Take This Job and Shove It featuring Sarah Betts

Transcript

Rob Dwyer (00:02.52)
Sarah Betts, you are next in queue. Thank you for joining. How are you?

Sarah Betts (00:07.157)
I am so glad to be here Rob, this is exciting.

Rob Dwyer (00:10.976)
It is exciting. I have to just start off and ask, can I call you Betts? Okay, great. That's how we're gonna roll. Sarah, you are currently the Director of Support and Operations for Vizit, but you have been in the support world for someone as young as you are, 29, I believe, for a long time.

Sarah Betts (00:17.095)
Yes, please. Please do. Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah Betts (00:28.746)
Yes.

Sarah Betts (00:36.363)
Yes, yes, longer than my adult life apparently. It's been a while. I have seen some things. Yeah, yeah, it's been a good place for me. It really has been.

Rob Dwyer (00:41.006)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (00:52.64)
You, I should mention, were the 2019 Stevie Award winner for Customer Support Woman of the Year. Like that's a big deal.

Sarah Betts (00:59.879)
my gosh, you Doug. Yes, I was. That is a big deal. And, you know, I just have to shout out my manager at Olark at the time, Emily Russell. She, she was doing all the work to nominate our team for support team. And I helped her out with that some, but then she slipped my name in as an individual contributor and I was.

Absolutely shocked that I won, but that was a huge honor. Yes.

Rob Dwyer (01:31.274)
I feel like we've recently had a conversation with all of the lists that go out there and kind of the way those happen. But I do feel like these awards by things like Stevie Awards or different, there are awards out there where the people that are nominated and the vetting process and the judging process because

Sarah Betts (01:43.903)
Mm-hmm.

Rob Dwyer (02:00.45)
I know I've been a part of that before, is very thorough. the people that are judging those things are, number one, there's a lot of criteria established for it. Each submission has all of this information justifying the why, why you should be considered for this particular award. So I just want to make it clear that that's not like being on just one of these lists on a website that just

Sarah Betts (02:04.715)
It is.

Rob Dwyer (02:29.486)
throws together a bunch of names.

Sarah Betts (02:30.855)
Yeah, I don't know if that's still a thing, but I remember the who's who thing used to go around. And it's just a pay to play. If you would just pay your money, and I get those all the time, like we've nominated you for one of the top 50 whatever in Oregon or West Coast or tech. But yeah, the Stevie Awards was like, they dug into like, how many chats I handled, my resolution time, how I was working with other departments, my CSAT, my all of that stuff. Yeah, was a lot.

Rob Dwyer (02:36.29)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Rob Dwyer (02:59.916)
Yeah, it's pretty cool thing. And you spent a long time at Alyce, which was acquired by Sendoso. And then you just recently moved. It's been what? About six months, right? Give or take?

Sarah Betts (03:09.547)
You

Sarah Betts (03:16.851)
Yeah, six, seven months was September, early September, late August when I started at Vizit. So yeah, it hasn't been too long.

Rob Dwyer (03:23.938)
Yeah. I mean, what we want to talk about today is kind of a very nuanced and an interesting conversation that I don't think we talk about enough. I have certainly talked about handling downsizing. know that, you know, Coach Rios, one time we talked about handling a RIF as a leader who's still in an organization. But I think

right now there are certainly a lot of people out there thinking about their own job security.

My question to you is, when we think about job security, are we thinking about it the wrong way?

Sarah Betts (04:09.963)
Absolutely. You know, 29 years ago when I was born, the belief was our parents taught us work hard, be loyal to a company, and that's where you work. And that worked for them. mean, my parents were teachers. They stayed with their school district for a long time. You my husband's dad was an electrician. He just, you know, kept going on that. It was the thing where you got a good job and you stayed there.

and then the company took care of you. That is not a thing anymore. You know, you've talked to so many people, every day you log into LinkedIn and you're like, there's another layoff. There's another person looking. And it's always a shock to us because we're like, who would get rid of that person? my gosh. You frequently there people I've worked with too. And I'm like, that's a power player. I'd want that person on my team. There is no security in just you work hard enough and you keep your job. That doesn't exist.

When I was re-entering the workforce, because I stayed home with my kids for a long time, I had a great conversation with Scott Tran, who started Support Driven. And best piece of advice I've gotten, he said, job security is not keeping the job that you have. Job security is the ability to get a job when you need one.

Rob Dwyer (05:29.038)
Hmm.

Rob Dwyer (05:32.66)
I want to dig into that even more. But first, I wonder, when you talk about how things are different, are things, do you think, different today with job security because companies get bought up, or maybe I work for startups, or things just move so much that

The companies themselves are less predictable or do think there's more to it?

Sarah Betts (06:05.203)
I think there's more to it than that. I'm one of those people that answers every question with, it depends. There's no single answer for anything. It's not like, why did my dinner burn? Well, it's because you forgot it and you turned the heat up too high. Like even that probably has two factors. But the layoffs are so complex. And I think especially in our industry of tech, where there's so many players in any company,

Rob Dwyer (06:11.64)
Ha ha ha ha.

Sarah Betts (06:34.959)
one person doesn't own a company and make all the decisions. You've got boards, you have executives, you have advisors, you have investors, like there's so much going on. And the fact is these companies are made not because somebody wants to build a cool thing necessarily, like that's part of it, but it's because somebody wants to make money.

Rob Dwyer (06:55.17)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. I think, look, we sometimes can build really cool things and make money at the same time.

Sarah Betts (07:04.415)
Yes, we're building really cool stuff. That's why I'm here.

Rob Dwyer (07:08.726)
Right. But those things don't always stay congruent with each other or the cool thing maybe doesn't make money. And there's a lot less cool things that do make money. OK, so your advice from Scott.

Rob Dwyer (07:30.67)
do I do that though? Like it's great advice. Thank you Scott. Shout out if you're not familiar with Support Driven mentions on this show. I don't know how many times get go get in there but. Like. That's great advice on the surface, but I need something actionable. What can I do to help ensure that I can get a job when I need?

Sarah Betts (07:33.513)
Yeah, it is.

Sarah Betts (07:40.375)
yeah, get in support driven.

Sarah Betts (07:59.587)
I think the two big, big things are always be upskilling. Like things change so fast. And the reason those cool ideas don't necessarily make money is that the next cool idea comes along. Any company, as soon as you launch your product, you're primed for a disruptor. Like that's just how it is. So don't let yourself...

be disrupted, be aware of what's going on in your industry, be aware of what skills you need to have. And some of those come down to basic communication skills. Be really damn good at communicating your ideas. Be really aware of how things are calculated in your industry, whether that's first reply time or the support metrics to how the balance sheet runs in a business. Being able to understand how a business works.

helps you be valuable to a business. And then the other thing that always, always comes up is work your network. Have a network. Know people.

Rob Dwyer (09:04.544)
Yeah, so certainly communities like support driven are a great way to build or flesh out some of your network. But it's probably not just that. What other options you have to build out a network? And how do I go not just building, but I think more importantly, maintaining?

Sarah Betts (09:08.021)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Betts (09:19.866)
No.

Sarah Betts (09:29.055)
Yeah. Well, and I think we have this impression that networking is joining a Slack community or going to your local coffee chat thing and saying hi and glad handing and handing out a card. That is not it. Your network is your professional friends. And we, we understand at a very deep cellular level if somebody is trying to take advantage of us, we just, have all of the alarms for that.

but we are very social creatures. So we identify very quickly when somebody is earnest, when somebody cares, when somebody genuinely needs help or is offering help. So like my approach to support driven is be curious. Who is this person? Why are they asking this question? What more context? You you see questions all the time like, hey, has anybody ever used this plugin? Okay, cool. What do you want to do with it? What's your use case? And just being curious.

and caring, that'll get you everywhere.

Rob Dwyer (10:30.606)
Absolutely. OK, let's talk. And certainly you don't have to go into specifics, but have you ever stayed at a job? Too long.

Sarah Betts (10:45.471)
yeah. yeah. But haven't we all, I mean, from the beginning, like, I think one of my first jobs in high school was cleaning the school between school years. And that was a really, really good preparation for me for learning how to tolerate a really terrible job. There is just nothing quite like

Rob Dwyer (11:09.366)
Ha ha ha ha ha!

Sarah Betts (11:13.899)
scraping the floor under the mats in a middle school locker room shower. Just, I don't recommend that for anybody, but also I do recommend that for everybody.

Rob Dwyer (11:15.81)
Hmm.

Rob Dwyer (11:23.774)
No, that's a that's a you've painted a picture that everyone should just get out of their minds right now.

Sarah Betts (11:26.827)
It's like nothing will quite ever be that bad, which may be set a standard. But no, I did have a job early on where the company was very unstable. Leadership didn't quite know what they were doing. And things were just always changing. And there was just a lot of gaslighting of employees. And I think once

once it got to the point where I knew I was being lied to and taken advantage of, we're doing everything we can to take care of you and I was making like a quarter of what everybody else was making, when you were really being taken advantage of or when it's really harming your ability to get another job, run. Just run.

Rob Dwyer (12:16.364)
I was going to ask you about some maybe examples or things to be on the lookout for when you know like, maybe I need to be looking. Certainly when new hires are coming in and you know that they're making more than you, that's a time at least to have a conversation, to just say, hey, I'd like to talk about.

Sarah Betts (12:35.177)
Yeah, especially significantly more. That's bad.

Sarah Betts (12:41.649)
yeah. And I'm not saying just run first, but have a conversation. Be like, I see this person's making four times what you were paying me that I can't be right. Start moving some decimals. but yeah, there's, there's a lot of things. And of course I can't go over everything and this doesn't apply to everybody. Like I understand that like right now I'm in a place of privilege where I have. I've come from the worst and been able to build a good life. So now I have enough of a cushion, which

A lot of women aspire to especially, know, our mothers and grandmothers couldn't even have a bank account. So for us to be able to have that fund to just be able to walk away, highly recommend that for everybody. You know, the FU fund, the run fund, whatever you want to call it, get that. But things like if you are being lied to, if you are being ignored, like your needs are being ignored.

If you have a boss that's like, I don't care if you're sick, I don't care if your kids are in the hospital, get your ass to work, start looking. There's other signs and there's posts all over with the layoffs. know, if you suddenly have a lot of metrics that you need to be hitting that don't quite make sense, get your resume polished, give up your weekends and get those resumes out because it's, that is the end is nigh. If you have a lot of leadership suddenly talking about churn numbers, like a lot,

about churn numbers, that probably is an indication that there's a lot of people going to lose their jobs soon, unfortunately.

Rob Dwyer (14:16.398)
Yeah. Leaving, though, and prepping to leave is complicated, right? I mean, it's not just that easy to say, well, OK, get your resume out there and start looking. There's a lot to consider there.

Sarah Betts (14:24.861)
It is.

Sarah Betts (14:33.331)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. There's a lot psychologically too. I mean, we live in a society where your job defines who you are. Like if I say, what do you do? You don't tell me, I hang out with my kids on the weekend and I do like I hike. You're like, well, here's my title. Who you are is your title. So I think first start exploring who you are outside of your job. Don't define yourself by your job because that's not as stable as it was generations ago.

but as far as getting ready to leave, start putting feelers out. There's a lot of jobs out there that don't get posted. somebody actually has an app now called the whisper app or something where people can post jobs before they post them, formalize that. But there's a lot of people that are looking for people and they're not, they're not putting it out there. And I think that's a reaction to the number of layoffs that we've had that now, if I open a role, I know within days, it's going to have hundreds of applicants.

and I'm gonna have to go through all of those. But if I know five or six people that are looking, I can start talking to them. So talk to people.

Rob Dwyer (15:42.094)
There's something to be said too, and we've touched on this at times on the show, the growth of work from home, in some cases work from anywhere, while tons of advantages come from that. You and I both enjoy advantages of that. When it comes to a company who is posting a role out there, if that role is open to remote work, the potential

Sarah Betts (15:52.608)
Mm-hmm.

Rob Dwyer (16:12.056)
flood of applications that I can get is very different than maybe what it was 10 years ago. And most, not all, but most roles were on-site roles. And so you're pulling from really a geographically limited pool of applicants who then also essentially are meeting or close to meeting the requirements that you have of that role.

And so I can have a role that 10 years ago I might have gotten 100 applicants for tops and today I'm getting 10,000 applicants. I can't Right? All the bot activity as well, whether that is just not even a real applicant or just automation of systems right where I can automatically just.

Sarah Betts (16:54.813)
And not all those applicants are real. That's the crazy thing.

Rob Dwyer (17:12.462)
go out and apply to this job and that job without human in the loop, if you will. It really puts a strain on the system. So I can absolutely see why some companies, particularly if they aren't hiring more than just a single person for a role, would be more interested in mining through connections. Who do you know that might be a good fit for this? Because now I get

three or four really great applicants that have been referred by people. And I know I'm just going to have a tough choice as opposed to I've got 47,000 applications that I need to use my ATS to filter things out. And who knows, might filter out people that are really, really good bits for this role.

Sarah Betts (18:01.641)
Yes. Yeah. And I so many companies laid off their recruiters too. So if you're the hiring manager, you probably have to do that yourself.

Rob Dwyer (18:09.388)
Yeah, absolutely true.

Sarah Betts (18:10.923)
You

Rob Dwyer (18:14.398)
So you talked about earlier how things have changed, right? There was a generation where you got a job. You probably stayed at that job for the breadth of your entire career. There is, however, still in some people's minds, this idea of the job hopper. And when they see that resume that has

Sarah Betts (18:39.979)
you

Rob Dwyer (18:42.722)
bunch of different roles over a relatively short period of time, that's a red flag for them.

Rob Dwyer (18:54.85)
What do I do about that? Do I concern myself with being a job hopper and stay at a job that I probably don't like and I see the signs, but maybe I've only been there three months and I'm like, need to stay here longer. So I'm not a job hopper. mean, what do you think about that?

Sarah Betts (19:16.848)
tough and I think

I think it's one of those things of, it a pattern? Like, are all of your jobs three months stints? Okay, that's probably a problem. Do you have one or two jobs in there that were shorter? Like I do. I had a job where I landed there for six months and two months in, I realized that it was an absolute train wreck of a decision. Like it was wrong for me in every possible way. And I didn't feel bad about leaving that. And in fact,

when there've there've been times when I've handed out my resume, I just left that job off of there. Like, I didn't feel like I learned anything appreciable from that job, except maybe some more things to watch out for upfront. But as far as you know, value to employers, and then I also left the Sendoso job after six months, because it also wasn't a great fit for me. It's, you know, no shade to Sendoso. It's a great company. Lots of fantastic people work there. It just wasn't a good fit for me.

And I think as long as you're prepared to explain that and why you left, there's a lot of people that are a lot more amenable to that discussion now. We've seen lots of people that are having offers rescinded or they get a job and then a few months later, everybody who has been there for less than X amount of time just gets dumped out with the people that they want to let go. So I think I'm seeing a shift in that. There are of course still lots of employers.

who don't wanna see those short stints. And I've even seen terrible things like if you've ever been laid off, I don't want you. Okay, well, I don't wanna work for you. Because if you have that little empathy for other human beings, we're also not a good fit. And I think that's one of the big shifts in the job world now is that there is a lot more nuance and fit. Like we talk a lot more about fit.

Sarah Betts (21:16.231)
It used to be that there were small town companies and then there were big companies and you worked at the factory or the mom and pop shop. And now we have so many stages. Like people talk about, you a series A person? Are you a series C? Like, where do you fit in this? And you know, what's the vibe that you like about your company? I think that's fine. Like for employers to have the kind of employee they want to have for some products, being there for six, seven years is an advantage.

Rob Dwyer (21:45.588)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Betts (21:45.885)
And for some, where it's a quick investment and turn things around, you want somebody fresh and able to just go hard on that job for a while and then take a breath and go do something else.

Rob Dwyer (22:01.782)
Yeah, it strikes me too that the type of role that you're in makes a difference as well. There are certain roles where it can be harder to come in from the outside where you're trying to do things differently. And maybe you've got certain experience in that function, but that experience doesn't translate to a particular organization. But then there are other roles where I want that.

Sarah Betts (22:05.899)
you

Rob Dwyer (22:30.658)
experience and or that structure and know how to come in because and it can be based on the growth stage but I may need to have someone hit the ground running where I'm saying hey I just need you to build this out because we don't have this right now and that's your role you come in and you do this I don't need you learning on the job I need you to know how to do this and there are other

Sarah Betts (22:43.947)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (22:59.436)
roles and stages of company growth where it's like, no, come in, just figure it out. Like we don't know what you're doing. You don't know what you're doing, but you'll figure it out. And it can be a really good fit because you fit the culture.

Sarah Betts (23:06.283)
Absolutely.

Sarah Betts (23:10.143)
that can vary by department in the company. like we have, our company has built a large language model. It's not built on the back of chat GPT or something like that. So when we bring somebody into the R &D department, we can't be teaching them AI. They can't be like, I'm really great at prompting chat GPT. We're like, no, you need to be able to literally build this thing. And that's a different skillset. That's not something that you can just kind of figure out. you know, say like in finance,

You want somebody that has finance experience, but it doesn't have to be specific to our industry. just needs to be, you know, how a SaaS industry runs. You you get gross retention and annual revenue and that kind of stuff.

Rob Dwyer (23:52.812)
Yeah, absolutely. OK, well, I would like to go back in time. A little bit with you. I won't go back all 29 years because that'll be too far, but I would like to know. From you bets, what was it like growing up in wiser? I don't did I say that right? Why it's Weiser Idaho?

Sarah Betts (24:00.971)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Betts (24:17.803)
Weiser, Weezer. It is Weezer, just like the band. Nope, nope. I was not a Weezer person.

Rob Dwyer (24:21.41)
Was your favorite bands Weezer.

Rob Dwyer (24:30.442)
So I have only been through like Twin Falls, right? Very southern Idaho, just passing through, just spend the night kind of thing. Now I'm not super familiar with Idaho. I know that Weiser is not that terribly far from Boise. But what was that like growing up? Because I imagine it was different than some other places.

Sarah Betts (24:36.361)
my goodness.

Sarah Betts (24:40.235)
Yeah.

Sarah Betts (24:57.035)
Yeah, Weiser home of the old time Fiddler's Festival. Yeah, yeah, the whole town just turns into Fiddle Fest, which is actually really cool when you have a town of like 4,000 people that suddenly has 10,000 people and they're all playing music for a whole week. It's pretty rad. I think it was good and bad. I was the teacher's kid.

Rob Dwyer (25:17.837)
Yeah.

Sarah Betts (25:25.995)
So my mom had been an extension agent. So she ran all the 4-H programs, all of that. And then that was shut down and she became the high school teacher. My dad was in the neighboring school district, high school teacher, coach, you know, did all the things. And so everybody knew us, me and my brother. We didn't go anywhere. In fact, there were times where if you just did not have the energy, you drove to another town to go to the grocery store because you didn't have time.

for the conversations at the grocery store. Totally different world. And so it was really wild then going to university and I went to the University of Idaho and suddenly nobody knew me. It's kind of jarring.

Rob Dwyer (26:13.452)
Yeah, that is definitely that big fish little pond to little fish big pond type of experience.

Sarah Betts (26:17.451)
yeah, very much so. Yeah, very much so. My college had more people than my high school, like my department. But no, it was good. And I did not get into a lot of trouble because I did not have an opportunity to get into any trouble. I was with my friend who'd gone to run an errand for my mom at lunch.

Rob Dwyer (26:32.032)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Betts (26:46.971)
and we ran the car off the road. It was icy, you know, was like we weren't just bad drivers. We slipped off the road and somebody helped us push the car back on and we got there. And before we got back to the school, my mom was like, you ran the car off the road? Who told you?

Rob Dwyer (27:06.744)
Word travels fast in small towns.

Sarah Betts (27:09.461)
So fast, like people say that, you know, small town news travels fast, but it travels at the speed of light. Yeah, we were five minutes, not even five minutes from the school. And she knew before we got there.

Rob Dwyer (27:22.766)
Yeah, the social networking aspect of small towns is probably what Facebook has been trying to mimic all this time, like instant connection.

Sarah Betts (27:31.083)
Oh, a thousand percent. Yeah. Small towns, you know, those little community pages, small towns were the first to do that because they were like, oh my gosh, like I, despite only being 29, I remember having a party phone line. And I remember being a kid and picking up the phone and like learning how to do it super carefully. So you could just listen in to see what was going on with Ardeth down the road. Ardeth had a very exciting gossip life. You knew everything that was going on. If you could just catch Ardeth on the phone.

Rob Dwyer (27:53.752)
Mm-hmm.

Rob Dwyer (28:00.566)
I think this is the second time that the party line has entered next in queue. I am not 100 % confident of that, but I think someone else brought up the party line. You've lost 90 % of the audience, I'm sure, but it's come up. Look it up, kids.

Sarah Betts (28:07.487)
Really?

Huh.

Sarah Betts (28:16.103)
yeah, yeah. Yeah, so just to explain it, yeah, and a party line is like a rural neighborhood all had the same phone line, as you literally shared a number with like 20 other people. And if you were a curious child, all you had to do was pick up the phone quietly enough and you could hear other people's conversations. Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (28:36.75)
Yeah, it was the early chat room. You just could hop in and lurk and you didn't have to say anything.

Sarah Betts (28:40.66)
It was.

Yeah, and I had like that small newspaper that like even in high school, the smaller community up north from us still had the Indian Valley report and it was who came to visit and who went to lunch with who and you know, Mrs. Smith was at the hospital for this thing. Like we would never do that now because massive HIPAA violation. But yeah, that's how you kept up on what was going on.

Rob Dwyer (29:10.956)
Yeah, it's wild to think about the types of things that would show up in newspapers.

that in a generation, you would just never put that now is all over social media or right people post all kinds of wild things. Yeah.

Sarah Betts (29:27.925)
Yeah, people still do. We still have the same curiosities. People have not changed at all. People never change.

Rob Dwyer (29:34.892)
No. The technology has changed that allows them to. You know, lurk or figure out what's going on with so and so and talk about the rumor mill and what's happening at the local Weiser High School.

Sarah Betts (29:38.42)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Betts (29:49.109)
And you know, maybe that's why I'm so, maybe that's why I'm so good at Slack. Like it's just another party line. People are just chatting as long as you just bounce around Slack and catch up on the conversations. Yeah. You know what's going on.

Rob Dwyer (30:00.206)
OK, I have a suggestion for you. I don't know what it's for. Maybe it's for a blog. Maybe it's for a podcast. I don't know what you've got plans for. But today.

Sarah Betts (30:14.507)
Plan for me.

Rob Dwyer (30:18.712)
There are times when I have a thing for alliteration. Apparently today is one of those days. And I'm just gonna throw this title by you. And I don't want you to say yay or nay, or that's the worst thing I've ever heard, or that's the best thing I've ever heard. don't want any of that. I am just, I am.

giving you this gift and you can decide whether or not it needs to be re-gifted or it's something that you might actually use. So here it is. Sowing (Sewing?) the Seeds with Sarah Betts.

Just gonna leave that there. If it ever comes to fruition, and I'm not even sure how you should spell sewing, gonna leave that up to you. Maybe it's spelled a couple of ways.

Sarah Betts (31:05.451)
Mmm.

Sarah Betts (31:14.559)
Yeah, I like them. Okay, I can't comment on it, but I like them.

Rob Dwyer (31:16.814)
I don't even know what to do with that, but I wanted to throw it out there. I actually want to ask you a question that's wildly different than anything we've talked about today. And you mentioned working with Olark. And you did an experiment with Olark. So first, I'd like you to tell us about the experiment, and then I'll ask you a question.

Sarah Betts (31:21.547)
Thank you.

Sarah Betts (31:35.211)
Yeah.

Sarah Betts (31:41.641)
Okay. So the experiment, one of my favorite things I've ever done was we noticed that the women on the team had kind of a different tone in our chats than the men. So I set up an experiment where I just grabbed my last 30 days of chat data. And then I changed my profile picture. I actually took my husband's picture, stole that and became Samuel for 30 days. And then I did, I think it was a picture of a daffodil.

or something neutral-ish. And I was Sam. I did not have anything that suggested my gender anywhere. And I did 30 days on each, and then we analyzed the data. And yeah, Samuel had better chats. By far, by far. Shorter chats, a lot more, okay, I'll do that.

Rob Dwyer (32:31.662)
you

Sarah Betts (32:41.003)
way less arguing. Sam was definitely kind of in the middle, but my takeaway from it was that I know my shit. I stopped questioning myself. When I knew something was the way it was, I was like, no, that's the answer. Like, you can argue all you want, but it's not going to change the fact that the logs say, do this, or this is what happened. And I quit second guessing. quit.

Rob Dwyer (32:54.051)
You

Sarah Betts (33:10.791)
engaging in the arguments. just...

Rob Dwyer (33:14.062)
So OK, I want to dig into that. Did you find that some of the difference was in both how customers would react, but also how you would respond under those different personas?

Sarah Betts (33:16.661)
Yeah.

Sarah Betts (33:31.521)
yeah, that was the fascinating thing. So this was early days of IBM Watson and our data scientist got a trial on Watson and ran those chats through Watson for tone. And when I was chatting as Sam, I took on a more authoritarian tone. Yeah. Which was fascinating to me. Like I figured people would react to me differently because I had seen people react differently to males where they would ask for somebody what they really meant was, I want not a woman.

Also a lot of marriage proposals. We had a lot of free users. No, hated that. There were a lot of chats that I just blocked because it got inappropriate when they decided that it was a woman. If you have women on your team, please, please, please, please, please let them not use their real name and don't make them use their picture. That's my request from this experiment.

Rob Dwyer (34:25.134)
think that's a great suggestion.

Sarah Betts (34:30.249)
Yeah, I am still waiting for more people to replicate that experiment. There's a lot of things I didn't try because I am a white woman. come from a place of privilege. I would love for data to be around like, what is it if it's a woman of color versus a white woman? What if there's visible disabilities? What if you were clearly non-binary instead of just a gender neutral name? I would love to see all of that. I'm not in a place now where I can do that. I don't have the volume of conversations.

Rob Dwyer (34:54.51)
So yeah.

So my question, my background is in contact center that is voice heavy. And we certainly see some of those same behaviors from callers where certainly the women on the team will end up in situations, unpleasant situations with customers that a man, that conversation just wouldn't happen.

Rob Dwyer (35:29.806)
The question that I have, or maybe it's just a thought experiment and not a question that needs an answer, but there are today technologies on the voice side of things that can change accent, change gender, the sound. And I know there's been a lot of conversation in the industry about what does that mean? Are we?

dehumanizing people, particularly as it relates to accents, right? Are we being classist? Are we taking away identity by, and or encouraging things like xenophobia?

And I wonder...

with a similar experiment if maybe you and I were to switch voices and take phone calls for a week, what would that do in how we handle calls, the language that we use, and how people would respond to us? Now, I don't know the answer to that, but I do think that we are sometimes focusing on

Sarah Betts (36:38.507)
Mmm.

Rob Dwyer (36:53.086)
so many different aspects of this. one of the words that has come up today is nuance. And I think we should be looking at all of these technologies with a little bit of nuance that maybe we don't feel like we're ready to embrace. But I do think

we should be thinking about it, whether or not we employ these and how we employ them should be thoughtful if we're going to try it out and experiment. But it just brought that to my mind because I know a lot of people are talking about this and saying, well, that's, you're just trying to make people sound white.

Sarah Betts (37:33.099)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (37:34.924)
Maybe, but maybe I'm just trying to help agents have a conversation with a customer that is just the conversation. Yeah.

Sarah Betts (37:40.811)
That's just the conversation and not the other conversation. Yeah. And, you know, I think my approach to that is had somebody come to me and said, I'm going to make you mail in your chat. I'm just going to change your picture and I'm going to do this thing for you. If you're taking somebody's agency away, I'm not a fan. If you give it as a tool to agents to decide if they want to use, I think that's an empowering move.

Because then it became a thing where I was like, well, I could just transfer someone to Samuel if they get snippy with me. And for the most part, I can just be me. I also think that similar to my situation, if we give people a chance to take on another persona for work, it can teach them to be more confident in their answers, because if the person without an accent is correct or accepted,

Nothing changed. And I think we learn if you're a part of a marginalized group, you learn to shrink yourself for safety. And I see this conversation come up a lot with women that something will happen and I've done this where I'm like, smiled, I went along with it. Why didn't I do this thing that would have had a different outcome? And the truth is,

Like, I think one of the scariest situations I remember is I was followed by somebody because I had stopped for somebody to crosswalk. The driver behind me didn't see that happen. He just thought I stopped randomly in the middle of an intersection. I had my baby with me and he followed me for like half a mile and got out of his car and was raging at me. And I legitimately thought he was going to attack me. And I just, smiled. I acquiesced to everything he said. Okay, absolutely. Whatever.

I like, I let that asshole get away with being an absolute jerk. But I probably saved mine and my child's So we learn in order to be safe to be less smart, less pushy or less confident in ourselves. And so if we have tools that teach us what we're doing and that we don't have to, especially in a situation on a phone.

Sarah Betts (40:03.717)
we're safe, we have a manager we can escalate to, something like that. I think that's a cool idea. Like, let people learn that they actually do know a lot.

Rob Dwyer (40:13.422)
Yeah, that's very interesting. Thank you for going down that thought experiment with me.

Sarah Betts (40:19.763)
Yeah, I know it's a different path that we went on. But yeah, I mean, I know that you strongly believe in agent empowerment as well. We have, we have this belief in our industry for some reason, maybe not us, but there is this, you know, it's just the support team. It's just the contact center. It's just the call center. Those are living, breathing human beings, every single one of them with families with

Rob Dwyer (40:44.834)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sarah Betts (40:48.299)
hobbies, with interests, with histories, and the fact that people get away with treating them as disposable things that we talk to, that's gross. I mean, we need to train people out of it. Be nice to your fellow humans.

Rob Dwyer (41:02.08)
Yeah, absolutely. Please, people. We could all use a little reminder to be nicer to each other, whether you're talking with someone in support or service or your neighbor or whomever it is. We could all stand to be nicer to each other.

Sarah Betts (41:21.973)
Yeah. Even if you've had a bad day or don't like the answer you're getting, it's still a person.

Rob Dwyer (41:28.866)
Yeah, that is something that I do think that nuance could potentially. And I'm kind of still going down this rabbit hole sometimes. And again, this is not an excuse and I don't want people to think about to think that. I think it's acceptable because I don't, but. Some people react to accents in a way that says.

I think you are less than and by taking that out of the equation potentially changes the entirety of a conversation. I would prefer that we all just accept people for being people and embrace their differences because that's what makes us so awesome.

Sarah Betts (42:02.891)
you

Sarah Betts (42:14.667)
Also if you have an accent it probably means that you know multiple languages and that's hella cool because I don't!

Rob Dwyer (42:21.198)
I also have an accent. It's called the Midwestern accent and. Yes, I just speak one language in that. Accent. That's all it is.

Sarah Betts (42:35.691)
Mm hmm. Yeah. I mean, I can switch back and forth between the Southern Idaho accent and the Oregon accent, but.

Rob Dwyer (42:42.924)
Wait, are you telling me there's a different accent between two bordering states? Tell me more.

Sarah Betts (42:51.339)
Yeah, Southern Idaho has, I can't do it on command and I shouldn't have even brought it up because I can't do it. have to hear it. like, I don't even know I'm doing it. My husband will be like, you just did that switch thing again. Cause I'll be talking to a high school friend. It's like, you're talking like Teresa. Hi Teresa. Yeah, it's a.

You know, there's a lot of like cricks and some Midwestern, a lot more casual. The vowels are all combined. Some people call it the Mormon accent because it's sort of that Northern Utah, Southern Idaho. Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (43:28.206)
Okay. Well.

Sarah Betts (43:29.341)
I learned as a high schooler at some point that it's not a radio, it's a radio.

Rob Dwyer (43:37.422)
Okay, now I know. Got it.

That's this has been a really, really enlightening lot of fun. Thank you.

Sarah Betts (43:49.661)
It's so fun to talk with you. You're a joy.

Rob Dwyer (43:53.336)
Well, I appreciate that. I know by the way that there will be some people who might be interested in expanding their network and getting to know you because now they've experienced you and they're going to be like, well. I need to know that's better. So.

Sarah Betts (44:05.291)
Yes.

Sarah Betts (44:10.165)
Ha ha ha.

Sarah Betts (44:14.918)
yes, find me on LinkedIn.

Rob Dwyer (44:17.4)
Find Sarah on LinkedIn 100%.

Sarah Betts (44:20.099)
And I, this LinkedIn is the only place where I use my husband's name. So I'm Sarah Betts Dunn there. So if you're looking for a Sarah Betts has a few of us out there. Sarah Betts Dunn. The one that works for Vizit. The one with a lot of hot takes and random opinions. And then Support Driven on there as well.

Rob Dwyer (44:38.86)
Yeah, absolutely. And if you're selling things on Amazon and you want to see some

Sarah Betts (44:49.385)
you should get your images optimized. Amazon, Walmart, if you're direct to consumer, come check us out. We have a really, really cool tool. And we just announced Spark. So if you have images and you're not sure how to make them better, we now have AI that will suggest changes for your creative team.

Rob Dwyer (45:07.32)
That is awesome. If you don't know what the heck Betts just said, it's probably not for you. But if you just heard that and you were like, go visit, Vizit. I'll put that link in the show notes as well. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate.

Sarah Betts (45:19.403)
That was a visit. Yeah.

Thank you. Thank you.

I appreciate you. All right. And if you're out there and you're thinking that your job just really, really sucks, you are not alone and it does not make you a bad person. Not every job is a perfect fit for everybody, but there is something good out there for you.