Viewpoint for UKG Dimensions: Read the Story Your Data Tells

In this episode, we cover:

1.       What a Viewpoint engagement is and the qualifications for participating

2.       The benefits of participating in Viewpoint

3.       True customer value realization examples

Find more insights on the Working Smarter Cafe blog.

Transcript

LAUREN:  Hey, welcome to the Working Smarter Café. I’m your host, Lauren Nawfel, and today’s episode focuses on how you can make the most of your data in UKG Dimensions and really read the story that it’s telling you. So UKG subject matter expert Jose Cervantes is here to talk about Viewpoint — what it is, how it’s helpful, and why you might consider learning more about it.   

LAUREN:  Hi, Jose.  Thanks for joining us here at the Working Smarter Café. 

JOSE:  Hi, Lauren.  Pleasure to be here. 

LAUREN:  Yeah.  So today we’re here to talk, you know, quite a bit about data, but before we dive into all of that, let’s get to know you a little better with a fun little game called two truths and a lie, so just three things about yourself.  Make sure one is falser but don’t tell me because I’m going to try to guess which one is a lie. 

JOSE:  Sure.  Sure, sure.  So, okay, two truths a lie.  So one, I have famously re-created dishes like the Gray’s Papaya hot dog from New York, everything from scratch, from the kraut to the buns to the hot dogs being stuffed, we’ll do that as one.  Two, my brother and I had been called up by the cruise band that you would see at the different like lounges that you could go to in the evenings, to play with them when we told them that we dabbled a little bit in playing instruments.  And three, I once sprained both my ankles playing basketball, at the same time. 

LAUREN:  Okay.  Let’s see.  So we’ve got, let’s see, I jotted them down here so I didn’t forget, so the first one is that you’ve re-created lots of different fun dishes, that you and your brother were called up to perform with a cruise band, and then you sprained both your ankles while playing basketball. 

JOSE:  At the same time. 

LAUREN:  At the same time 

JOSE:  That is a feat unto itself, right.   You could do one but doing two at the same time--You get a gold star for that. 

LAUREN:  Yeah, which makes me feel like that’s true, like that’s something that could have happened, you know, and that’s something you would share with people, so I’m thinking that’s true.  And then I feel like you’d be a great cook so you would re-create dishes.  I feel like that’s something you’d be good at.  And I’m going to say maybe it’s false that you’ve sung onstage at a cruise ship.  Am I wrong? 

JOSE:  You are wrong.

LAUREN:  I’m wrong.  You know, I broke my streak.  With the last guest I was correct, so.   Okay, okay, wait, all right.  So let me give it another try, so-- 

JOSE:  All right. 

LAUREN:  Did you not sprain both your ankles then? 

JOSE:  I did not.  That happened to my brother. 

LAUREN:  Ah, all right.  So it’s true.  It’s just not true about you. 

JOSE:  Not true about me, but that’s too good of a story not to tell, right.   

LAUREN:  Mm-hmm. 

JOSE:  So yeah, he unfortunately went a certain way with the ball and he fell to the ground, and then before we knew it both his ankles were the size of cantaloupes, so that always gave us a good laugh, but, you know, he ultimately ended up being fine. 

LAUREN:  Yeah, it sounds painful, though.  Ugh. 

JOSE:  Yeah. It was not fun for him, but, you know, end of the day, he’s okay and he’s back out there, so it’s all good.  And the cruise thing was true.  We literally were just hanging out one day at the lounge and the cruise band played a song in Spanish by a band that my brother and I really, really like, and we talked to them afterwards and, you know, we explained that, you know, we were trying to play that with our friends at home and they said, why don’t you come up and play with us, so we ended up getting up and I played the bass, my brother played the guitar, and, you know, we had a good time with them. 

And the cook stuff, yeah, I, I got in a little kick of re-creating dishes from scratch, and Gray’s Papaya was one of them, so we did the grinding of the meat, the stuffing of the casing, the making of the buns, the papaya drink and the sauerkraut and tried to make it as authentic as we could to New York City, which was really, really fun as well. 

LAUREN:  Yeah, it sounds good.  It’s making me hungry.  I haven’t eaten my lunch yet, so. 

JOSE:  Well, it was a good time-- 

LAUREN:  I doubt it will be anything as good as that, though. 

[Chuckling] 

JOSE:  They did come out pretty good, so we were pretty happy with the outcome for sure. 

LAUREN:  Awesome.  All right, well, thank you for sharing those things about yourself.  So now that we’ve talked about the fun stuff, and of course, this is still fun but more on the professional side, can you share a little bit about what you do here at UKG. 

JOSE:  Sure.  So currently I am in our ERM team, that’s the executive relationship management team.  And I work for our business value consulting outfit or group.  We call it that because it’s kind of a new function, a new practice that we’re standing up and we’re building, and what we’re attempting to do is get down the path of, you know, having some of the conversations we would have as an ERM team and for, you know, for those of our customers that formerly knew us as Customer Success, pre-merger with Ulti-Pro, or, with Ultimate Software.  It’s kind of the same group, right.  So it was the Customer Success team, we merged with the ERM team, we took on that moniker, so we are now the ERM team. 

So, you know, essentially a lot of the engagements that we had with our customers under that function where we’re talking about, you know, adoption of the product, adoption and utilization of, you know, how they’re using the system in certain ways, were all very important conversations, especially when we were talking about how our customers derive value from the usage of the product, and one of the key components to that conversation has always been show me, give me data, show me how I’m using it, guide me on how, you know, it’s important for me to either pivot or adjust how I’m using your services and/or products to ensure that I am successful as a customer. 

And the thing that excites us with this new opportunity that we’re doing is that we have, you know, an edict by our leadership to exactly go and do that, to help our customers have, you know, a little bit more of a deeper conversation using data to derive the narratives that demonstrate the true adoption or utilization of the product, while wrapping it around a narrative around value, right, because that’s the most important thing for us, that our customers see value in what we provide for them. 

LAUREN:  So then speaking about providing value and utilizing data to, you know, get better insight into how you’re using the product, can you tell us about Viewpoint and what it is. 

JOSE:  Sure.  So Viewpoint is the initial offering, we’ll call it, of this new business value consulting team.  It is specific to Workforce Dimensions, or it’s UKG Dimensions today, but for the most part what we’re attempting to do is grab data from those Dimensions tenets, pull it down into an environment where we can analyze it, we can use our industry expertise, we can use our knowledge of the product, knowledge of how it’s supposed to be used, and begin to create and craft, you know, an idea or a picture of what’s actually occurring in the environments of our customers and be able to share that back with them. 

So Viewpoint is intended to be an annual event at this point.  This is how we’re planning it as we build out this practice.  We’d love for it to be an annual event with our customers, where we get to sit down with them and begin to strategize on what worked the previous year based off the numbers we’re seeing and what are some of the opportunities that maybe we can take advantage of collectively and strategically as we look at the upcoming year, and then be able to rely on the assigned and named ERM, that executive relationship manager to the account, to help drive momentum against some of those opportunities. 

So from our perspective, you know, Viewpoint is an exciting offering.  It’s something that, you know, we really have a lot of push and a lot of momentum behind, because we really do think it’s going to be a differentiator, and it’ll change the way that we’re interacting with our customers.  The other thing that I’ll note is data is obviously very important, and from our perspective we need to have enough data to be able to provide meaningful narratives and meaningful evaluations for our customers.  So that means that we would generally want to work with customers that have at least a year’s worth of data in their environment. So if a customer has recently gone live, we’ll wait a little bit to let that data mature, before we can connect, engage, and begin to have discussions around what a Viewpoint analysis or presentation would look like for that individual customer. 

LAUREN:  And who is it at the, the actual contacts or the people at these organizations, these customers that we’re talking about, that would be interested in this?  Who are you, you know, you targeting?  Who should know about Viewpoint? 

JOSE:  Yeah, so from our perspective, we feel that, you know, this is a meaningful conversation at all levels of the organization, but we’re going to craft it for the folks that are the decision-makers at the organization or the folks that maybe own the application.  From our perspective, when we start getting into conversations of value and what are the things that we’re bringing to the table to kind of earn our keep, to show how we’re partnering with our customers.  That type of conversation needs to be had at those levels.  So we will respond in kind and ensure that, from our perspective, we have internal visibility to our highest levels as well to these presentations. 

So that when we have them collectively, if we need to have some of our leadership from our respective teams join the conversation to help support the narrative or support some of the key findings that we have or answer any questions that our customers may have at that level.  We’re providing a space to where you can have a constructive conversation around some of those very specific topics. 

Now having said that, you know, our main goal is to be able to interact with our customers and refine this program to turn it into a program that’s, you know, fairly lean but to the point, very focused on, again, that conversation of adoption, utilization, and value.  So, you know, from our perspective, any attendee from the customer side that can help us on that journey and help us define and validate that we did actually achieve the value that we’re looking for is absolutely welcome and folks that we would love to collaborate with. 

LAUREN:  So Viewpoint, then, it’s the engagement or the program.  So where does the data, then, come from that you’re using for this engagement? 

JOSE:  Sure.  For our Dimensions customers, specifically the ones that have Analytics, there’s a components to the Analytics package named Data Hub, that is our mechanism that we use to be able to grab said data.  Now Data Hub uses Google BigQuery as one of its main components to be able to interact with the data and pull the data that’s necessary, so we’ll use Data Hub in a very similar fashion.  If the customer already has Data Hub, we’ll piggyback off of what they have and get the information that we need to be able to provide that information. 

If the customer doesn’t have it, then we’ll do a quick spin-up of a Data Hub environment that we have access to, to be able to grab what we need and begin to share those evaluations with the customer.  If you were to consider Data Hub as kind of a mechanism or a tool to not only be able to grab data from Dimensions, but it also gives you the ability to grab data from other third-party sources as well.  So if a customer has access through Data Hub, through their entitlements, through the Analytics entitlement specifically, they would have the ability to actually commingle numerous different data tables or data sets, and then use the power or the BI tool of their choosing to be able to represent visualizations against said data. 

From our perspective, we use Power BI, but if a customer happened to be a Tableau Shop or prefer to use MicroStrategies, they could absolutely use those BI tools in conjunction with Data Hub to perform similar evaluations as they saw fit. 

LAUREN:  So customers, then, can use Data Hub independently, right.  This is a way for them to really, you know, lean into UKG’s expertise and guidance, if they move forward with Viewpoint.  Is that true? 

JOSE:  Yeah, I mean, if they own that entitlement, then they would have the ability to, again, connect to their version of Data Hub and be able to provide these visualizations.  Data Hub obviously would also be used to, you know, ensure that they have access not only to the data itself but it’s complementary to the data that they would see inside of the application itself, through the analytics features and functions that we have in our Analytics package that would be more front-line manager-facing, if you will. 

Consider that as our ability to provide information to ensure managers can make decisions and any data that you would be pulling out of Data Hub would be a little bit more forensically inclined, where you would essentially be using it to look back and see how things were.  You’d be able to evaluate your performance at that point. 

LAUREN:  Awesome.  All right, well, now let’s talk a little bit about some examples.  So can you share a couple use cases of specific scenarios that, you know, when you do a Viewpoint engagement the types of insights you would glean and find from the data? 

JOSE:  Yeah.  We have a big job ahead of us because many times when we jump into the data we are not experts at what our customers do from an operations or a business perspective.  We know what our products are meant to do, why we’ve designed them, why they’ve been implemented a certain way, but every customer truly is different.  You’ll find certain trends within an industry that are very similar, but we have to go at it with an open mind and we can’t necessarily just go in assuming everybody is the same.  

And as we’ve gone through our pilot program and we’ve shared a few of these presentations with our customers, we have found that certain observations, certain evaluations with one customer may not resonate with another.  So we truly have to be very focused on what we’re seeing in the data specific to that customer using our ERM group, other internal resources that connect and collaborate with that particular customer on a more frequent basis than we do to try to get an understanding of what their day to day looks like. 

And I share that because one of our first customers that actually went through one of our first presentations had a very peculiar situation where, on their exceptions, they had a really big number of early outs, where people were leaving before their scheduled time, and it superseded by I think it was three or four X their late outs, so they absolutely had a pattern where people were leaving early, but they still had a number of folks who were staying late.  And what we were able to uncover is that, for the most part, the folks who were staying late had kind of the same characteristics.   

They were a little bit more longer tenured, a little bit more senior in the roles that they carried, and in some cases they were mostly supervisors, so some of the decisions that were being taken on, for this particular customer was a supervisor who happened to be hourly and was eligible for overtime was sending the folks that potentially reported directly to them home early and then staying after and consuming some of the overtime.  Now that may be appropriate for that customer.  It may not.  It may be appropriate to a different customer if we saw the same circumstances, but it was still a call out that we wanted to put on the table because, you know, from our perspective, the question that we couldn’t really answer with the data we were hoping they could provide perspective to was, were they sending the right person home. 

And depending on whether you’re in a particular industry, like retail, for example, where, you know, you need to have a certain amount of coverage on the floor and you have to make some of these decisions if the demand or the foot traffic just isn’t there.  You need to be able to make the right decisions and send the right person home to keep your costs in control.  I think we could apply that just the same to health care potentially or manufacturing.  So it’s a similar decision point, but it’s one that we wanted to share with the customer. 

And then one other brief one that I’ll share, which I thought was a pretty, a pretty funny one that we ran into.  We had a similar conversation with a different customer, but it revolved around people coming in too early.  That was in consistent in a particular area, particular city in the States, this particular facility had the majority of their people coming in way too early, and the way they were running their business, it didn’t seem like there was a very specific need for the workforce to come in that early. 

The hunch that we had was that it could be people coming in, clocking in because they’re walking by the clock on their way through the facility, and then hanging out in the break room while on the clock, having a cup of coffee, having breakfast, chatting about the game the night before, and then deciding to, you know, whenever the scheduled start time came upon them, you know, head off to work wherever they were designated to be.  And, you know, we were, you know, we collaborated with the folks that we were setting up the presentation with on the customer side, and they shared some reservations on we probably shouldn’t, you know, get too much into detail with that because we don’t want to cause any friction with the folks who may manage or own that business unit at the customer. 

So we decided to be very, very tactful, and we shared our observations in a particular way, and the funny thing about it is, the individual who was over that group then just said, well, it just seems like I have the best-tasting cup of coffee because everybody comes in to drink coffee in my place before they go to work.  And [chuckles], and that, that really broke the ice and it kind of let the conversation be a little bit more natural as we were going through the rest of the data set. 

LAUREN:  So now let’s talk a little bit more about process.  So you kind of said that you, you know, you dive into the data, but then, you know, a lot of times you have to talk directly with the customers to get a little bit more insight into what story, I guess it is, that the, you know, that the pieces of information you found tell.  And so how is it that you work together with the customers, and what is the time commitment for them if they were to engage in this? 

JOSE:  Right.  So I think our engagement has kind of morphed a little bit as we’ve gone through the pilot.  Initially we thought it would be a certain amount of time, weeks.  We have found that we needed to be a little bit more fluid, just based off of variables on our end, variables on the customer end.  You know, what I can tell you from a process perspective, though, the ERM team, the main ERM that you will have at your account if you’re a customer, is the best place to start. 

They’re the folks who we would be coordinating with internally anyway to get a pretty good understanding on, you know, what it is that your business operates and how we can help some of the decisions that were made through implementation potentially or decisions that you’re making currently and how you’re using the product, they really are a critical and key resource for our team as well.  They’re kind of the shared resource, if you will, or kind of our combined go-to from a customer and from a Viewpoint team perspective. 

So I think, you know, when we begin to spin up an engagement and we begin to work with a customer, the ERM is absolutely riding shotgun with us.  They’re helping guide us through, you know, some of the things that would be important to you as a customer, but it’s not only that.  We have an expanded team internally.  If you’ve recently gone through an implementation, we’ll be connecting with your services teams that were a part of that implementation so that we can understand decisions that were made, you know, how are some of the things, or how a customer may have felt about certain features before they were implemented, situations like that. 

As well as the sales teams, who are, for the most part, responsible for, you know, account strategy and making sure that they understand the right product and mix that fit the need for our customer, so it is a very collaborative process on our end, and we have tried to keep our Viewpoint interactions heavier or heavier lift on the UKG side and less so on the customer side.  So what a customer can typically expect, when we begin to have an engagement, we’ll have a very brief 30-minute phone call just setting up the engagement, sharing Viewpoint in a little bit more detail, what we’re looking for, what we’re going to be doing, how we’re going to be interacting. 

And then we ensure that we have the access and the authority to grab what we need through your tenets, so we’ll have a few deliverables, a few signatures here or there.  It really doesn’t take a lot of time for our customers to kind of go through that and then review and then get us what we need to be able to begin our process.  Now once we actually get in flight, the data’s delivered to our team.  We begin our analysis, and then when the time comes, we typically want to schedule a sanity check with our customers.  That’ll be anywhere from 30 minutes to 60 minutes. 

It’s typically with the main contact or two with our customers to ensure that, one, we’re looking at the data in an appropriate manner, and two, that we’re drilling down in a way that makes sense through your business structure.  For example, if you prefer to look at things from a division level versus a locational level, we would flesh out some of those decision points, if you will, through the sanity check after you’ve seen some of the evaluations that we’ve created.  Typically we will share anywhere from 60 to 80 percent of a final presentation we’ll have complete in the sanity check to allow the customer to guide us and to say, yes, this is resonating, maybe not here, maybe drill a little further there. 

Once we complete the sanity check, we’ll go off, we’ll button up the final presentation, make sure it aligns with everything that we’ve discussed, and then typically we’ll have a final presentation with the customer.  In the final presentation, it has been very common for us to see the customer side grow exponentially.  I’ll share with you that with one of our customers we had one main contact, and by the time that individual saw the sanity check, we had almost 15 people, I think it was, in the final presentation, where, you know, leaders from all parts of the company for the customer were brought in to see some of the evaluations we were able to be produced. 

So I think as we look at, you know, how we look at a time commitment from our customers’ perspective, if we were to summarize kind of everything that I’ve outlined there, we’re talking anywhere from two to three hours at most, including the presentations, maybe give us four hours, depending on how lengthy of a presentation, over the span of anywhere from four to eight weeks, just depending on how we grab data and how we can collaborate and schedule events between us. 

LAUREN:  So very minimal. 

JOSE:  Absolutely.  We’ve tried to keep it very much a light lift on the customer side.  We’ve tried to take the majority of it on our end.   

LAUREN:  Now, Jose, what would you say is the number one most amazing benefit of participating in this engagement? 

JOSE:  Yeah, I’ll tell you that one of the reasons why we started going down this path with Viewpoint is an ERM team, when we were interacting with our customers, especially those that had recently gone live with Dimensions, we were getting asked some of the same questions, you know, are my people using the software.  We estimated a particular reduction in overtime.  Did we achieve it?  You know, where are we having, you know, areas of opportunity?  What are some of the things that we’re not using in the application that we should be using? 

And as we started going through these questions we realized that what we were needing, you know, was not just advice, if you will, from the ERM itself.  We needed to have an ability to share some of this in a little bit more detailed manner, based on facts, based off the data.  So, you know, from our perspective, when we talk about benefits, you know, one is being able to share with you, you know, you’re doing a great job, you’ve done this, this and this and it’s differentiated from where you were before, you need to keep doing that and, by the way, you should consider X, Y or Z that’ll amplify some of the benefits that you’re already on the path to get through your current course. 

Or in some cases, if, for example, the dreaded lift and shift occurred, we say the dreaded because many of our customers, especially if they were UKG Central customers moving to UKG Dimensions, they may have opted to just grab their configuration that they had for their payrolls and their work roles and just put them into Dimensions.   

I’ll share with you that we had one customer that we went through a Viewpoint presentation and we were calling out a specific area and configuration that we thought may need to be revisited, and they told us, well, we haven’t look at that configuration for almost 15 years, I think is what it was. 

Because they configured it that way in, you know, UKG Central way back in the day and it has just gone through and lived on through all the updates and then the eventual move to Dimensions, right.  So from a benefit perspective I would say, you know, our number one benefit, the thing that we’re going after, is value realization, how can we help you see and quantify that value.  And if we were to break that down further, we would absolutely want to highlight what are some of the features that Dimensions has that you’re absolutely taking advantage of and what are some of the ones that maybe not so much, right? 

What are some of the areas that you’re utilizing the system in a very smart way that gives your managers the visibility they need to make the appropriate decisions as they’re managing the workforce, and what are some of the areas that you need help, right.  And then obviously one of the most important ones, especially when you consider that the majority of our customers that have made a switch or a jump to a UKG Dimensions platform have some sort of internal ROI or payback that they’ve signed up for.  Some of them want to understand, how can I get there, and we’ve had some customers that have been very generous and have shared some of those numbers with us, and we have attempted as best we can to show them a path to go after those internal goals that they’ve set for themselves from a payback perspective on the project as a whole. 

So we really do feel that, from a benefit perspective, it’s our partnership in helping define tangible value realization. 

LAUREN:  Now I know you recently spoke about this at UKG Works in November. How did that go?  What did attendees think about it? 

JOSE:  It went really, really well.  We had an interview with one of our customers that went through the actual presentation, and it was an interview sessions between her and I.  We did an intro into Viewpoint for the folks who were in attendance.  We had, I think it was close to about 50 individuals in the room.  We had a very good chat about, you know, here’s what Viewpoint is, here’s what we’re trying to accomplish, and then we brought in kind of our star pupil, if you will, right, this customer did a fabulous job of kind of going through the process and sharing with us her thoughts and, you know, what are some of the things that worked for them, what are some of the things that didn’t. 

But ultimately, through our collaboration, we were able to have a really concise and impactful message to the majority of their organization.  And, you know, she was absolutely thrilled with the level of involvement, the level of evaluation that we were able to provide, and as a matter of fact, again, going back to the comment of, you know, being able to help our customers go after some of their internal goals, through our efforts we were able to prove that she had reached one of her goals that she hadn’t had time yet to validate on her own.  So she used some of our evaluations to internally demonstrate that she had reached some of the milestones that they had put in place for the project, especially from an ROI perspective. 

And they’ve done so well that, as a matter of fact, it actually even won her an award on our end.  She ended up becoming one of our innovation award winners at UKG Works.  So it was a really, really positive experience. 

LAUREN:  Great.  Now what exciting things, is there anything coming, about Viewpoint in the future that you could share with listeners? 

JOSE:  Yeah.  So we are in a cycle, and I’m going to call it a never-ending cycle, of continuous improvement.  So I’ll share that, you know, we are starting our evaluations on a particular level.  We expect them to mature.  We expect them to get a little bit more data-heavy, if you will, but not for the customer, more for our end.  The task will be more on our end to be able to explain specifically what these metrics mean more so than having the customer understand them by just looking at them. 

We feel that by going this route we move away from just simply saying overtime is bad or overtime is good, depending on the scenario, and we begin to correlate different variables to be able to prove out when you’re doing good why you’re doing good, and in the areas of your organization where you may be doing bad, well, what are some of the key factors or what are some of the habits that we’re seeing that have contributed to behavior that is less than desirable.  So from our perspective, that’s the piece that excites us.  We have to go through this journey slowly because we want to build it appropriately and we want to make sure that it’s built in such a way that it makes sense to everyone and everybody agrees we’re on the right path. 

But now that we’ve had that validation that, you know, we’re pointed in the right direction, then our intent is to not only get to the point where we’re bringing in, you know, these additional metrics that provide potentially a little bit more of a meaningful output as to what’s actually happening at our customer, our customer, in our customers’ tenets or environments, but on top of that, expanding what we have access to, beginning to bring in some of our strategic products and  provide evaluations on forecasting, on activities, on absence management. 

We can do some of it now, but maybe not to the degree or to the level that we would like to do within those individual specific modules.  And then the thing that we absolutely have on our horizon, the thing that we would love to be able to include, even through it’s on not on the short-term plans, long term we’d love to see what this means for some of our other customers with our other product lines and how we can replicate that. 

So we’re having good success.  We’re on the right path.  We need to keep this momentum and make sure we can prove out that we’ve validating, that our customers are, you know, loving what we’re putting in front of them, and I think that’s going to give us an opportunity to be able to expand and absolutely work with more of our customers and other products with similar types of engagements. 

LAUREN:  Now you’ve shared lots and lots of great information for listeners today about Viewpoint, but if somebody would like to learn a little bit more or understand the qualifications about participating, how can they do that? 

JOSE:  Yeah, I would suggest go to your ERM.  So your executive relationship manager is a key person for you to interact with us on the UKG side.  So that individual works closely with our teams, so as these opportunities come up and we have a customer who’s interested or who would like to have a Viewpoint analysis completed, we would work through that individual to figure out everything from timelines to qualifications to what we could potentially provide for said customer. 

The other thing that I’ll highlight is, many times as we go through our Viewpoint presentation and we have an output of opportunities, so as we go through all of the data, we also like to leave behind kind of a table of findings, what are some of the things that we thought were important to share and what are some of the opportunities that our customers have to be able to work against those opportunities and make some positive change that’ll really, you know, impact things for them. 

Our ERMs are a critical resource to help keep momentum against some of those opportunities as well.  We come from the same team.  We share the same DNA.  So some of the things that we’re going to talk about in Viewpoint are also talked about in some of the other ERM deliverables, like an adoption insights review that an ERM can provide to our customers, as well as an industry best practice review, which is a lighter touch on data, but it’s something that can be produced a little bit more frequently for our customer, if it’s something that needs to be reviewed in a quarterly business review, for example, an ERM can absolutely grab information from there to be able to share with our customers insights on areas of opportunity or goals that our customers are trying to achieve. 

So I would highly encourage, if you don’t already have it developed, develop that relationship with your ERM.  Share with your ERM what your specific goals are for that year.  The more information they have, the better they can be suited to partner with you strategically to go after those specific initiatives and then introduce our team at the appropriate time to bolster some of those efforts. 

LAUREN:  Awesome.  Well, thank you so much, Jose.  I really, really appreciate you being here and sharing all this great information with us. 

JOSE:  Absolutely.  Happy to be here.  Thank you for having me. 

LAUREN:  You’re welcome.  And so we have one more wrap-up question which we ask to close our episode.  So if you had to choose between either coffee or tea to drink for the rest of your life and it had to be either, you know, one or the other, which would you choose? 

JOSE:  Ooh, one or the other, it’d have to be coffee.  But I’ll tell you that even though I go through like a daily coffee kick, I go through like stages where tea becomes very important, but I typically drink tea in the afternoon.  Like it’s still a morning coffee, but in the afternoon-- 

LAUREN:  Yeah. 

JOSE:  --whenever I want kind of a warm cup of something, it’s typically a nice chai tea or a nice green tea. 

LAUREN:  Yeah, it’s cozy, right?  

JOSE:  It is. 

LAUREN:  Anyone who listens knows that I’m a tea person.   

[Chuckling] 

LAUREN:  All right.  Well, thanks so much, Jose, really, really appreciate it. 

JOSE:  Absolutely.  Thanks for having me again, Lauren.