We Have the Technology featuring Neal Travis

Transcript

Rob Dwyer (00:03.089)
Neil Travis, you are Next in Queue, my friend. How are

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (00:08.342)
I'm doing well, how are you?

Rob Dwyer (00:10.757)
I am fantastic today. Thanks for joining me. While you may have that US accent, you are not in the US. So before we get started, let's learn a little bit about Neil and your journey across the Atlantic and what you are doing today at

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (00:38.552)
Sure. I moved from San Diego, California to Rotterdam in the Netherlands about five years ago. People always ask me why. In that sense, I moved from my wife. So it was, hey, I don't have anything holding me back and let's be together and let's move and see what happens. It's a very exciting journey. Love it. Have been here and loving it ever since.

grow in our family. got two little kids, a three year old and a one year old. So things are really moving. At the same time, when I moved, I was half expecting to work at the grocery store stocking shelves for whatever I could get for the longest period of time. Luckily enough, I was able to land at my current company with the Academy to Innovate HR, AIHR for short. And I started when they were about eight people or so.

Ever since then, I've been doing pretty much most everything customer, but now we're about 100 people. So the scale is much different and we've been growing the teams and growing the functions and the product and everything. So it's very, very exciting. It's a e -learning company in the HR space. So really focusing on upscaling HR professionals in the development and the world of

Rob Dwyer (01:54.877)
Yeah, it's fascinating and we're going to talk about a new project that you're working on today. But I'm curious, you know, most of my audiences in the U S although I have a shocking amount of German listeners for whatever reason, shout out to Germany. Keep listening. I would like to know from your perspective as a California guy coming into Rotterdam.

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (02:14.049)
You

Rob Dwyer (02:23.423)
What's the most surprising thing for you about living in the Netherlands or what took the biggest leap to adjust to for

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (02:36.318)
Biggest leap to adjust to? I think I gave up my car. Drive a lot in the States. Here it's public transportation, everything. So in that sense, yeah, I think just the scope and size of things is very different. When I moved here, driving 40 minutes every day to work, no biggie, no problem. But if you want to drive somewhere in the Netherlands, 40 minutes, people think it's forever far away.

Rob Dwyer (03:02.291)
Hahaha.

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (03:04.12)
So I think in that sense, just the ability to get around the infrastructure is really, really good here. I would say one of the most surprising things to me is how much the bureaucratic and government systems talk to each other. Because in the States, you need to bring all your paperwork to everything. But here in Netherlands, you come and you give them your card and they're like, yeah, we have everything. It's all good. It's all set. You're done. the infrastructure is very, different. And I think that was the most surprising thing.

Culture shock people, not much. I'm a little bit of a weird case because I was always living under a rock anyway. So for me, it's mostly all good.

Rob Dwyer (03:41.161)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (03:46.119)
Well, certainly the driving thing is interesting to me, but I guess when you've had roads since long before the US was even a country, they're not exactly designed to handle the kind of cars that and traffic that we have in the States. And so it's critically important that you have a good public transit because

Those roads are just not designed for what we do here in the US.

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (04:17.678)
And everything is built out of tile and brick. So when they're relaying sidewalk and stuff, they're hand laying all the tiles and bricks and everything, which is a whole different experience rather than them just pouring concrete being done.

Rob Dwyer (04:30.003)
Right. Right. You know, a lot of that goes into when cities were designed primarily in Europe, these older cities, they were designed based off of the technology of the time. Right. And they certainly couldn't foresee a lot of things that would change. Whereas a young country like the US has had the opportunity

to do some planning and infrastructure based off of changes in technology, you're currently working on designing a community for your company. So that allows you at this point to take in some new technology and kind of survey.

what's happening with other communities. And so I'd like to spend some time talking about how you go about doing this and what's going through your mind as you're going through the process. But let's first just start with why, what's the point of starting a community for your customers?

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (05:44.59)
Before I answer that question, I will say that I truly hope that our migrations and new community and everything are as smooth as the transition into today's topic actually was from that conversation. Well, I will say we've always had a community and we've always known that as an e -learning company, that sense of community and learning together can really help drive

Rob Dwyer (05:54.845)
Ha ha ha ha ha!

well, we'll see. We'll

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (06:13.582)
development forward because learning is better together. When you're sharing those ideas, sharing those thoughts and sharing those best practices, you actually get to learn more very much like being in the support community, being able to collaborate with people around you has been a huge driver of my own personal growth and also some of the ideas and helpfulness of others. So we've always known as a company that community would be a big driver for us and a very big support system for

how we can actually help our customers get even more value. And the thing that we started out was just courses. We wanted to bring in an element where people could connect and actually share things outside of that. And when we were a very small company, that looked like a feed where we could update customers on the latest news, keep them up with trends, just share the information that was happening. And that's great, but it doesn't necessarily bring the real collaborative

engaging type experience that you would expect. Being able to just share news and information can be done outside of a community and it can be done in many different ways. The transition that we're going through now is actually taking outside of just the how we want to run community, how we actually build the community platform where people can go and engage with. That is really what's changing now and that's what I'm super excited about because it'll give that opportunity

a lot more into what people can get out of it. So if it's whether you have a question that you want answered and you need help to get unstuck in your flow of work, you're facing a challenge, people can help you with that and service that in a better way. If that is that you want to keep up with news and information and relevant discussions, awesome. And our goal with building and designing a community is to service a lot more of those types of jobs to be done rather than just, hey, we have one.

Rob Dwyer (08:13.097)
Did this transition, was the idea behind this sparked by members of your community? Was it sparked by your team or a little bit of both? Like how did you go from where you have been to saying, well, we need to revamp this and rebuild this?

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (08:37.644)
Yeah, that's a great question. It's a bit of both, I would say. Because if you think about things from a customer experience, businesses as they grow will always change. And a lot of growing organizations rely on third party tools and platforms to actually build that growth and support that growth. We are at such a stage that the third party platform we're using, we've pushed it to the boundaries and even gone a bit above what it can actually do.

in some very hacky ways, which is a great thing that we're doing, but at the same time, we need to be using the tools in the best way possible. And for that, actually being able to say, this is the moment that that tool is no longer working for us, and we're actually going to build our own and actually then transition into one that does service that community need a bit better and integrates with our own technology because we're building our own LMS.

That's the real driver for the change. So we have an opportunity not only to, through this migration that we're forced to go through and really growing towards, we have an opportunity to say, okay, now what do we really, really want to do with it? And what can we really offer that's much better? For example, the need, that's the need from the business, in a sense, an opportunity that we have from the need from our members. If you just have a feed, like if you imagine Slack,

and you have one Slack channel that's your community. If 10 people ask a question all at the same time, they kind of get stacked above. And then which one are you going to read? Probably just the most recent one in that sense. So the discoverability and the searchability and really people being able to find the types of content that works for them, that's the driver from our members. And that's really what we want to be able to get them the information they need in a better

Rob Dwyer (10:31.015)
Yeah, it's obviously those of us who have been in a slack community and you and I are both in some some communities together. They do the ones that I belong to do a really good job of separating out and creating different channels so that you can explore the things that are relevant to you get notified of things that are relevant to you, but also.

If you're curious, right you can dive into some things that maybe are not as relevant or at least you may not expect them to be as relevant, but they do give you kind of an idea of where to go if you have a question or where to go if you want to explore information around a particular topic and it's almost like entering a room it harkens

a little bit to the days of like AOL chat rooms where you could go into a room and talk with people. Although this is not the same kind of Wild West that AOL chat rooms were. These are very much like -minded people talking about very specific things that are relevant to their

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (11:42.154)
Hehehehe

the Reddit thread disaster.

Rob Dwyer (11:56.487)
I'm wondering though, as I talked about AOL chat rooms, mean, they kind of became notorious for some of the things that would happen in those chat rooms. I wonder what plans do you have, if any, for moderation? And what's the approach to moderation?

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (12:20.92)
That's a great question. I think that there are many things to consider when you consider moderation. For example, it really depends on the type of community that you have. When I was doing a lot of the research for designing our new version of community and what that will look like, I

Every company has community in some form or fashion to serve different needs. So there are some companies that have what they would call a sponsored community. And generally that's open to the public. You can join it. Maybe it's a community sponsored by something. And most cases that's a very public forum. And there you get a very big mix of

anybody and everything. So there the moderation I think is much much more trust and safety kind of hands on really trying to craft exactly what you want to see out of it. There are other communities that are centered on support for a product. If you think about like HubSpot's community or Atlassian community or something like that's where you're really focused on supporting the actual product need.

There you have people who are much more focused and kind of centered on a specific topic themselves. So there's less chit chats in this kind of wider spread of topics. Our community is a paid community for members. So it is already gated behind a paywall. So in that sense, the level of moderation that we have is already a bit changed because of that. We do have very centered topics. So people are really

on making sure that they do stay on topic there. A couple of things that we have in place for moderation would be one, making sure that the community guidelines are very clear and available for everyone and then they actually know what they are and what is expected of how they interact in the community. I think that's one thing that people are very adamant about, making sure that it is aware of how they can get the most value out of the community as possible. Number two,

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (14:25.762)
We do plan on moderating very lightly. When we need to step in, we will. But we don't necessarily plan on being micromanage -y in that sense. So we really do try and let it be as organic as possible and really only stepping in if there's a problem. If we talk about kind of the strict level of moderation. There is a softer level of moderation, which I would say is more around driving engagement and making sure that no question goes unanswered.

And that type of moderation, I would say, is very different because instead of focusing on controlling the topics or anything like that, you're really just trying to be as helpful as possible. And our community is spread within our learning content and within the community. So within the learning content, we really want to make sure that things are working well and that we're actually able to support their learning and development. And in the actual fuller community, if someone is unstuck in the flow of work and they haven't gotten an answer,

We really want them to see that value that they can get from the community. And there we'll either engage with them directly if we can support that question, or we'll orchestrate by bringing someone in to answer that question, whether that's a subject matter expert or another community member that we've seen is talking about relevant topics.

Rob Dwyer (15:40.243)
Yeah, I love that. You just touched on something that I really want to dig into, and that is engagement. So you already mentioned a couple of strategies that you plan to employ to drive engagement. What are you doing as far as measuring engagement or really measuring the success of your community today?

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (16:09.752)
That's a great question. When you say community today, would you say the community that we currently have are the one that we're transitioning into just so I make sure that we give you the right context you're looking for? Sure.

Rob Dwyer (16:19.484)
I want to know both because I think understanding how, right, maybe I looked at success today versus how I look at success in the future is really a big part of making this transition.

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (16:37.708)
Yeah, I would say specifically around the community that we have today, really looking at how many people are posting, what exactly is the activity of people actually visiting there. So we're looking at views, we're looking at usage in terms of people actually going to it, because that is really what we can measure. And we're also looking at, you are people actually commenting and engaging with others? So really that member to member engagement.

rather than just host to member engagement. So is it just us that's talking or is it our actual members that are talking? And there we've set up some measurements to make sure that we are being as active as possible. think when it comes to engagement and measuring success, there are a lot of ways to look at it, just like support metrics in general and these kinds of overall types of things.

Because one of the things that we were thinking was we need more comments, for example. If somebody posts a question or posts something in the community, are people commenting on it? How can we get more people to comment on it? And et cetera, et cetera. But in the new community, we really needed to ask the question, if somebody asks a question that is them being stuck or trying to solve a specific problem,

And there's only one comment, but that one comment is super robust and solid. And that's the answer. Do we need more than that? in that sense. So really in defining what is the level of engagement that you're looking for, what would be the best place to start? Because when we, when we surveyed our community to see what they would like to see in a new community.

80 % of people said they just want to read discussions others are having. They just want to lurk, which I think is classic of any community in a sense. The majority of people will want to just keep up with those trends. So how do we actually service that need as well is actually one of those. And that's where the more hidden engagement metrics like views comes into play. Are people actually going there and looking at it?

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (18:42.7)
So we'll look at daily active users, people who come in daily, people who come in weekly and monthly. And we'll compare that to our actual member base to see if we can get the active usage and people returning and coming back just to see if they're going there and going there in the first place. And then working towards creating engaging content where they'll want to cheer it, like it, engage with it. So first we're looking at usage, daily active users, weekly active users, monthly. And then increasing those.

and then creating that conversion to actual engagement and value.

Rob Dwyer (19:18.431)
Let's talk for a minute about the unique status that you have with your membership. You mentioned paid members. I'm wondering if the community might at some point be a vehicle to attract additional paid members through any type of premium access, right? Maybe there's a channel that

is more publicly available to give people a taste, right? That seems to always be the, that's the new model. Make sure people get a taste. I think we've all learned from drug dealers that we can get people hooked. If the content's just good enough, they'll start to pay for it. Is that something that you've considered? And if so, what?

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (19:55.97)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (20:14.547)
What challenges did you see with that? What benefits did you see with that? Those kinds of things are what I'm curious

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (20:22.614)
Yeah, I definitely think that there's a place for community led growth. And that's why you see a lot of communities that are those kind of sponsored by communities that we talked about before, because they really do try and get you to engage, whether that is just to know about their brand presence or know more about the brand itself. For us specifically, we did ask that question, is that something that we want to offer? Now is not the time in that sense. So I think it's a very conscious decision that you need to make.

What is the value that you would give to them in a sense? Or what is really that placeholder that they would, what is that taste that they would need? And is that something that you want to open it up to? think by having a premium product with a paid membership, you keep those a little bit quality of conversations a bit higher than necessarily having everyone and anyone in that, whether it's dedicated space that's public, for example,

If I had to think of one that I would probably put public to give them a taste, it might be a job board or a place to come and interact and go from there, for example. One thing that I would not want to be public would be a member directory of all of the members. So that would be something that, for example, would be private. think having a mix is definitely an option. And community -led growth can go a long way towards lead generation. And there's a proven ROI for that.

on the flip side though there's also a very back end side of it which would be community -led retention where for example they pay for courses or products and instead of saying you're not paying membership anymore you don't have access to anything I would say for example once a member always a member even if you don't have access to learning content you can always access the community and I think there it's a very different

type of experience in that sense because the quality level and the benchmark stays quite high. You don't open it up to everything. I would say trolls to be a bit in that way. But you do offer a lot of value to those who are ready to engage with for sure. And that's I think if you're going to do it for your business, definitely make a conscious choice about what that might look like for you because

Rob Dwyer (22:30.739)
Hahaha

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (22:46.998)
lead generation and working with marketing is definitely a good way to go. What are the efforts going to be

Rob Dwyer (22:54.291)
Yeah, fascinating. Your background is in support. I'd like to explore how community supports support, sits alongside support, does support interact with the community? Like, what's your plan for

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (23:18.414)
Sure. I will say since I started out eight people at the company, you wear a lot of hats. I've always been involved in the community alongside all of the focuses that we've been in. So it's been a close knit journey regardless. When it comes to support, I think there are a couple of ways to look at it. Specifically in our setup here at AIHR, we have a tier two support team. So a lot of that tier one support, which is more engagement related,

or for example in the comment section below lessons, we would separate that from actual support. So we have our community moderation team and they will focus on that more learning content type of support. If they have questions about the content itself, if they have questions about the lessons themselves, they'll actually work directly with our content team who creates the lessons and course material.

If it is something that is actually functional related or platform related, hey, this button's not working, I can't move forward, I can't do something like this, then they'll actually engage with our support team and they'll actually be able to jump in and help and support. So our community team members will just tag, hey, at support, can you help them with this or direct them the other way as well. So we do kind of separate out the types of support that are offered. So tier one is generally handled by

the community team themselves or a pre -sales team that we have on the other side of things. And mostly what we deal with will be more account platform related.

Rob Dwyer (24:49.395)
You mentioned earlier that you had surveyed your members to understand kind of what they were looking for in this new community. I'm wondering too, does this community supplant or does it live alongside your voice of customer efforts? Is this part of...

Or will it be part of voice of customer? Because obviously it is literally like lots of voices of your customers talking about all kinds of things. How do you integrate that with maybe an existing program?

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (25:32.43)
100%. Yes, it will be a part of it. If we truly want to say that we are a more customer centric and member centric organization, we need to build with our customers in mind and what their voices are saying and then their feedback. So being that close to our customers through an active and lively community is a fantastic way to stay close to them and to be able to understand not only just through, for example, what they're actually saying, but also through the things that they're doing.

because when we look at all of our community metrics and all of the data that also tells a story, when I say we surveyed our community, we did do a community poll survey where they actually engaged. At the same time we were running that survey, we also pulled all of our post data from the past year and broke those down in the types of posts that they were creating. What are those posts about? What do they actually want to get out of

and the story that the survey tells and the actual usage and data tells might be two different things. So making sure that we cover all our bases, not only voice of the customer from a qualitative feedback side, but also from the mass of people who didn't answer the survey but are engaging in a different way. So being that close with your community to actually talk with them, to get on boots on the ground and go talk to them and engage with them and hear what they're saying.

is a fantastic way to integrate that into Voice with a Customer and being able to structure that and bring it back into the business. Huge, yes, 100 % will be Voice with a Customer.

Rob Dwyer (27:03.325)
Yeah, I love that. think far too often companies. Forget about the fact that their customers are talking about them or to them or around them in ways that they can be listening to, and that data is just a treasure trove at times. And you don't necessarily get the same story from your surveys, right? Surveys are very self selective.

I'm going to tell you what I want to tell you if I feel like telling you, assuming that I want to make time in my day to give you that feedback. Whereas if I'm engaging in other places, there's already potentially feedback into how you can make my experience as a customer or a member or whatever the case may be better. the more that we, any company,

realizes that there are lots of different ways to get that kind of feedback, the better off all of your efforts will be.

Rob Dwyer (28:17.481)
So your membership, right? I'm thinking about your membership. I'm thinking about the fact that they're looking and engaging with specific topics. Like, what is the burning thing or trending topics among your membership that really is getting them talking?

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (28:45.243)
I think the world of work is always changing and it depends on what exactly you're looking at in that sense. Because we actually track not only all of the actual community engagement and conversations but also the discussions within programs and courses, there are many things that our members are really focusing on. If you think about HR space, there are many domains within that. It's quite broad to just say, it's all of HR in that sense.

very common theme across all industries how AI is impacting the world of work, 100%. Organizational culture and design, how organizations are structured and built and becoming an actual business partner to the organization as HR going from much more operational HR to much more strategic business partner and really understanding and being able to leverage that for sure.

If you think about the past couple of years in the world of work, the pandemic very, very much disrupted input in HR in the forefront in that sense and under the microscope. So those have been a lot of the trending topics.

Rob Dwyer (29:53.385)
Have you seen any, are any of your members like throwing up the red flag with AI and saying, hey, right, we, this has to stop or we have to put safeguards in place to keep our employees from using it. What are some of the concerns that I think this is very relevant to this audience?

What are the concerns that people are raising specific as it relates to AI in the workplace?

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (30:29.752)
think that there are many sides to the coin. I definitely think that there are some people who want to be able to leverage it and use it in such a way that it really, really helps support the employee experience. So one of the things that we actually teach and educate on is digital agility and digital HR, so actually being able to utilize and leverage technology for HR practices.

One of the big things is actually being able to leverage AI in a better way and in a safe way as well, making sure that obviously putting safeguards in place around employee data and privacy and laws in that sense, of course, 100 % will be a topic of discussion and everything that is going on. So one, employee safety and privacy, big conversation. Number two, how to actually leverage it for efficiency because in many ways, HR professionals are

full of operational things to do. And being able to automate a lot of those things and do a lot of those things is definitely a huge trending topic. I will say I am not an expert in AI and HR in that sense. So I would say that our members will definitely be able to have that conversation a lot better along with our AI HR subject matter

Rob Dwyer (31:47.363)
So speaking of, if someone was interested in learning more about your organization, maybe becoming a member, maybe they're an HR professional, what's the best way for them to do

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (32:00.31)
Aichar .com. Very simple. In that sense.

Rob Dwyer (32:03.977)
That is very simple. I think people can remember

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (32:08.834)
Hopefully, hopefully. I will say that if it is AI best practices and things like that, we do share a lot of materials on LinkedIn as well. So there are also ways to find it. And if you're a support or CX professional and is just looking to have some more resources around being a people manager and being able to actually support the employee experience a lot more, there are also many public resources available.

on AIHR .com that you can use, even if you're not an HR professional, being able to understand them in a digestible way and help people as well.

Rob Dwyer (32:41.523)
And you yourself post all kinds of incredible information on LinkedIn. So we'll make sure that your LinkedIn profile is in the show notes as well so people can check you out. I encourage people to do so. You post some really great stuff, useful tools, right? Not just random comments about things. You actually throw out useful tools.

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (33:06.642)
How moving to the Netherlands supported my B2B SaaS.

Rob Dwyer (33:10.559)
Let's talk lastly about another little thing that you do. You also have a podcast. Can you tell us a little bit about that and kind of what the purpose is?

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (33:26.412)
Yeah. I do also have a podcast outside of my time at AIHR. It's a bit of a passion project of mine. Because when I started, I didn't have any support background. I actually come from a retail telecom sales background. So very, very different than the world of scaling support. And I didn't...

necessarily have a mentor, a guide, or resources that I could easily get a hold of that could really help me to kind of get hands on some of the projects that I was trying to do. And so I grew the past five years within the industry. I'm learning a lot, have grown a lot in that sense. And I thought it would be a nice way to share some of those experiences for others who might be going through a similar journey.

So I do have a blog resource library and a podcast. I try to make it as practical as possible. That way they can get hands on and get some help in that

Rob Dwyer (34:23.423)
So even if you're not in HR, you can learn a lot of stuff from Neil. So go ahead and check the show notes for a link to that as well. Neil, thank you so much for joining Next In Que today. I really appreciate

Neal Travis | Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR) (34:40.631)
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate being here and being able to talk to you and enjoy the time that we had.