You never think about your customers being unhappy, but inadvertently you’ll end up in situations where you have upset or even angry customers. There are many reasons you end up in these situations and in my experience, the most challenging and most stressful situations were caused because of a service outage. I remember one outage at BroadSoft in particular, where we made the 6 o’clock national news. Ouch!. As the old saying goes, your character is not defined by how you are on your best days but how you act on your worst days. Here’s a few tips on how to handle these uncomfortable situations.

Many of us have ‘working during COVID stories’. Ours is about starting and growing a business while quarantining during the beginnings of this pandemic.

We were very excited to hear Microsoft announce its acquisition of ReFirm labs. You can view the press release here. We want to congratulate co-founders Terry Dunlap and Peter Eacmen; CEO Derick Naef and the ReFirm team for having a vision, executing on the vision, and building great value - value clearly recognized by Microsoft.

As many of you know, we started True North Advisory in March of 2020. We started the business as a totally virtual business which it remains today. We are truly a child of the pandemic.

By Scott Hoffpauir, Managing Partner

Last Wednesday evening I was one of three judges at a local business school competition, Salem State University. The Dean of the Bertolon Business school was enthusiastic for their students to present the plans for their start-up businesses. Many of the students at Salem State need to work full-time jobs as they earn their degrees. As a newly accredited business school, Salem State is providing the necessary tools to ensure student success. It was impressive that all finalists were so well prepared; the presentation, the business case, it was all first-rate. The one quality that stood out the most, however, was their passion!

Everyone is used to LinkedIn as being your professional profile for showcasing your work accomplishments. If you’re a super user, you’ll be following your top companies for their latest news or updates. But that’s all it was, a generic marketing tool for those looking for jobs and for companies just trying to be relevant in a social media universe.

Recently, Microsoft and Cisco announced mobile enhancements for their collaboration offerings. Looking back, mobility has always been an add-on, but now mobility has become a core tenant to their solutions. While the enhancements offered by both companies offer similar end user functionality, how they do it is quite different. Let’s explore some of the differences and the pros / cons of each.

After a week of SXSW sessions (and a few parties) I wanted to return to a topic that I have considered the key to unlocking the next level of customer engagement: enterprise knowledge. Now, to be honest this is not my idea but one beaten into my head by Conversational AI pioneer Raj Tumuluri, a good friend for 25 years. Raj, with his team at Openstream, has been helping large enterprises with building enterprise knowledge.

A few weeks ago, I joined the Meta-verse by purchasing an Oculus Quest headset. I heard so much about these that I decided to see how far the technology has advanced. It’s been a while since I’ve tried a set of VR glasses.

Today’s enterprise-grade contact centers are sophisticated and highly customized to create differentiating customer experiences (CX) and nurture customer loyalty, maximize employee performance, and keep the costs manageable. Usually, CX organizations have gradually built their solutions over the years or gone through the pain of changing their existing solution altogether. As we mentioned in Mike’s blog, he addresses the ways of incrementally adding capabilities to upgrade existing solutions. For many companies, it has been a challenging journey over many generations of technologies, organizational transformations, and brand evolution.

At True North Advisory, we have a number of clients that are either early venture backed or still privately funded. Each is facing the same challenge of making their first hire for a VP/GM of sales, and find it daunting. At True North, part of our advisory offering is to help in the process of recruiting the right person, and assuring the highest level of success of this all important hire.

It's clear that the battle to improve the customer experience is a popular discussion, and much of the debate recently focuses on migrating from on-premises to cloud solutions. While this migration brings great benefits, migrating a contact center is not easy given the complexity of the solution, the number of integrations and the embedded business logic. We have highlighted in a previous blog how poor existing experiences are and how these impact brand perception.

In our advisory, we have decided to focus on technologies that can improve the customer experience. We believe that this will continue to be a key competitive advantage for brands and therefore will drive innovation and growth.

In the early days of the COVID pandemic, many companies were in a "wait and see" mode with a timeframe of "returning to normal". As we now find ourselves two years into the pandemic, many of our clients are asking, "How do I create a FY22 sales plan when our outlook is still unknown?”

The True North Advisory team was away in Phoenix for our quarterly offsite this past week. As Jim mentioned in his last blog, even the best Unified Communications functionality in the world cannot make up for an in person meeting. There was time for some fun, a few good glasses of wine, and a seemingly impossible hike where Jim made it to the summit at Camelback Mountain.

Last week, we shared our views on the office of the future. As highlighted, one of the big concerns leaders have is how to create and maintain a dynamic and positive company culture if people are mostly working from home and/or at client locations. Even before the pandemic, there was a trend for people to work from home part of the time and companies to find talented people wherever they reside. Nowadays, most teams don’t reside in one office. They’re composed of members who are in different offices, client locations or at home offices.

This week we want to blog about where we see offices going as we slowly and awkwardly (hopefully) start returning to our new post pandemic normal. I was speaking with a very good buddy of mine who is a senior partner at one of the very large professional services firms about this topic - offices as both work environments and as platforms to help evolve company cultures.

Let me start off by saying that sales commissions plans have their place in larger more established organizations that are striving to build a repeatable and predictable sales machine. Many smaller companies try to adopt a similar approach and from my experience I have found most of these plans are very complicated and not aligned with the goals of the company. At True North, we work with a wide range of companies from small to very large, so we have an interesting perspective.

At True North Advisory, our mission is to help entrepreneurs and enterprises scale their businesses. This usually involves helping them with the following 5 journeys