The CarriersEdge Podcast | Episode #108
Jane: Hey there. Welcome to The CarriersEdge Podcast. I'm Jane Jazrawy. CEO of CarriersEdge, and with me as always.
Mark: Mark Murrell. Not CEO of CarriersEdge.
Jane: Yeah. The other guy.
Mark: The other guy.
Jane: And what are we now? Um podcast number?
Mark: One hundred and eight.
Jane: One hundred and eight. All I remember, it was an even number, so I get to to welcome everybody. So if you haven't already figured out, we, you know, divvy it up, odd, even, odd, even. And sometimes if I'm really lucky, I remember that I do even. But most of the time, I don't remember.
Mark: I'm the odd one. You can look at it that way.
Jane: So we have just come back from the all trucking all the time event of the year ATA's management and
Mark: management conference and exhibition.
Jane: That's what it is.
Mark: Yes. Which always cracks me up because they're trying so hard not to say convention.
Jane: Well, what I think is really interesting is it is it MCE or is it MC and E?
Mark: Ah yes.
Jane: Because
Mark: We talk about this every year when we come back from this thing because you get conflicting messages.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: You see it written as MCE all the time, but they will say it from the stage MC and E.
Jane: They will. And it will be ATA staff as well as carriers who are in attendance.
Mark: All I hear is MC and E, which sounds to me, I hear C N E, so I think of the Canadian National Exhibition. And then I hear MC and E, which to me is a was a Microsoft certified network engineer. There's a nerdy tech designation.
Jane: I don't, do not remember that, but okay. But it was the American Trucking Association's their annual
Mark: Not convention
Jane: Not their convention, but their annual conference. And I can never remember what MCE stands for. Management conference and exhibition. Okay. Well, that'll be in my brain for the next ten minutes. That'll be it. My brain is is very finely tuned. I have to basically make room for information all the time. So I'm constantly just basically erasing information. I don't need. The information that I store in your head I can just delete from my head. So you get to, you know, time.
Mark: Well, we have a very finely tuned shared brainpower where you only have one thing but you are very deep on that one thing.
Jane: I know everything about the one thing.
Mark: Yeah. Yesterday's thing, if it was different, no, it's gone.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: There's
Jane: Like I said, I'm I have a very efficient brain. I know, new information comes in and then I think about it and come up with all kinds of interesting opinions and I come to the conclusions and all of that stuff. And it's wonderful and brilliant and then, but then it's gone.
Mark: Yeah. Because if somebody doesn't capture it, it's gone forever.
Jane: Yeah. So you're
Mark: My job is to capture it.
Jane: So you're the yeah. You're the person who basically writes down everything.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: Or stores it in your head.
Mark: Well, in my brain is the opposite of yours where I have a whole bunch of different things that I'm cycling around, but none of them very deep. They're all very surface and sort of shallow because I don't really have the ability to go into something very deep because then the forty other things would get missed.
Jane: And I know this stresses you out because you'd like to go deep, but you are forced into shallow.
Mark: Yeah. I think fondly back to my time when I was on the road as a musician, where I had so few different things to do that I could spend all day on one thing.
Jane: Did you do that when you were first in tech support? Did you just have one thing that you were fixated on?
Mark: No. When I was in tech support, I was so busy learning all technology. And my first tech support job at Apple was at a time when they had like two hundred different products that we had to support.
Jane: Oh, so it's the same thing you had to
Mark: I had to very quickly figure out. Well, you did have to go deep sometimes because there would be technical things that were really tricky. But a lot of those got escalated to the tier two support. So the frontline people that I was, we just, yeah, had a million things that we had to support but only up to a very basic level for each. So that's probably where I started flipping. Is figuring out how to do a whole lot of things, but only at a very light level.
Jane: And I would like to emphasize that support back in the nineties was way different than tech support is now. Yeah. Tech support has become a commodity and not very good. Well, it's not support at all. If you get good support, then that's you you've paid a lot of money or you're just really, really lucky. But there is no service and no support for most things.
Mark: Everybody sees it as a call center. Or or a call center that is a cost center. And they see those two things as being negatives. They don't want a call center. They don't wanna interact with people. They see it as a cost. They don't see it as a brand builder or a value add or anything else that actually makes the experience better for their customers and leads to more profitability later.
Jane: Which so a couple of things that I wanna hold on to. Let's go back to the value of actually having good support, a good support system for your product. But I also wanna go back to your experience as a technical support expert or yeah. I guess you were just tech support. When I met you, you were just tech support, and I was just training.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And You know, your the the value that you brought was way more like, can you even imagine behaving the way that people do now?
Mark: You mean the way tech support people do now? Yeah. No. I cannot comprehend that. No. Because what we had to do is know all of the products, but also know how people use the products, and when they were having problems, make sure that they got those things solved. And at the time, there was, you know, after I left Apple when we went over to where we met at SoftArc. It was a product that was mission critical in some places. Like, in some situations, the entire business was running off of that platform. So if it was down, the business was down, and it was really a critical thing. So we had to take the time and support them. And we had customers all over the world, and we had reseller partners all over the world, So periodically, it would be six PM on a Friday night, and I'd be getting a call from somebody who was panicked in a different time zone.
Jane: In Sweden. Well, yeah. So prime minister was it the prime minister's office in Sweden that was using it?
Mark: Yes. The Swedish prime minister's office was using it, and I did actually have a support call from the prime minister after he stepped down, he went to a nonprofit and was also a customer there. So, yeah, my brush with greatness, I had a half hour long support call with a guy who had recently been the prime minister of Sweden.
Jane: But I remember I remember when you guys were taking calls, I mean, you did not have a script. You didn't you kind of answered the questions with as much as you could for every for every call that came in. It was okay, what do you like, you had to know what people, what systems people were running and stuff like that, but it was never a I can't help you. It was never like that cut off that you get now where it's that sort of, no, if it's not working, that's not my problem somehow.
Mark: Well, towards the end of my time there, they did try implementing a paid support thing and it did not go well.
Jane: Oh, no.
Mark: Where you would have people buying a support ticket and then you'd solve the problem. But then if they wanted to raise another problem, you had to tell them no, I can only do one thing with this. You have to go and buy something else and they were pissed off.
Jane: Oh, I can imagine. I would be.
Mark: Yeah. Well, they had been getting free support forever. And all of a sudden, the company decided they wanted to try and monetize support and add some outside person come and tell them, hey, you've got support here that is costing you and you should be recouping that by charging your customers. And it just created so much ill will in the community. And it just yeah. It was awful for the support people. It was awful in it was awful for the resellers, awful for the customers. Oh, and at the same time, then they wanted support to start doing sales calls too. So somebody who
Jane: Oh I remember that.
Mark: So as a sales call, we could talk to them and answer their questions about what the product does and how to do in the product. But the minute it flipped over to being a
Jane: Technical support
Mark: Technical support where it's not doing that. Well, now I gotta charge you.
Jane: Did you ever do that? Did you ever actually
Mark: I think I was off the phones by then, but I had to listen to other reps, you know, in the room because we we're in one sort of big room where everybody had their desks. And I had to coach people through it and help them and, oh, it was awful. There was times where I had to take escalations because I was the team lead at that point and when there was difficult situations or people were griping too much, the support rep would pass it on to somebody else, and I had to pick that up, had to have those conversations. And most of the time, I just ended up letting them have it and, like, don't tell anybody, but let's fix this.
Because it's stupid. It was absolutely stupid
Jane: It is ridiculous because the goodwill towards the product is just erased as soon as you have to try and get an answer to a question. And we didn't have, you know, YouTube videos up the yin yang that could you know, go through. And I find that it's really frustrating to try and get support. Being someone who knows technology and I can get to a certain point when I know something is a bug.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: And you cannot talk to a human being about this bug.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: They won't they won't hear it. Even if you were talking to a human being and not a bot, they just it's like it's like you're you're hitting a wall or something where they won't they just won't acknowledge. And it's really the way that software is just being kind of released as as you go.
Mark: Yeah. Well and that's okay. I understand the value of the agile model and putting things out there and learning from it. But you have to have a mechanism to collect that feedback. And it can't just be analytics baked into the code. It's gotta have some mechanism for talking to the customers and talking to the users. So they don't have that now and it's really a problem.
Jane: So going back to my original when I said, I wanna, you know, come back to how we look at support and how we look at customer experience is not how most companies do. Most companies do see it as a profit center. Or they see it as a cost center that needs to be recouped. And if it's a profit center, that's even better.
Mark: Ideally, they make it a profit center.
Jane: Yeah. Yeah.
Mark: They don't see it as a brand builder. They see it as dollars.
Jane: And I think that's it's important that you can really build your brand effectively with just really good support.
Mark: Well, the other side of that is if you're not talking to your customers directly, you're not getting feedback on how they're using the product, and what's working, and what's not working, where the gaps are.
Jane: But but Mark surveys.
Mark: Yeah. Okay. There you go. Great use. Great time to come back to our new recurring segment that we started this year. Is it a good use of technology?
Jane: Surveys?
Mark: No. NPS surveys are fine, but don't rely on them exclusively.
Jane: Yes. And I think we do this in Best Fleets, we talk about this in Best Fleets, but we also talk about in non Best Fleets in the real world, in our, you know, our daily lives, our- I am not how do I say it? I don't mind taking a survey, but I find that surveys generally don't let me talk about what I wanna talk about.
Mark: Yes. That is an excellent point.
Jane: I think that the things that I bring up are very good. I think that if I'm gonna complain about something is if you should listen to it because I'm pretty thoughtful about my complaints. But there's never you you get kind of like a you get the, you know, two hundred and fifty characters to try and explain what happened. And most of the time, they it doesn't give you the opportunity or they're not really asking you the right questions. They kind of give you rate the service, rate this, rate this, but that's not, you know, the food was good, and the service was okay, but, you know, the place smelled.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: Or something like that. They don't they don't actually offer you the ability to give the feedback you wanna give. So I always end up in the other comments.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: And I don't think that I mean, if you talk to people, if you give them a call and say, you know, how do you use our product? What are you doing with it? You know, I noticed that you have this many licenses, but you're, you know, you're using this much of the system. So how how is that going? And I think that would be or if somebody does complain, like actually have a human give them a call back,
Mark: what I think is very funny is in these products where it's near impossible to get a hold of somebody to actually raise a support issue, the minute that you finish with that issue and the tech closes it, which may not resolve it, but they close the issue. Like within seconds, you've got a survey from them.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: How was our support? Your support was terrible. I shouldn't have had to work that hard to get it.
Jane: And they also they do that way faster than they actually give you the support.
Mark: Oh, yeah.
Jane: And if you haven't an additional question, you have to do a whole new ticket.
Mark: Yeah. Whole other ticket.
Jane: And those support reps are off you know, I think they're incented or they're evaluated quite harshly because I've had them say, you know, can you basically can you give me a good review? And I think that's kinda garbage. People are gonna have good days, bad days. But the thing is if you try and have the cheapest support available, it's gonna be bad.
Mark: Well, if all you do to manage people is through metrics.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Is through these kind of specific measures, then they don't actually work. I mean, I wrote a blog about it a while ago about how data misleads you. When you focus too much on specific metrics, that's the only thing that people care about and you end up with all these other gaps.
Jane: And actually, you have a blog coming out.
Mark: Oh, yeah.
Jane: In a in a week or so.
Mark: Coming out this week.
Jane: Yeah. That is the same thing is that, you know, what are you measuring people on? So if you were measuring performance, then are you risking safety?
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: Because is the safety gonna go down? So it's kinda like this you know balancing act.
Mark: Yeah. Measuring things is fine, but understand that anything you don't measure is gonna drop off. And you can't measure everything. So how do you stay on top of it?
Jane: And how do you figure out what the valuable proposition is.
Mark: Yeah. The answer ends up being you have to proactively go to people and ask them. Which is the same thing, like, on the support world, you gotta have people that are on the phones or at email and actively responding and also getting out there. Like, we go out to shows and talk to customers. We go out in the field and we talk to people. I love going to a truck show and having a booth where drivers will come by and tell us how they use the product. That's really valuable feedback.
Jane: Yeah. And you don't get that from forms
Mark: Yeah. Or a chatbot. Those things are a blemish.
Jane: I I don't like how people have tried to replace human beings with AI. So as a cost cutting measure. I think if you want to if you want to make some money off your product, don't try and monetize everything. Don't try and monetize the human connection.
Mark: Yeah. Oh, that's a good one. Don't try and monetize the human connection.
Jane: That's the name of this podcast, Carly.
Mark: Unless you have a dating site. Unless you're Tinder.
Jane: Then you absolutely yeah. Then you absolutely are.
Mark: Unless that's expressly your business, don't try and monetize the human connection.
Jane: Which we're basically we're it's falling on deaf ears. The way the world is that, you know, you monetize everything. And you give nothing away for free.
Mark: Yeah. Well, right now. Right now that where all the tech bros are hurting for cash, yes, who give nothing away for free.
Jane: But it's very interesting trying to follow our our as well our Marketing Manager, Lindsey, as she tries to gain access back to her Facebook account.
Mark: Oh, jeez. That's been a nightmare.
Jane: She's still. People are saying, oh, we'll get back to you within forty eight hours. Nope. So there's.
Mark: Yeah so lesson to everybody listening. If you turn on two factor authentication on your Facebook account and it's using your phone, make sure you do not lose that phone. Because you will be dead in the water.
Jane: Print out those recovery codes.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: Do do everything because, yeah, Lindsey is like persona non grata in Facebook land. Which is a drag because she's doing, you know,
Mark: She's responsible for our Facebook ads.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Well, we digressed a little bit from MCE, but we
Jane: That was my, it was my fault.
Mark: No. That's fine. But MC and E the ATA event was a very interesting one this year.
Jane: Mhmm.
Mark: Big surprise. The attendance was down. And big shock the theme of the event was that the economy sucks. So for anybody out there who didn't know, the economy sucks in trucking.
Jane: No.
Mark: Yes. It's not just you. Yes. That's it. No. It's not just you. Everybody's feeling it.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Many people that I normally see there that weren't there lots of exhibitors that normally are there that weren't or people that normally have a larger exhibit scaled it right down or didn't exhibit at all just walk the show. A lot of vendors hurting lots of vendors kind of filling in those holes that I think are the one time only exhibitors. There's always a bunch of those who come in and try it out. Exhibitors who try out at a show. And if they don't immediately get a great response, they don't come back the next year. So there's always a bunch of those.
And it was a fairly small it's been small the last couple of years, the exhibits. But It was still a good show. It was really surprising. Like, the the people that were there were very engaged and the people that came by the booth had a lot of questions were very engaged on what's happening and we got a lot out of it.
Jane: Well, we also had an education session, which was my thing. I did it this year. And I had as my guests, Bradley, from Continental Express, Bradley Gottemoeller from Continental Express, and Emory Mills from FTC Transportation. And we had a good who had a really good turnout for the session.
Mark: Yeah. So I have to clarify that for anybody who hasn't been to this event. They have these education sessions at different times. And what's funny is when you walk into the room, they're huge rooms and they're set. For, like, massive audiences.
They're the instead of for way more people than ever show up, you know, we've been going to this thing I guess I've been going to this thing since twenty fifteen and every year it's the same thing. I go into these education sessions and the number of people that they have seats for. Like, this year, your room had five hundred seats. There's never five hundred people at
Jane: Well, I don't think there's even in a general session. I'm not sure there's five hundred people.
Mark: Yeah. So I think across both of the education sessions and the community meetings that were happening, you know, there might be five hundred people in attendance, but there's so many different things happening, and people go to the event for so many different reasons. That you're never gonna get anywhere near that. So the room always looks empty and it's kind of weird because you'll be looking out and I found this last year when I was doing it, you look out and it kinda seems empty. Because there's so many seats.
But when you count up the number of people there, it's a decent number. And you had a a hundred people, which is
Jane: In ATA MCE land, that's pretty good.
Mark: That's good numbers.
Jane: I've seen like thirty?
Mark: Yeah. We've been in some of the sessions where there's been thirty or forty. So you had a hundred and they stuck around and they were definitely interested and they all came up at the front. Well, not all of them, but we had a good crowd of them that came up to the front after with questions and wanting to collect books. And at least one of them is now part of the program got nominated.
Jane: Yep.
Mark: So that's great. That's what we wanna see is spreading the word to more different people.
Jane: That's really what we're trying to do at that session is is talk about what the program is what people get out of it. Give them some give them some more information. Spread the word. Spread the good word.
Mark: And was there anything else that stood out for you at the event in general or conference over the few days? It was cold and Nashville, and nobody was expecting it to be cold.
Jane: Yeah. It was it.
Mark: That was funny.
Jane: Yeah. Well, I wasn't expecting. I think the weather, like, the weather forecast was was incorrect. Because it was supposed to be way warmer than it was. It was starting to get down towards the single digits. And it was not like, so everybody was, like, you know
Mark: Single digits, Celsius.
Jane: Yeah. Single sorry. Single digits. So in Fahrenheit, I guess, that would be in
Mark: It's was like in the forties and fifties
Jane: Yeah forties.
Mark: It was not warm. And definitely, the bachelorette parties around there were not expecting it to be that cold. They were not dressed for it.
Jane: I mean, if you're gonna wear your mini skirt tank top and cowboy boots, like, you don't want it to be in the forties. That is for sure. Or in the, you know, twelve degrees Celsius. So I think that it was kind of what I expected. I expected there not to be the same attendance.
I expected people to all be kind of griping about the economy. I was interested, you know, Bob Costello's economy
Mark: AKA the most optimistic economist in North America
Jane: Yeah. His he didn't surprise me or, like, it was basically what I thought. He his I he thinks that it's going to the economy is going to get slightly better and go to sort of, like, kinda move to normal, which, yeah, I mean, last year remember what he said last year, he thought everything he thought it was only gonna be the spot market that was affected and everything else was gonna be fine. And it didn't was not fine.
And I didn't believe him at the time. Yeah. So you have to have a healthy skepticism.
Mark: Well, I think that's one thing that we've learned that really came into play this year. Last year, there was a lot of that, oh, we're not affected by it because we're not affected by it because we're not in the spot market. We all we do contract freight. Or we're not affected by it because we do very specialized stuff or we haul food so we don't have the ups and downs that the normal market does. And then what happened in year, the intervening year is that all of those people that were getting killed in the spot market went into contract freight or all the contract renewals started looking at spot market and thinking, why am I paying these contract rates?
Jane: Exactly.
Mark: So the contract people did get hit with it. And the people that were in specialized commodities, all of a sudden, had a whole bunch of new competitors underbidding them because they were desperate for work. So now what I've learned is that and we had a conversation this when we were there. Somebody saying, well, you know, we're in the we're in the food hauling business, so we haven't seen an issue. Been fine.
I'm like, well, it's coming.
Jane: Yet.
Mark: Yeah. It's coming because the the desperate people are gonna come into the industry and come after your work.
Jane: Yeah. And no matter we've heard from fleets that say, you know, we have had you know, we have companies that say, yeah, we wanna do business with you, your first choice, but we have all these other competitors coming in and in, you know, taken such a huge chunk out of the cost that we can't. We can't actually we can't say no. And I know in Canada, what's happening is that shippers are basically, they're doing the same thing. They're cutting their costs.
And they're looking for the cheapest version of this this service. That's really a commodity. It's like, well, if you're gonna drive something from a to b, what's the difference between this one that costs fifty cents per mile and this one that costs twenty five cents a mile.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: So they're kind of, you know, they're kind of moving towards the cheaper and more unreliable, less safe you know, it's gonna swing back around for sure, but I think what Bob Costello didn't say last year was that he didn't say yet.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: He said the spot if you're not in the spot market, you're okay. But he didn't say you know, you don't have to worry yet. And I think that for the gentleman that you were talking to at lunch when he said, oh, he's fine. He I think the biggest thing is to not think you're fine. Like, don't sit on your laurels. Don't
Mark: Yeah, always put a time component onto that. Like, you're fine now.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: It hasn't hit us yet.
Jane: You're fine for the next three months maybe. But things are gonna happen. And and then it trickles down and then happens to the vendors and the suppliers and and including us. And so everybody is just kind of, you know, in the same cesspool.
Mark: Yeah. I can see a lot of the shippers looking to cut their transportation costs because their costs have gone up in other areas.
Jane: Oh, yeah. Everybody's costs in their
Mark: raw materials, their labor costs have gone up. And if they can cut transportation costs, they're certainly gonna do it.
Jane: And I think that's why there's so much infusion of AI and automated systems because tech is seeing that trucking, the expenses in transportation are getting high. And how do you how do you minimize those? Well you can do it with tech. If you don't have to have a person, if you can automate it, it's gonna be cheaper in the long run. But in the short run, you're gonna have to spend money on the tech to do it. So there's there's that whole, you know, hey, tech can solve your problem, tech can solve your problem, and then not realizing that as you get more and more tech to solve your problem, it actually creates other problems.
Mark: That was actually one thing that I thought was kind of refreshing about ATA this year is that all those tech bros are out of money. So there was fewer of them at the show. Like, there used to be there was a period for three or four years where they were just
Jane: swarming.
Mark: Yeah. Because they had tons of money and they're putting it into giant booths. They've all scaled back or some of them have pulled out of trucking altogether. They're not doing some of these large booths that they used to or they may not even be exhibiting. Sometimes they're just walking the show.
So it was a lot calmer. There was less of this AI everything AI everywhere.
Jane: Actually, I don't agree because in all of the speakers, It was all about technology and AI and never talking about the downside. Never talking about the problems of introducing technology.
Mark: I was thinking more of the exhibits and the vendors that are walking around. There's fewer of those.
Jane: But we did see remember, you left we left the we left a general session and somebody handed you
Mark: Ah, yes.
Jane: A piece of paper that had this, like, you can get AI for all of these different jobs at your company. So you can have AI dispatch, you can have AI safety, you can have, like, there was, like, five different
Mark: AI customer service, AI controller, like, all of those things, it was quite hilarious, but it wasn't a booth. It was a couple of guys handing out
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: One pagers. So it really has scaled back and they really looked out of place and, like, everybody just took it and chucked it.
Jane: Oh, yeah. Well, I think
Mark: it was also printed on, like, a little desk chat printer.
Jane: Something like that. It was not impressive.
Mark: It was not a real flyer. So that was calmed down a little bit. Yes. The sessions, there was more talk about AI. And that's coming, I think, from the camera people that are pushing AI cameras, and there's a lot of AI driven safety kind of stuff.
But we've had that for three or four years. Like, I think since COVID, it's been pretty heavy on that, but it's all the other stuff, all the other vendors that were really toned down this year.
Jane: Yeah. I guess I would just prefer the not to have to listen to a constant sales pitch. I would like it for them to actually say, this is what it's not good for.
Mark: Yeah. Well, that's the problem there with those education sessions and Again, for anybody listening that goes in the future, the education sessions, they say that they're sponsored by. And what that means is that vendor bought that time. And for sure, they're gonna do a sales pitch. They're not supposed to do an overt sales pitch.
Some of them are better than others in that regard. They all end up at least subtly promoting their specific product, but often they're pretty overt about it. I've seen education sessions where the speaker who is supposed to be doing an actual education session goes on and on about the things that they do that their competitors don't or the things that their competitors do that they would never consider. Like, dude, not a sales pitch. You're not supposed to be up here trash in other people.
You're supposed to be giving us value.
Jane: I think that that's something that if, you know, our listeners take anything out of our conversations is that don't you can't just, you know, get taken out for dinner by a vendor and think that that, you know, their product is the thing to use. You have to do your your homework or you're gonna be replacing that vendor in two years. What happens is you get a great relationship with the salesperson and it's like, hey, how are you doing and drinks and dinner and blah, blah, blah, blah, and you end up buying the product because it's just such a great guy and then you find out that your drivers hate it. Or your office hate it. Or it doesn't work.
Mark: It only works on a 5G connection in downtown area.
Jane: Exactly. And so then you rip it out, you put it something else in, and so many people, so many fleets rip stuff out and put it back in. Like, they're changing systems every two or three years.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: They're changing cameras every two or three years, and that's because they're not doing the homework right at the beginning.
Mark: Do the homework at the beginning and save that time down the road because that is a lot of wasted time that people who have a more diligent evaluation and implementation process are not wasting that time and they're gonna end up just moving ahead. They're not going back to the beginning over and over again. They're just gonna keep going forward.
Jane: One of the things that I think is important is that's it kinda we're talking about it in terms of software, but it also relates to drivers. Oh, yeah. That, you know, hire drivers fast. Hire drivers fast. Let's go bam bam bam. Let's get them all. And not so much in Canada, but in the US, it really happens, is not a benefit to you. Yeah. Hiring fast is not hiring well.
Mark: Yeah. Slow down and pick the right people.
Jane: And hiring is one of the most difficult things in the universe. I cannot tell you how stressed it is, how stressful it is to hire the right person.
Mark: Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's difficult.
Jane: I hate it.
Mark: And everybody who hires is trying to do that. And I see people that have kind of accepted the idea that, well, if we can keep a driver for six months, we're good.
What? That's terrible.
Jane: Yeah. Why would you want
Mark: If we keep them for a year, we're good. What? That's a terrible idea. You put so much time into finding them and ramping them up and making them part of your community and getting them to learn your equipment and learn your customers
Jane: and your systems
Mark: culture and all of that stuff. You wanna keep them for ten years. Easily.
Jane: This whole, you're gonna wanna keep them for a year. If you can keep them for a year, then you're you've got them. And that's a fallacy as well because people leave after a year more than any other time.
Mark: Yes. And that was something that came up just before we went to Nashville for ATA, I was in Edmonton talking at a Northbridge customer event, which was fantastic, was great to see everybody and that I haven't seen for a while. And one of the things that I was talking about there is the idea that drivers this myth of when drivers leave, and people think that drivers quit in the first ninety days. And after that, you're good. If you can keep them for over a year, you're set.
But year after year, that's not what we find. Year after year, What we find is that more people are leaving after a year than in the first three months.
Jane: And it's not we don't after a year doesn't mean like anything after a year.
Mark: It doesn't mean that one year. It could be five years or eight years or something. But they've been around for more than a year. So those are people that are finding, they don't have opportunities, that there's nowhere to grow for them, they're bored, the work isn't that great. Like, there's a lot of different reasons, but it isn't just first ninety days. Yes. That is a a bad assumption to assume that it's just the first ninety days. So there we go. There's the ATA report. Anything else?
Anything else that stuck out for you? Well, you you were talking about people buying technology the wrong way and laughing because you had a good rant at dinner, but the wrong way that people evaluate technology. So it was very basically what you just did.
Jane: Was that my rant?
Mark: Well it was longer
Jane: That I had at dinner?
Mark: It was a bit longer, but it was very similar.
Jane: Oh, I think it was because they were talking about TMC.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: And technology coming to TMC, and it's what did
Mark: They were talking about software configured trucks.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: Which is something that's coming and they're they're challenged recognizing that a lot of their audience is struggling with the concept of some of the technology that we have now. And when you get to a point where the truck itself is defined by software or by a configuration file, that's really hard for people to wrap their head around.
Jane: And they don't know how to buy it.
Mark: They don't know how to evaluate it. They don't know how to buy it. They don't know what to do with that.
Jane: So they're basically just going to find a friend. And listen to them or find a vendor, find a trusted vendor, and then it's gonna be the same thing. It's gonna be I gotta trash this ELD because it's, you know, FMCSA has outlawed it and outlawed it now.
And, you know, I can't use this camera system because it, you know, it breaks down every five minutes or just on and on and on with, you know, how people are just pushing technology onto the trucking industry.
Mark: Well, it's it's been like this. I've said this before that watching the trucking industry evaluate and select software in general, any kind of software, back office software driver scorecards, training programs, like the HR systems, reminds me a lot of the PC industry in the nineties where people didn't really know how to buy. They didn't know what questions to ask. They didn't know what was good and bad. So they knew to look at price.
But they didn't know beyond that what to do. So they got it ripped off all over the place and sometimes it was unscrupulous vendors and sometimes the vendors didn't really know how to find a fit in the customer either, so they're given the wrong product to the wrong people. And it took a long time for the market to mature to the point where people knew what questions to ask and all of the kind of weaker products sort of fell by their the wayside and what you're left with now is a PC that you're pretty solid with. Like, any PC that you buy, that's a major name, is probably fine. Like, you're not gonna have those issues that we used to have in the nineties.
But it's kind of the the same evolution happening. Certainly, on the safety side, in trucking where, safety people haven't really had a lot of software to buy, so they don't know what questions to ask. I mean, we put together, what is it about a three or four page document? There's just any questions to ask when you're evaluating online training? Some things to think about what things to be asking a vendor and what to look at.
How do you decide if the product is any good? What things do you need to consider? And it's things that people don't really think about. Like, is your data secure? Does the system run? You know, is the system out? Do they have outages all the time? Do they have support available? And can your drivers actually call and talk to support? Like, these are things that nobody thinks about. So It's a struggle for the audience to try and figure out what to buy and how to buy it in in a slow process, but they'll get there eventually, I guess.
Jane: We'll get a new problem.
Mark: We'll get a new problem. Yes.
Jane: It won't be buying an ELD. It'll be I don't know. Figuring out how to get your your hovercraft to work.
Mark: Yeah. The AI is trying to kill us.
Jane: Yeah. Terminators. Terminators coming.
Mark: So moving on from ATA, we we're back last week, we had an actual weekend, which was quite awesome.
Jane: And Yes. We voted in the B. C. Election, which is hung now.
Mark: Yes. Been very adventurous being part of that.
Jane: We don't. We don't. There is no, nobody got elected yet.
Mark: Yes. So it's going to be a longer process. And now we're heading off to Toronto for the annual Fleet Safety Council conference, which bizarrely has become one of the highlights of our year. Has we have become something that we'd look forward to every year. And we have now been I was thinking about this.
Jane: Fifteen years?
Mark: Oh, no. The first one that we sponsored was two thousand and six. So that's eighteen years.
Jane: Eighteen! Oh my gosh.
Mark: There was one that we didn't. In twenty twenty one, they did a virtual conference.
Jane: Oh yeah.
Mark: And there really wasn't much to sponsor. So we didn't in twenty twenty, we had already committed to sponsoring. So we stuck out that one, but twenty twenty one, we skipped. But other than that, we've been there every year. Since two thousand and six.
Like, oh my god. How old am I now? If I've been at this this long.
Jane: Ancient. You're ancient.
Mark: It's gone through.
Jane: You're ancient years old.
Mark: I'm ancient years old. But this conference has gone through quite a lot. It started as something that was a full weekend. It would start on a Friday night and go until Sunday sort of noon, and it would move around to different locations.
And then they kind of settled into just doing a Thursday night reception and a Friday event. And that's really been the sweet spot for them. They don't move it around anymore, which is I think irritating for the people that are in some of those different regions is now it's always in Toronto and only there. But they get more people. They sell it out.
They have higher attendance. And it's a really good kind of meeting place. So I look forward to it every year because I get to see so many people that I don't really have a chance to see much anymore. And I get caught up and I think it's great for us because we can see a whole bunch of our partners in one place. We can see a whole bunch of customers in one place. Some of the media are there as well and we check a lot of boxes.
Jane: Yeah. I enjoy going there too. But yeah. So it has been part of I think Fleet Safety Council has been part of CarriersEdge, like, the whole time. It must have been that you started going there pretty early.
Mark: Yep. Yeah. It was, like, the first was one of the first events that we went to.
Jane: Wait a minute. What was the first event?
Mark: The very first event that we went to was the old recruiting and retention conference that Over the Road ran.
Jane: That's right.
Mark: The very first event was in what used to be in late September. And it was late September, end of September of two thousand and five. We went to that event and we were a sponsor and we had our basically our launch with our horrible branding and terrible flyers and four courses. We had four courses in our library.
Jane: Four whole courses.
Mark: And you know what's funny? The price then is exactly the same as it is now.
Jane: Yep. That's not funny. It's true.
Mark: No. The price then was considered you know, we looked at it and said, well, yeah, it's four courses, but that means that, you know, this price for four courses is, I don't know, it's like ten dollars a person per course. Where are you gonna get a course for that cheap anywhere else? And now years later, It's still the same price. And you have two hundred titles, great value added in the product.
So, yeah, I always look forward to Fleet Safety Council. We're sponsoring. I don't know who's gonna be there or what is gonna be like, but it will be a good day. It goes fast. It's so funny these events.
We were talking about this with ATA as well, where the exhibit time at ATA is really extended. It used to be one of these conferences where you had two hour block of exhibit time each day. And it's extended to nearly three hours each day. So you have almost nine hours of exhibit time, plus all of the other events that are happening, the education sessions, community meetings, general sessions. And it's like we get there And Sunday morning, we went over, got our checked the booth was fine, got our badges, and now it's Tuesday and we're leaving.
Where did all this time go? We have no downtime. We're not even really doing that much. You did your session. We didn't go to a lot of the other sessions and we just were always busy.
Talking. Just talking.
Jane: Just talking.
Mark: So many people to talk to and it'll be the same thing this week with the Fleet Safety Council where there's just so many people that where you talk to that we're gonna get there on Thursday night for the reception before we know it. It's gonna be Friday and it's gonna be done and boom, that's it.
Jane: Well, we're looking forward to it.
Mark: Definitely looking forward to it.
Jane: We'll have insights from there as well. I don't know what they might be. But it's gonna be fun. I think we're out of time though.
Mark: No. We've got a couple of minutes.
Jane: No. We have a couple of minutes.
Mark: Did I talk about something else?
Jane: No. I was just gonna say, like, are we gonna leave it there? Or do you have something else?
Mark: Well, we have some product stuff? Oh, yep. That we can give some updates on, you know. The thing that actually is what we spend our days doing. We can actually take two minutes and talk about that because we have a big release next week. Lots of technical things. Coming in our business.
Jane: I totally forgot about it. And Berenice, I was talking to me this morning about regression testing and I'm like, regression testing. Why would you be doing regression testing? And so regression testing is basically when you make sure that a big change hasn't affected the rest of the system.
Mark: Yeah. So everything else.
Jane: Yeah. So you can still you can still log in. You can still create a user. You can still do all the basic things. And in Berenice is in our is our creative team lead and so she had to go and test everything for image uploading images and things like that in Endicott, which is our course course authoring software. And because I couldn't understand what you like, why why would Divya be or or or lead tester, why would Divya be giving you this? And then I saw the ticket. I was like, oh, it's sessions.
Mark: That's a great example of the item from the beginning about things that are in your brain and then leaving your brain.
Jane: Yeah, because I remember you telling me about this, but I didn't even connect. And so I saw the ticket went, of course.
Mark: We've got a big change. Well, a big change to the way we manage sessions. That's the thing that is requiring everybody to test and make sure that it's all working properly. And this week, we'll also be doing load testing to make sure that it works under load, and that we don't have another Rogers situation where, you know, there's an upgrade that breaks everything.
Jane: Well, just so everyone knows. A session is basically the amount of time that you're logged in.
Mark: Yes. How you get logged in and all of that.
Jane: Yeah. It manages when you should be logged out automatically and
Mark: Prompting for passwords.
Jane: Yeah. Whether you're online or offline, that kind of thing.
Mark: And
Jane: It's kind of invisible. Like, most users aren't even gonna
Mark: Oh, well it should be invisible.
Jane: Yeah. You shouldn't notice it except for the fact that it's gonna be nicer when you get logged out.
Mark: Well, you shouldn't get logged out. And it also once this is implemented, it won't matter what server you're on, which is one of the things that's an issue for us with the old management of sessions is that it is tied to a specific server. So if that server goes down and you get rotated to another one, you have to log in again, which is a pain. And that causes complications in a bunch of different areas. But if you go to something like LinkedIn or Facebook or some other system. You have no idea what server you're logged in to. They may have two hundred servers around the country, and you don't know which one you're in, and it may bounce around from time to time. And you may be on one now and another one, ten minutes from now. That's the way it should be. And your session should come with you.
So that's what we're gonna be doing with this release is fixing that so that we can more easily spin up new servers without causing problems and break up the load when we have heavy traffic and things like that. And that's not even the part that I'm most excited about. The part I'm most excited about is redesigning the way we manage selection of courses and assignments.
Jane: Oh, yes. The selectors.
Mark: Yes. We have an interface for choosing what courses you want to assign to people that looked fabulous in twenty fourteen when we launched it and over time has looked less and less fabulous and now it is a nightmare. Because while that time has passed and the world has explored new interface design ideas, the content team have also been cranking out tons more courses. So we have a lot of things that look kinda similar and it's way too easy for people to assign the wrong title to people. And we can't have that.
So the new selector makes it very easy to see the region that the content applies to, whether it's cross border or domestic, whether it's a specific regional course, makes it easy to see what kind of equipment it is. So you can filter for courses with a particular trailer type or a particular audience, like filter by subject, and then do regular searches and things. So it's so much nicer. And two things on that I really like on it. One is it adds up the total of all the time that you're assigning and will tell you, you're about to assign this much content.
Are you sure you wanna do that? You're about to assign five hours of courses to somebody. Do you really wanna do that? And the answer should always be no. The second thing is for all of those titles that share content where you have a refresher course that is pulled from a larger full course It will keep track of all of that and tell you you've already assigned this content through this other thing. You don't really need to assign it twice. So you won't have somebody assigning the full course and all the refreshers together.
Jane: And all the baseline tests.
Mark: Yeah. That doesn't happen nearly as much, but we still have people that are getting the full course and all the refreshers assigned. And so I'm very happy to see that that's gonna get changed. So it's the first of a lengthy series of overhauls that we have on the interface. So after that, we'll be updating the the module list and the way we organize programs and all of those kind of things.
Jane: And are you gonna be doing some work on reporting?
Mark: Reporting is in there as well. Yes. Ricardo is going to be probably starting on that in the next few weeks.
Jane: And so what the other thing that we're gonna do is have our catalog be pulled straight from the modules list. Yeah. The website will have, always have the most up to date.
Mark: Yeah. The website right now is a separate list of courses, and that's a pain to maintain, so we're gonna fix that.
Jane: And just, you know, so everybody knows our website is now fully translated. So
Mark: Oh, yes.
Jane: English and French, and I don't think we've mentioned that. That's
Mark: No, because it happened in the summer when we were on break.
Jane: Was that?
Mark: It happened on the summer. In the summer when we were on break with this. So, yes. Fully fully bilingual website. Lots of things happening. So now I think we can wrap it up.
Jane: Okay.
Mark: I guess we should say bye now not just stop talking.
Jane: Okay. Well, thank you for joining us.
Mark: Yes. Thanks for listening everybody.
Jane: Bye.