[Webinar Transcript, March 2022]

Ben Leighton:

Thanks for joining us today. My name is Ben, I'm on the marketing team here at Kenect. Today we're going to talk about three key things to fixing staffing issues and avoiding employee burnout. I'm sure you've dealt with this in the last few months. It's gaining momentum as we head into 2022, so we wanted to address it, give you some tips to help you out. We're going to start off by talking about Kenect for about five minutes, and then get into the meat of the webinar. It shouldn't last more than about 20 minutes. If you have any questions, please feel free to type them in over there on the questions tab over on the panel, and I'll get to them as we get throughout this webinar, or for sure at the end when there's more time. So with that, let's get started here.

First off, who is Kenect? We are based in the Silicon Slopes of Utah, that's outside Salt Lake City. We're a text messaging platform for equipment dealers throughout North America, and we were founded by dealers and built for dealers. We help you communicate more efficiently, generate new leads, collect payment via text message and drive online reviews. We're actually the 25th fastest growing software company in America, that's according to Inc. 5000. We're also the 216th fastest growing company in America overall, so we've seen tremendous growth over the last year and really show no signs of slowing down as more dealers realize the benefits of texting, because that's kind of where the trend is heading, especially into 2022 during the pandemic.

Why business texting?

Why do your customers prefer text messaging? 89% of consumers would prefer to interact with business via text message rather than a phone call, 98% of text messages are open, and 95% of those are read within three minutes. So you're going to get a response fast, and you're going to be able to talk to customers quickly and give them information as things come in. 96% of consumers find phone calls to be disruptive, and 78% of US consumers say receiving a text message is the fastest way to reach them for important service updates and purchases. So if you have something coming up, an inventory issue, a staffing issue that's really hanging you up in your service department, this is the fastest way to reach customers, and it's what they're expecting, especially during the pandemic. They've seen text messages rise, and so this is where they want to be.

This is from one of our dealers: "We used to call customers, but 75% of the time they wouldn't answer. So now we text them with Kenect, and they immediately text us back."

This is the little button that we add to increase leads on your website. People just click it, and if they have questions about any service you have or any equipment you have, they can ask you. All these texts head into an inbox that looks like this. Similar to an email, you see the number, the person that's texting in, when it came in or what they texted about, and then also you can assign salespeople to it. So you can see on the side there, you can have names next to each customer or each number that comes in so that you can have them answer it specifically, have them handle it from the start, and so they can look at this platform.

This is all done through your existing business line, so you don't have to use your personal number, your salespeople don't have to give out their personal number. All these texts and questions and all that are done through the existing business line. So whoever is assigned to this person... Of course you can say, "Hey, my name's Bill. I'm handling your account," but you can also just text them back from the existing business lines. So they have one number that they're texting back, so anyone can respond, and it's really simple and easy for the customer.

Similar look on the mobile app. This is free in the App Store. So your employees can use this to send quick replies. You can actually use your camera to send photos and schedule messaging, and also do video chats.

We also started a new feature, which we wanted to mention, broadcast messaging. You can conveniently send a message to a subset of your customers by creating groups, scheduling a message or send one right away, easily identify and reply to broadcast messages right inside your inbox, and then quickly filter out broadcast messages based on scheduled or sent. So inside the inbox, you just click the little button over on the side, and you create a new group so that you can figure out which people you want to send this message to, maybe it's 300, maybe it's just a few, and then you name the group, pick the title of whoever you want to send it to, and then fill out the information and then hit Send, and then you can see here it shows you how many people in your contact group it's actually sending to, so you can keep track of who's gotten this message, who still needs to get the message, so you're not sending it all to everybody all at once. You can filter this, you can adjust it so you keep things flowing in your service department or your sales department, especially if you're getting into the situation where spring's coming up and you want to make sure that these people are getting their service done for the spring out of the winter. This is a great way to do that and actually keep revenue flowing. You hit approve, and then it looks like this when it shows up for your customer. So they can just click the link and schedule through the app, through the appointment reminder, and it's easy for them and easy for you to keep track of all this.

The top eight ways that dealers use Kenect: scheduling appointments, setting up automated reminders, sending quick information like hours, maps, and "Your equipment's ready for pickup," you can send targeted warranty reminders and scheduled maintenance notices, you can also collect payments via text message. Video chat with customers, like we just talked about, attach and send photos, videos, invoices, and PDFs, especially if you have bills that you need to send, you can send them the whole bill and show them exactly, line by line, what's going on so that invoice and PDF can go right through that platform. Generate online reviews from Google and Facebook, and then capture more leads from Facebook, Instagram, and your website.

Avoiding employee burnout.

One of the main things that's happening right now is staffing, right? Staffing issue is the big problem. What's being called the great resignation. A lot of people are prioritizing their lives rather than a job, but what really is the key factor is burnout, and we want to get into that just a little bit. So, we'll give you some stats and then some solutions. First off, what are we seeing? Well, 38 million people quit their jobs between January and November of 2021. 4.5 million people quit their jobs in November alone, and that's according to US Labor and Statistics. That's the highest level in nearly two years, since right after the pandemic. According to Gallop, 57% of workers reported feeling stressed on a daily basis in the past 12 months.

We hear a lot about people resigning or leaving because pay is not great or they just want to start something new, but mostly what we're seeing is burnout. People are just being stressed out by inventory issues or being overworked, or just feeling the pinch of what's going on around them, especially during the pandemic. So they're just feeling the burnout, and that's mainly what's driving this huge staffing shortage. 52% of employees said they reported feeling burnout in some form or another, and 25% of employees say they routinely underperform due to stress. That's a huge deal. So people that are actually still there, 25% of your workforce is actually feeling like they're underperforming because of the stress that they're feeling. 55 hours per week of work or more is associated with 35% higher risk of stroke compared to working just 40. We're seeing people working overtime, we're seeing that trend, and that's a huge deal, especially when you're talking about burnout. You want to make sure that you're providing solutions to employees to make sure that you are not leaving them in the lurch, and you're also taking some stuff off their plate to keep burnout not an issue. So some of the solutions, you need to take a look at.

First off, adopt a plan that makes you and your employees happy. Sit down, ask your employees what's going on, what they're feeling. Some may be burnt out, some may not, some may just say, "Hey, if you'd just take this off my plate, I'll be fine," that kind of thing. So just make sure you're talking to your employees and making sure you know what they're dealing with on a daily basis.

Abandon perfectionism and look for more simple answers. This doesn't mean you need to abandon your goals. You just need to adjust as things pop up, right? We've seen a lot of changes over the last year, and you need to adjust as it goes. Be flexible, and also make sure that your employees can give you, you know what your employees are capable of. You're just looking for simple answers, making sure that you know what you can accomplish.

Don't focus on who has quit, focus on finding solutions. We're seeing this quite a bit. A lot of people are focusing on saying, "Well, I lost four people. I need to replace the four people right away." That's just not feasible. We're not seeing that in the job market. People just aren't returning as fast as we thought, so rather than focusing on who has quit, focus on finding solutions, like adopting a new system, a new communication system, something like that takes something off the plate of your employees.

Find ways to reduce stress in the workplace. Maybe a couple extra breaks, or maybe just things like you don't have to sit on the phone all day, you can use a texting system, something like that, so you're actually giving time back to your employees, you can also set boundaries for workers and your customers. What that means is you're telling your workers, "Hey, we're not going to get this part in until next week," and then make sure that they know they can tell customers that. Making sure your customers know, "Hey, we're dealing with staffing shortages and inventory issues," so your customers are aware and there's no mystery around that. So it's easy for them to adjust and to figure out, "Okay, this is what I should expect," especially around this time. Everybody's dealing with this, so it's not going to be a mystery to customers. If you're open and transparent with them, they're likely to stick around, because they know that everyone else is dealing with the same thing.

The economic impacts of burnout are significant, costing the US some $4.6 billion every year. That's according to the Annals of Internal Medicine. This isn’t just about burnout, this is just about all the medical issues that are associated with burnout, so just making sure that we're not putting more on their plate than employees can handle and making sure you're adopting that plan.

Set expectations about communication with employees and customers. Just let them know what you're dealing with. Let them know what you expect of them. You don't want the moon, but you want to make sure that they have the tools needed to make sure they're communicating with customers efficiently and making sure customers know what's going on. Try developing solutions like standardizing workloads. That's an easy thing to do, especially if you're saying, "Okay, well, you do this, you do that," adjusting the workload for employees.

I think the thing that gets lost sometimes is when people leave, all of those duties go back to the employees that are still there, and so if it just keeps piling up, and piling up, we don't realize that all of a sudden, one employee is doing five jobs, and we don't know that until we talk to our employees and ask them what's going on. So trying to develop solutions that standardize workloads and making sure you're talking to your employees, setting expectations and making sure you know what they're dealing with so that you can create a plan yourself.

Push back deadlines that aren't urgent. This goes back to the goals thing, making sure you're keeping your goals, of course, but be more realistic about what the deadlines could be. Don't set yourself up for failure. We all know we have lofty goals and we want to hit them, of course, but we are trying to make sure that we are hitting those deadlines when we can and adjusting as things pop up. So automating certain systems that we can helps alleviate that, making sure that texting is also part of that, and we want to take that phone call time away from employees. What I mean by that is we're taking texting as more of the standard and calls as less of the standard. So if your employee is, say, spending hours on the phone trying to get people to pay bills, it's easier if they can just text them. That takes a few hours away. That takes time away from their day, maybe a day. That takes something away from their workload, another task that they don't have to do, that kind of thing. So making sure that you are automating tasks.

The second thing that I wanted to talk about was communication. Touching on this real quick, dealers sometimes struggle to set communication boundaries. Some give out their personal cell numbers to customers. Very few set boundaries and expectations about communication. So what we want to do is have you stop giving out your personal cell number. Through the Kenect platform, we use your business line for that. All of that platform is done through your existing business line. We call your carrier, we set it up. It's really easy, and it's just adding another tool to your business line already. People can still call you. It's just adding that other element that customers are actually more aware of these days, especially during the pandemic. You don't have to take customer calls after hours. You can actually balance responsiveness with boundaries. This also takes a huge load off employees, because they don't have to be sitting by the phone, or they don't have to have their phone with them at all times. They can just have customers hit this platform, text the platform, somebody will respond. They don't have to be the ones that are there sitting by the phone all night.

This is just to show you what we are talking about. A typical lead waits over an hour to be responded to, and there's a large variability between after hours response times and dealerships being the most responsive, but still, there's a three and a half hour wait for people to get a response after hours, and what I mean by this is this shows you the difference between using your personal line or using your business line that doesn't have a texting feature, versus the platform that we offer, because you can set up automated texts that text people back right away. As soon as they text in with a lead, you say, "Hey, we're going to get back to you. It's after our hours, but as soon as somebody comes in, we'll get back to you."

You don't actually have to have somebody sit by the phone all the time, and you don't have to have somebody stay late in the night to make sure that you're capturing these leads. You can just have this platform, it's on their phone, it's easy for them to see, it's texting through the existing business line. So that specific employee doesn't actually have to respond. You can have somebody else respond with them through that business line, because it's all coming out of the same number. It's easy for them to use this and easy for them to figure it out, and also to save them time, and save them time from having to sit there at all hours of the night or to give their personal cell number to make sure that they're giving this out.

Using texting to set boundaries. No need about your personal cell number. You just text the business line, you can route whoever is assigned to handle the after hours communication, so you can have one employee, that's their job. So instead of having them do five jobs and doing all this other stuff, you can have one employee that's assigned to handle after hours communication, or you can just create an automated quick reply, like we talked about.

So if you do get after hours responses and you want to respond, texting takes two seconds, and then phone calls take minutes. Maybe you're leaving a voicemail too and waiting for a response. So you're trying to make sure you're cutting that time down between responding to potential customers, but also making sure that you're responsive and that you're not giving out your personal cell number.

The last point is to find solutions, and then ways to create revenue. First off is be proactive. Text everyone who's bought from you in the last three to four years. So what I mean by that is you can set up that automated texting system or do the broadcast messaging if you'd like, but you can text everyone who's bought from you in the last three to four years and just say, "Hey, we noticed you haven't come in a little while. Do you want to come in and get your equipment serviced?", that kind of thing. So that keeps revenue flowing.

Be transparent about how long things take. This is for your employees and your customers. We touched on this a little bit, but if you're transparent, it's going to go a long way. Customers are going to realize that you're going to tell them the truth on everything that's coming up, and especially since your competitor is probably doing the same thing, then you want to be right there telling your customers exactly what's going on. Everyone's dealing with inventory issues, everyone's dealing with staffing issues, so they're going to be understanding. It's not going to be a mystery, but as long as you're transparent, they're going to stick around.

Don't wait for them to reach out, reach out to them. So what I mean by that is if something's happening in your sales department or your service department, if you're trying to fix their equipment, you want to reach out to them and say, "Hey, your equipment's about an hour away from being done. Just trying to keep you updated," or, "Here's what we found," that kind of thing. You don't want them to text you first. You want to be able to be proactive, and this is an easy way to do it. It takes two seconds to get through this. You text a customer and you say, "Almost done, an hour away. Couple seconds," and you send it off and they know that they're getting updates and they know what the status is.

Make them feel like they're part of the team, that they're in it with you. Make sure that they know what's going on around them and what's going on in the service bay, and then over-communicate. If you think you haven't texted them in a while, send them a text and say, "Here's what's going on," or, "Here's what we're on now," or something like that, so that you can keep that communication going and keep them engaged and make sure that they know that they're part of this and that they are getting the latest information from you.

Increase in remote payments.

Remote payment popularity. It gained momentum during the pandemic, and it has not stopped. This is something that we wanted to share because we know that this is kind of daunting for some people, but it's something that's important and has gained momentum, and really, this is what customers are looking for. Customer convenience via contactless interaction. They've gotten used to this kind of thing, they've gotten used to the text-to-pay over their phone, and so it's easy for them to navigate this. Instead of having to come into your department and pay a bill, they actually do it over the phone. Cards aren't going away, but shift to remote forms of payment is happening right now.

Simplicity and convenience, that's the bottom line. Customers say they prefer to continue shopping online or smartphones for home delivery, freeing up time for people and activities more important to them. So this is what it means, because we're seeing this shift as we deal with staffing and inventory issues. This is an easy way to take something off the plate of your employee, and this is how we do it. We collect deposits via payments, via text message from sales and service. You can collect service tickets on special order parts with a 98% open rate, like we talked about earlier, allowing for after hours pickups and remote drop offs by collecting pre-payments. You can also increase over the phone sales and offer curbside pickup. You can get paid faster and reduce accounts receivable. There's the huge help to your employees. You're taking that task away from them, so they don't actually have to be sitting around all day dealing with accounts receivable. Not everyone's going to use text-to-pay, but it's certainly going to take a huge chunk out of the time that they have to use for this, because if people are actually filling this out themselves, they don't have to sit over the phone, get the card number, get their name, all the security information, all that stuff, they don't have to do that. They can have the customer fill it out themselves, and you get next day funding, and it's a hundred percent secure.

Why text-to-pay? Why are we looking at this? Because we've seen four times year over year growth per location, and some dealers are actually running 80% of service and parts payments through text-to-pay. So it's really the trend, right? This is what's happening. Not everyone is using text-to-pay, but it's certainly growing, as you see here in this graph. Simply and convenience is really key. This text-to-pay growth started really hitting a head during the pandemic, but it has grown exponentially over the last year. We really are seeing this grow because customers are seeing this as the best option. They don't want to come in and do face-to-face interactions. They'd rather just fill it out themselves.

So how does this look? You click on the little payments icon at the bottom, you send them the link and said, "Here's the link to fill out your information and send us the payment." You click in the amount, you type in the description of what they're paying for, and then the customer completes it, and they know that this is you because you can click the little logo at the top. We can actually change that to your company's logo. So they know where it's coming from, they know it's you, and they know what they're paying for, because you've sent the description in to them. They fill out their name, they fill out the card number and all the pertinent information, and they send it back to you, reducing the amount of time your employees have to use on this and reducing the amount of time they have to interact with you. So it's in and out, quick and easy. They barely have to interact, they can come pick up their equipment, you can leave it for them outside. Say, "Here's the keys. This is it." That's it. You have limited interaction, because they've paid before and they're ready to go.

Benefits of Kenect.

The six key benefits of texting, we just want to go over this real quick. Generate more leads via the website widget, which we showed you, the “Text Us” button. Generating five star reviews that stand out online to sell more units. You can also use video chat in sales and service for more effective communication. You can also collect deposits and payments from sales and service, which we just showed you, and then texting from your existing business line. That's probably the biggest thing that we wanted to talk about. That changes things if you're not actually giving out your personal cell phone anymore, you're texting through your existing business line. We connect that through your carrier. It's just another option for your customer. Really easy for them to use, because they've most likely used it before, and it's really simple, because everyone has access to this platform. Every one of your employees who you want to can have access to this platform, so they can see it, anyone can respond. It's all coming through your existing business line. So messages are able to flow smoothly and you're not giving out your personal cell phone.

And with that, if you'd like, feel free to text us, and you can also get a free demo, we can set up and show you how it would work for your business so that you can see a personalized look at what this tool can do for you, what we can offer you, especially as we're getting into 2022, you want to be able to offer another tool for customers to be able to reach out to you and communicate more efficiently, and especially with staffing issues, that's become more key.

Questions over here from Ted. "What OPE companies are currently using Kenect?" We are connected with Honda OPE, Husqvarna, a lot of OPE companies that are already using Kenect. I would say hundreds, if not thousands, because we've seen the growth and they've seen it and we've expanded. So we know that there are people, OPE companies are using this and have used it for a long time, and they know that it works and they're spreading the word. So we wanted to share this with you because other OPE companies do use it, and other OPE companies are seeing the value in it, especially when it comes to texting. This is just a tool that a lot of people don't necessarily think of in 2022, but we know that we've seen the growth and we've seen what companies can do and what customers respond to them. So they see the response from customers and they know that it works. So hopefully that answers your question.

Feel free to text us, get a free demo and learn more information. If you have any questions, you can call if you need to. We're ready to stand by. All right. Thank you for joining us. Really appreciate it. Hope you have a great rest of your week, and thanks a lot.

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