LFG with JJ Podcast - E5: Todd Sale

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Juan (0:00): Welcome to LFG with JJ, the podcast that helps you level up your CX game by navigating CX and AI technologies. I'm Juan Jaysingh, the CEO of Zingtree, the AI-powered Customer Experience platform, providing LFG with JJ solutions that turn every human into an expert. 700 plus companies across 54 countries trust our solutions to boost their contact center proficiency, enable their customers to self-help, improve their internal processes and more with Zingtree. Todd, great to see you. We have Todd Sale from FleetCor, who's the SVP of Customer Experience Operations Team. Excited to have you here, Todd. Would love to jump right into the podcast with you telling us, who Todd Sale is. I know you have a unique background, so I'd love to hear about your background and learn more about Todd Sale.

Todd (0:54): Sure, no, I'm super happy to be here. Thanks for the invite. So, who is Todd Sale? I started about 30 years ago. I needed a job that had health insurance cuz I had a baby. Wow. Turns out, I'm still working for the kids I feel like, but it all started 30 years ago cuz I needed a real job. I was a blue collar roofing houses, working on cars, doing the things that I actually enjoyed. But needed a real job. So I got a job as a call center agent, and I chose this job because it had health insurance like right away. And that's really how I got my career started. In a lot of ways it is a lot about who I am because I started at the ground level, never really it took me 15 years to get a college education, which is way too long. I don't recommend that. It wasn't always a pretty career when I had first started. I wasn't even a month into the job and got called into the director's office to listen to a call. And boy, I, listening to this call, I was just getting quite a hard time from the caller and thought, man I'm doing such a good job. Like I'm really handling this call well. Little did I know that at the end of the call I might have said some inappropriate things about the caller that was recorded. Fortunately, the caller didn't hear it, but my boss's boss did. So I attribute my career to the grace of a leader way back who could have fired me and probably should have, but didn't. Starting in that, entry level position, I just was really all-in and I don't really know why I was always all-in, but I've always been all in and every job I've had, I've probably been underqualified in just about every job I've had, but then been able to catch up to those qualifications by, just taking every day, one day at a time and learning every day. And you're really, at least for me, I'm never really satisfied. I'm sure my people aren't super happy about that but that's also, I think, served me well in my career. That's

Juan (3:18): amazing. Thanks for sharing that. That's a unique background. 15 years of college. Let's drill down on that. I think that's a great story to, share with the world. I don't know that's only, I've seen four years, five years, six

Todd (3:31): years, but 15. Listen,

Juan (3:33): it's nothing. You made it, but, I would love to hear

Todd (3:35): about it. When you do four years and 15 years, it's because you ran outta money as a freshman. Was too dumb to go into military, cuz that would've certainly been a lot easier than the path I took. Then you start having kids early in life and the next thing you know, you're trying to juggle, daycare and college cost and kids baseball games. And I just took a really slow, long path to getting my college education. I like to think it served me well because towards the last part of that, I was a working professional and I feel like I got a lot more out of the education, but I don't recommend that

Juan (4:16): path. So let me ask you this question, Todd. If say you did not have your college education, you're obviously smart, you've been very successful in your career and you continue to make, great strides, but let's just say, life got in the way. You had kids, you're working, you're doing well, you did not complete your education. Would you still be here now? Would you still be able to do all the things you're doing?

Todd (4:37): It's a super good question. I think that the last couple big moves in my career, so for example, when I left, Call it Chicago and came to Nashville. I'm not sure I would've been considered for that because

Juan (4:52): you didn't have a

Todd (4:52): college degree. Cause I didn't have a college degree. I can't say that for certain, but I think I would've just never got the interview. But, listen, I wish I had a Master's. I wish I had done it earlier. I would be farther in my career if I had done it earlier. But it's, everyone has their own path and that was my

Juan (5:12): path. Yeah. Was there a time in your, progression in your professional career that you felt like, of course, I, from your mindset and attitude, you're always growing, you're always learning mindset that you have. I see that, but was there a time, a moment in time where the light bulb went off, where was like, Hey, Todd Sale can make it happen. Can do it. Was there a time where you felt like, I'm gonna be on a great path for success?

Todd (5:39): I've been asked that question before and I do the mentoring here at where I work. And back before Covid when we had very traditional classes, I would meet with every class and I would tell the story of, how I got started. Some light bulb went off in 1993 when I decided I'm going to be working whatever, eight hours a day, five days a week. I might as well make the most of it. What would happen if I took in that time every single phone call, like it was the most important phone call of my life? What would happen? And I'll tell you what started happening, is you become such a differentiator on the floor that the next thing you know, they're saying, Hey, Todd, we'd like to put you in a supervisor role. That's great. I've only been here three months. I've never been in a supervisor role and let alone in a call center supervisor role. But, of course, I'm young and hungry and I accept that job. And frankly, that path that repeated itself, it repeated itself almost in every promotion I got until later in life where I was promoted into a role that I really should not have been promoted into in terms of my experience or qualifications. But I think when you're a leader and it's those early leadership promotions, you can get away from with that. Not sure you can do it later in life, but it worked for me, so there was definitely a light bulb went off. I was, I'll just tell you, I was taking personalized Christmas stockings for Sears in November, and none of the personalized stockings were gonna be delivered by Christmas. So basically every single phone call was a very unhappy person. Mostly the grandmothers from Ohio, I think, is the only people that called. But it was tough and, you get up in the morning, you're like, I'm gonna go get yelled at all day long. And then the next day and then the next day, and then the next day. But it served me well. It's started my career. That's

Juan (7:50): amazing. That's an amazing story. We're gonna transition into the Customer Experience industry. But before we jump in, you've got one of the coolest names in business. Todd Sale, especially in your role where you get, hounded by vendors like Zingtree and everyone trying to sell you. Every time when someone asks me your name and Todd Sale, they ask me again, wait, Sale? That's his last name. That's pretty cool. I'm sure you've heard that before.

Todd (8:17): I have. I should have went into sales. Because then it would give you something to really break the ice with, but yeah.

Juan (8:27): It's still pretty cool. So yeah you've got a unique background. You've been in the trenches, you've been taking calls. It's a great mindset. Take every call like it's your last call and give it your best. And that's served you well. Now you're in a leadership role. You've got an amazing success in your career. Where, you've been in the CX experience for a long time. I think you said 93. So 30 years you've seen a lot, what is the state of the union of the CX industry now? Where do you see it going? There's a lot happening in the last few months. We've talked about all the latest and greatest that's happening with Open AI, ChatGPT. Would love to get a sense from you as a leader, what is happening in the industry now and where is this industry going.

Todd (9:13): Sure. So what's amazing to me, this is just my opinion, what's amazing to me is there's still what I think of as low hanging opportunity. Right? Regardless of the size of the organization, there's so much opportunity to leverage technology, to better prepare your people for serving others. Cuz that's really what it comes down to. And then obviously the real, kind of a bang for your buck on Customer Experience, is that the customer has the Amazon experience where they don't necessarily need to talk to a human. That's what we're all striving for. So where, like right now I was just talking to my team, just the other day I said, there's no better time to be in Customer Experience than now because of some of these emerging technologies we've been talking about. Things like chatbot and self-service, and artificial intelligence, machine learning and yeah that's all out there. There's countless products that you can go plug in. We use a couple ourselves. Certainly not optimized, but this Chat GPT thing, just everybody I show it to, cuz there's still some people that haven't really heard it about it. And I'll pull it up on the screen. And I'll ask it a question and it's like they just don't believe it. So we, that's coming. That that's gonna completely change, how we service. I think it's for one, if you were never gonna replace the human, but we're certainly gonna make it a lot easier for us to support complexity, for us to support needs. And I've always been trying to find a way to let the associate, or let the person on the, that's providing service, to just focus on the caller or focus on the person sending an email or the person behind the chat. Cuz that's the hardest part. Remember there's a person behind this request and, back when you would do this in, face to face, right? I don't know if you know this, but Sears credit used to be in every single Sears office. So when you had a credit issue, you would go to your Sears store and somebody would meet, they're face to face and you would resolve your credit problem, make a payment, whatever. Now, that happens so rarely. Sure it does happen, but it's just super unusual. So people didn't all,

Juan (11:52): they just showed up to the store to fix a billing issue. I did.

Todd (11:56): Yeah. Listen, we're going really way back way, way back. But the point of that is you don't. It's easy to get disconnected when you're providing service from the, from the call or from the customer, from whoever it is you're supporting because there's that distance. And then imagine with Covid, many service professionals went home, so now they're isolated doing that. So I think where CX is going with the artificial intelligence and the tech that's on the horizon. It will allow us to just completely change, number one, change who we hire. Like today, we have to hire for all these skills. You have to hire for someone that's, can put a puzzle together and has good proficiency with computers and has great language skills and all of that. Where I think in the future you just hire a really nice-hearted person who has a good work ethic and has great communication skills. That other stuff, that other skill is not necessarily as needed because hopefully the tech brings that answer to the associate. Right to the screen, so to speak. Listen, that doesn't even count all the stuff that gets deflected because the customer can self-service. Yep.

Juan (13:15): Yeah, it's a really good insight. You talked about, you're not gonna replace the humans. You're gonna support and augment them and empower them. And the new technology has been around, we've heard about AI, machine learning chatbot for 10-15 years, but now it seems to be coming, crossing the chasm, getting more mainstream. But do you still think it's happening now? Or does it need a little bit more time? How do you think about that?

Todd (13:48): I don't know. That's a great question. Like specifically the new artificial intelligence where it's this amazing ability to respond with a contextual answer that is lightning fast and mostly right, like without even tuning. It's like super close. Imagine if you tuned it. In terms of timing, I really don't know. I think, listen, I think the really big operations, like the folks that have 20,000 agents, they will have the funding and they have the ROI to go make it happen. And they're probably gonna be on it very quickly if they're not already on it. What I don't know is the more, smaller players like me, we have just, just say we have a thousand agents. You have to think about things differently with a thousand agents, and I don't have a thousand associates taking one kind of call. I have a thousand associates taking, I don't know, a hundred different kinds of calls potentially. So I don't know. I think it's like everything else. It comes along a little bit slow, and then this thing just explodes. I believe that's what's gonna happen.

Juan (15:00): No, well said. You said you talked to your team recently about how exciting it is to work in this space now. It's a hot space, especially with the latest and greatest tech innovations that's happening. I think Customer Experience, Customer Support can benefit tremendously from it. So it's a great place to be in. So tell us a little bit more about your, your day-to-day job. You've been at FleetCor for some time now, you've progressed in your career within FleetCor, you're a leader within FleetCor and, leading your Customer Experience and Operations team and, what does your day-to-day look like? How has technology impacted your role, what are the current tech stacks you use? We're excited that we're partnering with you at Zingtree, hopefully Zingtree is supporting you. So just like to learn a little bit more about your day-to-day and what's working for you and let's start with that.

Todd (16:00): Sure. My day-to-day is really managing across a diverse set of products, in a pretty diverse org as a shared service. So said differently. I just have a lot of bosses, I have a lot of stakeholders, and, more importantly, I have a lot of associates that rely on myself, my leadership team, and all these stakeholders. If you think about it, these associates rely on us for their own livelihood and for their own kind of job enrichment and for us to help them in a difficult job. Cuz these jobs are tough. I'm not complaining about my job, but I can tell you that associate role is a hard job because you never know what the next customer's gonna say. Everything is measured and everything is measured even in seconds. So it's a tough role. And then to lead that is also difficult. So where I spend most of my time is trying to stay ahead of changes. We're an organization that's very dynamic, constantly changing. And if we're doing a great job, that means our associates are ready for any of those changes. That's probably the biggest thing that we work on is readiness for change. The other thing that we focus on is just what I think of as just continuous improvement. You're never really satisfied with the Customer Experience. Even Amazon, who arguably has the best Customer Experience in the world, has challenges. We're probably all customers of Amazon and we've had some misses now and then. So when the best of the best has challenges, then you certainly know you have a long way to go and we have a long way to go. So that focus on continuous improvement, focus on that associate experience and then. You had asked where, what our tech stack is. Let me just start with a NICE-inContact, kinda ACD telephony platform. We use Salesforce for CRM, or chat and email case management we've been with nice. Not even a year, so far so good. And then of course been with Salesforce for many years. We are starting to use Zingtree and in my org there's pockets of my org that have a 1+ experience with Zingtree and are super happy. My group just started using Zingtree in the last, call it three or four months, and we're spending all of our energy right now as we've realized the capacity of some of this tech, and we have to get the foundation right. So we're moving slow to go fast, and I've been blessed to work with some amazing people. I gotta tell you, working with Zingtree is a lot of effort because it's forcing us to look at every process. It's forcing us to evaluate that process. It's forcing us to think differently about every contact. There's personas behind the contact. It's forcing us to think about the risk of every contact, because now, instead of educating somebody and they make a judgment call, which of course is what we do all the time, we're giving the associate a little bit of an out to just follow the screen. So it's gotta be right. So fortunate thing though is not just having some amazing people, super talented and incredibly dedicated. But they are almost as excited or more excited about the Zingtree platform than I am. So it's easy. It's like you just kinda wind them up and then step back and watch it go. So where we're focusing on just earlier today, we're focusing on that foundational work, and then how do you boil the ocean? Because we want to put Zingtree on every desktop. We want to maybe not fully script every conversation, but we want to script most of them. And the most important and valuable part of what we're doing is the insights. All these stakeholders I mentioned, they all are asking, how is this working? Or how, what have you heard about these kind of challenges or these things that might happen to a customer? And they always want data. And listen, Salesforce can give you data. There's nothing wrong with that. And we use Salesforce for data. But when you can put together a very precise model and then measure it. It changes everything. I gotta tell you, we did something over the week, last week, and the calls are coming in today and I'm in a staff meeting with, it's a billion-dollar business head. It's a billion-dollar business. It's one of the businesses I support, and they're asking me questions and I literally had a report up in Zingtree and I was hitting refresh. Like every 30 minutes refresh. So I knew he was gonna come around to me and ask me this question. I wanted to be able to say, today, in the last whatever, 12 hours, here's what's happened. When I came around the table and sure enough, the question came up, it was pretty cool to be able to say, look, this is what we know as of whatever, one o'clock today. And it'll evolve. And we'll we think that having this more precise data that's that kind of real-time, low effort, low code, we think it can actually create more value than all the other things that potentially can be a part of Zingtree. Yeah, that's how I spend my day trying to keep people happy, trying to help my associates, trying to leverage the, you know, this great tech that we have. We have a lot of great tech trying to optimize that. And then Lauren, you asked me earlier about Chat GPT. I'm still trying to figure that thing out. I just know it's amazing. I don't know how we're gonna apply it, but we will. Yeah.

Juan (22:10): That's great. Thanks for sharing that. On Zingtree. Any, thanks for talking about Zingtree, but I'd love to just get your thoughts on, what is your message to Zingtree nation? What can Zingtree do better? What can, where can we take our platform as a great partner to you and FleetCor?

Todd (22:35): Yeah. So absolutely I'd love that question. So I would love, like if I could do things differently over the last four or five months, I would've liked to have been part of a user community where I could have learned a couple things that I learned the hard way. And I was overly ambitious to just go throw some stuff up and help associates. And by the way, it was super effective. What we did in our pilot was super effective. We actually had agents basically building trees. That's great until you step back and say, Hey, I wanna put this on every desktop for every kind of phone call. I wanna put it in back office. I want to be able to extend it out to other departments. And you realize you really need to take some steps back and build a foundation. You need to architect a model that others can follow so it's consistent because otherwise you'll never be able to maintain it. So I would ask Zingtree nation to collaborate and help us all together. Think about how, do you just work smarter? What have you done or what use cases have you done that probably a lot of companies have that I would've never thought of. I'll tell you, I've got a back office ops guy. Who is recommended we use Zingtree for something that nobody else would've thought of doing. And I don't know if it's gonna work, but we're gonna try it. And I think there's pockets of application for Zingtree that just aren't super obvious. So that's how I would speak to Zingtree nation is let's get together, let's help us build a governance model, like a standard. Help us have a standard for how, if you have. You wanna scale the thing, here's how you start. Maybe set the right help, help someone like me who's new, set the right expectations. Cause you know, I have nothing but big ideas. And sometimes I think the ideas are bigger than our capacity. That's another thing that might be helpful.

Juan (24:44): That's great feedback. Message will be sent. Thank you. Thanks for sharing with me and our team. So that's super helpful. I'd love to talk a little bit about, what are some of the biggest successes, maybe a success that stands out in your day-to-day work at FleetCor, or a learning moment that you had, or your team had, would be helpful to hear that from you.

Todd (25:09): As related to Zingtree

Juan (25:10): or just in general? Just in general in your day-to-day work, your time at FleetCor, what was like a success moment for you and your team, or a learning moment for you. Yeah, so

Todd (25:27): A success moment, and this is sort of interesting, I think. I have had a lot of different roles here at FleetCor. And at one time I managed Relationship Management, Account Management and that sort of high touch white-glove team, and we had this client, and this client was super hard. Do asking us to do stuff that just nobody's ever done in our organization. And it was just tough. One day we woke up and somebody told me that's the largest client that the company has. And I was like, wow, that's amazing.

Juan (26:10): Is and didn't know that or did they progress to become the largest, or they

Todd: 26:14 progressed to become the largest. When you're super close to it, it's easy to miss those things. Now the rest of that story is they acquired my company and that is FleetCor. So FleetCor was that large client. Wow. Listen, they were, they, we were not easy to work with the high expectations. I would drive to Atlanta from Nashville and just regret, oh my gosh, I can't wait to drive home. It was one of those things because you're going to see your client, you know you're not meeting every single objective, so you have a plan around it. It's a tough meeting. It's ironically, I'm sitting in Atlanta today in the home office for FleetCor. So, for me personally, I think achieving success with that client. Then really helped me be in my career today because a lot of stakeholders worked with me when I was a vendor. So I would say that's probably on the list for

Juan (27:13): successes. That's pretty cool. So you mean you worked and not only were their biggest customer, they ended up acquiring your business. That's amazing.

Todd (27:29): They did. Yeah. Great success story. Any learnings, any challenges that you know, come top of mind?

Todd (29:03): So yeah, I think the, these are tough ones. So number one, just resiliency is so important. It's so important and every, and it just, no, nothing. Nothing is ever easy it seems, right? So if you learn how to be resilient, it just takes away just some of the weight off your shoulders to me, because you just wake up going, okay, today's gonna be a tough day. And suddenly it's not a big deal. Some of the, just in terms of learnings though, that I'm constantly reminded this and I struggle with it. Is there some disciplines that you have to have in operations and it's easy when people aren't asking questions or there's not an issue to let those disciplines slack and then sure enough, you can just about, look at a calendar and go, they're gonna come back around. So disciplines are things like tracking things that are working. You still have to track them because someday they may not work and you don't wanna wake up when it's too late. And things have eroded to a point of a customer impact. So to me, learning in my role is just to maintain that discipline to even when things are good and you're working on the hard and bad stuff, you gotta have discipline to keep on top of even the good stuff and make sure that it, if it, when it's gonna fail one day, just be on top of it. That's great.

Juan (31:39): So we're getting close to the end of this podcast. I've got a few more wrap-up questions here. From our conversations before, and feel free to say you want to pass on this question, but from one of our conversations from the past, I still remember something unique about you. You said in your, as your career was progressing, you're interviewing at different roles and there were some interesting opportunities that you had or you had an interesting opportunity which you passed up on or didn't follow through on. I thought it was a pretty cool experience that our viewers would enjoy hearing from you on if you're open to sharing the opportunity that came to your table and you went through the interview process and you decided not go down that path.

Todd (29:50): Listen, this is like on the list of the things never don't do this. Don't do this. I'm in my career and I got moved from when I left Sears, I came to Nashville to work for a home shopping network that just through bad luck, including Hurricane Katrina, this shopping network basically shuttered. And so now I'm in Nashville. My family's in Nashville. We come from Chicago, and my family loves Nashville. So I was looking for work. And I came across a company that Apple was aggressively pursuing me, and this is in 2004, maybe 2003. And they wanted me because I had this great track record and experience with work from home and remote associates. So I had, I was a unique candidate. They really liked me and they were recruiting me hard for this top secret project. They couldn't really tell me much about it. They said it's like you take your flip phone and your iPod and imagine them together, right? Just imagine what that would be like. It's like that, but I can't tell you about it. And we need someone to come run our at-home operation, or at least be part of it. I don't think I was running the whole thing, but certainly be a significant part of it. And they wanted me to move to California and the California thing was like, not moving my family from Nashville to California. I'm positive it's beautiful. I'm positive I'd be retired now if I had made that change. But I didn't make that change. I could have been part of launching the iPhone. That's great. Can you imagine?

Juan (31:41): You would've had a, I don't know. Did they get a lot of support calls back in the day?

Todd (31:44): I'm sure they did. I can tell you they get a lot of support calls even today because I've hired some of their leadership and they still have at-home an at-home model. And can you, so imagine you're going through life and you're seeing Apple stock and you're seeing Apple just completely changed from where it was in the two-thousands, which was like a novel thing, right? It was just like this novelty thing and it's gone through a downturn and...

Todd (32:08): Yes. Yeah. And you could have been part of that. Ugh. Anyway, so don't do that.

Juan (32:16): But that's a unique experience. That's great. Thanks for sharing that story. Yeah. So what do you do in your, when you're not working, when you're not with your family for any time off stuff. You know what or what do you guys like doing as a family? I know I play a lot of pickleball now, right? So I don't know if you've played pickleball. I know it's big. It is starting to get very popular in Nashville from what I hear, but I don't.

Todd (32:39): So I've played pickleball once and I watched it. I thought I'm gonna be killer at pickleball. Turns out I'm not. So one and done. I'll play it again. We'll have to play. We'll have to play next time I'm there.

Todd (32:51): Yeah, for sure. My son is a golfer, so I go out and golf with him, but I would not call myself a golfer. My family enjoys going to Minnesota and fishing. That's our thing. We do it in the summer and we look forward to that once a year. But what I do, so I'm a car guy and I've got some friends that in the neighborhood area and we go and rip up the roads and take a Saturday drive. So Saturday I got a text message and they're like, "Hey, we're gonna do a loop." And what that means is I get about 40 minutes of therapy by myself in a fantastic car. And with a bunch of great guys, and we go and do that. That's my, that's my therapy.

Juan (33:39): That's amazing. So you do this once a week, every Saturday?

Todd (33:42): No, not necessarily. But it just so happens that it worked. We went out this weekend.

Juan (33:48): Got it. That's awesome. That's cool. So that you're, you're you're in the fast lane. You're driving fast.

Todd (33:55): Now listen, I was not breaking any rules. Of course, I would never break the law, but there are some amazing roads in Tennessee and they're super desolate. We exercise the cars.

Juan (34:07): Great. That's great. Last final question. So you've had a phenomenal career. What advice would you give to the young generation that's listening to this podcast who just getting their career started, what advice would you give a younger Todd Sale to get their career going?

Todd (34:27): Yeah. So I give this advice to all the new hires when I get a chance to meet them. And that is, is that all in kind of message that no matter what the job is, you always go all in because you never know where it's gonna take you. You really don't know your skills, your abilities, or even what you enjoy without, if you, unless you go all in. And I tell them like entry-level Customer Care roles. I say, "Look, if you go all in on this job and you hate it, I promise you're gonna have learned some skills that you can take to your next job. But if you sit here and just fill in a seat, just take up space and don't really apply yourself. You're not gonna get those skills for what's whatever's next." And the other thing I would say to a young person that's just getting started is be selfish for yourself and invest in yourself. I don't know if that's the most eloquent way to say. When you go all in, you're investing in yourself. And when you invest in yourself, there's no telling where it can go. Like you can support others, you can have a family, you can support a family, you can support great hobbies. And you can control your career instead of just being at the mercy of wherever you're working, you can actually lead where you wanna work, who you wanna work with. So that's, that would be my advice.

Juan (35:58): That's amazing. I love it. I love the advice. All in, Todd, you are all in. You tried to do this podcast on Sunday afternoon. I know my family was trying to get me to go to Carmel, which is an hour away from where we are in the Bay Area. We ended up not going, so I could have done the call yesterday on Sunday. So I know how much you work every day, every weekend. There's always, you're keeping vendors like Zingtree honest and keeping us on our toes. So appreciate that. That's great advice going all in and the mindset that you had when you started your career that, "I'm gonna treat this call as my, like my last call." I can see how that served you well. So thank you so much for that inspirational message. Appreciate your time, Todd, and great to see you. You bet. Take care.

Juan (36:48): Take care. Thank you, Todd. Bye. Appreciate it.