From Ice Cream To Building Better MSPs With Positive Employee Feedback
Stephen Spiegel is on a mission to help managed service providers differentiate themselves from inside out. Spiegel’s company, Boca Raton, Fla.-based Crewhu, was designed specifically to make it easy for MSPs to gather and analyze feedback to look for not only complaints about specific employees, but more importantly to gather positive feedback from clients about specific employees in order to reward them for not only doing their jobs well but also for improving customer satisfaction.
Spiegel himself did not come from the MSP space. Instead, he set up a string of ice cream stores in South Florida where he noticed that practically the only time a customer took the time to go through multiple clicks on a website to leave feedback was to complain about an employee. Managers, acting on such feedback, approached employees with the negative feedback, resulting in an employee turnover rate of 100 percent, he said.
“I finally had an ‘Aha!’ moment that you had to be either really upset or really happy to leave feedback,” he said. “And for the most part, you get more motivated when you’re really upset, hence the one bad review. I needed to figure out a way to make it so easy to leave a review that we could get a lot more feedback.”
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Spiegel’s experience in setting up a system to easily collect regular positive feedback and reward employees appropriately eventually caught the attention of some MSPs who applied his methods in their own businesses, Spiegel said.
“We weren’t tooled for MSPs at the time, but I really liked the way they were using it to gamify the number of tickets closed, number of calls made, number of sales closed, all these things that it really wasn’t built for,” he said.
Spiegel said the key to motivating employees is to collect feedback from customers and act on that feedback by rewarding those employees immediately. Crewhu, he said, does this by making “Crewcoins” available to reward employees with prizes that MSPs can customize, and combining that with CSAT (customer satisfaction) to help improve customer stickiness.
“Just that little bit of recognition motivates them to engage on a consistent basis and create this service culture which will differentiate one MSP from another,” he said. “But now MSPs can operationalize it to get more Google reviews to work on your reputation, use in your sales process to show how they take care of customers and how they take care of employees.”
For a look at how MSPs can use customer feedback to motivate employees and build customer satisfaction, read CRN’s interview below.
How do you define Crewhu?
Crewhu is a customer satisfaction and employee recognition platform built for managed service providers. But it actually started with me trying to figure out a solution to a problem I had in my retail franchising business. I brought Cold Stone Creamery to South Florida, and we started to build one after the other, and all of a sudden we had over 100 employees. And I started to see turnover, like in a big way. At the peak of it, we had over 100 percent turnover within a year. And we had multiple disparate locations. So it was really hard for me to see anything. And all I knew is I was getting one bad customer review per location per month. So I wasn’t getting enough feedback. It was always bad. Then I noticed I had to click 20 times just to leave a piece of feedback. I finally had an ‘Aha!’ moment that you had to be either really upset or really happy to leave feedback. And for the most part, you get more motivated when you’re really upset, hence the one bad review. I needed to figure out a way to make it so easy to leave a review that we could get a lot more feedback.
I also saw the young managers at all my stores were quick to come at employees when something went wrong. But I saw no evidence of anybody coming to employees when they did something good. I call that the ‘relationship bank account.’ If you keep coming at someone, and it’s always negative, they’re not going to respond well, and it’s not going to be constructive. However, if you’re recognizing them for their small wins on a daily basis, you’ll start to build that relationship bank account, and when something goes wrong, you’ll be able to come to them and they’ll be responsive because you have that ‘money’ in the bank.
So we created a system that connected to our loyalty account. Every time someone came in, they could leave a review, not with 20 clicks, but one click. All of a sudden we weren’t getting just one negative review. We were getting 100 reviews, 96 of which were positive for the most part while four were negative. So we were celebrating the winners with the guys on a daily basis. And when something went wrong, they were receptive as to what happened and what they could do better. We retooled it to where we were able to recognize an individual specifically for what they were doing. And all of a sudden, turnover went from 100 percent to 40 percent.
How did this become an MSP-facing technology?
We tried to sell this to all of the franchises in the country. I was friendly with some of the executive team. They gave me access to the market meetings, but they weren’t willing to give me any marketing dollars to roll it out to the stores. But if the franchisees agreed, we’d be able to do that. We weren’t getting far. It wasn’t happening as fast as I thought it would.
About that time, some MSPs started to use it because they found it on the Internet organically. We weren’t tooled for MSPs at the time, but I really liked the way they were using it to gamify the number of tickets closed, number of calls made, number of sales closed, all these things that it really wasn’t built for. I reached out to them, and they told me what an MSP was. I became friendly with them. I went to IT Nation back in 2015, walked the show, talked to a bunch of people at the HTG peer group, talked to people from ConnectWise, to vendors, to MSPs. And I thought, ‘What a great industry.’ They had the same problem that I saw in retail. There were a lot of people working directly with customers, and they were in a thankless job. A very hard job, and getting yelled at all the time by customers. But there was no real way to recognize them on a daily basis for the hard work they did. And in an MSP, if techs may back up or disengage just a little bit, all of a sudden you have an average service desk, right? You have average field engineers. There’s no way for you to really differentiate your MSP. This was an opportunity to help MSPs find opportunities to recognize their employees.
So we built out integrations into the ticketing systems. We started with ConnectWise, then Autotask, then Kaseya BMS, Microsoft Teams, IT Glue, and other PSAs. We automate the feedback coming in. We collect it, we report on it, but we also created a way where positive feedback could automatically lead to recognition for their guys. So those employees felt like they were being seen where they hadn’t felt seen before. And just that little bit of recognition motivates them to engage on a consistent basis and create this service culture which will differentiate one MSP from another. But now MSPs can operationalize it to get more Google reviews to work on your reputation, use in your sales process to show how they take care of customers and how they take care of employees.
Do you have any empirical data that shows how improving the positive feedback for MSP employees actually makes a difference for their business?
We collected close to 600,000 responses from surveys over the over the last 12 months. I think last month alone we collected over 70,000 in less than last 30 days. These were typically responses to tickets that were opened and closed by an MSP customer who then responded to whether it was good, neutral, or bad. We got written feedback in a lot of them.
We help MSPs get more surveys and improve their CSAT (customer satisfaction) score. Now, when we compare customers that only use the CSAT portion against those that use the recognition and rewards portion, we find a difference of 30 percent in the amount of feedback collected. In other words, people who use CSAT surveys plus rewards and recognition collect 30 percent more surveys than those who only use CSAT. We also found that those who use recognition rewards improve their CSAT score base by just over 7 percent. And if you collect more feedback, and you have a higher CSAT score, that is going to affect the growth of your of your MSP.
How does that data help in terms of recognizing actual individuals within the MSPs who are basically the customer-facing part of the business?
First, we do it right at the survey level. So if a tech is attached to a ticket, and it closes, it’s a positive survey, they can send out an automatic recognition worth what we call “Crewcoins.” Or the MSP could have a contest with all of their techs and reward all the techs that hit the goal, or they could reward the tech in the first, second, and third place. So there’s a number of ways to do that. In addition, if you want to support and maintain the service culture, you do that by using the core values of the organization to empower employees to recognize one another for helping each other out. For instance, one core value may be, ‘got my back.’ We expect when someone needs help, they feel that and can ask a colleague, ‘How can I help you?’ Let me let me contribute to this. Let me help you with this project.’ So I can give a fellow tech a ‘got my back’ patch. And you’ll give it to them [with a personal note]. This creates this environment of teamwork, this environment of collaboration where people want to help one another.
What is a Crewcoin worth?
It’s based on the penny point system. So 100 Crewcoins is worth $1. One thousand Crewcoins is worth $10. And so you decide how many Crewcoins to award. We have a store where you could set up prizes. And the prizes could be very personal to your organization. Say you live in Canada and you’re by Whistler, so it can be a weekend ski trip. In Florida, it can be a weekend in the Keys where you learn how to scuba dive. Or we could do things more general, like automate gift cards for Best Buy or Amazon or Home Goods that focus on the things that that are important to your team. So one company’s one store may look different from the store in another company. You really want to make it personal.
The concept we came up with in Crewhu is that people understand recognition programs and reward programs are important to motivate employees. However, it’s hard to do. And there’s certain concepts that need to be followed. It’s our ‘4 Ps.’ You want to make sure you’re recognized publicly. You want to make sure you’re recognized promptly, so when you see it, say it. Our platform allows you to give spot recognition really easy. You have to be proportionate to the action taken. So if it’s something that normally happens on a daily basis, it’s a certain amount. If it’s something that’s more of a weekly incident, it’s maybe a little higher. And finally, you want to make it personal. You want to give a specific person recognition. There are certain awards for the team, but there are certain awards where you want to call someone out personally because they put in the effort.
When you are recognizing the small wins, consistently and daily, people are alright with negative. People don’t like negative because they don’t feel safe. But working with the ‘relationship bank account,’ if there’s a lot of positive going on, they’re OK with it. They understand that the negative is to help you. And there’s accountability. You need to do your job, and you need to do what’s right. And there’s something about making a mistake when taking risks and failing, and on the other side there’s failing because of negligence or lack of care. We always try to set up an environment where it’s OK to make a mistake. It’s not all about being perfect.
What are some things Crewhu is doing to improve the platform going forward?
We’re really focusing on the data. We’re creating dashboards that shows what the lower third CSAT percentage is, what the middle third looks like, what the upper third looks like. We’re breaking down recognition and the engagement percentage by those thirds. We’re looking at the Crewcoins given per employee by those thirds. We’re working a lot with the data and analytics to see what integrations are important. And we’re focusing on some popular integrations that are coming out. We just launched an integration with [ScalePad’s] Lifecycle Insights. We feel the more we plug into these platforms, the easier it will be for MSPs.
What’s the biggest prize that an employee of one of your MSP customers has ever received?
I heard this from my team. It was a lunch with a CEO. It was it was a lot of money. I don’t remember offhand how many Crewcoins it was. But it was an extraordinary amount. It would take months to get enough Crewcoins to redeem this prize. The employees were really curious. Finally, someone redeemed it. I think it was a California MSP, and the CEO chartered a private plane to take them to Las Vegas for a lunch and then they flew back. Some other cool things I heard were helicopter rides. A funny one I heard of was a pie in the boss’ face. There’s a lot of creative things. The most popular though are gift cards. People like to spend money on things, but with a family, there’s a guilt factor where you might not spend money on a new PS3 game you want. But here, the key point is, it doesn’t matter. It’s really free money. So it allows them to splurge on themselves.LEARN MORE: Professional Services | Channel Programs
Joseph F. Kovar is a senior editor and reporter for the storage and the non-tech-focused channel beats for CRN. He keeps readers abreast of the latest issues related to such areas as data life-cycle, business continuity and disaster recovery, and data centers, along with related services and software, while highlighting some of the key trends that impact the IT channel overall. He can be reached at [email protected].
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