Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
How Avionté Is Raising the Bar on Customer Experience
19 Plays2 days ago
What happens when the gap between what software vendors promise and what they actually deliver finally starts to close? Everyone says they offer world-class service—but most agencies will tell you that’s not what they’re getting.
In this episode of Avionté: Digital Edge, host Chris Ryan sits down with Varun Nath, Chief Operating Officer at Avionté, to talk about how his team is rethinking the customer experience. It’s not about more features or faster transactions—it’s about building genuine partnerships that actually drive results. The rising NPS scores tell part of the story, but as you’ll hear, the real change runs much deeper.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Vendor Promise Gap
00:00:00
Speaker
Every software vendor promises world-class service, but ask staffing agencies and most will tell you they're not getting it. So how do we close the gap? On this episode of the Aviante Digital Edge, I sit down with our COO, Varun Nath, to talk about rethinking the customer experience beyond features, beyond transactions, towards real partnership that actually moves the needle.
00:00:24
Speaker
Numbers show we're making progress, but as you'll hear, the real story goes much deeper.
00:00:35
Speaker
Welcome to the Aviante Digital Edge. I'm Chris Ryan, and today we're tackling one of the biggest disconnects in staffing technology, the gap between what software vendors promise and what agencies actually experience.
00:00:48
Speaker
Here's the paradox. Every vendor claims to deliver world-class service, yet most staffing agencies say they're not getting it. Some see technology as just features and functions, while others walk in with big expectations, only to end up frustrated when reality falls short of the sales pitch.
00:01:06
Speaker
So what happens when the gap finally gets closed?
Reimagining Software Partnerships
00:01:09
Speaker
To answer that question, I'm joined by Varun Nath, Aviante's Chief Operating Officer. Varun has been with Aviante for about four years now, and he's been in his current COO role for the last three years, not just managing the operation, but actively reimagining the relationship between a software company and the agencies it serves.
00:01:30
Speaker
Our rising NPS scores suggest we're on the right track, but as we'll hear today, numbers only tell part of the story. So welcome, Varun. Yeah, Chris, thanks for having me on today.
00:01:41
Speaker
Glad to be here. So Varun, let me start with a provocative question. Many staffing agencies view software vendors as utilities, kind of like electricity or water, and just they want you to keep the lights on, don't break anything, send the monthly bill.
00:01:56
Speaker
But partnership has always been a core value at Aviante. It's kind of in our DNA. And now that you are the one in charge of making that real in day-to-day operations, I'm curious what you have to say. Does partnership actually matter?
00:02:10
Speaker
Or is this just marketing hype we tell ourselves? I would say that partnership absolutely matters. Great software is just great software, but without great service in the form of partnership, you can't maximize the software that you're using.
00:02:23
Speaker
And I believe today staffing firms need not just another vendor that's going to ship software and send them an invoice. They need a partner who's invested in their success and delivers outcomes. And, you know, software in this industry touches everything that's business critical for a staffing agency.
00:02:37
Speaker
payroll, compliance, candidate experience. So if your vendor isn't aligned with your goals and is more interested in just collecting an invoice from you, you'll feel it in missed revenue, frustrated recruiters, and unhappy customers on your end.
00:02:49
Speaker
So again, just to summarize, I believe partnership is about making sure customers actually get the outcomes they expect, and it's more crucial than ever in today's world. So in a sense, we're not just selling software, we're really working with a customer, leveraging technology to deliver an outcome.
00:03:05
Speaker
I'm curious about
Insights from Staffing Industry
00:03:06
Speaker
that. A lot of staffing agencies say that vendors will talk a partnership, but only deliver transactions. So what does an effective partnership actually look like in practice?
00:03:16
Speaker
you know, it's Monday morning, the client's freaking out, they have a challenge of some kind, everything's on fire. What does partnership actually look like? Partnership means that your goals are aligned.
00:03:27
Speaker
And at Aviante, we always say our success depends on our customer's success. So that is the guiding philosophy of what partnership means to us. And beyond that, it means understanding what our customers are actually trying to achieve.
00:03:40
Speaker
Most often, they're trying to increase sales, right, with the employers that they serve. They're trying to deliver a great candidate experience and make sure that they get paid timely and with enough margin to run their business.
00:03:51
Speaker
So when there's a fire on Monday morning, it's not just a person at Aviante logging a ticket on a customer's behalf and passing it on to the next person. Internally, it's making sure that that person at Aviante is empowered to navigate Aviante's organization, pull in resources as needed, and advocate on the customer's behalf.
00:04:11
Speaker
So we designed our processes around customers so they don't get bounced around between our departments. A customer can call one person, one contact at Aviante, and you know that someone's fighting for you inside of Aviante.
00:04:22
Speaker
That's what partnership looks like. And it it keeps the customer at the center of everything that we do. Got it. Got it. So let's back up a little bit. Coming from business school where they teach you frameworks, matrices, and theoretical models, and then you've worked in software
Customer Success as Growth Catalyst
00:04:36
Speaker
for a while. And I'm curious, when you compare the real world of software and staffing where chaos reigns and customers don't follow textbooks, what was your biggest, oh, crap, they didn't teach me this moment in business school?
00:04:50
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, certainly business school teaches frameworks, like you mentioned, it helps try to structure the chaotic world of business, but the real world is messier. And I think for me, the biggest learning at Aviante was realizing how personal and urgent staffing is.
00:05:04
Speaker
mean, you have to make payroll every week. And you have to put talent to work every week. And so you're not just fixing software or servicing software, you're impacting someone's paycheck, a candidate's livelihood, an employer's operations.
00:05:19
Speaker
And so there's no chapter in the business school textbook that can teach you about the level of urgency and accountability that staffing specifically requires. And I think when it comes to partnership and how I translate that learning into action is sometimes we have to do things that don't seem efficient from a business standpoint.
00:05:36
Speaker
or don't look good on a financial statement, but we do it because we know it's the right thing for the customer, like adding additional resources when necessary. So I'm curious about this and in particular your management philosophy, you're running a service organization inside a software company. And in some ways that's a little bit like being a social worker at a hedge fund.
00:05:55
Speaker
How do you make that work? I think my philosophy is simple. Everything has to be structured around the customer's success. What does the customer try to achieve with our software and how do we deliver that most effectively?
00:06:06
Speaker
And beyond that, we believe that service isn't just a cost-centered Aviante, it's a growth driver for our own business. If we do our jobs right, customers expand with us, they renew with confidence, and they refer their peers.
00:06:18
Speaker
So I tell my team, our mission isn't to close tickets, it's to create trust, it's to deliver customer success. That mindset makes us a partner, not just another utility. So as you've gone through this process and you're rebuilding the entire customer experience and thinking that through, what are the core principles that drive your decisions? And when your team comes up with competing priorities, how do you align direction?
00:06:41
Speaker
It's actually very simple. What's best for the customer? Whenever there's competing priorities or a discussion that needs to be had, it's what's best for the customer. And so we've intentionally built or rebuilt, I should say, Aviante's internal organizations around customer outcomes rather than internal convenience.
00:06:58
Speaker
So when it comes to optimizing for internal staff convenience or internal staff efficiency or a customer outcome, we always optimize for the customer outcome, even if it needs more work behind the scenes for us.
00:07:10
Speaker
So Aviante's NPS scores have jumped significantly, and I guess that's probably a reflection of that focus around
Optimizing Implementations for Better Outcomes
00:07:16
Speaker
the customer. But let's be honest, a few years back, we have some customers who were less than thrilled.
00:07:22
Speaker
And I'm sure as you know better than anyone, when it comes to customer satisfaction, the job is never finished. So what specific changes did you implement that moved the needle and actually made a difference?
00:07:34
Speaker
Well, there's a long list I could get into, but I think there's three major things that we did and I'll list them off and then I'll go into detail. One was we standardized implementations and beefed up how much training we were offering new users.
00:07:49
Speaker
Two. We implemented a customer success team, which is sort of the proactive twin of our customer support team. So whereas customer support is typically reactive where you submit an issue via ticket and wait for response, customer success is a group of people that work with all of our customers to help them see around corners proactively and implement technical strategies and take advantage of best practice features.
00:08:12
Speaker
And then thirdly, we totally revamped our customer support department so that, again, it wasn't optimized for internal convenience, but optimized for fast response times, fast resolution times. And so I can go into detail on each one of those just a little bit.
00:08:26
Speaker
One, standardizing implementations and increasing training. That allowed us to take a look at our implementation project plans and basically take on all the work that we thought was too complex or too time-consuming for a customer to do.
00:08:38
Speaker
So we had to change our mindset around what does implementation actually mean? So we found ourselves as an implementation team taking on a lot of the behind the scenes work that we typically ask a customer to do, like inputting data into the system, configuring the system.
00:08:52
Speaker
So that helped streamline the project plans a little bit and it reduced the time a customer needed to take on a particular project. And then with that additional time a customer had, we said, we're going to offer more training resources. We're going staff a human trainer to almost all of our projects so that you can get some form of live interaction.
00:09:08
Speaker
We're going to beef up our knowledge base. We're going to put in place in-application training, also that you can reduce the time to value a user experiences on the platform. Two, customer success.
00:09:18
Speaker
I talked about it a little bit. That is a brand new team that we implemented just over a year ago at this point. And again, that team is supposed to be focused on proactive work with our customers to help them take advantage of all the new features and functionality we continue to release.
00:09:32
Speaker
And then support, we basically refreshed the whole team, redid our triage and prioritization frameworks and bifurcated the group so that they can specialize in different areas of the product and better serve our customers.
00:09:43
Speaker
It sounds like it's not just a big idea. There are a lot of small, important details that really make a difference to customers. And in this particular case, I want to drill down a little bit around implementation because, you know, in my experience, it seemed to me that implementation was the most important predictor of success in anything related to human capital or staffing software.
00:10:04
Speaker
and And having a bad implementation could literally haunt a relationship for years. So I'm curious, what was it about the implementation? It sounds like you were actually taking some work that we used to expect customers to do for implementation, and now we do it because we found we can actually do it better than they can. Is that right?
00:10:24
Speaker
Yeah, that's one of the things, right, which is, do what's hard for us, but easy for the customer. So we applied that philosophy to implementations as well. And we've taken a look at each task in all of our project plans and really rationalize why we're asking a customer to do something or why we're doing a specific thing.
00:10:45
Speaker
And then we've automated all the rest that can be automated. So the collective impact of all of this is that customers are now getting a more standard professional implementation experience.
00:10:56
Speaker
It's quicker than any other vendor in the space, and it delivers consistent outcomes because you're getting implemented on best practice features from day one, and we've trained our users to take advantage of those features from day one as well.
00:11:09
Speaker
One thing we didn't change, which I'm really proud of, is keeping implementations in-house. Other vendors in this space outsource a lot of their implementations, and it costs more it takes longer. We're very proud of the fact that we don't have to do that at Aviante.
00:11:21
Speaker
So how long does it typically take to take a customer through an implementation at Aviante? I've heard tell of staffing agencies at some firms where it might take a year or more when they've got a complex implementation and third-party vendor.
00:11:35
Speaker
What does it typically take for Aviante? I think it depends on the customer size and the complexity of the implementation across several dimensions. You know, a couple of those being how many products are you implementing all at once and how many data sources or legacy systems are you coming from?
00:11:51
Speaker
Typically the most complicated part of an implementation is the data conversion. So if you're coming from a third party legacy ATS and payroll system, or you're coming from three, that can impact how long a typical implementation will take.
00:12:05
Speaker
But I'll say on average, For advertised customer coming from an average legacy system, it generally takes around three months. Our most complex enterprise implementations still take less than a year.
00:12:17
Speaker
And that could be at 1,000 user customer converting from 10 different data sources. We're still able to manage that in-house in under a year. Maybe it's six to eight months instead of the average three, but we're talking about months, not years.
00:12:32
Speaker
So one other thing I've noticed with implementations, and this is something agencies don't always think about, is when an agency acquires a new branch, maybe they merge with a competitor, the integration can be a
Handling M&A Complexities
00:12:44
Speaker
real challenge. And usually there's a time crunch because M&A deals by their nature are kept confidential until the last minute.
00:12:51
Speaker
ah So you have multiple systems, different processes, data everywhere. How do we help customers navigate that chaos? Well, exactly as you said, when agencies merge or acquire someone else, you know time is short, complexity is high.
00:13:05
Speaker
Our service teams have built playbooks around this very fact. And so we know exactly how to consolidate systems, migrate data, and align processes quickly so that the agency you have acquired can get online within then weeks, essentially, if not days.
00:13:19
Speaker
And we've done this so many times for all of our customers who have aggressive, inorganic, or acquisition-heavy growth strategies. And this is really where experience matters. Our teams have a lot of experience doing this type of work. And the key is is doing it with speed without sacrificing compliance or data integrity.
00:13:36
Speaker
And that's really where our team is able to hold a candle against other benefits. So having a high tenure implementation team is actually critical in M&A response. Correct. And just knowing how to handle all the complexities that come along with compliance and data conversion, data integrity issues.
00:13:53
Speaker
All of that stuff is sort of pre-built out. It's a playbook that we rinse and repeat depending on the customer. Got it. So let's say you're implementing a new customer and the customer might have a strong point of view about what they want.
00:14:06
Speaker
To what extent do you find yourself actually advising around new ideas, new workflows, maybe suggesting different approaches or a third party integration to customers? How proactive are you now and how does that change the game?
00:14:21
Speaker
Our entire implementation is based off of best practice methodology. So what we do is we actually take what we believe are the best practices within our software suite, which are informed by the aggregate customer community base that we have.
00:14:36
Speaker
We put that into sort of the default system that you get, and we actually work backwards from our best practice workflows to identify, okay, which ones don't work for a your specific business or which ones need customization.
00:14:48
Speaker
So when it comes to being prescriptive, we've moved much more in that direction because the products over time become so comprehensive and so vast that no one staffing agency can be an expert on it every aspect of how they want their system configured. So we work backwards from best practice to customize by exception, not by a rule.
00:15:07
Speaker
And that's an interesting point because so many staffing agencies will start a discussion by saying, we do things differently here. We're unique in some way. And of course, we want to honor that. But there may be places where a staffing agency can actually learn from standard practice.
00:15:21
Speaker
So clearly there's an opportunity. There's another myth I want to get at, and I've heard this said by a few agencies at different points. Some believe that once a software company gets too large, they can't necessarily remain service-oriented.
Balancing Reliability and Flexibility
00:15:36
Speaker
And there's this belief that only a small boutique technology company can really provide you with customized service. My experience is that oftentimes the smaller vendors are resource-constrained or they have questionable security infrastructure. They may not have the resources to respond at 2 in the morning.
00:15:52
Speaker
They might have one engineer on call. How do you balance size and the importance of enterprise-grade security and reliability while still providing a very high degree of personalized service, which is really what agencies want?
00:16:06
Speaker
I agree with the general sentiment of smaller vendors can feel more personal, but they often can't scale or support customers in critical moments. And larger vendors, they have scale, but then customers can feel like a number and they don't really get that bespoke white glove service.
00:16:20
Speaker
I think we built Amiantic to bridge that at. We have enterprise grade security, reliability, resources, products, but we paired it with a service model where every customer gets named dedicated resources.
00:16:33
Speaker
And we have an internal staffing model that allows us to flex up and down but depending on how complex a project is getting or what the timeline is or really what the customer needs to be successful. to run payroll that first week. So if I need to pull in an extra two people on your project because it's coming down to the wire and we need an extra pair of hands on keyboard, I have the internal staffing flexibility to do that because Aviante, we have the scale and the resources to do that.
00:16:58
Speaker
But it's not going to be a brand new resource rolling onto your team while the other ones out of office are doing something else. It's going to be your project manager who's been with you for the whole project for the last five or six months, paired with maybe your trainer who's going to help out in the last bit of the project, but also has the context of your specific needs and organization, paired with maybe your dedicated customer support agent and your dedicated customer success manager and your dedicated account manager. We have all of these things ready to go and we can pull them in as needed throughout the project.
00:17:28
Speaker
So it's really combining the advantages of large and small. You wanna create the relationship of the smaller organization and have those well-known reliable contacts that the customer counts on it you know every day, but you can bring all the resources you need to the party whenever it's appropriate.
00:17:44
Speaker
That makes a lot of sense. So one thing I've always wondered about customer service is that you get the 1% of customers who are going to be most frustrated. They may have a demanding timeline. They may have a mess that needs to be cleaned up.
00:17:59
Speaker
And I'm curious, as you were working through your role in operations, when did you realize you were actually making a difference? Was there a specific moment, a watershed customer interaction where it all clicked?
00:18:11
Speaker
I don't think there was any one specific moment because these changes are so complicated that we had to make over the past few years, and it takes a while for them to bear out as well and see the impact. But a lagging indicator of success for me is a funny one, but it's personal.
00:18:26
Speaker
I just stopped receiving angry emails in my inbox. It just stopped happening one day. And now I almost never deal with an angry escalation, starting with me first as COO at Aviante.
00:18:38
Speaker
I think that to me represented that we've implemented multiple layers of accountability within the organization that all own customer success. It doesn't just start with leadership.
00:18:49
Speaker
It starts with the frontline project manager or customer support or customer success manager at Aviante. They're able to mitigate a lot of the risk for customer unhappiness or just meet tough customer requirements before things have to bubble up to me. So...
00:19:04
Speaker
For me, that's been an interesting lagging indicator. where hit Inbox is just cleaner than it used to be. So your team is heading off challenges before they reach your door, which means that things are working right.
00:19:15
Speaker
That's kind
Motivating Service Teams
00:19:16
Speaker
of neat. Now let's talk about team morale. Great service requires genuine enthusiasm and a positive attitude. But you have service team members who are under a lot of pressure. They're dealing with the toughest challenges.
00:19:28
Speaker
So how do you keep your team motivated and energized when they're essentially professional problem solvers dealing with problems all day long? I think it's a multi-cronged approach, but I'll start by saying you have to hire people that enjoy solving problems.
00:19:42
Speaker
So it comes down to just upstream hiring the right people for the right roles. But beyond that, I think we keep people motivated by a mix of intelligent incentive design and recognition.
00:19:53
Speaker
So intelligent incentive design means incentivizing our staff based on customer outcomes, not Aviante outcomes. right? So we reward customer success managers, customer support agents, and project managers based on how quickly they're able to deliver value for a customer.
00:20:10
Speaker
Got it. And beyond that recognition, if someone has a customer win or they were able to drive adoption of a specific feature or really turn things around at a specific customer, we celebrate those things internally very loudly.
00:20:23
Speaker
We make sure that those stories are what people keep in their minds in meetings and in emails and other things. And so think With those three prongs, you get a team that's excited about coming to work every day and delivering customer success.
00:20:34
Speaker
Yeah. So as you were managing your team, were there any points where the service team was ah opposed your recommendations and changes or they didn't want to follow through with your thought process?
00:20:45
Speaker
How did you overcome it? Yeah, change is always hard. It always brings resistance. And so many people in the organization have different perspectives on what direction we need to row in or what problems we need to fix.
00:20:56
Speaker
I think what helped me overcome that was unifying all these different teams within customer operations around a single idea, which is hard to argue with. What's best for the customer?
00:21:08
Speaker
No one can argue against that. If you analyze every idea or priority against what's best for the customer, you're automatically going to make the right decisions. And I don't even need to be in the room anymore to make sure that's happening.
00:21:20
Speaker
And that's really just culture at the end of the day. If it happens without me being in the room or without leadership being in the room, then it's our culture. And that's how I think we overcame a lot of the latent resistance that comes along with change. Got
Adapting Service for Non-Technical Staff
00:21:31
Speaker
it.
00:21:31
Speaker
So looking ah ahead, a lot of people in staffing didn't sign up to be software experts. They got into the business because they like to connect people with opportunities. But now we're kind of at an inflection point in the industry where there are a lot of developments going on.
00:21:46
Speaker
Artificial intelligence, automation, new platforms. And i guess one of the things that I'm wondering about is what is service and support need to look like to help these non-technical professionals thrive as the world changes? Because things are happening at a very fast pace.
00:22:04
Speaker
I think it needs to be just in time. So what that means is we need to get new user training into the hands of a new user as soon as they access the system. They shouldn't have to sit in a separate training class.
00:22:16
Speaker
If we've implemented a new feature in the system, we need to send out notifications and communication about that feature just at the right time for users to take advantage of that. If a customer is struggling or is unhappy with something, we need to be able to respond just in time, not two months too late or two months too early because they might not have the time to talk to their software vendor while they're focused on growing their business. So I think that's going to be the primary application of how we leverage AI within customer operations internally at Ambiente.
00:22:43
Speaker
We wanted to help predict and signal when a customer needs specific help and what type of help that might be. So I think ultimately, AI for us is not going to be about replacing our internal staff and making customer support a chatbot.
00:22:56
Speaker
It's going to be about making our staff more effective with the time that they have because AI is going to be signaling to them what's needed when for a particular customer. listen And as we go through this accelerating pace of change, do you have a fear that some of our customers are going to get left behind, that the challenge of adopting new technology is going to be too great for them?
00:23:17
Speaker
How do you see Aviante overcoming this challenge, helping agencies to navigate new technology? I do have a fear of that. I think that's true of any technological transition in any industry.
00:23:29
Speaker
There are always technology laggards and technology leaders, and typically the technology leaders outperform the rest of the industry. So ideally, that's where we'd like to see all of our customer base be. However, that's not always the reality. And so I think one way we can help is by developing intuitive products that kind of scale up and down in complexity based on what the customer needs at any given point. So maybe we deliver a fully comprehensive ATS, but not every customer needs to take advantage of every bell and whistle in that platform to realize ah ROI.
00:24:00
Speaker
I think same thing with our service model. We need to have flexible service models so that we're able to support our customers and meet them exactly where they are. We can't talk past our customers and start talking about complex features and playbooks.
00:24:12
Speaker
Customer's just not there. So we need to have different flavors of how we implement the product and how we service that product so that we can match exactly where customers act, whether they're a lagger or a leader. And I think you can only really do that if you have humans that care about their customers, servicing those accounts and those customers every single day.
00:24:29
Speaker
And that's really what we do best at
Customer-Centric Service Design
00:24:31
Speaker
Uyante. It's interesting, Vroon. I really appreciate your candor around this. When we talk about the challenge of customer service, it sounds like the most fundamental principle is design customer service to service as customers.
00:24:43
Speaker
It goes right back to the basics. so What's best for the customer? So I really appreciate real talk about what it takes to serve customers in this industry because so often I hear people talk about it and they'll throw out ideas or metrics, but at the end of the day,
00:25:00
Speaker
you have to have a customer service mindset and you have to be able to understand exactly where your customers are. What I will say now to listeners, if you want to learn more about how we're approaching customer success differently, reach out to your account manager or visit aviante.com.
00:25:15
Speaker
This is Chris Ryan for the Aviante Digital Edge. Until next time, stop accepting vendor mediocrity, demand partnership.