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Steve:
As a CEO of a company, I have a constant craving for data so that the leaders in our organization make sound business decisions, and that data must include the customer's experience.

Tim:
We meet with each team each month and go through all of the past projects in addition to upcoming potential projects and when we go through the past projects. One of the things we review our CX results and if if they're not in the kind of excellent, very good range, why is this? What are we doing wrong? What do we need to improve? What is the situation?

Steve:
Let's talk about experience monitoring on this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at walkerinfo.com.

Steve:
Hello, everyone. I'm Steve Walker, host of The CX Leader Podcast and thank you for listening. It's never been a better time to be a CX leader, and this podcast helps explore topics and themes that help leaders like you deliver amazing experiences for your customers. If you haven't noticed from the roughly 230 episodes of this podcast, data is important for customer experience. Providing a great experience is certainly a good thing, but it's not enough to assume that your program is delivering. You must gather the data necessary to either confirm you're doing it right or find you need to make some changes in order to improve your CX. Well, my guest today is also a CEO and like me is really big on results measurement. Tim Thoman is the president and CEO of Performance Services, a company that designs and constructs high performance buildings. Tim, thank you for being a client of Walker and also thank you for being a guest on our podcast.

Tim:
Oh, thank you for the invitation. Looking forward to the conversation.

Steve:
Well, just to put it in context for our listeners, just tell us a little bit more about your company, its history and your career, and then we'll talk a little bit more about your interest in customer experience.

Tim:
So I attended Purdue University as a mechanical engineer, so I kind of approached…

Steve:
Boiler up.

Tim:
…that's right, exactly. And so I approached things from kind of an engineering perspective, very data driven. And so I started the company 24 years ago and we've grown it organically and we now serve nine states kind of in the middle of the country a little bit to the southeast in Indiana. Indianapolis is our headquarters. The and what we do is we have architects, engineers, project managers, programmers, salespeople, and then performance assurance people. And we design and construct institutional facilities, primarily K-12 public schools, but also city and county facilities and some higher ed facilities. And we've done some health care as well.

Steve:
And I don't know, you're a private company, but like how many employees? How many customers? It's a little firmographics there.

Tim:
So we're about we're 260 employees.

Steve:
Wow.

Tim:
This year we'll do somewhere between five and $600 million in those nine states and we're been growing fairly aggressively. So I think we've the last seven years, we've grown 550% or something. So significant growth over the last five, six, seven years, so.

Steve:
Yeah. So I hear you were CX before CX was even a thing. Somebody told me that early on you started your own kind of customer feedback process. Can you just kind of give me the the roots of that?

Tim:
Sure. So when I founded the company, one of my commitments was 100% customer satisfaction and that that would take precedent kind of over everything else and that financials would not drive the decisions. And so and for many, many years, we always believed in that and we always talked about it, but we really didn't have a process in place to deliver on it or to make sure we were doing it. I mean, so the evidence was more anecdotal in that I'd see someone at a conference or I'd stop by and see a customer and say, how do we do? And and that almost always say, Oh, you guys, it was great, works great, but and then tell me about these problems they had during the installation. And I said, Well, why didn't you call me? Why didn't you tell me? Like, like, oh, every project has problems, so it's no big deal. I knew you guys would take care of it. You did? And what I'm like. Well, like, I want it to be an amazing experience throughout the process. And so it's always kind of frustrating, like we need some type of tool to gauge satisfaction during the process. And also we talk about 100% customer satisfaction. So how do we… How do we know we're actually delivering on that? And so I started doing some like spreadsheet. Like we had our own questions and we'd call or it was very nonscientific and unfortunately more random when we had time. And then our VP of Sales and Marketing engaged with Walker Research and they brought in a program, the customer experience program, and, and we were able to identify the kind of the five key points to measure. And then there was the helped with the process of automatically soliciting that response or response to those questions, and then also a pretty analytical approach to how we're doing. And so that enabled us to fulfill that commitment in a very empirical and in less time consuming way.

Steve:
Yeah, I think my records indicate maybe you became a client like in 2016, roughly. So yeah, you've been doing it maybe a little more professionally over the last six years. But I want to go back to the early stage because I think this is just such a key concept for our listeners to keep in mind. You know, any kind of organized collection of data around the customer is valid and it's better than nothing. And it's such a critical aspect. But just again, like even though it was episodic and it might not have been, I think you're being modest, but as a business leader, what kind of inputs did you get early on and what were some of the changes that you made to the business that that helped you go on this phenomenal growth trajectory?

Tim:
Well, so because we are committed to like doing whatever it takes to make sure the customer is happy, we always ended up with a happy customer. So that's kind of where we we felt we were fulfilling that part of our mission. But again, the way we did it was kind of irritating to customers and it was also very sporadic and the data was more we just kind of looked at all the responses and kind of say, Yeah, it feels like we're doing a good job, you know? So it wasn't very scientific, so it was dramatically different once we had kind of a structured program through CX because what we were able to do is, well, let me take a step back. So as it relates to the impacts in our business, so the from the beginning, my belief was that if we took great care of customers better than anyone in the industry and great care of employees, that the profits would come. And if we focus on excellence, in other words, doing things right, learning from all of our mistakes and our successes that we would be successful.

Tim:
And so and that's turned out to be really the key to our success is just continually, no matter how or whether it's needed or not, to be competitive, constantly figuring out what better ways to drive value in our customer's eyes and and then also making sure that our employees are thrilled. And so and we… We have a similar approach to employee satisfaction as we do customer experience. It's simpler, much simpler. But so we measure that a couple of different ways every year to see if we're improving, staying stagnant or or declining in any area. And then we also look at financials and make sure that we're still remaining profitable. So those are the kind of the areas of focus, the big picture areas and everything else kind of builds around that. And so but but I will say having so our Net Promoter Score is up to like an 82 right now and we track that monthly. And so it's, I don't know what they consider world class, but I believe it's somewhere in the sixties.

Steve:
Oh, 82's world class, believe me. Yeah.

Tim:
Okay. And so, but what's interesting is what we did is we tied this in with our employee performance reviews into bonuses and into this trip we take as a company. And so and when the CX report comes in from a customer, if it's anything other than excellent or very good, then the project manager, the supervisor in that person's supervisor gets an email and the the account executive who handles the account, they all got an email. They get an email saying, hey, we have a potential issue here. And then the project manager, usually during the installation phase, would follow up and find out what's going on, why are we having this issue? And then each month when we review all the product, we meet with each team each month and go through all of the past projects in addition to upcoming potential projects. And when we go through the past projects, one of the things we review are CX results. And if if they're not been the kind of excellent, very good range kind of why is this? What are we doing wrong? What do we need to improve? What is the situation? And so this constant focus and the data, the empirical data that's being gathered is and engaging our employees on as a minimum monthly. But often every time a survey comes out, if it's not in the range, we kind of expect that has really driven all our employees to focus first and foremost, even in front of financials on customer experience, because they know that's that's what is most closely tracked. That's how they're most heavily graded. And most of our employees, they want to do a great job for customers. So I'm not suggesting that they wouldn't care. But by having that accountability and tying it into their success in the organization and their pay it, it brings a different level of focus. And I think as part of why the results are so much better.

Steve:
Do you like free stuff? Well, me too. I like it, too. Well, if you want a chance to get your hands on some CX Leader Podcast swag, go to cxleaderpodcast.com/feedback and complete a short survey on how you think we're doing. We're always looking for ways to improve and your input will help us do just that. Again, that's cxleaderpodcast.com/feedback for some CX Leader Podcast swag.

Steve:
Hey, my guest on the podcast this week is Tim Thoman. He's the president and CEO of Performance Services, which is a fascinating company that designs and constructs high performance buildings. These are big projects. You know, the clients are spending lots of money. It's a high touch business. And he's really given us an MBA on how to implement a CX program and drive a company that performs on on all cylinders and creates excellent results. I mean, it's an amazing story to go from 0 to 5 or 600 million and zero employees to 230 in less than a quarter of a decade. There aren't many businesses that can say they did that. But now that I'm talking to you, I understand. But as the business matured, you know, I would assume that early on, some of it was a lot of reactionary kind of firefighting. But as as you scaled, you had to build structure and build processes. So where were you informed about that, like your training and development or just checklists or or any kind of example you give me of of how you sort of scaled this thing up from an internal perspective based on the feedback you were getting from your customers.

Tim:
Yeah. So well, one of the things that we have always done is we do a postmortem on every project that we've delivered, and I think that's getting close to like 1000 projects, so..

Steve:
What a database.

Tim:
Yeah. And we look at every interaction from the first sales call through the construction, through warranty and and then we usually we have performance assurance where we monitor monthly the performance of these buildings up to a decade after they're completed. So, but so we and we usually hold the postmortem sometime during the warranty period. And the and one of the questions we ask, where did we make mistakes and what caused those mistakes and how can we not do that again? Because we don't mind making mistakes as long as we learn from them and we don't make those same mistakes. And then where did we have successes that were surprising? You know, where do we perform well above what we expected and why was that? And so the and all of this feeds then kind of are our best practices in this check point document we have. And and so that over time, we've just we've experienced just a ton of mistakes and we've learned from them and and some unexpected successes, or at least performance at a level higher than what we anticipated. And so from that, we have, again, these best practices documents that and so before a project goes out, there's this long list. It's like a seven page document that our people have to go through.

Tim:
And essentially it's kind of making sure that we're not going to make the same mistake again. And they and I remember it was kind of funny a couple of years ago when our engineering manager came and we asked before we sign off on the final numbers, we asked, well, have we done have you taken it through the checkpoint process? And the answer was no. It's like, Well, why not? Like, Well, we don't have time. This could take two days, maybe longer. I said, Well, if we don't have time to make sure we're doing it right up front, how are we going to have time on the back side when it doesn't work, when the customer is upset, when we have to replace spend two, three, 400,000 to replace something? How is it going to cost less time or less money to do it that way? And what our goal is to deliver 100 customer satisfaction. So know how does it how does that thinking jive with kind of the these bottom line objectives we have and kind of like okay, fine, you know, we'll spend the day or two days because one of the questions is like so for instance, as a small example, it was over about 15 years ago, we installed all this mechanical equipment in this mezzanine area in a gymnasium up near the ceiling, and when the units came in, they wouldn't fit.

Tim:
I'm like, Well, how can they not fit? Like, Well, the answer was as-built drawings were wrong. So we, we didn't physically measure. We assume that the drawings were correct. We ordered all the equipment based on that. Well, when they come in, they won't fit. So now we have to rebuild this mezzanine. At the time, it was like 50 grand. Now it's for 150,000. But but that wasn't an unforeseen condition. I mean, we could have measured it, right? Yeah. And so we we that was an expensive lesson. But now one of the line items there, I think it's up to like 250 line items. One of them is, have we measured every space we're putting new equipment if it's larger than the existing equipment. Have we physically measured it? You know what I mean? So as you're going through that, you haven't done that. Well, that may mean you need to go out and do a bunch of measurements so it can take time. But that's kind of but that's how you make sure you don't make mistakes.

Steve:
You know, it's a great example. And, you know, a couple of other things you said in there, you know, you stick to your process, right? If you know the process works, you don't want to ignore the process and at the expense of possibly creating down the road quality issues. And then you gave a great example of the cost of poor quality. You know, I mean, those are expensive lessons to learn. But, you know, the kind of the continual process of learning and putting that back into your processes, the processes that, you know, deliver that 100% customer satisfaction, that's exactly what what we would advise our good clients to do. So I'm I'm proud to to showcase you here. Talk a little bit about when we started working with you, did you already have an NPS score at that time or is that something that we implemented? At that time?

Tim:
We didn't know what NPS was, so…

Steve:
OK.

Tim:
We didn't call it customer experience, we call it customer satisfaction.

Steve:
So you said your NPS now is 82. Do you recall where it was when you started? Was it always was it always high or have you…

Tim:
Yeah, well, it's always been high. I think we're in the low sixties or something.

Steve:
Yeah. But you've still improved it over time.

Tim:
So. But it's gotten a lot better and I think our response rate because we track that it's over 90% now.

Steve:
90%.

Tim:
Yeah. And then we track truly loyal and that's not high eighties and then we track yeah. Those are the primary metrics.

Steve:
And you track them every month?

Tim:
Oh yeah. And we have matter of fact we on our BI tool, business intelligence tool and we've broken down the questions that relate most to the project manager, to the salesperson, to the engineer, to the architect. And so they have their own CX number related to the questions that relate most to what they impact, you know.

Steve:
Yeah.

Tim:
So we have an overall, which is what we really focus on mostly, but we also have individual CX scores for each person based on their specific projects, based on the aspects of the project that they most impact.

Steve:
Yeah. So you break it down by the functional areas, the touchpoints and you know what, what those drivers are that's going to yield the ultimate outcome. And then do you ever find like some, some functional improvements inside of that, like a project management best practice or an engineering best practice that you can then replicate across your teams?

Tim:
So we're constantly asking our employees for ideas on how we can get better. And so and all I think a lot of those ideas come from this, the results of the results. Because there's so much visibility to it the way we do it, people are just highly focused on making sure that every response is excellent or very good. And what we… What we don't allow in what we've is this idea of, hey, give us a good story. So because that totally invalidates, you know, because we're not really trying to impress anybody else. We just want to be great. So we're not we're not really promoting this to our customers or anything like that. We just want to we want fulfill our mission, mission guiding principles. And so this is kind of a tool to do that.

Steve:
Yeah, there are two kinds of surveys out there. One that's trying to chase the number and get sort of check the box. And then there's the ones that are really trying to make sure that you're getting to the right answer and really trying to, you know, dig for things where you can be better. Have you seen a change in sort of how your customer relationships are formed early on by this? I mean, you know, you've had this 100% satisfaction since the start, and that seems to be a lot of your brand promise. But have you seen that sort of emerge in terms of how you onboard new customers and…

Tim:
Oh, we don't. So I think what the way it really impacts our ability to retain customers and attract new customers is that if customers are really happy and we deliver high performing buildings and we make it an enjoyable process and, you know, the construction process and enjoyable process, then that's just they want to work with us and they mean so they try to find ways to work with us. So that helps us retain our customers. So we, you know, we'll have multiple phases. I mean, we have some customers we've been working with for over 20 years now. So that's a big piece. And the other piece is that in time, because we have no bad jobs, we are the safe choice. So sometimes it's difficult for people to understand who best to go with. And but if you have no bad jobs and a customer is guaranteed to have a success with you, if everything else looks similar, then we get the nod. And so by having no one say anything negative about us, we have everyone that talks about us has a positive experience. And now that we're the market leader, so everyone kind of knows. So it's it's just I guess we're kind of the the easy button, if you will, or the safe button, which I think is helpful.

Steve:
Hey, Tim, we were talking off the air about some of the improvements that you made over the time as you scaled your business from zero to over a half a billion dollars. You know, just give us a couple of examples of where your your program influenced, sort of how you put that structure in to support that growth.

Tim:
Yeah. So we spent most of our time just in Indiana working on our processes. And before we expanded outside of the state, we wanted to make sure we had scalable processes and that our business would be scalable. And customer experience was an important part of that and we didn't… we'd rather be great than large. And so we wanted to make sure if we were going to expand, that we would be able to maintain our culture and maintain a deliverable to achieve our guiding principles and our mission and vision. And so CX was an important part of that. And so we're now in nine different states and we track CX and all those states. And what's interesting is I thought that as we grew, our CX would go down because we have new states, new managers, they're not connected to corporate as much, or at least they don't physically reside here. And but I think through various processes, including CX, our Net Promoter Score and our truly loyal and and our employee satisfaction have all gotten better over time, which is was kind of surprising to me. And the and one additional data point that was kind of neat as it relates to customer experience in in Indiana, we've competed with the best places to work five times and we've taken the number one spot twice. Number two once, number four. Number five in Illinois, which is you have to be a certain size of an office to compete. We've won the number one spot in Illinois twice now. So so I think having our processes scalable, including the CX process, has been really critical to us scaling and maintaining the quality of what we deliver. And, and in the results.

Steve:
It's a great example. You know, you you pilot things, you get it right. You kind of design what the ideal situation is, realizing that you'll never totally get to the ideal, but at least you have sort of this model and then you scale from that. And you're right, those things should just continue to, to grow like. That as long as you stick to your processes and discipline. So. Thanks for sharing that. Hey, Tim, we've come to the part of the program where I ask every guest, including you, for what we call take home value. This is kind of your key point that you would like our listeners to take away from your discussion here on the podcast today and something that they could go and apply at their company to improve what they're doing in their company based on your experience and the lessons you've shared with us, so Tim Thoman, what is your take home value today on this podcast?

Tim:
Well, I would say if you don't track it and you don't build it in to as part of the fabric of the business, then it won't happen. And so if customer satisfaction and customer experience are important, you need to build in a process to to empirically track it and then you need to at least we found that was very helpful for us to integrate it into all of our processes as it relates to your bonuses and your annual reviews and so forth. And then for senior management, senior leadership to have visibility to it. So that's just made it part of our culture. It's just what we do. And, and I think that's how we've been able to deliver maintain currently net promoter score of 82 just as part of our normal day and day out business.

Steve:
That is a great tip. In fact, I think that reminds me that I think Peter Drucker wrote back in the 1950s that what gets measured, gets managed in an organization, and you have definitely built a beautiful system of measuring the customer experience and the results speak for themselves. So congratulations Tim on a fascinating company and really thank you for coming on and sharing your story with our listeners. I know that it's going to be inspiring. Hey, if anybody wanted to continue the dialog with you, you want to just give us your website and are you on LinkedIn?

Tim:
I am on LinkedIn, yes.

Steve:
And then just give us the website for Performance Services, because I think some of our listeners may just want to check out your company.

Tim:
Yeah, it's performanceservices.com.

Steve:
Great. Thanks again for being a great guest on the podcast and…

Tim:
Good to be talking to you, Steve.

Steve:
…yeah, I look forward to more of that. Hey, Tim Thoman is the president and CEO of Performance Services. They build incredible buildings in nine states here in the Midwest. And he's given us a great story and we're grateful for him coming on. If you want to talk about anything else you heard on this podcast about how Walker can help your business customer experience, feel free to email me at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Remember to give The CX Leader Podcast a rating through your podcast service and give us a review. Your feedback will help us improve the show and deliver the best possible value to you, our listener. Check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com to subscribe to the show and find all our previous episodes, podcast series and contact information so you can let us know how we're doing. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success. You can read more about us at walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening. And remember, it's a great time to be a CX leader, so keep doing that work and we will see you again next time.

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