Dan Roberge:
Today we're talking to Paul Szymanski, our IT manager here at Maintenance Care. He's going to tell you all the deep down dirty secrets. So what have we been working on lately? Like, what are some of the stuff that we've been working on? Like, what would we talk about?
Paul Szymanski:
We've got a lot of projects in the pipeline. We're always quite busy, but this year we've been extremely busy. We've got some product updates. We're working on, upgrades, and that's a whole, whole process because we, you know, we get the requirements to the developers, they work on it, they test it, they give it to us. And, so we have to test it, and we try to get focused on that because we have other work coming in. So that's always a challenge. But, we've got to do it because the customers are always after new features. And, you know, sometimes we get a bug fix or two in there as well. And, the product has to grow, and we know that's important, too.
Dan Roberge:
Yeah, that's my favorite part. Like, since the beginning, like, since we started, maintenance care. My favorite part. It's always been the new feature development. Like, whenever our lead developer releases something out to the, you know, to the live production server. I'm always like, it's like Christmas. He knows. Like, I feel like it's the new thing. So. So I've always enjoyed that. I love designing the interface with our dev team to come up with the best way for our customers to see things. And then, but the part I never liked was the part that you're doing, which is the testing and the making, documenting, testing, making sure everything's, you know, working correctly. And so, I mean, do you like doing that stuff?
Paul Szymanski:
We see the fruits of our efforts, you know, the additions, the features, the changes that are going in there for a reason. And we usually empathize with the reason because we get the customers coming in on support saying, hey, can we get this? We'd like to request this, or sometimes it's just, you know, fine tuning something that's there that just needs a little polish on it. So we see the fruits of our efforts is that we get, customers that don't have to call in for support, or customers that could use these new features. So, I think it a lot of work. It's not necessarily fun, but we take pride in doing it well because it makes our lives easier and makes the customers, you know, makes the software more useful to our customers, which is the end goal.
Dan Roberge:
Yeah. And people don't realize how much detail work it is to test. Right. It's just like, oh, press this button. Is it working? No, that's not all that is. You have to do it like like are some of the things that you can think of that you have to do systematically, let's say when you're doing testing on a new feature that maybe we missed something, you know, what are some of those examples?
Paul Szymanski:
Yeah. So there's, I mean, maintenance care is a whole lot of things. It's a lot of information, but it's a lot of workflows, and it's very flexible. You can access information, from one part of maintenance care in different areas of maintenance care. So you might be getting asset information from a task, or you might be going into the asset module, or who knows. So there's different ways to get at the same information. And that can be, you know, where we sometimes get caught and we try to look for that so we don't get caught. So yes, we fix that if you get to that information from this perspective. But if you come in from a different direction, oh shoot, we forgot it looks a little different there. So we want it to be harmonized. So it's the same data regardless of how you look at it or how you approach it.
Dan Roberge:
Yeah. And so and we have different user or security roles, or they're accessing it from let's say different browsers, or you know, so there's always these weird things that can catch us that, we forget all this particular situation is so unique. We didn't test for it.
Paul Szymanski:
That's true, that's true. And, we have such a you know, we've got a diverse, marketplace for our software. We have different types of customers, you know, whether it be health care or manufacturing, institutions, municipal, governments, so, so mean as well. I don't have to tell you how flexible it is. And it's so flexible that these customers can use it in different ways.And, and and it's not like one way is right or wrong, and that's the flexibility that's been built into the product. But we need to, you know, be the customer's advocate when we're testing because we know customers use this feature in different ways. So we really have to have our radar on when we're testing it. And be, be aware and look at the details.
Dan Roberge:
So the other thing too is like, we don't make it easy on you because we have four products, right? So it's mainly here's the most complex and the most, evolved. But we've been updating steadily, pretty aggressively new features across different platforms. So that doesn't make it easy on the team.
Paul Szymanski:
It does make for a lot of work for the team to juggle all these products. We've got some, you know, some of our people in testing and tech support that, I think of them as Swiss Army knives because they can pull out a new blade when they get a support call or when they're doing product testing that, you know, there's a lot of different arms to that, to that knife. And, you know, they really have to be flexible and, have a lot of product knowledge and, and, and customer knowledge as well. You know, like I say, I can't emphasize enough how diverse our customers are, and their needs are different because they're in different industries.
Dan Roberge:
So yeah, and that's how in a sense, that's how care clean was born. Our other software about that is specific to housekeeping because, you know, we were getting customers that are using maintenance care as a maintenance software. And then they were asking, oh, well, we want to use it for housekeeping. And it made sense for a while. But then, you know, they wanted some specific features that were for clean. So we decided we have to create a separate tool that is unique to that. And so that, I think, you know, people don't understand maybe how related to the customer support issues, our product development is, we track those and what do we do for that? Like that? We track our issues and we, you know, we categorize them and we later develop, you know, features based on their suggestions or their issues.
Paul Szymanski:
Absolutely. So, you know, the frequent requests get to the top. You know, if we have many customers asking for the same feature or same adjustment, you know, we hear that and, you know, we've got some big customers, with many locations, in different products. And we've got little customers, using just one product for one location. But, you know, we hear them, you know, we can't be everything to everybody, but we like to put in the features that are going to help a lot of customers. And, and help in different industry. So, so there's some features that, you know, we put in that, help all the customers who are using a product, you know, maybe care clean. There's, you know, in maintenance care, we might put in a feature that's more, for one vertical industry because, you know, health care is asking for this, or or automotive is asking for this. Care clean is really maturing into a product that addresses some specific needs, especially scheduling and things like that, that, you know, it just proves time and time again that if you buy software, you know, made to address the solution you need, it's going to do that. You know, I've been on the other side of this. The first part of my career, I was the customer. I was sourcing software solutions. You know, early in my career, they were all premise based. You know, we would install them on our servers and, over the years, you know, then it was VMs on our own servers, virtual machines, and then it was cloud based. And, obviously, you know, as somebody who was sourcing these solutions for my, company, my, my enterprise, the cloud based solutions were, you know, by far the better way to go. It's to solve so many problems for me as an administrator. You know, product integrity, backups, security, scalability. I didn't have to update my software on my servers. It was just it was a win win situation. And, you know what I really like about maintenance care and, I think most of our products, if not all, is the month to month, feature. I mean, I remember when I was sourcing software, in my previous jobs, and they wanted us to buy it, you know, you had to buy this software was going to cost you, you know, 30,000, 50,000 dollars. And it's like, boy, you really got to do your homework and make sure it's going to fit. Or they wanted you to contract for a year to start. And it's well, that's the same diligence because once you switch over, it's hard to switch away. So it's not just the financial commitment, it's you're telling your organization, hey, you're going to have to use this software for a year, because if they buy it, they're not going to let us buy something else because we don't like it. So I remember just loving the licensing model where you can go month to month because it made it my life easier. I still do it by my due diligence, but you know, you weren't sticking your neck out. And it also showed that the software company had that kind of confidence in their product that they didn't have to try to hook you for a year to get you as a customer.
Dan Roberge:
Yeah, it's hard. You know, it's funny you say that because I think, when we hire salespeople, for example, a lot of them are programmed initially when they come in to do the hard sell. And, you know, salespeople are like, good at, you know, convincing you need this, how great it is, but usually aren't around to suffer the consequences of your regret. Once you've bought something, you don't like and now you're trying to find them and they're like, well, no, you bought it. Too bad. You know you're married to us. But, with us, like, we don't sell that way because you are month to month, and you can cancel any time. So it's a little different sometimes. It's actually not for everyone. We've lost salespeople because they sometimes can't get their head around the idea that they're responsible for making sure it's going to be a good fit with the customer, not just the sale. And I think that definitely holds us accountable to, making a good product and, and then following that up with good support.
Dan Roberge:
But you're involved as well. We have SLA's in I.T. As our IT manager, you are responsible for delivering on some of those SLA's. And, and so what how does that work in our company like, you know, get some insight as to what we do to make sure that our customers are well looked after and in a timely manner?
Paul Szymanski:
Actually, you know, we've done a lot in the, in the last period about that. We've always taken that very seriously, but we've instituted a lot of new, tracking so we can see the metrics. And it's not just to, report up to the executives and whatnot, because I know people like yourself, you know, you want to know what's going on. So we share that information with everybody every week, staff meetings, manager meetings. Everybody sees our metrics. And where the trends are. And I think that's very important because, sometimes. Yes, sometimes the trend is not maybe where we want it to be. So we need to push some resources There or get some focus, or visibility to it. And sometimes, you know, we're very proud of the job we're doing, and we can demonstrate, hey, we're doing a good job on live chats or we're doing a good job on direct calls. And, you know, it's not just a feeling. It's hard data. And we see that and we see what the history has been over time. So we want people to be proud when there's good results and, when we need to focus some efforts on remediation or improving, then we have the tools to do that.
Dan Roberge:
So, yeah, we've, I think the biggest, leap forward that we did or in recent time for support has been the live chat. And you're not talking to a bot or an AI. You're talking to our team, and everybody in the morning logs into this chat and they need to be ready. I've done this, like I've gone on like let's say a sales demo with a big customer, and I say, and they say, what is that button? I'm like, that's the live chat. You can talk to our team. And they're like, press it. Let's see how fast they respond. But every time I get a response within our SLA, which is what it's one minute, right, is our response time minimum, maximum one minute that you're going to get somebody that actually is going to talk to you.
Paul Szymanski:
Correct. That's what we great ourselves on and we take it very seriously. So our internal SLA right now is, for a live chat to be with, engaged within one minute 60s, 90% of the time or better. So we are tracking that, and we're quite proud of that. So I think, you know, what I tell my people and what we discuss is we've all been on the other side of that chat, you know, whether we're trying to get all of our phone company, maybe they're having a problem on their cell phone. We've all been on the other side of that. And, the people who reach out to us by live chat, they, they want a relatively quick solution. They want to talk to somebody relatively soon. But they're multitasking. That's why they didn't pick up the phone. You know, they're working on something else. So our job is to help them do their job. And, you know, making sure that we get back to them within a minute and have somebody get engaged working on their problem. That's important. And we a lot of customers are just thrilled by that. We get really good feedback from our customers on our responsiveness or live chats. Now, that's not to say we can always solve their problem immediately, but we can tell them we can get their information immediately. And if necessary, get back to them, you know, very quickly with an answer.
Dan Roberge:
Yeah, that's the world of difference. I remember in the early days of, you know, this concept of good customer support, it wasn't always around. Like, honestly, like most companies did not have this, push for good service. And, you know, we were always surprised at how, let's say, how easy the return policy was for Costco warehouse. You know, Costco. It was one of the first that said, okay, we're going to allow a lot of returns, and it just brings a confidence to be able to buy from them. And then there was Apple. Apple for me, you know, kind of solidified in my mind that this was necessity for our company in that, you know, it would tell you how long you're going to wait on the phone, you're the next caller or it's going to be only a minute more. They would tell you that now a lot of companies have this, but at the time they were one of the first. And I just always found that level of service was needed. And people forget too, that even today a lot of software tools do not have live support as part of their agreement. And you have to email the ticket in. And, you're always dealing with somebody different. So you have to re-explain the problem. And, you know, depending on the severity, they might not get back to you. Try to submit a ticket to Google and you'll never hear back from them. You know, and I'm not talking bad about Google specifically, or saying they're terrible at the support. But, that's just from my personal experience. But I'll tell you that there has been a change for us, at least when we deal with our customers in an effective way, that way that they respond with wanting to stay our customers for a long time. And that's the benefit that we get from helping our customers that way. All right. So let's talk about also some security stuff. You know, part of your role is to make sure that our teams, our internal systems are secure, our customer's data is secure. You know, we currently host our platform on AWS, Amazon cloud. And, what kind of things do we do that help secure their data and, you know, customers would be interested in knowing that, help them feel better about using maintenance care and their information.
Paul Szymanski:
So one of the things I often, point out to customers is that maintenance care started out actually, all of our products started out from the ground up from day one as cloud based products. So I'm kind of proud of that. And the IT technical part of me appreciates that because there's a lot of software out there that was written to be on premise, dedicated servers, etc., etc. and when you design a product that way, that's a whole mindset. And a framework for how security and access and things are provisioned and controlled and monitored. So, ours is not one of those products that was started out as, you know, install on your server. And then we sort of ported it over to the cloud and fixed it up and, you know, changed things. It was designed from the ground up. So that is a huge advantage. When you know your product is going to be a cloud product, you design it with the mechanisms, the controls, the access, everything is inherent and integrated.
Dan Roberge:
You know, like obviously we have limited access to our database from, you know, a live database? We encrypt the information. But what kind of backups do we do? Like what do we do on that side of things?
Paul Szymanski:
We have, you know, we are using all of the awesome, capabilities at AWS doing backups. And, our Canadian customers can be happy to know that all of your data stays on Canadian soil and is backed up on Canadian soil and our U.S. customers, likewise, all of their data is on U.S. soil and backups are on U.S. soil. So, that should be reassuring. We have backups that are done. Throughout the day. We have a near real time backup, a database that's in near real time backup that's always available. We also have discrete backups that are, you know, portable and can be, used, if there was some sort of a need for them.
Dan Roberge:
Yeah. We have limited access to. And that's the thing is, people, because we were family owned in a sense. Right? We're not, outside investors who come in and have a board of directors that dictate who should have what, and so on. We've really limited to the ownership group as far as like the keys to the kingdom of the data. And then everybody else has limited access based on their role, specifically. And that's monitored.
Paul Szymanski:
That's correct. Access is taken very seriously because it's no good to have a very secure product if you allow our staff to get in there and just do whatever. We use role-based access.
Dan Roberge:
Now, the team, we've got some developers, we have support people that you manage every day. What types of people are we looking for if they want to apply to work at Maintenance Care at Gen Core? What are your ideal candidates for either developers or support teams?
Paul Szymanski:
Yeah, I'll start by saying we use a whole gamut of resources here. We have full-stack developers, report writers, and technical support people. We also have people who do training, which can sometimes be technical. We have people that massage data; a lot of times, our customers have data they want us to bulk upload for them. We can work with that, and we have people working on data conversion. The type of people I like to have on my staff are those who can put themselves in the customer's shoes. The outcome is always going to be better. Sometimes I almost close my eyes and think about a project or what it's like from the other side. I want my staff to think that way because we are not here to make our product do what we think it should do. We are here to make our customers' lives easier by helping them get their work done. Whatever that means to the customer is our goal.
Does that mean getting on a call with the customer, saying, "Hey, I don't understand. You're a long-term care facility, and you're doing things differently than everyone else. Why is that?" Let's understand it because we don't want to say what you're trying to do is invalid or isn't a good idea. Maybe we just need to understand it. So we've gained a lot of industry knowledge by working that way, asking our customers what they want to do and why. Sometimes we share industry solutions that a lot of customers like and are very common. But we're open to new ways of doing things. If a customer says, "Yeah, everybody else does it that way, but we don't because of this and this, and here's what we're trying to do," that's great. We're going to help them do that, and we're going to gain some more insights into that industry along the way.
Dan Roberge:
Yeah, absolutely. When we've talked about hiring new people, it's about having a good knowledge of the job you need to do. Obviously, you have to have the technical capabilities, but be customer-focused, right? Like you're saying, that is a big one. Even developers are known as being kind of sitting in the corner and just working on their computers. But we have developers that talk to customers because they need to understand what we're trying to achieve. If a customer requested a feature, we want them to get it right from the source, so there might be a need to connect directly with the customer. You can't be a full introvert and not want to speak to others. We work collaboratively with each other, so there's obviously a social component that needs to also exist. And I think the one thing is being able to do other things as well. We don't only just do this job; we all do a whole bunch of things here at Maintenance Care, at GNXcor. So, I think openness to do other things is probably a big deal too.
Paul Szymanski:
Yeah, and that works both ways. When I'm recruiting or interviewing somebody, I will talk about that. That's almost a promise to them: "Hey, we're not going to just put you in one silo and keep you there and make you do the same thing all the time." So that's, as far as I'm concerned, a job perk—that we wear a lot of hats. That's good for the company and it's good for the person and the employee. It also helps when we get really busy in one area. Maybe we're onboarding a whole bunch of new customers, and we need a couple of people to jump in and do the job that normally only one person does. So, having that kind of flexibility of wearing different hats gives us additional resources when we need to focus them in one area.
Dan Roberge:
It's a great place to work, so that's a great point. Well, thank you, Paul, I appreciate your time. We're probably going to do this again. Maybe we'll do another touch point sometime in the future. If you're a Maintenance Care customer and you need to ask our team for any technical issues, it's Paul's staff that is helping. So if you have any issues, you can escalate those issues right to Paul.
Paul Szymanski:
That's why we're here.
Dan Roberge:
That's right.
Paul Szymanski:
And I look forward to doing another one of these.
Dan Roberge:
Absolutely, excellent. Thank you very much. Thank you.
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