VERN: Well welcome to this third in a series of podcasts that relate specifically to what we're referring to as the Acceleration Program here at NISC. With me is Doug Remboldt. Doug heads up all of the support areas of the service areas within NISC, whether it's accounting, billing, engineering, or telecom utility. So that's a pretty big wheel house, Doug, and when we talked about this acceleration plan in my mind, the first thing I think about is our focus is on improving what we already do, for the members that we already have. 820 members, literally thousands of calls coming into your service centers and one of the major goals of this acceleration plan is to improve what we already do fairly well, but we know it can be better. We look at the HDI scores, right, every day. So part of this acceleration program is me going to you and saying "Doug, I want you to talk to your managers. How can we help you? Where should we be investing? Where do you need additional resources to make that support function a better customer experience a better member experience?" You know we look at how we're perceived as NISC, and it's about our products, are our products robust? Do we have an enterprise solution? It's about the price of our products. But at the end of the day, we are defined, I believe this Doug, we are defined by the level of service we provide. Great service covers up a lot of sins, right? No (laughs), great service is really how people remember and the impression we make on our members, so it's so critical. So all the discussion of acceleration for me comes down to this, how can we better serve our members through providing a higher level of support? So you know when we started having these discussions Doug, and we said: "Doug, tell me what you need." Tell me what you were thinking and what your goals are for this acceleration initiative. DOUG: Well my first thought was whatever number we need we're going to have to scale that back to some extent because we're never going to have as many resources as we all want, right? And so our discussions as we thought about how we can make a difference with some increased staff and how we can do a better job of being there for our members was really to figure out how we can interject a couple people into a couple of key areas and get them up to speed without compromising the service to our members today. One of the things in support that really is very difficult is bringing new people onto the team and getting them up to speed. So putting a whole bunch of new people under one team actually can decrease the service we're giving to our members because we've got to take time and we owe it to those new employees to spend time training them, so part of our plan here is to interject people slowly, and so part of what we're doing with the acceleration plan is bringing a couple of people onto some very specific different areas but really our plan is over the next 24 months how are we going to grow and expand and cross train and do a better job of serving our members, so part of it is adding some people now. The other parts will be adding some people into next year's budget and the year after as well. So we're trying to spread that around and make sure that not only are we growing that staff to take care of our members but we're not doing it at a pace that compromises the service to our members every day either. VERN: Makes sense. So Doug when we talk about the maturation the growth the evolution of our software products, a lot of that comes through your service centers. A lot of it comes from NISC support people talking to our members our members convey "I wish the software would do this" and they're recommending changes and that's been a very important part in how our products have evolved. But we're at this, and this isn't your first rodeo You were here for the rollout of iVUE, but we're at this precarious place where we've got a new product coming to market, iVUE Phase 1 is already there, Phase 2 is in the beta site, Phase 3, you know out there are little ways but it's coming quickly, and we're at this place where we always have to say do we put that functionality, those changes, those enhancements, in the legacy product or do we wait for the new product and put them in the new product? Because we know if we put them in the old we're going to have to put them in the new too. So you have a lot of redundant work. That's probably one of the most difficult parts of managing a software lifecycle is when you're in transition like we are right now trying to make the best use of the resources that we have in RD&Q and support, sometimes we have to make some hard decisions and say you know we're not going to put it in legacy we're going to put it in Connect which probably means you're going to have to wait a little bit longer, but that's really a challenge isn't it to balance with our members? DOUG: It really is, and we're very fortunate in that regard because if we communicate our plan to our employees and we communicate that same plan to our members, everyone's really on board with helping us trying to accomplish that mission. And so even though no one ever wants to hear no we can't do that right now. Our members really understand, and they're really good to work with on those things and are support people understand as well. One of the challenging things about being a support person is that you ultimately want to please the member, and you want to do as much as you can to help that member accomplish what they're trying to do or to effect change in the software in a way that they feel is positive and will help not only that member but are other members. And so as a support person it can be very hard to say "no" or "not now." But we all know as an organization if we're going to accelerate the development and the deployment of iVUE Connect, we are going to have to be disciplined. And so support will absolutely play a role in that. We've already begun talking about that as managers within the support team and focusing on what pieces of our product are really in pretty good shape right now that we can dedicate some resource to some other place and leave that piece of the product as it is for the next 18 months as we really work on new things so as a support team we're excited to be a part of that solution. It's a difficult conversation sometimes to have, but in the end, it's for the betterment of NISC's products and to our members. VERN: Great answer. Now just the execution of that, right? DOUG: It is a lot easier to talk about it than it is to it. But again our members are partnering with us, and sometimes they get a little frustrated or excited about it. But at the end of the day when they take a step back, and we take a step back we can all agree that we just got to be together on the priority. VERN: Ok. Final question. You know, Doug, if we go all the way back to the 2000s, you know I mean the beginning of 2000, we had multiple, we had five utility pieces of software we had two telecom pieces of software I view is very much about consolidating that into one utility piece of software and one telecom, and we accomplished that and I think part of the strong financial performance that we see is because of the efficiencies from that. So Connect is really a groundswell because it's taken that final step. It's moving telecom and utility into a unified product. That's not easy, but you know when I think about the possibility, Doug, of focusing all of our employees on a single product, I mean there's a lot of work to get there but, that's pretty exciting. So as we're developing the software and moving in that direction what are you doing in support? Because as our software platform changes so too, the support structure has to change because all of a sudden your support people, and I don't want to scare your support here, are going to be you know taking questions on a bundle of telecommunications service and a time of use rate on utility. I mean we're really going to have to work to develop our people to develop a skill set that will make them effective in that unified environment. Tell us what you're doing to get ready for that. DOUG: That's a really good question, and we're doing a lot of things, but we aren't doing any of them quickly. We're really working on moving into this environment in a pace that is sustainable, and it's not overwhelming for our employees. We don't have any expectation that six months from now everybody that is currently supporting our telecom SIS product is an expert and utility services and functionality. Same with utility knowing and understanding everything that goes on in telecom. Because it is a common product, it will give us a common framework to begin learning those things together. And so are already working, just this week, we have a telecom group that has been working with United in Missouri on phase 2 has spent the entire week working with our support team helping bring them up to speed on the differences between just a normal multiservice and utility and what goes on at United as it relates to their telecom type services. So we're beginning that process we're working on who we can bring in to the telecom group that understands the backend processes and utility, the delinquents, and the way we calculate bills because we know that functionality is coming from the utility side as we move into iVUE Connect Phase 3. So we're doing it in small pieces. We also know at the end of the day if our members are specifically geared toward telecom they want to talk to a telecom expert and the same is true on utility but we also know that there are some members of ours that do both. And so we're going to be working on bringing those together so that we have teams of people that can do both. But we're also always going to have, at least for the foreseeable future, teams that specialize in utility and telecom. VERN: Ok. Well Doug thank you very much for shedding some light
