Video: UDT On Differentiating The Customer Experience In The Last Mile

hey Channel insiders welcome back to channel Insider partner POV your source for untapped opportunities and unfiltered opinions in the it Channel all to help you make Better Business decisions I'm your host Katie boso my guest today is Jesus Pia Executive Vice President and chief experience officer at UDT Jesus explains what sets UDT apart from larger service providers is their attention to detail in what he calls The Last Mile and as you'll hear it's that differentiator that helps UDT keep ocean freight ships running on time hey Zeus welcome and thank you so much for being here well thank you very much and a pleasure to be here with you all in this morning and looking forward to participating in this I really can't wait to get to know you because as we've spoken about prior to this recording UDT itself is has gone through a lot of Transitions and adaptations since its Inception in 1995 from a reseller to a services provider so how would you explain what UDT is today and how you came to be a part of its Mission 13 years ago I'd like to describe UDT as a IT services organization there's very specific things that we do and we measure them all back to the outcome of the customer we're fanatical about making sure that at any cost that the customer has a good outcome at the end we tie it back to either Financial metrics satisfactory metrics kpis that are different because different organizations have different measurements on how they measure success so we try to do that on a daily basis uh we deliver a lot of different Goods but at the end of the day it's really the services and that last mile that makes a difference between us and we feel most of the larger or other competitors out there you mentioned services and that was something that you really pushed for when you joined UDT why did you want to bring managed services to UDT at the time that you came over and how did you know it would be a successful offering for UDT I didn't 100% know it was going to be super successful but uh but without joking around that's always been my passion Services has always been something that I do since I started at UDT and prior to UD I was in two other organizations that we brought managed services to the goal has always been to be able to provide a little bit more of a Last Mile customer service InCentric approach to the customer so with that you know we end up delivering all our services as many as we possibly can on a managed solution because now we end up not having to you know per se nickel and dime the customer for everything that changes in the environment for everything that happens in the environment customer pays a flat fee on a monthly basis and encompasses a whole lot you know that normally they would have to call different organizations to bring in to do little pieces and odds and ends we'll bring it in as a all-encompassing for the customer right who are your customers at UDT and what are their typical sizes and verticals that they hit we do have a a pretty uh wide variety of customers right uh and we purposely did that from my Inception I focused always on the commercial side of the business Henry and Gerard when they started the organization they focus on K through 12 there's a specific reason why both balance each other really well because the the buying cycles and the spending Cycles are are always a little different you know one is federally funded the other one you know you have to go and and do good in your business to be able to fund whatever growth you have or whatever you need to do since that we've added you know state and local government uh We've added different sectors we we don't Focus specifically on a vertical other than K through 12 that is our big vertical but we're a very horizontal company where we provide again Services across all of these different vertical right you know being in in South Florida you you you have a lot of financial customers and your portfolio you have Logistics customers in your portfolio just because where you're at headquartered but we have offices in in in Oklahoma we have Offices in Tennessee in Georgia the Carolinas and they all have a little bit of a Different Twist as a vertical that they're a little bit better on those offices just because of where they're located so you know we always made it an effort that we weren't going to verticalized specifically even though we have deep expertise in certain verticals because we've hired people because of the locations that we're in a very good point about not being vertical specific because at the end of the day who you're serving is about their specific needs and not necessarily having to do with what industry they're in so I appreciate that you've told me that your customer relationships with UDT some of them go back 20 years what's the secret to maintaining a customer relationship for decades just being honest you know just delivering what you say you're going to deliver being available at any time all of us do great work all my competitors do great work all of them have great Engineers just like we do everybody thinks that their Engineers are the best Engineers I think ours are the best Engineers you know the reality of it is is the customer relationship that you have that's why we're so big and so it's so important to have a full 360 view of our customer we invest heavily in that customer relationship right where most of our sides don't have the different touches we have an account manager that's assigned to the account we have a service delivery manager that is assigned to the account we have a customer success manager assigned to the account and then there's an executive alignment to some executive at UDT so at some point if somebody's not either happy or they're in the process of not being happy we take care of it quickly and we jump in and we make things right for the customer because I could sit here and say that everything's always perfect but it's not we live in an IT world and in it you know we deal with security issues we deal with issues that we can't control and therefore is how you respond to them right so our succcess has always been around that is how you respond you know why do we maintain 20-year relationships it's because again you listen to the customer you manage to their outcomes and you're always there for them doesn't matter when or what time you know you're able to pick up the phone and I'd love to be able to give a real world example of this kind of customer service could you tell me a customer success story in which you and UDT were able to successfully help a customer solve a challenge one that happened last week uh Thursday night one of our Logistics customer large ocean transportation company they had an issue where their maintenance had expired they weren't aware of it and of course Murphy's Law the main the unit that was not uh under maintenance I had a issue a failure and I get a call at 10 o'clock at night on a Friday night so how do we handle this and immediately we assembled the team because we have deep relationships in like companies like Cisco foret you know HP Dell and all that picked up the phone call certain people that you know obviously Through The Years you build relationships and then you start almost asking for favors you know uh and you take care of it that way because you know they call us sometimes for favors and we help each other because at the end of the day we're all trying to do the same thing help our customer in a difficult moment it doesn't matter at that moment in time who fault it was whether it was a customer's fault whether it was an employees fault or our fault it doesn't matter at that moment in time what really matters is how you jump to the occas and how you come together as a team and go solve the the problem that the customer has because as as minut minute it could seem to somebody else this could be catastrophic for them you know and you have to understand that and has no boundaries things happen at any time it doesn't really matter the fact that you pick up the phone that last mile what we call that last mile is the differentiator in my perspective right I mean people will say different things you know we compete against really large integrators you know service providers the difference is the less monile so that customer Seaboard Marine you've been working with them for a long period of time I do have a question when it comes to the logistics of working with an ocean liner company is there anything about that that stands out to you in which they're looking for somebody who has that Personal Touch who knows exactly what they need what are some of the challenges that go directly with that industry because that's that's a first for me hearing about that kind of customer you know one of the main reasons why we've developed the relationship that we've developed is because we really understand their business we've been doing business with them for 20 years maybe a little bit more at this point in time but the reality of it is is that we really understand they're logistics company um the way they do their Logistics is through sea right but there's a lot of intricacies to be able to do that you know there's cranes there's trailers there's tires there's mechanics there's warehousing there's just a slew of things that they have to deal with to make sure that the package goes from you know let's say Florida to Freeport Bahamas or Europe or whever it goes right you have to understand that side of it and it you know it takes time right to build that trust and that relationship so we do a lot with them today uh I don't like to say we do a lot for them because we actually do it together we have a Cooperative approach to it where they have their it teams we have our our managed services and and and Engineering teams and they all know each other pretty much at this point in time by first names they know who to call quickly to get their their responses but you really get to understand the logistics and that side of it right so you don't understand it's not just that a router went down a piece of equipment had an flavor you understand that that router that piece of equipment that went down can stop a freight from leaving the port well that could cause now millions and millions of dollars and delays that are tariffed and all those kind of things or there could be a refrigerator package you know that's inside containers inside there that could now even implicate even worse right so is if you understand that now you have a diff different respect to what you're doing doing every day there's a mission here that you're trying to accomplish and you know at the end of the day we care about that and and again it goes back to understanding the customer and really living up to that last mile that's so interesting to think about how the Snowball Effect to really understand where that goes you know you might think it's just a router it's just one router that goes down but that router is directly connected to as you said these issues where it could be high tariffs now if something is late or something is running over or a refrigerator unit that is on a timetable might go down so it's really important to consider the the implications of oh that's just a router it's actually much more than that with that said how do you get your clients to understand that how do you stay in front of them to help them know that this is this is a 247 365 job to make sure you're looking out for this it's not only when something goes wrong or as you said when Murphy's Law kicks in I will tell you this you know um our business is a word of mouth business right we're not you know IBM AT&T you know we don't have the ability to Market that way right because obviously we're not that size but our name has to be word amount so at the end of the day I could give you a lot of reasons as to how they make and they understand that but the real truth comes with they see that we do the work to understand their environment so that's part of it right we invest in our customers we invest time in understanding what they do not only understand understanding what they do but now hiring people from that industry to help us better bridge the gap and then the most important part is when something does happen they see that we're there either we're proactively telling them or if if they noticed it before we did because we're remotely monitoring they see that we're there no matter what like I told you the example of you know Friday night right doing the work to understand but also being there when the phone rings that's the part that you know you have to be true right you could say you're going to do a lot of things but the reality is how do you prove it until the issue does happen and that's when really the Magic Begins right and that's when they become a Believer right that's when the difference you know between us and people that don't provide that last mile if you think about it you know my title I have two titles I have EVP and that's because I still help Henry and Gerard run the whole organization as a whole but as a cxo which kind of my daily job not a lot of organizations invest in a cxo of our size right and the reason for that is because they don't believe that customer experience because there's a difference between customer success and customer experience customer experience is across the whole organization so we could do a great job you know from a Services delivery but if we're invoicing everything wrong and we're delivering something to the wrong place and we're doing all the other stuff wrong then the customer experience is not the same so part of my job is that right making sure that there's a customer experience across all of UDT we have multiple lines of business inside of UDT we have endpoint right management which we call it workflow events we have manage services we have Security Services we have different solutions that are like backup patch management you know uh cyber defense those type of things how do you make a customer feel that they're the most important seamless across all of that that's the magic right that's where you know the that side of of that last mile is so important you know you talked about how you've been doing this for three decades and it makes me curious to think about all of the new trends and technology that you've seen come and go um and then become common place in the age of AI ransomware new threats all sorts of new trends and different risks kind of cropping up every week how are you approaching security with your clients and are you finding it challenging in any area to get them fully compliant or fully understanding of the seriousness of security in this day and age that's one that that we we uh maybe struggle with it's a little bit the the word of how we explain this to customers we invested heavily in security and we actually look at security very holistically so we do the regular manage Securities MDR mxd all that kind of stuff but once that's responding a lot of stuff could have probably happened before right so what we tell the customers is to be prepared now we hired a team of experts um that we've had now like I said for a while and these gentlemen and ladies because there's it's actually a pretty vast group and it's it's kind of really cool where I see the introduction of of of a lot of uh female workers into it is has been on the security side which is actually pretty interesting love that um there's a very analytical side of it that that happens there that we have a really good team there because of that right um so we look at Cyber defense differently so we look at it from governance from risk we take that and then we apply it to the customer and the size and the vertical and all these different things because there may be a regulated customer or a non-regulated customer so they there's different things that they have to do because of that but the reality of it is they should all be doing it acting like if they're regulated because everybody's gonna at one point in time GNA have some type of a breach is how do you respond to that how quickly you're ready to respond to that and if you have everything in place to be able to come out with the least amount of disturbance and credibility to your name seven years ago aiso will get breached he got fired today aiso gets breached they don't get fired right because it just happens it's how prepared you are and have you done all the right things to be able to address the issue at hand so we have a team that's completely segregated from our security response team that's based on helping customers meet at least the minimum thresholds that they should meet depending on who they are and their afford pability because you could also a company by security to be able to put things in place so that they can help themselves not you know respond quickly you know get out of whatever mess they're in as unscathed as possible so with that said I'd love to know is there a vendor or solution a specific solution that you just think works really well right now whether it's supporting you or just providing a great solution that is going really well love to get your thoughts on that if you're comfortable shouting anybody out I'll tell you one that I don't know how how much is uh the word the name out there but it's called the company called p and they deliver a lot of tools for service providers in the back some of them are arbot type tools others are AI driven tools we really enjoy leveraging that platform because it helps us with our customer success right so it helps us as much as we can you know predetermine when a customer situation is not going the way it should go so it gives us different lever to start seeing you know you know the typical red green yellow right so they have certain level of tool sets that help us predetermine that you know so we leverage that tool a lot we also leveraged at gbt internally and now we've actually created a UD based you know uh co-pilot we believe that there's a lot that we can do with that with our data that will help us again provide a better customer experience to our customers Henry and I are on a mission right now uh to create that digital dialogue for the customer it's like kind of moving a mountain you know or carving a tunnel through a mountain because as an organization and as an industry we don't think that way but we have definitely uh a big task around us around that creating that digital dialogue you know as per or others may say the Amazon experience we don't want to lose a touch but we want to be able to give customers that ability to go self- serve themselves at any given time one of the things and maybe because I'm old school but one of the things that still for me is a pet peeve and our industry is I like to do as much as I possibly can online on my iPhone and on my computer and all that but there's sometimes that you just need to pick up the phone and talk to somebody we don't want to lose that we want to be able to have that ability for customers to have the digital dialogue because there's folks that today that's how they do it right you know we have a newer Generations coming in they were born with the devices in their hands but at the end of the day you know there's some times said you still got to pick up the phone and have a conversation that human effect that last mile that I talk about a lot it just doesn't happen on a chat or it doesn't happen you know with a AI one more thing I should ask if we want to get in touch with you if we want to learn more about UDT from an IT buyer perspective and learn how we can work with you how can we contact you sure it's UDT online.com you could do it multiple ways you know on my LinkedIn account you can I I look at my LinkedIn I answer it uh pretty good my email is J penaud online.com thank you so much for joining me today not a problem it's has been my pleasure thank you for giving us this opportunity and the platform to talk a little bit about UDT and and what we're doing here you got it thanks so much to Jus for joining me today and thank you for watching or listening you can check out all episodes of Channel Insider partner POV on Channel insider.com or watch on our YouTube page at Channel inssider newws and trends you can also listen to every episode in podcast format on your preferred podcast listening platform don't forget to like subscribe and follow wherever possible so you never miss an episode you can also connect with Channel Insider or me Katie boso on LinkedIn and Twitter once again I'm your host Katie boso and I'll see you next time no

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