Unveiling the True Cost of Customer Service: How to Identify and Fix Financial Leaks in Your Operations

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studio in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by Kennesaw State University’s Executive MBA program. The accelerated degree program for working professionals looking to advance their career and enhance their leadership skills. And now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, KSU Executive MBA program. Without them, we wouldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on the show, we have the founder and CEO of MarginSignal OS, Brandon Burdin. Welcome.

Brandon Brundin: Hey, hey, hey, thank you for having me on. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to be here.

Lee Kantor: Well, I am excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about MarginSignal OS. How are you serving folks?

Brandon Brundin: Well, you know, MarginSignal OS, wonderful company. Being able to find that gap, put money back into company’s pockets by tying behavior to KPIs and finding out where they’re leaking that that cash flow.

Lee Kantor: So what’s the back story? What was the genesis of the idea?

Brandon Brundin: Well, the back story is funny, you know. So you know how their companies are looking at dashboards, right? Charts everywhere. Right. So what you do is you click and you start noticing the green lights flashing everywhere. Everything looks great. But when the quarter ends, CFO starts asking like, hey, where did that money go? Right? Well, I’ve been working at a fortune 50 company for the last 15 years, and I noticed that nobody was paying attention to these markers. And sitting there, notice that there was a $42 gap in between what they were paying the company. Companies or providers or what we were paying the people to answer the phones. And what we were actually saying on the back end. And as I started to chart that over those years, I started to realize that it didn’t just happen here at this fortune 50 company. It was actually something that was industry wide for anybody who took phone calls. Contact centers everywhere.

Lee Kantor: So you discovered this and it just wasn’t showing up on the dashboard. Everything was looking okay. They were getting green all across the board.

Brandon Brundin: Absolutely, absolutely. So like where did their margin go is usually the biggest question, right? Everybody wants to know especially in economy right now. Where’s my money going. Right between what the reports say and what your money is actually doing. You know, that’s what I found out we could solve.

Lee Kantor: And was it something kind of obvious once you uncovered it, or was it something that’s different in every organization?

Brandon Brundin: What’s actually Obvious. It’s just nobody’s tracking it. So for example, let me give you an example. When you call in and make a phone call, we’ve all had this scenario where we’ve called into a call center and we didn’t get the issue resolved. We hang up and then we call right back in. Well, in that situation, that’s one touch. That call cost you X amount of dollars when you called in again. Let’s say three days later, they said it was resolved on the books, but you actually have two touches. So if the call is, let’s just say $20 for that call, that second time you call in, it’s 40. If they have to get a supervisor in, it’s another 50. And then so on and so on and so forth. But nobody’s actually tracking that information. They’re just tracking. Hey, did they call in? Did the issue get resolved or how many times the customer called in to talk to you?

Lee Kantor: So then once you discovered this gap, what was the next move like? Were you trying to create like, how did you kind of make a business around that gap?

Brandon Brundin: Well, what I did was I started to sit down and said, okay, there’s got to be a formula to make this happen. Like, there’s got to be a formula that everybody’s got to know this. You assume that a fortune 50 or fortune anything would have some type of system in place that shows them, hey, this is how much X amount we’re spending on calls at this time. Many times they’re calling in, well, it wasn’t right. So as I started to sit down and do the math, I started to come up with a solution, a cost per resolution. We’re not really resolving the calls, are we? That was the question that came into my mind. And then I started to research, do a little bit of market research, a Swot analysis to see if there was companies out there that did that. No, there wasn’t. There wasn’t anything out there that actually tracked. If we were getting like, how much did it cost for a resolution for a customer?

Lee Kantor: So in order to capture that, you have to kind of follow the customer through sometimes multiple calls like you described.

Brandon Brundin: That is correct. Just having the most companies have software that tracks a customer’s call, giving it a personal ID, for instance, just like an insurance company, an insurance company would have your patient access ID. If it was a tech company, they’d have the service ticket. Or if it’s a customer service telecom company, for instance, it’d be your phone number. They have software that tracks it, but what the software doesn’t track is are you calling back for the same issue? Uh, and did the issue really get resolved, or was it just put on hold for a couple of weeks?

Lee Kantor: So does your solution require the company to kind of re, um, reevaluate what they call certain issues in order for it to be followed truly from, you know, from birth to grave.

Brandon Brundin: That would actually be something that would happen. But that’s why we’re here. We actually saw that forum instead of them having to spend hours and thousands or hundreds of thousands to be able to design it, put the formulas together and then reorganize themselves. We actually sit in the middle. We’re actually a layer that you could plug into your data that you already have and be able to get that output. That provides you that resolution and was to say less than two weeks, you’re able to get that information readily available.

Lee Kantor: And then once you have this information, how do they go about solving it so they’re not paying an extra $42?

Brandon Brundin: Absolutely. That’s what separates us from consultancies. Consultancies provide you with the information. And they go, hey, this is our findings. And look, go ahead and go fix it. Have a nice day. Good luck. That type of people.

Lee Kantor: Right?

Brandon Brundin: Right, exactly. That’s what I’m so used to. Well, me being a first, I was a corporate trainer, which allowed me to go in here and go, okay, you have this problem. Well, let me go ahead and fix this issue for you. Right. I use those skills that I learned to be able to create a personalized package with these 12 parts that are actually something that is across all of the industries, not just for one that says, hey, for instance, you have a high transfer rate, okay? Hey, you got a high escalation rate or for instance, your ticket rates are really good and your two departments are not talking, but we might need to get some coaching in. Real life coaching in to resolve it. And here’s the package that you could use to apply to it. And it’s proven that it will work for you.

Lee Kantor: So this is part software and part human solution.

Brandon Brundin: Absolutely. Well, you know, in these days AI, that word right there is a very sticky subject, right? Ai is going to take my job. Ai is putting us out of business. No, no, no, AI is here to support you. It’s allowing you the best way I can say it’s like Iron Man. Iron man has an AI to help Iron Man, Iron Man. So in this case, this tool is always human in the loop because yes, AI helps you make faster decisions, but you still have to make the decision to act.

Lee Kantor: So now, uh, is it you mentioned call centers? What are other kind of use cases?

Brandon Brundin: So for instance, Oh, man. Operations. So if we’re going to think of this, let’s think of it as operations. Any type of system that has to deal with the tracking. So like we discussed the ticketing for, uh, it centers, uh, having to do repairs, uh, dpos health insurance, having to do claims as well. I found out out there that not only is that 40, $42, uh, big gap between, on average, a big gap between what they’re paying the front reps and the issue to be resolved. I’ve also noticed that there’s usually per month, and I did an average ticket range of like 20 250,000, uh, calls that come in. There’s usually $42,000 gap of margin leakage every month. So it doesn’t have to just be call centers. It could be with anybody that has a ticketing system that deals with a customer that needs to be tracked. Insurance, uh, healthcare insurance, uh, call centers, bcos those type of firms.

Lee Kantor: So if, um, if the leadership is seeing only green, how do they know they have a problem? Like what is, how do you kind of bubble up this pain? So they know that they have to take care of it.

Brandon Brundin: So bubbling up, the pain is quite simple. And I’ll put it in the simplest terms, as my mentor would always say, listen, be bright, be brief, and be gone. We don’t want to know how the sausage is made, right? When we show them the information, it’s real simple. You give us all the data that you have. Give us historical data. Over the last six months, your chart said that it’s green. You’re solving all the problems, but you’re at the end of the month, you’re still losing money. At the end of the quarter, you’re still losing money. Well, when we run your data through our AI system, that allows you to make a specific decision, basing it off of just, hey, just tracking these individual calls that come through, we’ll go ahead and place it against what you’re currently on. Earnings were for that quarter, and we can track exactly how many calls were coming through. And those calls at the end. We’re going to give us a magic number. Hey, your cost per call is this. This is how many calls kept calling back throughout that that three month period, because most calls are only being tracked between a week, seven, three days, seven days, or a month over that time frame. And then at the end, you’re going to get that magic number out of that formula. And that formula is going to tell you, hey, you’re really paying $18 per call versus that 12 you told that you’re mentioning or, hey, your BPO is paying this much, you’re losing this much margin through that leakage. And if you make these changes here, which you can track over the next quarter, you can start seeing the changes on the graph, which we also have a dashboard that shows you these changes, that feeds live from the information that you put into it.

Lee Kantor: So once you kind of identified that there’s an issue and you put in your system that I would imagine lessens that leakage. How have you. Do you have case studies that show. Okay. If we implement this system. This is where this change is going to happen. Do you have kind of those kind of case studies?

Brandon Brundin: Absolutely. So if you go to w-w-w dot os.com, you can actually see one of the case studies for that specific example. And you can also do a quick reference on yourself as well, where if your company has 50 employees or more, that’s really where you see the greatest impact on these type of procedures. You can actually see one of the case studies that we’ve done where we’re the numbers, how we work the math out on, hey, this is how many agents you’ve got, this is how many calls you got going back, and this is how much you can say on an annual basis on that first annual basis.

Lee Kantor: And then how much does it cost typically to implement just the assessment to see where they’re at?

Brandon Brundin: Well, if you do the assessment for the first it’s $500 for an assessment on there. You can do it through the site real quick, real easy. You just put in your information. How many employees you how many, uh, agents or how many calls you’re getting through the system? Um, how much you pay per call per touch, as I like to call it. And then, uh, just a few pieces of information, like if you’re discussing healthcare, uh, it, if your insurance, so on and so forth. Your industry. And then at the end of it, it’s going to give you a printout. It’s going to give you a baseline because what you’re giving me is the baseline. If you don’t have the full, uh, ESV sheet or your spreadsheet, you’re going to give me the baseline. And at the end it’s going to say, hey, yeah, this, this is definitely going to improve here and this is going to improve here based off of the information you provided at that point, we get a phone call and then we can discuss the different packages, uh, ranging from 15,000, uh, on up and enterprises have a different, different scoping where we sit down and then we actually talk about it and we see the numbers and we put it through the dashboard, that would be hopefully eventually on inside internal, no security risk there. It’s all owned by you at that point. Uh, and you’ll be able to see the changes and we develop a plan along that.

Lee Kantor: And then once the change is implemented, is it something that you have to check on a regular basis to make sure there’s no kind of creep coming back?

Brandon Brundin: Absolutely. Well, that’s a great question. That was a wonderful question inside the system. What is it? What would separate us from the consultant, like we said was set it and forget it. No, the situation here. The system automatically keeps picking up and tells you, hey, you need to turn this lever on. You need to turn that lever on. My job as the founder and CEO is to make sure that we stay on top of the people. We’re not only just giving you a product, we’re providing our leadership as well. So being there every quarter during those quarterly leadership meetings for them to ask questions like, hey, what does this mean? How do we fix this? It should already give you that predictive ability through the data that you’ve given over time, the historical data. But we want to make sure that we’re always in involved in it so that if there are any changes or any updates or even just feedback. I just want to be educated on how we can make our teams better. We want to make sure we walk hand in hand in that partnership.

Lee Kantor: Now, when these organizations kind of bought into this dashboard system, this green was supposed to solve this problem. Like that was why they were getting this right? Because they wanted to, they wanted to be able to see things that maybe aren’t obvious. And it seems like they’re still hiding things if you’re not looking properly. Um, is there any advice for folks who are kind of leaning on dashboards like this to be a little more skeptical about what they’re seeing and to kind of really start asking questions?

Brandon Brundin: Yeah, absolutely. There is some advice and here’s something that anyone can do Monday morning. Pick your most common customer interaction. Do things people call or email you about the most and ask one question. How many times does a customer have to contact us before that thing is actually fixed? Not how fast we pick up, not how nice we are. How many touches does it take to actually solve it? If you do not know that number and most companies do not, I promise you there is money hiding in that gap. And the one question will tell you more about the business than any report you’re looking at right now.

Lee Kantor: Now, who in the organization are you looking to have these conversations with? Is this kind of the CEO level, or does it go down to other C-suite in order to get to the right person that cares about this issue? The most?

Brandon Brundin: Well, majority of the. Thank you for that. The majority of the interactions or the leaders that we’re looking for is that that a VP of operations, customer experience. The Senior Vice President of those organizations, uh, senior directors of the operations or customer experience from these, these individuals have the most influence. These most people, these are the individuals who are looking to make the change that not only impacts the bottom line of the company, the heroes, as I’d like to say, but also will improve the culture because now there are no longer firefighters, they become fire preventers.

Lee Kantor: So now in your kind of trajectory, uh, what stage are you at here? Are you, uh, do you have kind of the escape velocity you need, or are you, uh, like, what are you looking for? Do you are you looking for funding or are you, are you self-funded or did you do you have some funding behind you?

Brandon Brundin: Well, in the age of AI, self funding is actually something that is easy as long as you know how to build a computer and have a mind for framework and have for when you need to access to do these things. Um, we’re definitely, we’re definitely in the, in the funding phase right now where we have a product that’s ready to launch. We’re ready to rock and roll. We’re actually looking for our next three clients so that we can expand this further. Our first couple test case studies went very well very well. We’re able to turn around their industries and show them on the dashboards where they were lying. So that’s the phase that we’re currently in.

Lee Kantor: So those three next clients who would be kind of the ideal, um, three next clients for you.

Brandon Brundin: Like what ideal three next clients. Yes, sir.

Lee Kantor: Yeah. Just like from an industry, from a, a pain like what, what if you were to pick the ideal three perfect next clients, who would they be?

Brandon Brundin: Uh, I would have to say. Oh, yeah, this was a good question. Yes. This one, my three. My first best client would be. Oh, I would, I would love to. And I’m gonna name a company, well, star, little star, uh, because they do, they do client care there. And they also handle, uh, some portion of the insurance. And I know customers are calling in, excuse me, uh, patients are calling in to get things resolved and they may not find that resolution. That would be a perfect, a perfect client. Or if we were going to do a generic just high ticket, it seems like you’ve got high escalations in any of these industries. Insurance, uh, you take business, uh, bpos that take phone calls for outsourced phone calls. And the last one I would say is the, uh, insurance, healthcare and BPO. So those are my top three, top three as long as you’re getting high. If you’re seeing that you’re getting high repeats, uh, if you’re getting high handle times if you’re getting anything of the sort work. Escalations, transfers, and you’re trying to figure out, hey, how can we get this down? How can we make ourselves more efficient, more lean? Those are my those would be my top. Those would be my top.

Lee Kantor: And then, Brandon, if somebody wants to learn more one more time, the website, the best way to connect.

Brandon Brundin: One more time for the people in the back, it is w w w dot l o s.com. And you can also take your quick, quick assessment there as well and be more than happy to serve you.

Lee Kantor: All right, Brandon, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Brandon Brundin: Thank you for your time, sir. Have a good day.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.