The following transcript has been edited for length and readability. Listen to the entire discussion here on The Broadband Bunch. The Broadband Bunch is sponsored by ETI Software.
When Scott Lauber, President, and CFO took the reins of ISPN along with CEO Jeff Neblett in February 2020, they were greeted with the greatest disruption the workplace has ever seen. It was especially challenging as ISPN is a customer service and support organization for rural broadband ISPs. But with challenges, comes opportunity. Scott and his team were able to move 95% of their operations remotely while still maintaining a superior level of services to their clients. Discussion topics include:
Craig Corbin:
Welcome to The Broadband Bunch, A podcast about broadband and how it impacts all of us. Join us to learn about the state of the industry and the latest innovations and trends. Connect with the thought leaders, pioneers, and policymakers, helping to shape your future through broadband. Join us on Facebook at The Broadband Bunch and see the latest episodes, news, and photos. The Broadband Bunch, as always, is sponsored by ETI Software.
Craig Corbin:
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of The Broadband Bunch. I’m Craig Corbin. Thanks so much for joining us. Customer service and technical support have always been vitally important for internet service providers, with help desk staff many times being the primary point of contact with customers. Given the increased demand for and dependence on connectivity, the need for top-notch support has never been greater. More than a quarter-century ago, ISPN Network Services began providing a better customer experience for internet users of independent and competitive local exchange carriers all across the nation. During that time, ISPN has expanded its portfolio of services to work with cable operators, municipalities, electric cooperatives, hotels, and wireless internet service providers. Our guest today, the president and CFO of ISPN Help Desk & Network Services, Scott Lauber. Scott, welcome to The Broadband Bunch.
Scott Lauber:
Hey Craig, great to be on. Great to be on with you guys. I really love what you’re doing with The Broadband Bunch, and am excited to be part of it today.
Craig Corbin:
Well, we appreciate that, and appreciate your time, and being able to learn more about ISPN and what has been done over the past quarter-century and what the future holds, but so much to cover in our conversation. We’ll get to as much as we can, but before we do that, if you would, for our listeners, provide a bit of background on how you in particular came to be associated with ISPN.
Scott Lauber:
Happy to share for the listeners out there. I actually joined ISPN back in early 2020, coming up on about a year and a half, two years now. And my business partner and ISPN CEO, Jeff Neblett joined as well. We had always been entrepreneurial guys with backgrounds in investing, consulting, working with small and medium-sized businesses… Love that ecosystem. And we built a relationship with the previous owner at ISPN, and it turned out that, as we got to know the business, as we got to know the industry, there was also a desire there for the previous owner to sail off into the sunset and look for retirement, look on forward to the future. And so it became a nice fit, again, as we got to know the team and the business where Jeff and myself were able to join in a unique setting.
Scott Lauber:
And for us, it’s super exciting, because I think ISPN, as you mentioned, has a long-standing history of providing high-quality tech support to rural ISPs. And I think we’re on just the precipice of what the next wave of that looks like with a lot of the government money and the need for our services, especially with COVID and everything that’s happened. Bringing that new energy, bringing those new ideas to an industry that maybe is a little bit slower than a mover is exciting for us, and it’s an awesome opportunity to be part of the ISPN team now.
Craig Corbin:
And Scott, I would assume that part of the equation with regard to the target customers that ISPN serves would be, and you made mention of the fact, that many are rural providers, and oftentimes not equipped with staff to provide a 24/7/365 support, yet that remains a tremendous need for their customers. Talk about how ISPN fills that void.
Scott Lauber:
It’s a great point. And that is our bread and butter, so we are focused on technical support, more commonly here at Help Desk Services, for those rural ISPs we operate in just shy of 40 states now, I think, based on my last count. It’s not just concentrated in one area. Obviously, there are rural areas across the country and it’s great to be able to service them, but you hit the nail on the head. A lot of these smaller ISPs are thinking about growth or establishing a network of initial subscribers and looking to grow in the future, and they, a lot of times, don’t have the capabilities in-house or don’t have the resources to be able to provide the customer support side of the business. They’re focused on technology, they’re focused on building out a strong network and providing that to their end-users or subscribers, but when it comes to problems, troubleshooting, et cetera, especially on a 24/7 basis, as I’m sure you guys can relate to, the need for internet access and connectivity is really changed in the last five, 10 years, and it’s really a utility now that folks expect to have 24/7.
Scott Lauber:
Being able to provide that support, and help end-users and subscribers work through issues, or just be able to stay connected, it’s great to be able to provide that back. And our staff is all local. We’re onshore. We essentially are based out of the greater Kansas City area based in Lenexa, Kansas. We’re providing 24/7 support, and we’re excited to be able to help those smaller communities that maybe don’t have the resource pool or infrastructure that some of the big telcos and ISPs have.
Craig Corbin:
That’s an interesting point too, mentioning that the staff is 100% onshore, and so that brings a comfort level, I would assume, with the customers that you’re working with when they reach out for support. Just to provide a more complete definition of the services when we look at tech support, many providers are going to be offering the traditional triple play, the data, video, voice solutions. ISPN staff has to be able to address issues in all three of those categories. Talk about what comes into play in that regard.
Scott Lauber:
It’s a great point. It’s not just one silo of support, or we’re experts in one area. We really need to know every piece of the equation. Every ISP is a little bit different. I like to say they’re all the same, to an extent, but they are all different. And there’s obviously a lot of evolution and what the service offerings are there, but we spend a lot of time with our partners. Again, we really think of ourselves as an extension of their team. So, in part of our onboarding process, we’ll get to know the hardware that they’re using, the different modems, routers, et cetera, issues that they’ve had with their network in the past, and make sure our staff is versed and knows everything going on in that realm so that when they get a call or we’re receiving an inquiry, we can best handle that support.
Scott Lauber:
Because ultimately, no one’s happy when they call in and they’re not able to resolve their issue. We put a lot of emphasis on being able to resolve issues the first time so that folks do not call back. And from our side, that that requires a level of investment and a level of coordination and collaboration with our partners to really act as an extension of their team and basically know their technology core, as well as their internal staff, do. It’s exciting. It’s a lot going on at the same time. As I said, every ISP is different, but being able to build those relationships, and see that value, and get that positive feedback from folks on the frontline that are dealing with issues is really rewarding.
Craig Corbin:
That’s an interesting point too, that you made mention of just then, with the fact that your team has to know the individual services of every single provider that you serve. And so they’re really wearing a lot of different hats depending upon where the calls are coming from and being able to shift from one set of information to another. That speaks very highly of the quality of the team that you have been able to assemble. Talk about that if you would.
Scott Lauber:
Again, another great point. We invest a lot in our recruiting and our training. I think that we’ll probably get into it in a little bit, but that has obviously transformed or changed with COVID, having a largely in-office, predominantly 100% in-office team and now moving to a remote model. We can get into that shortly thereafter, but we spend a lot of time on the recruiting and training side of the equation. As you mentioned, we want our partners to feel like the techs at ISPN are an extension of someone that they would hire in their local area that is going to be able to walk grandma through her issues when she’s calling in and doesn’t know why Netflix is working or is having issues, and why her iPad won’t load Google, et cetera.
Scott Lauber:
We spend so much time to make sure that our techs get the right training, that they’re not thrown right into the fire, and that we’re continually investing in that, in the resources, and the library of information. And as we grow in partners, that knowledge base continues to grow. We try to develop it and provide it in bite-size chunks, where our techs go through training and maybe deal with some simpler partners to start, and as they get well-versed and understand some of the common issues, they work their way up and go through different phases of training where there are more complex issues, et cetera.
Scott Lauber:
We’ve invested a ton of time. I would say COVID even made us look at how we do our recruiting and training, and find areas where we can continue to improve. I think that’s another mindset that we have with our team, is always looking on ways to improve, because ultimately we want to be able to provide the best quality of service to our partners. I think it really stems from that investment in your team and your people and making sure that they come along for the ride, and that they see opportunities to grow within the organization.
Craig Corbin:
And that’s exciting too because it’s obvious that in the vast majority of conversations, your team is representing the providers as the only person or persons they’ll ever speak with within that relationship, so that’s a huge responsibility with that. I’m curious from the standpoint you may have mentioned, of walking the customers through how to accomplish certain tasks. Are you seeing an increased need in what would, I guess, be referred to as digital literacy? Educating the consumer?
Scott Lauber:
Yeah. It’s a huge deal. That’s a great point, Craig. We’re tracking every inbound call that we have to our center and we look at those metrics pretty actively, but the number that entails some type of customer education is pretty large. It’s a big number. It is more than just following steps A, B, C. There’s a lot of, I think, other companies out there that may be brand themselves as more of an answering service. Hey, we’re going to note that you have an issue and we’re going to get back to you. But for us, it’s really a level of understanding what the issue is, looking at how we’ve handled those issues across other partners or that partner specifically, and educating the customer because ultimately, our goal is that they don’t have to call back in.
Scott Lauber:
They get that issue solved, and they’re satisfied, and they maybe learn how to understand how to troubleshoot that issue or resolve that problem on their own the next time. It’s interesting. In some respects you could say, Hey, well, we exist to handle call volume and troubleshooting needs, but we’re really invested in making sure the overall customer experience is positive. And our partners work with us for those reasons, because in rural areas of the US where you might have 500 or 1,000 subscribers in a town or home, losing some of those customers because of poor service actually has a huge impact on these local ISPs.
Craig Corbin:
No doubt. You’re listening to The Broadband Bunch, proudly presented by UTOPIA Fiber, building a more connected nation. By DxTEL, creators of the Harper Broadband Marketing Library, and by your zero-touch automation experts, ETI Software Solutions. Our guest today, Scott Lauber, the CFO/President of ISPN Help Desk & Network Services. Scott, we focused largely in the conversation to this point on tech support, help desk services, but that is not anywhere near all of what ISPN is able to provide. Give us an overview of the other areas of service.
Scott Lauber:
Yeah, Craig, I’m glad you asked, because while tech support or help desk services are the majority of what we do, we do offer a bunch of other, call it managed IT services to this rural ISP across the US. We actually offer hosted email, which is a pretty important one. And again, there’s a lot of identification around email and service for ISPs or service providers offering that to their customer base.
Craig Corbin:
Absolutely.
Scott Lauber:
And managing that from a server perspective, et cetera, is actually costly and tough to do for these ISPs, so we have our own data center and manage our servers in our headquarters, and are able to provide that service, hosted email. And then we do offer, believe it or not, we do offer some other managed network services. We have a small engineering team and folks on our team that will help with PC and remote repair, specific issues that customers run into.
Scott Lauber:
We also do a bit around network monitoring and the health of networks and help ISPs manage that. We’re really trying to grow that group of services because we’re seeing needs in the marketplace, as I’m sure a lot of other service providers are in the telecom or the ISP world. The needs of our customers are only increasing, and the needs of their end-users is only increasing, so we want to be in a position to be able to support them. That service offering has evolved over time, and we see it will continue to evolve over the next, call it a couple of years, as the community grows.
Craig Corbin:
That’s the perfect segue to my next question, because in this industry, the only constant changes, and the speed of evolution is only increasing year by year, month by month, week by week. And that places a tremendous demand on ISPN to be able to grow with your customers. As their products and services evolve, you have to do likewise. Talk about, from a philosophical standpoint, how you and the team there at ISPN have addressed that particular demand.
Scott Lauber:
It’s another area where we are extremely focused on understanding the needs of our customers or partners, talking to them regularly to see where they’re going. You mentioned there’s a lot of change. There’s a lot of growth. I think there’s a lot of investment in the space. I can think of a couple of partners that we work with off the top of my head, where they’ve been either growing or have ambitious growth plans due to funding or building out broadband services in areas that it doesn’t exist right now. I think, based on the latest stat I looked at, I think there’s still 25 or 30% of folks in rural areas that don’t have some type of quality broadband access, which still blows my mind every day, just given the world that we live in.
Craig Corbin:
Sure.
Scott Lauber:
There was one partner that was ingesting or transitioning a couple of companies into their operations. Their subscriber customer base was growing by over 50%, we were providing those guys services at a certain level, and there was a need to increase those services. And I think the only way that you really understand that is having these close intimate relationships with your partners and understanding, hey, here is our growth plans. Here’s what’s going on at our organization. How can we use you as a trusted partner to help us navigate that? At the end of the day, you want to be able to provide the same level of service, whether it’s an ISP that has 5,000 subs or 50,000 subs. And so from our side, there’s obviously a resource piece of the equation that we’re actively looking at, but we want to be able to step up to that challenge and help our partners and be an extension of what they need to do to keep their subscribers happy.
Craig Corbin:
Certainly. There’s no doubt that ISPN has been extremely successful in doing just that with a wide array of services, including Tier 1 support. We’re always curious in our conversations here on The Broadband Bunch of any particular examples of success stories that ISBN has experienced over the last quarter-century that you might share with us as a great example of what difference has been made for your customers.
Scott Lauber:
Yeah, I’m glad you asked, Craig. I have probably a handful, and I won’t put you guys the scrutiny of talking through everyone, but the one I was actually just alluding to a little bit, is one of our larger partners went through an event, and we see this with a number of our partners, they might be going through an acquisition or an aggressive expansion into a certain area because there’s a need, or there’s a business case for that. And a lot of the times in this case, in particular, this partner was forward-thinking to bring us into the loop, into their plans, and have an idea of how we were going to have to change our support model to address their business plans. I think a lot of ISPs play catch-up in that regard.
Craig Corbin:
Sure.
Scott Lauber:
In the fact that they say, Hey, let’s grow, grow, grow, and then we’ll figure out the support side of the equation or what the impact is. In this particular case, we were fortunate enough, like I said, to have those strong relationships to have that local team really understand that in these smaller communities, they don’t have the resource pool, all the things that we talked about. And so you’re actually able to help them transition, call it that event, or that acquisition period where their subscriber base increased by over 50% overnight. And they had switchover and cutoff dates of a couple of weeks for thousands of subscribers that were moving to a new service provider and help them with communications, how to track that, how to educate customers on what their new plans were going to be, what that looked like. If you all of a sudden found out that your service might be changing, and you had to figure all that out in a short period of time, the phones were busy.
Scott Lauber:
This partner in particular, like I said, was an exceptional partner to work with, that we were able to work with them and make sure that we were buttoned up on that transition. And it didn’t end after that transition, there are always laggers. There’s always follow-up on this, and maintaining that. That transition period, and holding that partner’s hand through every step of the process was super important. And it ended up being a great success for them in regard to their overall customer satisfaction and the number of conversions that they had from that event or acquisition, those couple of acquisitions that were going on.
Craig Corbin:
That’s a huge part of the bottom line, Scott. You talk about customer satisfaction. That’s what it’s all about, serving their customers to the best of your ability. And that is something that will always remain a top priority. One thing that I wanted to get to before time slips away, we made mention early on in the conversation, is the fact that your team is based here, stateside, in the nation’s heartland in Kansas. I’m curious how the last year and a half dealing with the global pandemic has affected the setup of what would be a traditional call center operation. If you would share with us what ISPN did.
Scott Lauber:
Of course. And it’s another great topic. It’s funny, I’m reflecting on some of the things over the past 18, call it 16 to 18 months that we’ve gone through, and it feels like it was just yesterday, but time flies. We joined, as I mentioned, joined ISPN in February of 2020. And, if you remember a calendar, by the third week of March, it was major shutdowns across the United States and obviously, globally, with coronavirus and the pandemic in its early stages. We actually were able to, as a call center or contact center business that has, like I said, historically had 100% in-office staff and a business model, we realized we had to pivot quickly. We had basically two goals.
Scott Lauber:
Once that we realized COVID was going to be a real thing, one was keeping our employees safe and making sure that they, with everything going on, personally, that they were safe. And two was what you just talked about. How do we continue to deliver high-quality service under a different model than what we had traditionally operated under? I’m happy to say that we were able to successfully move 95% of our workforce remote within a matter of weeks.
Craig Corbin:
That’s amazing.
Scott Lauber:
We had 95% of our workforce moved remotely. And from our perspective, I think it changed a couple of things in regards to how we… We’re still actually currently a remote workforce. That 95% is still operating remotely today, but we’ve invested a lot of time and money into how we hire now, in regard to geography and local positions and that remote hire. That individual, now, doesn’t get a chance to come into the office and meet the team. You’re doing that entire process via Zoom or via video. That’s been a different dynamic, so we’ve invested in how we do that and how we advertise that.
Scott Lauber:
We’ve invested in our training, as I talked about before, creating more resources for our technicians, developing a library of how we do things, and spending more time on training just in general. We had a classroom training set up previously, and now that has transitioned to more of a remote model, as many businesses have had to. I think security is a huge one too, investing in maintaining security. You move from having a strong security model when you have folks in the office and you have guard rails around that, but then moving to work from home, you got a lot of different aspects to deal with from a security perspective. So again, more investment and just us looking at what’s the best model there and how to manage that. And that ties into some of the other business metrics that we’re continually looking at, as I mentioned, at ways that we can get better and continue to improve, but actively looking at our workforce.
Scott Lauber:
Hey, are we keeping our partners happy? What does customer success look like? None of that changed. If anything, there’s probably been more scrutiny, and us looking at that even closer with more of a remote workforce. And then I think the last thing probably to highlight, is the communication with your employees. I think it’s unprecedented times. Obviously, there’s been a lot of tough situations across the US, across the world with dealing with coronavirus, what that’s done, but communicating to your employees, keeping them up to date on the latest guidelines, whether it’s CDC or local guidelines, helping them with other aspects around mental health, social isolation, et cetera, is very important.
Scott Lauber:
I hate to say it, but I think there’s a lot of businesses out there, not telecom specific, just across the world that is probably playing catch up in that regard because they didn’t realize they were going to have to operate remote, or they probably didn’t think about the implications for folks from a personal perspective. And so we’ve gone out of our way to make sure that we try to keep our employees connected. I’m not saying we do it the best. There are challenges associated with it.
Craig Corbin:
No doubt.
Scott Lauber:
We’re always looking for ways to keep our employees connected, et cetera. We had a number of company events that we had to cancel last year, and now while our company is operating remotely, we’re happy to continue some of those into the summer and into the fall, which is great, because I think it does create a little bit more sense of community, a little bit more sense of culture. And you miss out on a lot of that, especially in a call center environment or contact center environment where, if I’m on the phone answering a call, Craig, and you’re sitting next to me, in the old world, you can hear what I’m doing. You might say, hey…
Craig Corbin:
And lend a hand as needed.
Scott Lauber:
Exactly. Scott’s having trouble, let me hop in there.
Craig Corbin:
Yep. Absolutely.
Scott Lauber:
You don’t have that luxury anymore, so you got to invest, I think, in these other aspects of the employee experience that translate to the customer experience.
Craig Corbin:
It’s obvious that, that you guys have navigated that extremely well, and congratulations on being able to maintain a seamless service to your customers by going to a remote call center setup. Tremendous work there. So glad to learn more about what ISBM brings to the industry. Before we let you go, one of the things that we always enjoy is what we refer to as the Back to The Future question, where we ask you to jump in the DeLorean, take yourself back in time. And if you could whisper, of course, given the fact that your time with ISPN, relatively short, but if you could go back and change anything, the timeline trajectory, or what, share with us what that might be.
Scott Lauber:
That’s a tough question because I do think there are aspects, and largely, I think the way we approached it was the right way. We’ve got a lot of feedback. One thing we didn’t talk about, continuing to get feedback from your partners and your employees…
Craig Corbin:
Certainly.
Scott Lauber:
Understand what’s happening out there and how they’re feeling is obviously super important, so we actively do that. But I would say, I think just investing, continuing to invest. Maybe it’s not something that I would have changed, but just the level of investment in our team, in building our remote capabilities. I think we probably when we first moved to the work-from-home environment that we just talked about, we, as a lot of businesses, probably thought it might be a little bit temporary, At first, it was, hey, this is going to be something for three months or six months, et cetera, and then, here we are today. There’s still obviously an impact.
Scott Lauber:
It’s been great because it’s made us think about how to change our business model a little bit, but continuing to invest in your team, continuing to invest in the tools that are out there to keep people connected, or helping remove those barriers that might exist from a remote model around communication, around collaboration, coaching, et cetera. I think there’s a lot of unique tools out there. I think there’s a lot of interesting software, even telecom-specific software that we’ve utilized. But if I had to go back in time, I probably would have invested in more of that stuff earlier, just knowing that it would pay dividends in regard to keeping our employees happy, keeping them connected, dealing with things like social isolation, and ultimately providing the same level of service, if not better service than we have to our partners.
Scott Lauber:
I’m not trying to skate out of your question by any means.
Craig Corbin:
No, well said. Well said.
Scott Lauber:
I think that investment is super important to our mission statement, which, at the end of the day, is helping underlying subscribers stay connected. And in the times that is the new normal now, with schooling and telehealth and all these other things that are now moved to remote models.
Craig Corbin:
Vitally important.
Scott Lauber:
As you guys believe at The Broadband Bunch, and everyone that you’ve had on your show, having that access is super important. And so being able to be a piece of that equation and help on the front lines of keeping people connected is really what we’re all about. And it’s exciting to be part of it.
Craig Corbin:
Absolutely, and we appreciate what ISPN is doing for so many providers in the industry. It’s a vitally important aspect of the industry, and we appreciate your time and willingness to share the story of ISPN. We look forward to a future visit as you continue to grow as a company. And we will eagerly await that. And thank you so much, Scott, for your time today.
Scott Lauber:
I appreciate it, Craig. It’s great to talk with you guys again. Love what you’re doing, and am a big fan of the show. So excited and happy to have been a part of it today.
Craig Corbin:
Awesome. That’s going to wrap up this edition. Thanks so much for letting us be a part of your day. We’ll see you next time, right here on The Broadband Bunch. So long, everyone.
