Winter is Coming featuring Jeremy Hyde

Transcript

Rob Dwyer (00:02.891)
If you are anywhere in the United States right now, north of the central part, it's probably cold where you are. I know that it's cold where my guest is joining me from today because he is in the great state of Minnesota and Minneapolis St. Paul region. Welcome Jeremy Hyde to Next In Queue. How are you doing, my friend?

Jeremy Hyde (00:27.158)
Hey Rob, good thanks for having me. You're right, it is cold. We got a lot of snow yesterday. Similar to last winter, we made it really far into the winter with almost no snow and I was starting to think it might not snow in Minnesota anymore and then Mother Nature didn't like me thinking that way so she she decided to remind me it does still snow here and I think last time I checked it was about 8 degrees Fahrenheit out there so it's snowy and chilly.

Rob Dwyer (00:56.293)
Yeah, I was just in Minnesota last week. It was five degrees. And for those of you who have never been to a place that gets that cold, I lived in Minneapolis for a couple of years, quite some time ago. And you think you know what cold is, and then you experience a Minnesota cold. And you go, well, that's just different. I've never felt that before.

Jeremy Hyde (01:25.334)
Yeah, anything above freezing is fine. 30 something degrees, no problem. You start getting below that though, you start getting close to zero especially. And yeah, you take a breath outside in that cold air and it just hits you in the chest and you're like, yeah, okay, back inside we go.

Rob Dwyer (01:41.347)
Yeah, it is ironic, however, that you are the senior director of customer service for Sun Country Airlines. And so we're going to bring the sun with us because I think we could stand to warm things up a little bit. Before we get into it, mean, tell us a little bit about your journey. You're there for what?

five or six years today, but you've been in the contact center business a long time. Tell us a little bit about that.

Jeremy Hyde (02:17.442)
Yeah, I'd have to do the math, but we got to be going on around 20 years or so total, especially if I count a year or two from college. Yeah, when I graduated, I was from college. I was looking for a job and I couldn't find one. I had a degree in human resource management and there were not a lot of entry level HR positions that were open and available to me.

And so a friend was working in a call center. was a supervisor in a call center and suggested I go over there because I had to pay my bills. And so that's what I did. I started working there and you know, if anyone's ever heard me before is kind of heard the same thing. Like the first couple of years at least when I was working within the call center there, I was trying to work out of it. I was trying to, you know, I was going to, this was just the thing that I was doing for a little while to pay the bills. I was pretty good at it. So that worked.

Rob Dwyer (03:08.421)
You

Jeremy Hyde (03:13.862)
but I was going to go on to do something different, but at some point, things just kind of clicked and it was like, Hey, this is interesting. I'm good at it. was growing in my career. people were mentoring me and it was like, Hey, I can make a good career with this thing. And I found a lot of it so interesting. You get to see so much of what the company does, the good, the bad, and the ugly, you know, it all kind of rolls downhill into customer service.

So I thought that was really cool. We had really cool, really good workforce people, some of the best learning and development people I've ever known in my entire life. So I just was surrounded by these amazing people and just continued to soak it up. So I was an agent, I was a team lead, I was a supervisor, I was a manager, kind of did that whole thing. And spent my career kind of growing up within contact center. As you said, I've been at Sun Country now for...

going on six years. In addition to the work that I do, you my day job, I also serve as the president of the Midwest Contact Center Association, which is a nonprofit contact center networking group. We've got two chapters, one in the Minneapolis area and one in Chicago. And that's a big part of my life, a big kind of passion of what I do as well. You know, so much of my success came from others.

you know, those really smart people that I was talking about workforce and training and all of that. They get a lot of the credit for where I'm at today. And so trying to be to others what they were to me is where I spend some of my free time.

Rob Dwyer (05:00.773)
I think that's why I have always wanted to talk with you. And we've been.

Rob Dwyer (05:11.641)
You are definitely one of those people who gives back and that's something that I really, really appreciate about you. You mentioned getting some snow. And when you get snow in the upper Midwest, often it is not just a light dusting, right? It can wreak havoc. You work for an airline. Tell us about what...

happens when weather events like that occur when you work in a contact center? What's that day like and what are your agents feeling as they're getting ready to start their day?

Jeremy Hyde (05:53.134)
Yeah, those are tough days. We've got a new leader that started with us within the last month or so. Really lengthy contacts on our background. And yesterday during this snow event, as we call it, sounds very formal, she was checking in and going, is this normal? I've never seen anything like this. And I was like, this actually ain't that bad. I've seen way worse than this. Yeah, the airline industry, I'm sure there's others that

Rob Dwyer (06:17.295)
Ha

Jeremy Hyde (06:22.638)
that maybe are like this as well, but not a lot, has this unique ability to go from what you expect to happen to something that you could never imagine. I'll give you a really extreme example. March 2020, when COVID was really starting to take hold in the US, I remember a day when people started changing their plans and all of that on a day when we should have received about 2,000 phone calls.

We had 60,000 attempts.

Now again, very extreme example, but.

the way that your day goes and the sort of volume that you can receive can change very drastically. You could be, you can easily be 400 % over forecast with a good snowstorm or a hurricane or wildfires or anything. So that's tough. And of course that's when customers really need you the most. And it's frankly without self-service and things of that nature, it'd be impossible. You could never staff to that demand.

But you know, we have things in place. So yesterday, you know, it's I'm sure there's all sorts of other contact centers that have an all hands on deck sort of a plan that all right, this person is now an agent for the day and this person is now with this. I actually I handled seven text message conversations yesterday myself. I felt like I wanted to pitch in and do what I could do. And so I don't know, we'd have to ask those seven people whether or not they got good service. But that's the sort of thing, you know, you

Jeremy Hyde (08:00.59)
You make those adjustments. We're also, a remote environment. We have a lot of part time employees as well. And so we'll also put the call out, hey, if you can hop on even for 30 minutes. And we've seen some pretty nice adjustments that can be made as a result of that. People going, I'm not doing anything. I could hop on for, I guess, whether it's 30 minutes or three hours and kind of help the customers through that.

Rob Dwyer (08:25.381)
Yeah, it is, you know, my experience in the hospitality space and hotel industry very much mirrors that. A lot of that goes hand in hand. You're potentially canceling a flight or looking to reschedule and then the hotel is next if you were staying in a hotel.

Let's talk a little bit about, you mentioned self-service and the industry is certainly moving toward, and by industry I don't mean necessarily the airline industry, I contact centers as a whole, are moving more and more towards self-service and channels that allow that.

Rob Dwyer (09:16.611)
I want to talk number one about what you guys use in particular and how that helps because it obviously does when the volume goes through the roof. But then I want to follow up and talk about the critical nature of actually having human agents to talk to. So let's start with the self-service piece and what that accomplishes.

Jeremy Hyde (09:46.264)
Yeah, we've built out our technology in such a way that when somebody is disrupted, our website recognizes that that individual experience of disruption of X minutes, hours, cancellation, whatever the case may be, and will allow them to make changes to the reservation that are appropriate based on the disruption that they've experienced.

What's interesting, think, kind of to your second point though is we probably don't see the level of engagement that I would like to see with that self-service. And we built it in such a way that what you can do yourself is the exact same thing that my people can do for you. But I think that yearning for

This is complicated, it's important. I need to talk to a person to be sure. I need to make sure I know that I understand that I'm confident in what's happening here overrides a bit. And I think there's some things that we can do to try and give more confidence upfront and make sure that they understand like you can do this yourself. You'll get the same thing that a human could do. So there's tweaking. We need to continue to put people in a position to help themselves, but.

especially if somebody doesn't travel a lot. They've never been through a disruption. We're not taking business travelers to their meeting in Atlanta for the day. That is not our market. We are taking families who are paying with their own money on vacation to see grandma or on spring break in Mexico. And these folks are traveling once a year, once every 18 months. These are not road warriors that, yeah, I'll just

slip out my AmEx and I'll use my points to that's not who these folks are. They don't travel a lot, so they want often that human touch. yeah, have to figure out how to marry those things. We want to be able to scale to the need, which requires non-human support, but recognizing that there's an interest from the customers to have the human support.

Rob Dwyer (12:06.959)
brought up one thing in particular, which I think is knowing your customer base and their proficiency in...

Jeremy Hyde (12:15.373)
Mm-hmm.

Rob Dwyer (12:19.525)
Plan B and Plan C. And not every customer is proficient in that. You do have the business traveler, the road warrior, who it doesn't phase them. They just go, well, yeah, of course it's canceled. Or of course, my flight's delayed, right? But I think something that we discount a little too much, and I'd like to hear your thought on this, is

the way people react under stress. And if I've got a trip to go see grandma for Christmas, let's say, right? I mean, that's the time of year that we're in and my flight gets canceled. My stress level just goes through the roof. And so in my mind, there's also that challenge of

doing this thing, which may, for an agent who does it all day long, every day, is super easy. But for the person under stress, who maybe under certain circumstances could do this, but under these circumstances just doesn't want it.

Jeremy Hyde (13:24.014)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Hyde (13:35.992)
Yeah, absolutely.

Obviously that stress weighs heavy on the agents as well, you know. One of the things that we talk about is like when we put out that request for help on a day like today and we have an amazing team and people hop on, there's probably also some people that get that message that are scheduled to work later in the day that are going, huh, you know, my throat might be a little scratchy. don't, maybe today is not the day to show up and get.

today might be tough. You're right though.

People struggle with that stress and figuring out how to manage through it. And sometimes that shows up in, I can't possibly do this myself, I need help. Sometimes that shows up with anger and that sort of thing. And with travel especially, it's not like, your UGG boots aren't going to arrive in time.

I'm physically traveling maybe with my family, maybe with my children, which is just stressful to be in with. If you've ever taken a small child through an airport, like you know, the stressful situation, those days are tough. You're glad when you get there. But yeah, so that people often aren't showing up in their finest hour as a result of all

Rob Dwyer (15:10.127)
Yeah, absolutely.

You just touched on this, and I'd like to dig into it a little bit more and what you do to try to mitigate this. And that is the agent response. So agents who have gone through this, they know what to expect. They know their shift is coming up. They know it's going to be that kind of day. And

Jeremy Hyde (15:32.511)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (15:41.283)
That kind of day can come with some really upset customers.

It can come sometimes with just nastiness coming through. What do you do to, number one, prepare these agents? But also, what kind of strategies do you employ to help agents deal with kind of the brunt of that?

Jeremy Hyde (16:14.318)
You know, with the preparedness, something that we started doing this year, earlier this year, is actually utilizing an AI training tool. So instead of the role play that you would usually do as a new employee, you know, me and Rob are buddied up and we're going to go through this scenario. You know, often what happens, a couple things happen. One is, you're not going to be that mean to me.

It's just like you can't write like your buddy from training is not going to cuss you out and tell you what to do with it. And then to probably you're not going to talk like an actual customer. You're not going to present yourself your scenario. You're going to give me kind of exactly what I need in the order that I need it. And probably not even on purpose, but just because like you're learning things in that way, you're walking through this checklist of items. And so I think.

going from training to reality, especially a disruption, a snow event, something like that. That first one that you go through was like, whoa, I don't know. That's not exactly how we practice that. But we can train the AI to be kind of mean and snotty and to talk like a customer. so that's what we've started to do is we're utilizing a tool where we've created personas. We create certain scenarios and

both new hires and tenured agents, frankly, we have them practice having these conversations with an AI as the role play as the customer. And so I think that's helped a little bit to recognize, like, I'm going to get challenged in a certain way. If I don't have the greatest of options to present, the customer isn't just going to go, OK, then.

and move on, they're going to push on you and they're going to ask questions and they might be kind of sending a rude or upset or whatever the case may be. So I think that's helped in terms of the preparedness. We do see...

Rob Dwyer (18:01.903)
Bye.

Jeremy Hyde (18:16.16)
it's easier to go through these situations when you've been through them before. You know what to expect to some extent. You've built up a toolkit to draw from. You know how to leverage your resources and some great phrases to use and all that sort of thing. So I think that has helped, certainly. You know, the other piece, like...

I don't know that we're doing anything that's really groundbreaking to be honest with you. mean all the sorts of things that any other leader in a contact center that deals with people that aren't nice could probably give some pretty similar answers to what I would give here. I used to work in a space. Medicaid, Medicare, know health insurance where we couldn't fire a customer. Like if we had a Medicaid. Customer. We were.

we had a regulatory obligation, we had to cover them. And so even if they were unwell and would threaten our people and were really nasty and terrible, like there wasn't a whole lot we could do about it. When you work in a different industry where you're not, there's not a regulatory obligation to maintain a relationship with a customer, it is kind of nice to like with just the people that are really unreasonable, abusive threats to say, you know what?

We're not gonna do business anymore. Here's your money back. Let's not do this again. So that, know, the worst of the worst like that is the treatment that folks can get where they are no longer welcome to do business with us. But obviously that's reserved for some really outlier nasty situations.

Rob Dwyer (20:00.835)
Yeah, but those outlier situations are situations that agents remember. They can weigh on them and there are lots of organizations not by regulatory enforcement, but just by their culture. Have this customer is always right to mindset, even though that whole phrase is bastardized and taken out of context.

Jeremy Hyde (20:28.365)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (20:30.307)
And so I do believe that when you are willing as an organization to fire a customer, it tells the agents like they've got my back and there's a lot of value in

Jeremy Hyde (20:47.436)
Yeah, so last week we fired a customer. And this is the first one that I can remember in a long time. Frankly, it doesn't usually get to that point, but this person. The language in the threats are just. Especially given the situation or just really. Mind blowing, but that individual had called 8 to 12 times that day and just really harassed every single person and so.

to your point.

letting the agents know. If I hadn't let those agents know that we fired that customer, they wouldn't know that we have their back. And so we made sure to let them know. First, it was we've referred this person for review. We've got a process. We don't I don't just sit there and willy nilly decide that I'm going to fire. We've got a But I let each one of these. Yeah, I think it's good checks and balances, right? But we let these folks know, like, first of all, I'm sorry you had to deal with that.

Rob Dwyer (21:41.221)
That's good. I think that's good.

Jeremy Hyde (21:49.74)
Second of all, I want to remind you that, you know, here is our kind of policy around disconnecting on a customer when they're doing this sort of thing. Like you can choose not to speak with them anymore. I want to make sure you guys all remember that. And thirdly, you know, we've referred for this process. We likely will no longer do business with this individual because the way they've traded you isn't okay. But had I not closed the loop with those folks, they wouldn't know what, you know, how would they? So.

But that piece, like that culture, in the moment it only helps so much, right? When you're taking that abuse, like it's going to weigh heavy on you. But if you've built that culture where you know your team, whether it's your colleague, your agent coworker, or your lead, or your senior director, like they've got my back, it can help.

Rob Dwyer (22:42.117)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I wonder, I mean, you have been in this particular company for long enough that I wonder, you see outside of just the stress of weather-related events, do you see an increase of stressful situations around this time of year, right? The holidays and people are traveling, you see family and that kind of

thing is that is that typically a stressor that that comes across from customers?

Jeremy Hyde (23:21.634)
You know, I think within our industry.

It's it's a I shouldn't even say it's a uniquely busy time of year because a lot of other industries are busy this time of year as well, but You know starting this weekend a lot of people are traveling for Christmas holiday and see families that sort of thing so In addition to what you're saying that it's a it's a stressful time of year for some because they've lost somebody and it's bringing up those memories and for some because they are Struggling to afford presents for their children

On top of all that, like this is the one of the busiest travel seasons of the year. So it certainly is a tough time for us as a result. It's busiest time of year. Anytime that something is at its peak, it's wound tight. you know, things can go wrong. Snow is happening, whether it's in the Midwest or the East Coast. Like there's there's a lot of weather related issues. So yes, it can be.

a very stressful time of year and we see that uniquely around this time of year for all of those reasons.

Rob Dwyer (24:29.997)
Yeah. I wonder, do you guys, when things come down, like, do do something special for the agents, like after New Year's and kind of that peak travel season has abated a little bit? What's the environment like after New Year's?

Jeremy Hyde (24:54.668)
Yeah, there's we've got a lot of seasonality in our business again because it's people paying with their own money going on vacations and that sort of thing. We definitely see a lot of seasonality. And so winter time, spring break time, know that's Minnesotans get out of the snow, go to Saint Martin, Saint Thomas, Mexico, pick your island that you love, Puerto Rico.

But there are times of year, like May in Minnesota, things start to come alive. The snow has melted. There's green that you can see again instead of brown, or September when kids are going back to school. You know, there's times of year when like nobody's traveling. And so we really take advantage of those times and kind of remind people like, hey, go and do some traveling of your own. Because the demand changes so much.

We actually will say like, you know, May, June, September, whatever, like, would you like to take the month off? Would you like to take three weeks off? Like, go nuts. Let us know. Do you want to reduce your hours, whether you're full-time, part-time, you want to work less? It's good for us, obviously, to try and match the demand and try to align to the seasonality, but it's good for folks to be able to kind of look forward to that as well, take advantage of flight benefits.

unwind after a busy season, that sort of thing.

Rob Dwyer (26:25.219)
Yeah, that sounds fantastic. I can attest though that May in Minnesota is. Man, there is just something about it before the mosquitoes get really bad, but it's warming up. Things are getting green being out by the lake like.

Jeremy Hyde (26:37.57)
Yeah.

Jeremy Hyde (26:41.26)
At the end of winter, you're kind of getting to that point every year where you're like, I don't know if I can continue to do this. And then like this amnesia thing happens because as soon as the weather turns, you're like, it's amazing here. Why would I ever leave? And it's just a cycle that repeats itself every year.

Rob Dwyer (26:48.261)
You

Rob Dwyer (26:58.819)
Yeah, I think it's like women in childbirth. think it's a very similar experience. Like. I don't think that I could go through childbirth and ever go, yeah, that's something I want to do again, but.

Jeremy Hyde (27:01.836)
Yep. Yep.

Rob Dwyer (27:12.645)
There's some kind of magic that happens where they forget about how incredibly painful and brutal that process can be. And I think that's very much like Minnesota winners. You forget about it and you're like, summer is amazing here.

Jeremy Hyde (27:32.492)
It is. There's nothing like being on a lake in Minnesota in the summer.

Rob Dwyer (27:37.241)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, as we get ready to wrap up this year, I'm curious to know what you are most thankful for this year.

Jeremy Hyde (27:53.4)
Mmm.

Jeremy Hyde (27:56.91)
That's a great question. I in my personal life, I'll start there. Why not? I just have an incredible family, an amazing wife, two incredible children. My oldest daughter is learning to drive, and that's terrifying, but also it's pretty cool. She's about six months out from getting her license, assuming she passes the test. But it's just...

It's really neat watching the kids come into their own and each of the things that they're accomplishing at different phases in life. So that's super gratifying. We've had a wonderful year together as a family. Professionally, I really...

The way that this team has developed and come together over the last five or six years is really amazing. And this team looks incredibly different than it did six, seven years ago. Our organization looks a lot different than we did, you know, seven, eight years ago. And the way that this team continues to build together to support each other, the way that they show up,

not only for customers, but for colleagues as well. We just continue to do a lot of really, really cool things and all of that is possible because of who we are and the way that we go about our business. And so I'm just really grateful for the people personally and professionally that are in my life. That's what makes it all special. And so I guess that's what it would be.

Rob Dwyer (29:44.239)
pretty awesome. There's nothing wrong with that answer at all. I'm curious. You talk about the organization changing.

Can we talk about some of those changes and some of the things that you think have been most impactful as it relates to the contact center? What kinds of things have you guys done over the past, let's say, five years that have really changed the way that you do business?

Jeremy Hyde (30:11.928)
Well, starting at kind of the organizational level for folks that aren't familiar with us, some country Minneapolis based, I hate to call us regional because that's kind of discounting who we are and what we are, but we are very entrenched in the Minneapolis market. The organization

change to a low cost. Kind of all a cart model. Seven or so years ago. And that was hard. You know the change from kind of the old business model to the current was hard on customers. It hard on employees. The reality was. We wouldn't probably still be sitting here if we continue to try and operate the way that we used to and so.

the changes that were made were really necessary and had to find the balance of a business model that was financially sustainable, but also delivered on something that we could all be proud of. And so there's growing pains associated with that. More specific to our team, the contact center, I mean, it started with rebuilding a lot of just core functionality, workforce management.

learning and development, you know, all those sorts of things, making sure, you know, from workforce perspective, like, did we have a solid forecast? Did we have a sense of what might happen? Do we understand the bands of kind of change that could occur? How do we build staffing that's flexible and dynamic? You know, how do we respond? It used to be like you couldn't

And it used to be we all worked in the office near the airport. And so on snow days like yesterday, not only were we challenged because our volume was much, much higher, but people literally couldn't make it into work because they couldn't drive or didn't want to drive through the snow. And so that's a double whammy. I've got less people to deal with more volume. So we've shifted to a fully remote, heavily part-time group of

Jeremy Hyde (32:34.486)
of team members were spread out. We try and remain focused in the upper Midwest where people, one, can take advantage of flight benefits, but two, kind of know who we are. You we've got the brand presence as an employer. Our part-time program has been incredibly powerful because we can, one, match the demand more effectively rather than, you know, just eight and 10 hour shifts. You've got just these big blocks of time and

You're overstaffed here and you're understaffed there. Instead, you start doing some micro scheduling, three, four, five hour shifts, the days and times when you need it most. During the busy times, maybe they're working a little more. During the slow times, maybe they're working a little less. There's a lot of things like that that we've done that frankly are just very kind of nuts and bolts, you know, kind of tactical. It's not like AI revolutionized what we're doing here, but.

We did have to challenge the way that we approach certain things and think about like, there a different way? We've become an employer that.

is a great employer for a different type of employee. A remote part-time employee in small, not in Minneapolis, in small town, Minnesota, Wisconsin, you know, whatever it may be, like we're great for them. They love us. It's a different type of employee than we used to hire. So those are the sorts of things really that we've been working through. It's like, all right, what are the problems? What are the challenges? What are the opportunities? And

going out and finding things like that and kind of retooling and rebuilding to position ourselves as best we can.

Rob Dwyer (34:20.569)
I mean, with all of the talk about return to office, and there is a lot of talk and there are a lot of reasons for it in a lot of different industries, but you hit on something that I've been harping on for years. And that is the remote model, which doesn't have to be work from anywhere.

In your case, it's not necessarily work from anywhere, but it is a regional work from home model. Does something for a contact center that is critical to the nature of the business, which is we need to be able to respond to customers regardless of weather, power outages, internet challenges. And when you centralize,

those operations in a facility.

you subject yourself to a potential critical failure in your ability to be able to do business at all. And so that work from home model that you described.

The snow comes, let it come. We'll still answer the phones and the text messages and whatnot. If one person loses power at their home, it affects one person. It doesn't affect my entire operation. you know, I was in a contact center where the fiber got cut to the building, like, we're done.

Jeremy Hyde (36:01.666)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (36:01.733)
Like there was literally no internet in the building for an entire day because the fiber got cut. Like you're just done at that point. And so that resilience, I know that there are all kinds of reasons to champion being in an office. And there are all kinds of reasons that meeting people physically has benefits, but

Don't just discount the benefits to your business of having a remote workforce. And one of the things that you brought up is I'm able to employ people in areas where they might not have the same kind of opportunities. Like Minneapolis is a huge city. There are all kinds of job opportunities. But if you get to outer Minnesota or Wisconsin outside of the big cities like

Milwaukee or Madison or what have you. Those opportunities like it's maybe I can work at a Walmart or I can go to the dollar store. You know, I don't have a ton of options. so being able to work from home and just know like I need a good internet connection and I can work and make a living like that's a big deal to a lot of people.

Jeremy Hyde (37:06.04)
Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Hyde (37:24.174)
Absolutely. Well, and you mentioned something throughout all that as well. And I completely agree with you.

remote hiring work from home doesn't have to be and for me should not mean hire from anywhere. Now don't get me wrong, we hire from all over the place, onesie twosie. There's a specific town that I'm not going to tell you the name of and we hire within a 50 mile radius of that town. That is our spot. We love it. There's there are not the same amounts of opportunities.

We don't see the same sort of wage pressure. There's just this really, really great workforce that continues to be really, really great for us. And so we concentrate on a specific area. And if I was somebody out there that was getting started or starting to go remote or whatever, that's what I would be thinking about is like, what are the unique needs of my business or the unique

benefits that we offer as a business and then let's hone in on a regional focus where we want to hire as a result. Interestingly, we're fully remote. Like we interview, onboard, train, like everything, like you do not need to step foot and you may never step foot into our building. But what a regional focus does allow you to do

We've gone and done in-person job fair sorts of things. And so if you're trying to figure out, like if you identify the town, the city, the region, whatever, where you wanna hire, and then you're like, but how do we let them know? You can still show up in person there, start to build some buzz, and then shift it to your remote processes. And like, even when we do that, we still then go back and like, all right, we're gonna schedule you for a remote interview. We're gonna get on a video call and see how you do.

Rob Dwyer (39:11.449)
Mmm.

Jeremy Hyde (39:25.164)
over the phone with the technology, you know, all that sort of thing. But yeah, 100%, but if something changes in that market, all of a it's not a good market. There's some local thing that happens or whatever. I can go somewhere else. And that's the beauty is like, if you're locked in, in person, you got to show up to this building. Minneapolis a couple of years ago had the lowest unemployment rate in the country. It was like 2%. And the wage pressure was

crazy. And so it's like, in that situation, if I was locked in, I would never have been able to find and keep the people that I needed just because of all of those external facts. But I wasn't. I like, all right, forget it. We don't hire in Minneapolis. Like, team, don't. When you get resumes, I want you to focus on this little town that we really like to hire from people. So yeah, doesn't mean hire from anywhere.

Rob Dwyer (40:09.913)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (40:18.669)
Yeah, well, and the nice thing too is the word spreads in those little towns about this great employer. And you can become an employer of choice, even though you don't have a physical presence there. there's a certain affinity too to the brand and to the company that can occur when you're taking that kind of approach.

Jeremy Hyde (40:42.286)
Yeah, you get your employees posting in the local community Facebook group and then all of a you've got 10 more applications coming in and absolutely.

Rob Dwyer (40:46.053)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (40:50.169)
Yeah. Well, Jeremy, it has been absolutely my pleasure to get to talk to you. I really just have one more question before we wrap things up, but I do want to encourage people to go down to the show notes. There's going to be a link to your LinkedIn. Make sure you reach out to Jeremy. If you're interested in the Midwest Contact Center Association, there's no better person to talk to.

than this guy and find out more. I know I haven't been, but I know they do some great in-person events in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. think last year you guys did like a Saints game or a Twins game. I can't remember one or the other, or maybe both. Twins? OK. Yeah.

Jeremy Hyde (41:36.632)
Yeah, we did. We did the twins this year. We did the Saints the year before. Absolutely, we do that. We do that once a year, so that's a great place to come in and check us out.

Rob Dwyer (41:46.083)
Yeah, okay. If you were going to take a trip on a some country airplane today to one of the destinations that you service, where are you going, Jeremy?

Jeremy Hyde (42:07.31)
All right, because I can never just give like a straight answer that follows exactly the guidelines of question that was answered. I'm going to give you two.

Jeremy Hyde (42:19.65)
The first one is the trip that we're actually taking in the spring or spring break. That's St. Martin. We went last spring break and loved it. And we were trying to decide, we're very much like Caribbean Island, sort of a family. so this year we're like, where do we go? Do we check out something different? And we're like, you know, we loved it the last time we went, like we could just go back. And so we're, we're going back to St. Martin. We're staying in the exact same place that we stayed.

All that so st. Martin is great. It was so much fun. So beautiful plenty to do So st. Martin is is one Another one that I'll mention just because maybe people aren't as familiar with it Roatan Roatan is a small island off of the coast of Honduras

Rob Dwyer (43:10.405)
Honduras, yeah, I know it.

Jeremy Hyde (43:12.798)
And I haven't been, my father-in-law has been, I know others that have been and have loved it and just thought it was amazing. you know, people wouldn't normally think of Honduras as their, you know, spring break or winter destination, but this little island is, it's the place that tourists want to go to, again, be on an island, have great weather. I think they've got some rainforesty type things going on as well. So that's on my list to visit at some point.

Rob Dwyer (43:42.465)
I have not been to Roaton, I have been to Honduras and I hear it is amazing. So I very much enjoyed the time that I spent in Honduras even though it's for work, but it was a good stay.

Rob Dwyer (44:02.253)
great! Go! The weather is amazing!

Go do it. Jeremy, thank you so much for being on Next In Queue. I appreciate it.

Jeremy Hyde (44:12.654)
Thanks for having me.