjoy.

So, I like to move from the early phase of startup, but not too early, because I'm not a technologist, right? When you're very, very early, you want someone who's coding as part of, you know, fixing the company, the customer problem. That's less me.

So, I like to join what a company is kind of in the tens of people, maybe 100, and grow it, you know, 5, 10x before I transition to the next person that takes it over. So, normally, if you look at my LinkedIn resume and stuff, I'm normally operating in companies, you know, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 years, right? Depends on how much it takes to move to the next phase and then transition.

[JP] (41:28 - 41:28)

That's a big range, Boaz.

[Boaz] (41:29 - 41:33)

That's a big range. It is, but, you know, different companies are different.

[Dillon] (41:34 - 42:16)

Boaz, that is our time. This has been a phenomenal conversation. We learned about healthcare.

We learned about NPS. And I actually love the way we wrapped it up, because I think you described it so incredibly well. And in a way, this is JP's favorite topic, and I'm so glad we got to talk about it, which is knowing yourself before you go and try to find opportunities.

Knowing what you're good at, what you like. I love that you even had data around it. I think that's fantastic, and it is what everybody should be doing as they search for opportunities in their career.

Look, there's nowhere to go from here, Boaz. I would typically say, come back.

[Boaz] (42:16 - 44:30)

One thing, one comment. So, I'd like to say one comment to finish. Please.

Tie this together, right? There was a post earlier today, by the time this is published, maybe a little bit later, by Sarah Buccino that worked for me for about four years at TALEC in US Bank, and talked about the value of network when you look for a job. We're in a very tough economy right now.

I know so many people who are having a very hard time finding jobs. My son just graduated college, and so many of his friends are having a very hard time finding jobs. It's a tough economy.

And I think the point that Sarah was making is brilliant and super important for all of us. Network is everything. You can go online and apply for jobs.

In today's world, you'll be one of 10,000 people that apply to every job. That's very hard to win. I can tell you, I worked at 10 companies, nine of them, literally nine of them, I was brought in by someone who knew me, not by applying for a job.

And almost all of the real conversations I had exploring towards deciding on a job came from network. But here's the thing about network. Network is not about you contact someone to help you.

Network starts three years earlier when you invest in helping other people, not for the purpose of getting something back, but for the purpose of creating a network that may at some point help different people get different things. Today, you might be looking for a job. Tomorrow, you might be looking for references for positions on your job.

I'm two and a half months into this company. I already had close to a dozen conversations with people in my network trying to learn about healthcare. I know nothing about healthcare.

So I started to call people. Hey, I see that you've been on this company. I've seen you've been in that company.

Can we spend an hour? And they're investing their time to help me learn about healthcare because we're helping one another. So network is key.

I think this podcast is a way to expose people to ideas and to other people, which is very helpful. Thank you for the opportunity. I really appreciate it.

[Dillon] (44:30 - 44:53)

You got it, Boaz. The pleasure is ours. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and your expertise.

What I was going to say is, I want you to come back, but I don't have anything more to offer you unless we do a three or four hour interview. So we might have to go back to a 15 minute episode and we'll just have you on five times. What do you think about that?

[Boaz] (44:54 - 44:56)

You tell me when and I'm happy to help.

[Dillon] (44:57 - 45:03)

Boaz, it's been a pleasure. Until next time, we do have to say goodbye. Thank you very much.

Take care, guys.

[VO] (45:09 - 45:45)

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