Mike Love: Nothing today would be, a complete answer without mentioning AI at least once. 

Tom Arbuthnot: I, was gonna, I, was gonna ask Mike, I wondered if it would come up, so I'm really interested in your thoughts. 

Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast This week we are talking a Teams Phone and Teams Contact Center customer journey in South Africa. We talked to Mike, who's the CTO at LabourNet. Really interesting conversation about their journey to Teams Phone, how it's improving their customer service, and also how are they using Landis Contact Center and really making a data driven approach to serving their customers. 

Really interesting conversation. We also are joined by ScopServ who are their partner and we talked about the deployment and really how they're maximizing their investment. Thanks to Mike for joining the podcast and also many thanks to Landis who are the sponsor of the podcast. Really appreciate their support. 

On with the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. You know, on the pod we really like to hear customer stories and, really excited to hear this one, a bit of a different story and, from South Africa as well. So nice to get some, a bit more global coverage on the pod. we're gonna be talking to Mike at LabourNet and ScopServ, who are the partner who helped him with the, Team's journey and also Contact Centre Journey, which we're gonna get into in, in a bit more detail. 

And first of all, Mike. Thanks for doing the pod. Do you want us to say hello? Introduce yourself. 

Mike Love: Yeah. Thank you very much. Appreciate, thanks for inviting me. I'm the CTO at LabourNet and I'm looking forward to exploring a little on what we've achieved. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Thanks. And Janet, 

Janet Souter: thank you so much Tom, to you be part of this conversation today. 

My name is Janet Souter-Dantu and I'm one of the co-founders of, ScopServ Integrated Services. Worked in the customer experience space and the unified communications and Contact center environments, and organizations across, the labor advisory and legal services, higher education, financial services, healthcare insurance, and particularly BPOs and Contact center and the public sector. 

And looking forward to this conversation today. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, interesting to get your wider, wider perspective on the different markets as well. And also we have Vanesia. 

Vanesia Raborethe: Hi, I'm Vanesia and I head up the sales team at ScopServ. looking forward to this conversation and looking at the whole Teams and Microsoft ecosystem for LabourNet. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome, thanks. So Mike, give us some context about LabourNet. 'cause it's quite an interesting organization. Thousands of clients, and you've been there for quite a while as well. 

Mike Love: Thank you very much. LabourNet is an HR, payroll and legislative compliance, provider. that's a whole lot. So what does it really mean? 

we really partner with our clients, to provide, and support them in a range of specialist services, across multiple domains, labor, law, payroll, occupational health and safety. . Broad-based lack economic empowerment in South Africa, employment equity and, training and information compliance in, in the South African context that would be poppy or analogous to GDPR in the, in the European market. 

So it's quite a broad spectrum of, offerings and, . Business domains that we support our clients in. But I think first and foremost, the important piece here is in, it's not only about meeting the legislative compliance, but really trying to, assist our clients to see and leverage compliance as an advantage or, position themselves as an employer of choice at the end of the day. 

So that's a little bit about who we are, what we do. At the core of, of all of those solutions, is our payroll offering. We have a national presence, in most of the, or all of the, the major centers. we have a, spread across the, the South African and, elements of the African market, and it's really about us making sure that we acknowledge that good business practices are not about the size of the organization, whether you're rural or local or metropol. 

it's really a, an important factor and for us that. Presence, where our customers are, where they're doing business, is really important. So that gives us an intimate relationship and ability to deliver in that information Compliant, sorry, legislative compliance space we were mentioning earlier. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And I'm guessing with those varied types of customers and, and the geographic spread you have, like, it comms is a, is a big part of the business. 

Mike Love: very much so. And I think the. It's really exacerbated in, in our business, the sort of post COVID era where, business became a lot more dispersed, less and less of a reliance on, central in the office, et cetera. 

So it's a, a great, drive for us, to ensure that we are enabling not just our clients to, experience the service. . We offer, but really to support our consultants who are engaging with the clients across those domains in such a way that they can be effective and position the LabourNet offering. 

Tom Arbuthnot: And what does that, what does the business look like in terms of, headcount and locations? You've obviously got a massive coverage there. I'm guessing that's some physical office, some agent remote working or something 

Mike Love: like that. Yes, very much so. So we have, . Office in Johannesburg and Cape Town, Durban, the major centers. 

then we have, satellite offices or regional offices within the smaller centers. things, areas like Eastern Cape in Northwest, through to, well, Munga. et cetera. So, we have quite a, a, a number of offices across the country, right the way down to, even in the very remote regions of the Northern Cape, where we may have, . 

An individual who is appropriately qualified. and again, to maybe, draw the cliche out a little bit, got married, married to a farmer, farmers out in the Northern, Northern Cape, but still being able to deliver in the legal practice and the skills that are are there because there are businesses everywhere. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. And take us a little bit through obviously, pre-Teams, you must have had some other communications platform. What drove you on the, the Microsoft Teams journey? 

Mike Love: Okay, so yes, absolutely. we, we de we definitely did have other, platforms involved. . I think we can never discount the standard, PTSN, type, GSM, et cetera. 

So that was always a platform that we, we had in place. We then, ventured into the more digital type communication space, with, alternate providers. Sort of looking at where our business is going, how we are, aiming to drive that experience that our clients have. I think it's important to maybe just digress a little before I answer the question explicitly of why Teams is, even though a lot of what we do is preparing our clients to be legislatively compliant, let's be honest. 

The only time that they phone us is when, what I say, they under duress. There's one of a few things that happen. Either a department of laborers, inspector has arrived at their pre their, their premise and said, we are coming to do an audit. So that call is to say, help us make sure, what do we got? How do we do? 

Talk us through this or else it is something like a disciplinary hearing or there's been some workplace incident. and the client in reality is under the, under stress. it's never a, an, a fun exercise. So, 

Tom Arbuthnot: and it's always very timely as well. This is not send you an email, let me know in a week. 

This is, I need to get on this. 

Mike Love: so with that being kind of a reality of how we engage those, that pre-work is, e is easy in context because it's scheduled, it's planned, you can work with it, et cetera. But once you get into the second phase of it, when there's an incident, whatever the nature of that incident is, it's now a critical situation. 

And, . We firmly believe, there are various other business models, but our, our key approach is to say, at that point in time, our clients want to speak to and engage with a human and individual, preferably that consultant who understands their business, not just one of a thousand, potential consultants who technically are skilled, but those who they've engaged with before, we've built up a relationship, et cetera, et cetera. 

So all of these dynamics are a really important piece. So, if I, if I then put that into context as well and say, when we receive that call, I think the first thing that a client really wants to see is that, is to get that sense of we've got your back. this is what needs to be done. And most importantly, the first two or three steps in the process are handled quickly, slickly, et cetera. 

I'm gonna, go back to your question and say Teams over. the sort of post, COVID era grew in stature in our business, quite significantly. it was driving what we are, seeing as our core. For supporting our consultants and engaging, and it was a natural transition just to look at the, the Team's platform and say, how do we extend a single platform across all of our stakeholders? 

and ultimately our objective is that. We have a seamless interface directly between our clients and our, and our consultants. I think that was the major driver for going down the route with, the Teams communication, platform as a, foundation. And I think everybody would love to say that the telephone is, is something that is going to die. 

I think it's gonna die just the, the week after Cobalt dies. and we really can't, . Ignore it. It is such an important part of the, the communication infrastructure 

Tom Arbuthnot: and so like it's a big change going from kind of primarily GSM and PSDN to a UC. Platform. How, how was that journey? And I guess that's where kind of ScopServ played a part in that journey, I guess. 

Mike Love: Yes, v very much so. It's still very much a journey. We are not there, we are the first ones to admit that there are, unfortunately still some of our clients that don't get the best experience. but we working at it every day and aim to move that in the, in the right direction. Is, is 

Tom Arbuthnot: connected connectivity quite variable in some of 

Mike Love: those? 

Well orations as well. Connectivity will always be a variable, for us. yeah. With the broad spectrum and, and unfortunately we have to acknowledge, even though it's not true in the client's mind, it's always our side that's breaking. It's always outside. That's not the problem. 

Tom Arbuthnot: It's, it's good. It's good to acknowledge that you are, yeah. 

You, you are serving the customer. So that's, it's, it's, guilty until proven innocent. 

Mike Love: Well, well, 

Tom Arbuthnot: that's it. All over. That's 

Mike Love: it. It doesn't even help trying to prove that we are not innocent. It's just a reality. So it's, it's really trying to, acknowledge that. associated with it as well was the initial, POC, and I think that was probably the, the most important, aspect for us in that we were able to, with the assistance of, ScopServ and, Landis, and everything was coordinated for us. 

Through the ScopServ team. it was a very easy, engagement model, and it really gave us that ability to, take the step and, put the, let's call them less than ideal experiences that we'd had in the previous, engagements, behind us, and, get to a position where we said, okay, this. 

Unified model can really work in, in this area where we have, as you said, this high pressure situation, everything is time critical, et cetera. And I think then from there, the other other part to it is, this is almost certainly never, and, and in and in the case of, Teams based, communication platform, including telephony. 

It's not one provider that we are dealing with. It's not one, single ubiquitous solution that you just drop down and everything works seamlessly. so that coordination that, ScopServ, were able to provide us in terms of the physical, aspects of getting telephone lines moved from, old to new. 

coordinating with the, the Kodak providers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I think bringing all of the parties together was, the secret to the success. And then, . Landis, being a US organization and US based, and us being in South Africa wildly different, time zones, but I've gotta acknowledge that both, Landis and ScopServ, were, . 

There with us all the way. It didn't matter that it was a 10 o'clock in the evening call South Africa time so that we could engage with the US support team. and vice versa. The US team would often wake up at early hours of the morning to engage with us when we had a critical, situation. So it really was a, a great partnership that developed across, the, the broad set of organizations and, . 

The danger of having a solution, where you've got. Multiple parties, never materialize that danger of, it's not my problem, it must be the other guy. and I think that's a really important, aspect to the successes that we had. Everybody was vested in finding the solution or proving where the problem wasn't rather than. 

The departure point of it's not mine. 

Tom Arbuthnot: No, that's great to hear. And and you mentioned Landis there as your, as your Contact center on top of Teams. what were the use cases and what did that look like? What were the features you needed from the, the Landis Contact center that drove you to that solution? 

Mike Love: Okay, so we have, we have, a level of complexity in that, we can never predict where the demand is gonna come from. so, yes, we have regional offices and a client calling in who, who's in, region A. If we get 10 problems in that area, we've only got one. especially in a smaller area. We've got one, available, branch administrator in that if they're now receiving this call, they can only handle one call at a time. 

So we need to be able to distribute our calls, globe, sorry, across our global, . Network, who's picking it up? What are they doing? Where is it? So one of the key elements was being able to, I identify where the pressure points are, re-root those calls via queues to the, whoever is available. 

leveraging off of, Team's presence as well as, I'm gonna call it, manually triggered presence or, closed off. situations. So I think that whole, that, that is the core aspect of really just bringing in the, . Not so much a skills based aspect, but an avail, avail, availability based aspect of who can serve as the client. 

coming back to what I was saying about our objective, our objective is that any client calling it at any time should speak to an individual within our organization being handled with empathy within one minute. so that should never be more than that. That's 

a, 

Tom Arbuthnot: that's a, that's a tight sla. 

Mike Love: That's a very, like, 

Tom Arbuthnot: especially with a 

Mike Love: company of, 

Tom Arbuthnot: you know, your level of customers. 

Mike Love: Correct. And, do we get it right? Yeah. Sometimes. Are we on that journey? Absolutely. And we will get it right eventually, but that's where, that's what we stretching ourselves towards. 

Tom Arbuthnot: I appreciate the transparency. And Janet, maybe that's a good time to get your perspective, both on the partnership with LabourNet and also like how you helped with this Team's journey and working with Landis and LabourNet. 

Janet Souter: Thank you so much again, Tom. who we are, I think I've kind of opened up with that and, we specialize in, communications and over the years we've worked closely with, . a lot of enterprises like BPOs, the financial sector, the healthcare, sector, retail and public, and then obviously recently with, LabourNet. 

That was a very, very, very exciting journey for us. and at ScopServ, we focus strongly on, those long-term partnerships. It's not just, here's another customer. It's about that long-term partnership and we, we truly believe in, that that journey in and not just sell and disappear or provide and disappear, we will walk that entire journey with our clients, from a strategy and a design through to the implementation, the user adoption, the optimization, and the ongoing support. 

So we really involved in, the commercial and the operational as well as the people side of the business, making sure, solutions make financial sense, deliver measurable return on investment, and most importantly, empower Teams on ground. Ground levels to succeed, right? 

Tom Arbuthnot: mm-hmm. 

Janet Souter: Excuse the pun on the Teams there. 

sorry, I just had to throw that in there. But, what really drives, us building our relationships is, is, is trust, and protecting our customers brands as well, and ensuring that technology becomes an enabler of. A great service and not a barrier. So again, like I said, I'm really excited to be here with Labournet. 

and Landis to share this journey, and all the lessons learned and hopefully some very practical insights, that other organizations can part potentially take away. Mike, I'd like to know how did ScopServ help you understand what was possible within the Microsoft ecosystem? For your organization and your Contact center, and what challenges led LabourNet to explore a Teams based Contact center solution? 

And how did you identify the need for this approach? 

Mike Love: Part of our strategy is to establish, what we call the LabourNet platform. And our objective there is to say that the platform is where our clients and our consultants meet in the digital world. So with that platform, approach, doesn't matter whether it is a, a product offering. 

IE we have a client who is using our payroll system and. They are self-sufficient and they capture their own data and they do whatever, or whether it is a disciplinary hearing that needs to be scheduled and then subsequently chaired and so on, that all of those, interactions, land up in the, in the platform, similar to what I was saying earlier around, communication and, visibility of information, et cetera. 

as an organization we, we've. Seen the value of Teams, and we believe that it is a, a natural extension in both, from a pure technology perspective, but also from that, client engagement platform perspective, as the foundation to, achieving that. So that was, that was the driver to explore, initially, . 

Sounds feasible. Now let's find out whether it's possible and then how practical. And then, how, value generative is it? And I think that was kind of the, the process, of going through. I think the, the piece that, allowed us to transition from this is a twinkle of a good idea towards a practical solution, was going, being able to really have a solid. 

Foundation developed off of the POCI was referring to, earlier. I think that's where we got the, the real value and turned the corner. 

Janet Souter: Were there any unexpected efficiency gains, customers experience, improvements or operational outcomes that surprised you when working with ScopServ and the Landis platform? 

Mike Love: The Surprise WA was probably captured in. How well we work together as an extended team, and if I have to stand, if I'd let that stand out. But thereafter, it was kind of the, almost each piece was evolving one on top of the other. and, and we still very much there. So, and that, that might. that might sound like a bit of a negative answer to your question, in, but I actually see it as a positive in many ways in that we were able to progress stepwise, one piece on top of each other. 

that wasn't a case of going from really poor performance to everybody working late nights to suddenly good performance. It was really one piece on top of each other. and dealing with it today. So it was a, it was an, and it continues to be an incremental journey rather than these leaps and bounds, which are sometimes quite unsettling. 

what, what was a surprise, and this was more of an internal reflection, is how much it highlighted internal processor inefficiencies or. Like all things being a technologist, I have to blame, I can't blame technology, but the reality is we actually experienced that. It, it's not a technology problem, it's a people problem. 

And I mean LabourNet people problem, not a client, problem. And once we'd managed to get the organization realigned to say, how do we, get the best out of this technology? It became a whole lot easier internally as well. And I think that that was another, aha moment. we always talk about it's people, process data, all of those sorts of things that come through, but the importance of process was exponential, sorry of people was exponentially more important in the early stages of the project. 

Vanesia Raborethe: I'm gonna jump into my questions now. I'm gonna ask you more on the user adoption and the deployment of the Teams Contact center solution within your organization. How did that go straight to us on how each and everybody sitting down trying to navigate this new system, give us some insight on that. 

Mike Love: So I think it's, it's important that we distinguish, a few categories in there. 

the first category being our. True frontline staff. that would be your, typical, receptionist at a branch, or a, prime allocated Contact center type, employee. And the, the adoption there was slick, it's clean. they didn't, to be honest, they didn't even realize that they were dealing with something different. 

In many ways other than answering and dealing with, what, until we, we sort of took the first step of really exposing into them that they now suddenly had a lot more information. So initially it was, it's just a telephone call. I was speaking to somebody after, forget what they, and then it transitioned into, I understand a little bit more. 

I have some more information available to me. And that was. both, what is coming in, when the call is coming in, as well as, accessibility into our, into our world. just through Teams presence as an example, I could see who's there. we all, we've all used, . Whisper type, transfers, let me quickly phone you, let me talk you, whatever. 

But being able to have the voice conversation with a client and in the same time typing a Team's message to somebody who you're dealing with and being able to interact it as almost empowered our frontline staff, where those frontline staff are not, consultants. So they don't always have the skills or the background. 

They, they're the, they, they're the first, first touch point when I can't get to a skilled person immediately. So not putting them in a position of being under strained was, I think the biggest, value add, on their side. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's a really good, that's a really good point, Mike there, that the ability to. 

Engage with the wider team while engaging with the customers. That's, that's quite, you know, potentially transformational, who's someone who feels like they're out on a limb a bit in the conversation to have someone, back at HQ or, or a peer being like, yes, maybe this, maybe that. 

Mike Love: Agreed. And so, so I think that's the one user group. 

Then, then we have our specialist support team where they are, experts in a domain. they do in. However, they are first line support in the domain. And then our third group is the consultant who is engaging with clients directly. They would typically be going out to a client. They would, be conducting the earing on premise, et cetera. 

So if, if we use the analogy there, . Our, our payroll solution. When a payroll administrator, wants to do a function that they do maybe once every two or three years, they can't remember, they've got a vague recollection. They would phone into the support center and there'd be a, a dedicated number that they can call that only have to go through the main switchboard. 

We have a relationship with those clients. They hit a knowledgeable consultant directly. there, there we were, able. To, and I think the, the big value add there that came in was how we were able to optimize those, . Support consultants just through, smarter availability. looking at how we are rostering, and what types of value that we are getting because of the information that was coming out of the Landis Contact center, on top of Teams. 

so the physical communication is one thing, but it's that information that sits on top of it allows us to, optimize a little in, in that space. And, and our objective is not. No, let me, let me not, be disingenuous. We will always be looking to optimize, but that's not our primary, objective. Our primary objective is to give, high level of, of service to our clients. 

So, that really helped us, elevate and it's coming back to that people problem. Suddenly our, support team managers had so much more information available. They could see that there were. We've rostered four people who are on call, but I can see that there are three and there're 10 client calls waiting in the queue. 

I've got a scramble now to, to find, and bring other others in. And we could dynamically know who was in the office, not in a meeting, not doing whatever, and get consultants who maybe in an hour or two's time would be going out to a plant. But they, they have capacity right now and we could. dynamically bolster that set of, resources. 

and that's an area that we'll be working on substantially over the next while is that balancing effect that, and. Today. our clients, we've, we've, we've worked quite hard at moving them in such a way that the, the mindset is, I, I don't phone my consultant because I don't know whether they're in a meeting, whether they're gonna take my call, whether they do whatever. 

If I phone the national number, I'm gonna, yes, I might get my consultant. when I make that call, if we are smart enough and often we can get you to your consultant immediately, but if we can't, we are gonna get you to a knowledgeable person as quickly as possible. and again, I'm gonna be transparent there. 

. We are not happy with where we are in terms of achieving that, but that's the ultimate goal of, the, the Teams and Landis-based platform so that we really can get you to the right person at the right time, remove the stress. Then we deal with the Admin and then we solve your problem. kind of in that, in that order, 

Tom Arbuthnot: that visibility that you've talked there about the data is really interesting 'cause the Teams phone natively can root to calls different people and can provide that. 

But actually the, the, the, the data and the insights and the smarter routing and the presence space routing sounds like that's a big, a big value add there. 

Mike Love: Absolutely. So, . It's not just about the physical routing. it's about what, how, how do we get that routing to add value to the interaction and get us closer to our objective of that one minute, target that we're trying to, to achieve. 

But just to add to some of those horrible targets, we never want anybody to be on a call that's ringing for less than 15, I mean for more than 15 seconds, as well. So we, we, we, we, we really are killing ourselves in some ways. . Putting a lot of pressure on, but we think it's the right thing to do. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Well, it's great to have high objectives, right? 

Because if you, if you're, I mean, that's still, if you are falling out from 15 seconds to a minute by, by global standards, that's still a very impressive, SLA for your customers. 

Mike Love: Unfortunately, I have to acknowledge that some of our, many of our customers, will today say they haven't had that, that experience consistently. 

but many will also say that they've had that experience, as well. So it's a, it's a journey. Coming back to your point on that, on the data, as we are able to leverage our data more and more effectively over, the coming months, I think we will, . We'll start seeing some quantum leaps in, in that service delivery objective. 

Janet Souter: So Mike, you're speaking my language. customer service delivery and a customer experience is, is really right up my alley. and I'm super excited to hear what you guys are, achieving. So, looking back, without giving away too many secrets, what key lessons have you learned from this journey and what advice would you share with other organizations? 

Particularly, considering a Team's omnichannel Contact center within the Microsoft ecosystem. 

Mike Love: Probably the first lesson and the first optimization we found, was be careful about the conflicting channels. let me use that as an example. we enabled our whole organization to. have both inbound and outbound calls off of Teams, as an example. 

So, the outbound calling, became. A white elephant very, very quickly because you've got a lot of competing channels of, WhatsApp normal, GSM call, et cetera. And in reality, the, the phone on the desk, in the office, doesn't really exist anymore today. and fundamentally the phone on the desk in the office doesn't exist because I'm not in the office most of the time. 

I'm at home. Okay, so what is the most, or I'm, I'm at a client in, in the consultant, sphere. So we kind of missed a trick over there, in, in that one. And so the outbound, I'm, we're gonna be, we, we consolidating quite a lot in that space. So that was an interesting lesson learned for us, as to what is the VA value of outbound? 

Call in the context of a typical pick up the phone and phone somebody. but what, what is happening quite significantly and part of our platform, roadmap is bringing our clients into the Team's journey directly. so as they, so. As they have a problem in the, not too distant future, they'll be able to engage with us directly on Teams and we've invested quite heavily internally, in being able to leverage the Teams platform to, allow the client to initiate communication with us. 

we, we, we believe that that's going to be, one of the, the next big game changers for us that will, allow us to get closer to those objectives I was talking about early on. coming back to my comment around, people internal and internal, process, that was, . a significant piece. And I think the first lesson, that really started paying dividends there was to make it every senior manager's responsibility to, test the system every single day. 

IE. a manager in Joburg picking up the phone, pretending to be a client, phoning the branch in Bloom Fontane, and pretending to be under duress and really experiencing that, customer journey. and until we were able to, at a, at a fairly broad, scale. From this, not just the CEO and myself and the core team, picking up these calls and saying, guys, we are not getting the experience that we want. 

But really driving that into the business as, and, and, and, and we tried all the things, you know, the, the typical, fire up and automated process that does, that doesn't, it actually didn't add the value that we, that we wanted until we got our people to engage and. experience the customer experience and really digest it. 

we didn't see the, the value coming through and we saw the stepwise changes as that was maturing. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That, that reminds me of a, a Jeff Bezos story, Mike, of where there, I think mid, mid board meeting, he rang their own support desk to see what the experience was. I think that's such a good cultural thing to do, to really know, like, not is it just working technically, but is the, is the pickup time there, is the experience there. 

Mike Love: Oh, yes. I mean, and we, we've got some perlow war stories internally of, we've done that exact same exercise a good few times. and we've had such from wonderful experiences to, a disaster. and, individual training and retraining that came through that were picked up as a consequence, et cetera. 

Tom Arbuthnot: And did you have this level of visibility? Before you had Landis and 

Mike Love: Teams, 

Tom Arbuthnot: as in how long calls were taking, how many calls? 

Mike Love: No. We, we were, we were battling, we really were battling to get that, that visibility, prior. 

Vanesia Raborethe: So what's next for LabourNet in terms of optimization or optimizing or expanding in your Microsoft ecosystem? 

And how do you see us, ScopServ continuing to support your journey? 

Mike Love: The really important part is it's data, data, data, data, data, data. as the foundation, that is both the, I'm gonna call it operational observability. How we understand what's happening, where things go, et cetera. And then it's the client leg, leg to that. 

we still, babes in the woods as far as how we are truly leveraging the wealth of data that we have about our clients, to, to really, . Improve that, that client experience at that stress point that we were talking about early on. So I think that that's the foundation of the next phase for us. and the associated with that is then being able to expose it directly with our clients in at that integration point in the platform and it being a truly seamless client experience, rather than, . 

What's LabourNet's, telephone number now, again, how do I find it? OL, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. that, that we have. So I think that's, that's where we see our souls, going. I think. Nothing today would be, a complete answer without mentioning AI at least once. 

Tom Arbuthnot: I I, I was gonna, I, I was gonna ask Mike, I wondered if it would come up, so I'm really interested in your thoughts. 

Mike Love: however, I think what's what is important is, we are not an organization that is looking to remove the human in the loop. I think I've stretched it enough times. so it's about, AI. Enabling and augmenting the consultant, engaging with our client, not repla, not replacing the engagement that the client has. 

with LabourNet, with an overly zealous, approach on, pushing, AI technology in, in into that, stress point. we will always, and, and obviously be looking for efficiencies, in that support role. So it, it is a, a critical part of, of what we're doing and, we'll see where that journey goes. 

it's early days for us, but the foundation for it for me is critically important. And the first foundation is the data. and, I always say that. Another, another made up statistic. but the reason that we've been safe in many, in many instances, globally as an, as an industry is because people have been trying to find the holes. 

now that we have AI, that actually I think there are too many instances where AI has just been turned on without us doing the foundational work first. And then AI can find holes at the rates. . Of millions of people at a time, kind of thing. So, our, our first step on top of that is, establishing a, an appropriate, foundation. 

it's not just from a pure, good practices perspective, but we also acknowledge that the type of data that we, manage on behalf of our clients is probably one of the most desirable data sets that's out there. Just to use an example, if you, if you were able to get hold of somebody's payroll, you know everything about every employee that would be needed to perform, identity, identity theft, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. 

So that, cautious approach for us is really important, to provide that level of confidence both to ourselves and to our clients that we are not. We are being more than responsible, when we turn AI as the, core part of our platform going forward. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Do you foresee like things like, AI agent coaching would be the kind of context into industry term, but you mentioned that idea of people chatting each other while they're on calls for support. 

It sounds like you are poised for. That AI coaching to help the person on the front line could be really interesting. 

Mike Love: Well, well, even if we remove the, or, or before we talk about AI coaching, just the ability for, let's call it an AI based summary of what this, this client who's called, I can identify the client off of their number. 

give me a quick summary even if I'm not an experienced. health and safety consultant, but I've, I've, I've the first person who's onset, I can have an intelligent conversation, with a client as a, just by being enabled. And I think, that in itself is such a powerful, piece in that it, it kind of changes the game from what I call a static view of the client. 

And I think we've all been doing that for a long time. Last time they called us whatever. but now suddenly going, okay, well. . A much more dynamic view. We've got that static view, but, what's happening, what's on the news today? what's been there? How's it potentially impacting, the industry of that this client? 

Is there a strike in that industry that's happening today? So I can, I can almost foresee what, why this client is calling me because I, I now know a lot more of this dynamic information. And that in itself, enabling the, the client interaction, just puts us in that position to continually demonstrate the empathy part of our client service. 

That, is so important to just drop those stress levels as, . The call is answered. 

Janet Souter: LabourNet deals with complex legal matters and often very challenging client interactions. it your team constantly remains so positive and professional. How does LabourNet maintain such a strong, engaged and healthy culture in a high precious service environment? 

And the reason why I'm asking you this is as a service provider, we've experienced this firsthand and we love to hear your perspective. 

Mike Love: I think it, it starts from the, the, the organization and who we are, how we see our clients. and you, you you're talking about, the supplier relationship. we, we often discuss it internally that says, how do we want our clients to engage with us, and are we treating our suppliers in that way? 

and, and I think it's a, it's a conscious conversation that happens on a, a regular basis. similarly associated with the, the way in which we deal with our clients. the way in which we engage with them, we've. I think we've, we've realized, and we've recognized that it's not just, this is not just a service engagement. 

This is an, it's first and foremost grounded in the people. I think the, the strategy of saying we are a people, first business, we're not an, we're not an AI first business as an example. is, is an important part. And I think as we, we demonstrated, internally, it's. It, it creates those healthy, out outward, relationships as well. 

So that's probably the best answer I can give you, right now. But you've prompted a question and I need to, do a little bit of, digging internally, because it's, . Thank you very much for that. It's nice to hear, I think sometimes we, we are often all too harsh on ourselves, and we forget to take and recognize those wins where, they're being experienced, in the broader ecosystem that we engage with as well. 

So thank you for that. It's a, . Very complimentary, question. Thank you. 

Janet Souter: I really appreciate that. I wanna just add to that is that I think we forget that sometimes we're dealing with people, and I loved what you said, you know, AI is, is here to stay and, and it's just gonna keep growing. But they, they, we still people, you know? 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah. No, I think it's, it's, it's about enabling the people, isn't it? I think, you've all touched on, and Mike in particular has touched on, it's about. En enabling and supporting. And it sounds like you're on a, a great journey. And Mike, I appreciate the transparency of where, you know, you've got objectives and, and, and room to further improve the, the customer service. 

It's great to hear a really honest perspective on, on that ongoing journey. And as you said, I think it is an, it is a, it's an forever journey, isn't it? 

Mike Love: That's it. Very much so. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well thanks so much everybody for joining the pod. Really appreciate the insights and everybody look out for another one. 

Team, 

Mike Love: thank you very much. Appreciate being invited, and thank you for the opportunity to share. 

Vanesia Raborethe: Thank you, 

Tom. Thank you.