The ZIZO Effect

Ep 9 The ZIZO Origin Story: Part 2

• ZIZO Technologies Inc. • Season 1 • Episode 9

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Join us on 'The ZIZO Effect,' where we continue with 'The ZIZO Origin Story: Part 2.' In this episode, Andrew Reimers and Jimmy Chebat dive further into the evolution of ZIZO, picking up where we left off in our discussion of its foundation. Explore the discussions that shaped the revolutionary decisions at ZIZO, from the impactful conference that reignited Jimmy’s vision to the intensive research and strategic pivots that followed.

Uncover how the development of ZIZO's gamification platform was influenced by the dynamic changes in the workforce and the advent of the gig economy. This episode reveals the behind-the-scenes efforts and innovative approaches to enhancing agent engagement and performance in modern contact centers.

Don’t miss this opportunity to see how ZIZO’s journey through challenges and innovation continues to revolutionize workplace dynamics. Make sure to tune in for an inspiring continuation of the ZIZO story.

Listen now and follow us @playzizo for more insights on transforming your work environment through gamification. Get ready—It's Game Time!

Andrew Reimers:

Welcome back to The ZIZO Effect podcast. Today we're thrilled to continue our journey through part two of The ZIZO Origin Story, picking up right where we left off last week. Building upon the foundation we laid in our previous episode, we now delve into the pivotal moment when Jimmy's vision for revolutionizing the workplace materialized, with the launch of ZIZO. From its very inception to its initial strides, we uncover the narrative behind the platform that's reshaping employee engagement and productivity. If you haven't yet, please be sure to check out part one of this conversation in episode eight to learn more about ZIZO's foundation and the man behind it. So get ready to dive back into the evolution of ZIZO. This is part two of ZIZO's Origin Story. Get ready, it's game time. All right, Jimmy, so you go to this conference and there's a buzz around the e-whiteboard unexpectedly. You came home, you got some things to think about, tell me about what happened next.

Jimmy Chebat:

Yeah, when I decided like, okay, this is the moment, this is the moment. I remember when I shelved the e-whiteboard and I said, one day I will bring this back. This was the moment I was looking for and I wanted to make sure that it is really the moment. And why is this the moment? And so, before even spending any money on starting to build a new venture or bringing back the current one, I had to evaluate why. Why is now the right moment?

Jimmy Chebat:

I had, you know, I talked about it in our last episode Like, I know that things have changed. You know, increasing wages, the gig economy, there's a younger generation that's entering the workforce. What makes this all different? You know, how is this impacting? And so I did some some deep research into all of those things and and looked at is this, is this a temporary shift? Is this going to continue? And you know, and all of those wages are never going to go back down. The generation is never going to. I mean, they may get older, but it's always going to be a younger generation.

Jimmy Chebat:

And the gig economy looked like it was here to stay. Uber was really taking off. New companies, ride share companies like Lyft were coming into the marketplace. You had, I believe, even Instacart, and DoorDash was starting to come around. So that was scaling. And there's still a host of other personal gig type platforms like Fiverr and Upwork that were out there. That not just for driving.

Jimmy Chebat:

And then, you know, I wanted to uncover what made e-whiteboard so successful and so I hired this UX UI designer, which is kind of. You know people ask well, why UX UI? Isn't this just more user experience, user interface? And it is, but more about the experience. What part of the e-whiteboard experience, what about it, was so successful? And so we hired this individual and she did a ton of interviews with people who have used the platform within my organization, because they've used it the most, and then some people who worked outside in different agencies and who haven't used the platform. She created a comprehensive report it's about 50 or 60 pages which included building the personas, like you know, for each stakeholder, you know, from the agent to the supervisor, to the manager and director and owner, and what was important to each one of those. And there was one common characteristic that really stuck out for her and you know that she put into the report, which was the gamification aspect of the whiteboard.

Andrew Reimers:

Wow, I mean we've talked at length about the strength and the importance you know of gamification when done right, but so correct me if I'm wrong. I mean at this point, then you're doing all this research, you're looking into what was successful about e-White board. You're finding out gamification was the key. You still have your agencies at this point? Actually executed the transaction in February of 2020.

Jimmy Chebat:

And so there was two years of extensive research beyond just the why, but the how to we're going to build it before making that final decision.

Andrew Reimers:

And that timing is just incredible, because you're turning your entire world upside down by selling off your agencies and going after a passion project fully, and then the next month we enter a global pandemic.

Jimmy Chebat:

Quite literally, one of the most major changes and shifts in, probably, global history happened in March of 2020. Yes, for me, the transaction was completed at the end of February 2020.

Andrew Reimers:

Yeah, any doubts ever seep into your head.

Jimmy Chebat:

A hundred percent. I mean you just lost. I just sold one of my companies to pursue this. At that time I would have to categorize it as a passion project. Right yeah, the ambition was there, the goal was there to build a successful platform and company. But until you've gotten traction and product market fit, you know, bringing some revenues in it's, it's still a dream.

Jimmy Chebat:

I mean yeah, and and so you know, I decided to move forward, you know, regardless. So, after the pandemic hit, we had about a month or so where it's like we're scrambling, trying to figure out what it is that we're going to do, and then, in April 2020, I hired my CTO.

Andrew Reimers:

So, knowing you, jimmy, and from what I've seen and what I know about you, you have a really tight circle of trust and you say you hire your first CTO. If I remember correctly, it was somebody that you'd worked with before, right?

Jimmy Chebat:

Yes, Yannick Tessier and I had worked on a prior project back in 2015. And it was an idea and a concept that, ultimately, I had to shelve as well, and I'm not going to get into it, but a lot of the technologies that we were building at that time came into the marketplace in various forms, and it was a great experience. It was disappointing, but I think failure is part of success and I think that experience helped both Yannick and I decide how we want to operate and, yes, we began to work together again and that was a decision that we both made and I think we're both glad that we made.

Andrew Reimers:

Yeah, that's awesome. So you know we gamification is going to be the key. We know we have leaderboards right, you put a list of best to worst. You create a leaderboard. We talked about that. You talk about the friendly competitions within collections, but talk to me about some of the steps. What goes in to building a video game like experience from scratch?

Jimmy Chebat:

From scratch. Yeah, I mean, maybe we weren't going from scratch because we had the e-whiteboard as kind of a foundational element, but we knew there was so much that we had to change that. It is pretty much from scratch. We didn't use any of the coding, we didn't use any of the functionality, we didn't use anything from the e-whiteboard. We did literally start from scratch and I had three objectives. That, you know, was the beginning of the vision. Number one this had to be fully automated. I didn't want another system that depended on human interaction to make this a success or a failure. My first experience with the whiteboard it stung, and knowing that I knew the benefit of this platform but people just couldn't keep the data accurate really hurt me and as much effort as I put into trying to help people manage the data and the information and the importance of the accuracy, it just never took and there's no way it was going to be scalable anyway. So I knew that we had to integrate directly with systems of record. Objective number one automation. You do that through direct integration. And while thinking about doing this, it was not just a single data set or data source, but multiple data sources. I knew that in my operation. You know, I got some information from my collection software and I got a lot of information from the e-whiteboard. But there were other systems. Phone systems, phone systems, dialer systems If you had any call scorecards right, that did your analysis. That was later. New technologies were coming out where you can analyze and score the quality of each call. There's compliance, there's time and attendance. There's a whole host of other systems that people are going into to pull data from. I wanted to centralize that and I wanted to give them one source of truth. So while we're doing this, let's do it right. So that was objective number one. The objective number two is we are going to have a huge data warehouse with a ton of data and I want to be able to provide as much insight into that data as possible in a format that's easily digestible and actionable. And so that was objective number two provide actionable business intelligence. Give them one source, one place to go get it. Without having to be an Excel master, without having to do anything. And you know it's customized, you know, for your own purposes. And you know again, everything that I'm thinking about here is to be scalable. So, even like we didn't think about collections being our target market, we thought about this needs to scale to all call centers. And then it needs to scale beyond call centers. We have three criteria. We still do Any frontline workers, any workforce or operation that has repeatable tasks, you're doing the same thing every single day.

Jimmy Chebat:

We knew that that had the highest level of attrition, fastest burnout rate and the biggest problems in terms of trying to maintain a consistent workforce. And you know, in a large workforce doing the same tasks, right, we, you can't have a leaderboard of three, you're always going to be the top three. So you know. And that's call centers was a big part of that. But so is sales, so is retail, even manufacturing in some cases, although a lot of automation has replaced that. And then the third is a fully immersive gamified experience that is also automated. So, yeah, very ambitious. I mean, I know you chuckle and I probably chuckle at myself in those early stages.

Andrew Reimers:

I wouldn't believe it if I didn't see it with my own eyes every day, yeah, every day.

Jimmy Chebat:

Yeah, I'm still so proud of what we've been able to build here at ZIZO and maybe a little bit in awe. I know what I'm capable of. Sometimes my dream is too big and people have to kind of like, whoa, whoa, whoa, how do you expect to do that?

Andrew Reimers:

And so pushing and getting our developers to accomplish what my vision was, I'm very proud of their ability to do that. Family, people that are literally your family, people that you'd worked with in the past and some new people that you've met. You know who were some of the people that you brought in that helped you bring this to life.

Jimmy Chebat:

Are you trying to get credit here? Do you want me to put?

Andrew Reimers:

No, we haven't reached, Don't worry Well there's a pivotal moment later in September of 2021 we'll get to. I was like, let's talk about Andrew, like you've been talking too much. Hey, no, I'm talking before me. Yeah, no, I mean.

Jimmy Chebat:

Titus, Titus Tallchief, who has been my business partner in all of my endeavors, you know, starting back in 2010. So when I got involved, he was one of the first people that I hired. Not one of the first, but early people that are in that definitely the one who has been with me for the longest time. Him and Moe, Moe Sileo, who is, you know, she'd been with me at the agency at every step of the way. She's been with me in any capacity that we needed her, whether it's a payment processor, doing bookkeeping, hr, party planning, office manager, party planning, she's just so amazing.

Jimmy Chebat:

And Titus, from an operational standpoint, ran the agencies and then ran my debt buying company and is now part of the ZIZO operation and his insight into the operational side in terms of the product itself but also running a company. So there's two parts to this business. It's building a product, but also building a team to build the product, and that's a very difficult and then scale the product and sell the product and support the product. And you know, customer service and customer success is a big part of that. But Moe and Titus, who have been here since day one, we've, of course, Yannick. Yannick is not with us today. He's still alive. Yeah, there's times and moments where you know people's journeys, you know they crisscross and at some point he may come back.

Jimmy Chebat:

I mean, the door's always open and, um, he wanted to, you know, venture into a different area and so the journey of his family yeah, and you know, for for us, uh, we've had a couple other hires that were amazing, yeah, um, and a couple hires that may not have been as amazing, but they're all experiences that we value and treasure here at ZIZO yeah, exactly, um, we won't get into names of the not amazing.

Andrew Reimers:

Um, there's not many of those of course not of course not, no, and they've all. And the thing is, from my experience, is that every single person has brought value and taught me something. 100%. I love the culture and I love what we do to find people that are going to be a good fit but you know that's still the now and I still want to get into what you were building.

Andrew Reimers:

So you know, we talked KPIs a lot in the last episode and how you reverse engineered from your primary KPI to find out the behaviors that you wanted to track. You know, not every KPI was created equally. You mentioned your rank levels. You talked about the leaderboard, of course, being almost unintentional, just by ranking your agents in lists from best to worst. But when you knew that you needed to build a video game platform, what was the first feature that you knew had to be a part of it?

Jimmy Chebat:

I think you had said it with leaderboard. I think that was like I didn't have to think about that. That already existed. It's a natural part of any gamified game mechanic in most video games and operations and that was just a no brainer and that wasn't something that I considered. But I think that the thought process for me wasn't necessarily about the feature itself, but it was about the task of reward distribution.

Jimmy Chebat:

Right, I wanted 100% participation and that was one of the things that, when I reflect back on the gamified culture of call centers, specifically collections, is that when you do any form of contests and tournaments, there's only a handful of participants that are actually being rewarded and recognized. Only one person can win a contest. We've even tried like, hey, we're going to have enough prizes here where everybody could win. We'll have the different levels of prizes and even do drawings, and then there's always some form of problem where somebody is upset or disappointed or unhappy. And I wanted to remove all of the negative aspects of gamification and I wanted to give everybody an opportunity to compete against themselves.

Jimmy Chebat:

And so, when looking at my, inspiration came a lot from video games, and when you look at video games, one of the common features in video games is getting challenges Right, and so to me, that was something where it's you're not competing against anybody else, it's can you do this? And if you can, you're going to earn a reward. And you know and in the beginning in a video game it's easy, Right? I mean, if you come in and you're at the most difficult level, you're never going to get past that level, You're never going to continue playing that game. So it was more about the game experience for me, coming in, being able. What is the intelligence, the logic that's really going to drive this uh platform without manual management? And so the game engine was the first real big thing that I worked on.

Andrew Reimers:

Now, I'm not going to ask you to share any intellectual property or anything like that, give any you know behind the scenes secrets as far as how our platform works, by any means. But you know, I'm going to be honest with you here, jimmy. I've been here two and a half years. We talk about core, we talk about the reward distribution matrix and the game engine and I'm still not sure I'm 100 percent certain of what all of those are. What was that process? Like man? How did you even start?

Jimmy Chebat:

Yeah, oh man, if, if, if, uh, you've seen it, you've seen the matrix, I've seen the matrix and we're not talking about the movie there are more than three parts to it.

Jimmy Chebat:

Actually, there's a four matrix movies. Um, we are up to matrix five, oh, in terms of our original spreadsheet. So I started with a spreadsheet and it had 20 different tabs with all the different functionalities in it, and so I, from there, I built a Power BI tool and that, you know, took that. Actually, I built a prototype of our game engine in a database and was able to take 10 years of my historics and I'm fast forwarding through this story but to validate both the game experience, the reward distribution, the acceleration through careers and rank levels, because after I've set kind of like the rule sets like from difficulty level right, 25 rank levels, difficulty levels, accelerating through the rank levels, rewards, matching the difficulty levels and the rank levels, and the logic that allows people to get promoted and demoted, which is a feature that I didn't have in the e-Whiteboard the , the ability to go backwards. But all of that needed to be fully automated and work with a budget that is unique to every customer without having to change anything in the core. So that experience is.

Jimmy Chebat:

I loved it. I'm a nerd. I had no problem admitting that I geek out on numbers. I love Excel, I love Power BI and this was my prototype. This was the logic that I was designing that was going to drive the success or the failure of ZIZO, and it's been a roller coaster ride, but we've been going up for the most part up and up and up slowly, and sometimes you got some valleys in between there. But it's been an uphill battle that is reaping rewards and benefits.

Andrew Reimers:

Pun intended. You know the timing. Yeah, the timing you know we talked about earlier with the pandemic and the shutdown, the global shutdown. You put all your eggs in this basket saying I'm going to build a revolutionary platform. It's going to have the game engine, it's going to have the reward distribution matrix, it's going to include everything that's like a video game. It's still going to include the data. It's going to have the direct integrations with multiple systems of record to make sure that we're that one source of truth and we're not even at the end of 2021 yet.

Jimmy Chebat:

No, you're not even getting to the interface, no, we're still on the back end. Yeah, no, we're still on the back end, but you read my mind because I wanted to ask you you know this was about how long was this initial process of building these things out before you even started thinking about or building in the interface? No, the interface was actually designed. The original version was designed even before the white one?

Jimmy Chebat:

Yes, that was before we even began programming. Okay, developing you have to have some visual aids right. So it's a mock-up. You know that goes from low fidelity wireframes to you can go from low to mid to high or you go from low to high where you start to really design the user experience. So you do that before development and you do that visually and you mock it up and you design it and you start to kind of test it. We had our original design. I don't think we ever. No, we did launch in the sandbox with the original design, but I think before we launched into the marketplace and what we call production now, we had made some significant design changes to that. So you know the interface was originally designed with the first concepts, the ideas, and that was designed with MVP in mind. So and people don't know MVP stands for minimal, viable product and when you're developing something you don't develop the entire vision.

Andrew Reimers:

No, no, no. You need the functionality there.

Jimmy Chebat:

Well, you can't because it's going to take you years and years to get the full vision, especially with all of the features that I had in mind. You have to go in with hey, let's get started and put something out and let's get feedback. Yeah, is this what you want? This is what you need. Do you like it? Does this work? Does that work? And so, um, you know, when we started talking about the long-term vision of ZIZO's user experience, we started to start making some modifications to the interface.

Andrew Reimers:

Definitely, so you know, let's get to. We'll fast forward. I know that there, maybe I've told this story in the past, maybe not on the podcast but mentioned titus, your partner in crime. I'm sorry, I shouldn't say that about him.

Jimmy Chebat:

Uh, there is a story that at some point we'll give him the opportunity to share yes, you're, you see your partner in business.

Andrew Reimers:

Yes, oh, I didn't mean to drop that bomb. Oh wait.

Jimmy Chebat:

All right Now we have to tell the story.

Jimmy Chebat:

Now we have to tell the story so, quick aside, we'll have to put a picture of Titus. But he had designed it's funny, his son is here and he was part of this story Designed a fake bomb. He used the cardboard roll from paper towels, like three or four of them, tied them together like dynamite and with black electrical tape, put a broken iPod. You know, this is back in the day. So the old technology A broken iPod, taped it to it, put some wires on it, made it look like a bomb and put a magnet on it. And he thought it would be funny. You know, they were playing some games. His kids were very young and they were playing like whatever types of games. And he came to the office here I was working on the weekend and he attached it to my vehicle. I was on my way to Canada and I had to cross a border, an international border. Fortunately for me, actually, no, he came to my house and put it on my car. I had to come to work and get my passport because it was in my desk. So I came to work. Fortunately for me, unfortunately for Titus, that contraption that he made, this fake contraption, fell off in front of the door of my office building Fast forward.

Jimmy Chebat:

Monday morning I get a phone call and you know from, from. Moe says hey, jimmy, you got to get down here quickly. I said what's going on here, like Elmwood is closed, there's a bomb in front of our building and there's the, the, the, the, the bomb team, or what do they call it? The bomb squad, bomb squad. Thank you, the bomb squad is in front of our building. So I'm driving down and I got rerouted and I had to walk.

Andrew Reimers:

Yeah, no, I couldn't get through. I was. I was working at the time in that office and I could. I was taking the bus and I couldn't get through, so you remember.

Jimmy Chebat:

And so what happened? Was Moe recognized, or thought at least that hey, because he brought it into the office and she's seen it. And she went to the police and says I think I may know what that is and it's not real. And they questioned her and they said no, it's a fake bomb, it's not real. They had people in the news was there? Oh yeah, they had people in the news. Was there, oh yeah, had people in that whole suit with you know, to dismantle a bomb.

Jimmy Chebat:

I think they may have had a really did yeah and so she explained the story, saying that's here's what happened. You know, my boss made that. And so the police came and they we have some questions for you, do you mind coming with us down to the station. And he was like he thought okay, well, yeah, there's no big deal, of course. Yeah, I'll answer it. Yeah, this was a. This was a game I play. I was playing it with my kids, I did, I put it on my brother-in-law's car. It was a, it was in the news and his name became synonymous with this bomb. So, yeah, he carried a partner in crime.

Andrew Reimers:

He is the bomb. That might be a bonus, yeah.

Jimmy Chebat:

So that aside.

Andrew Reimers:

Okay, so you, you know, maybe I've mentioned in the past, uh or not, I honestly can't remember. I'm like legitimately asking do you know? Have I talked about how I got this job?

Andrew Reimers:

you can talk about it again, okay yeah, I've known titus, as I've mentioned, uh, for a very long time. Him and I worked at a record store together, uh, back when I met him when I was 17 years old, and we've hit it off right away. He he's been like an older brother hell, even a father figure at times to me, and we've worked together. He was the one who recruited me for collections as well. He's the one who brought me in.

Andrew Reimers:

That's when I worked for you for the first time, and I also will never forget interviewing for a position with you and not getting the job, but it's okay, because here I am in 2024 doing a podcast with you somehow. But anyway, I digress. I'd always been in touch with Titus and I was a mail carrier hating my life and he had reached out about this company that was starting or that was going, and they were looking for a customer success manager. I was like sure, and he set me up for an interview and I looked at the website and I'm like I have no idea what the hell this company does.

Andrew Reimers:

I can't figure it out. What is gamification? I don't even get it, but I need another job. So, basically, that brings me to my next question. September of 2021, you hired me as your customer success manager and I'm just wondering how has your life changed since that moment? Well, I mean quite a bit.

Jimmy Chebat:

I think that the world has changed. Going back real quick when you talk about the pandemic, because I think that's something that we've got to talk about Not only was the fear of, hey, I don't know what it's going to look like, is there going to be a company here for me to even build, is there going to be a need for it? One of the big things that happened during the pandemic that I think accelerated the need for a product like this was the work from home. I think, very quickly, people understood like, yeah, we're going to work from home for a short period of time, until this thing passes Well.

Andrew Reimers:

If you remember, they were saying, oh, it'll be no more than six weeks, Six weeks.

Jimmy Chebat:

It was extended and it kept on getting extended and it kept on getting extended and during that time, you know, the government was putting out a ton of money and a lot of people were. You know that was one of their more profitable years, If you reflect back. People were making good money and they also recognize, like I, don't have to go into the office to be successful. And so this new culture of work from home was born, and a lot of people since then, even still to this day, have refused to come back into the office, whether the ownership's decision or the workforce says no, we want to work from home. And maybe there's some compromise in a few businesses where they do hybrid, where you've got to work in the office at least two or three days and then you can work from home. And there's a variety of different types of setups, yeah, uh, from from one extreme to the other, but that the culture of work from home, everybody's disconnected. You don't have a culture, no, or it has to be reimagined and redesigned and it has to be based on something. And so there's a ton of new solutions that started popping up from there.

Jimmy Chebat:

Of course, Zoom really took off right. Everybody was doing remote work and Teams. Part of the Microsoft suite exploded as well as all other tools. There were some tools that had cameras that watched people while they were working. They had tools that communication tools. Slack was a big one. It was big before then, but it really exploded during and after and still to this day. So work from home is a big part of what we try to keep in mind for a fragmented or a dispersed workforce. How do we design it? Where we can enhance a culture, build a new culture using Zizo or verification, and I watch it happen.

Andrew Reimers:

Every day. I see these hybrid companies and it isn't a matter of they were, you know. Some companies require people to be in office three days a week. Some require Tuesdays and Thursdays. Some offices the people that are local have to be in the office full time, but they still hire remote workers who are at home. That's just the way that it goes and I've seen culture building through Zizo with my own eyes and I've experienced the difference between the call centers that use Zizo and call centers that don't, and there's a noticeable difference.

Andrew Reimers:

So I want to talk about a lot of the features and what separates Zizo from other platforms that you mentioned. But when we sell Zizo and we talk to people about our platform, we promise three things. We promise increase in engagement, we promise a boost in productivity and a decrease in attrition, and we've gone to great lengths to talk about all three of those up to this point on the zizo effect. So let's talk about features. We've discussed leaderboard and what that can do to a team's culture to give that transparency, people to know where they stand. But you talk so much about how, uh, collections call. So collections, call centers, sales, whatever it might be is a naturally gamified space. Tell me about how gameplay works in Zizo.

Jimmy Chebat:

So gameplay is the way I designed it and, if you remember from earlier, I wanted it to be all inclusive. So inclusivity is a major part of this. I want it to be fair and objective. I don't want an automated.

Jimmy Chebat:

So this game engine we talked at length at the core was designed to be able to have different buckets where our clients can decide where they want to put their budgets. So you have a main budget and it's split up into different buckets where people are competing against themselves, which is dependent on their rank levels. They are competing against themselves in terms of both performance and time. So milestones is a big part of that. So we want to reward people, not just for being there for three months, 90 days or a year or five years. We want them to hit certain performance milestones across all of their metrics and, again, more opportunities to recognize and to reward. So these are all based on micro rewards.

Jimmy Chebat:

We're not giving people TVs every time they do something, which will exhaust, you know, and one person will win it and it'll exhaust the entire budget. We're talking about a dollar here, $2 there, 50 cents multiple times a day. Your leaderboard we talked about. You're competing against other people to be one of the top performers, and we've even made that based on rank level, where we weight the rewards more heavily in favor of people who are rookies just starting off. If you're showing up in the top 10 leaderboard, well, you deserve a little bit more than somebody who's been there for quite a long time, who may be a superstar or legend, and so we we adjust and accommodate for that. And then contests and tournaments is really where probably one of the the only places where it requires manual work here, and we're even working towards automating that yes, but I want to say what you're calling manual work compared to what has been done in the past is hardly manual work.

Jimmy Chebat:

No comparison, I mean we're talking a matter of minutes.

Andrew Reimers:

You know I've seen how easy it is to run multiple competitions. You know we feature one-on-one competitions, we feature team versus team. We have individual goals again, where you can maybe take somebody who doesn't love the team versus team or maybe doesn't like being in competition with other people, and you can set individual goals. You can have my favorite, the collaborative goal, where you get everybody in your department or everybody on your team or in the office all working together towards one goal and maybe they get to get out early. Maybe they get to go out and hang out together, or they just get to go home paid out and hang out together, or they just get to go home paid.

Jimmy Chebat:

You know, yeah, actually if you remember and I may have shared this story in previous episodes, but you were there when we would do this every Friday. Yeah, we would take a look at our weekly expectations and see how far or close we are to hitting those numbers and we would create a stretch goal, you know, and say, hey, if you guys could hit this number, whenever you hit this number, you can have the rest of the day off paid. And it's one of our most successful contest types, you know, from not just people actually hitting the goal, but from team building and camaraderie. Everybody's working together. The energy levels are through the roof and, like you had just mentioned, you'd go home. You wouldn't go home afterwards.

Andrew Reimers:

Not always.

Jimmy Chebat:

Everybody would go to the bar and have a few drinks together, again further deepening the relationships that they're building with one another as peers, and the business doesn't have to pay for it. It succeeds because it's built into the objective and people are overperforming, and it's not something that you can sustain all the time, right, but you've got to know when to use those opportunities and present them. This platform provides the tools to automate those, and there's a couple more that I'd love for you to continue talking about.

Andrew Reimers:

There are. It's the tournaments which I love. I love the battle Royale tournaments where you literally set a point system. It's everybody for themselves fighting it out. It can be blind, it can be handicapped to meet different rank levels, which we are going to talk a little bit more about. Rank levels because I know that they've evolved even since the initial inception of the whiteboard. There's a single elimination, bracket style tournament, which is so popular, and we just, you know, getting off March Madness right now, all of our customers were utilizing the bracket tournament and just watching the friendly competition. You know, if I'm, I see their emails and I see their teams messages back and forth to each other, egging each other on, and you know that part is so cool. And and when you say manual work, all you're doing, you're setting parameters and you're setting clear objectives for the competition and then once you hit that confirm button, that's it.

Andrew Reimers:

It's there. You don't have to sit and keep track of how many deals everybody is closing you don't have to keep track of. You can have 10, 12, 15, depending on how many people are in your department competitions running at once and you can set it and forget it. Or if you're smart and you're running a business, you can use it to motivate your people throughout the day and get more production out of that.

Jimmy Chebat:

Yeah, there's different ways. I mean, all of the features that we've designed are designed with fail-safes to prevent negative aspects of gamification. So even things like hiding the rules, right, and maybe exposing them at the final stretch. Handicapping uh, we want everybody to be able to participate. We want it to be fair. They're so, rather than making the same rules for everybody, you can click the handicap button and level the playing field. Uh, to make sure that everybody has an equal opportunity to win. You can separate, you can create a contest and if you love a rule, you say, hey, rookies against rookies, pros against pros, experience level grouped together and competing only against one another.

Jimmy Chebat:

And, like you said, it's not something that you have to manage pull reports, try to provide updates. And the fun thing about it is not just fun, but what makes it highly effective is they're getting real-time status updates. Everybody wants to know, and that's a good thing you know, because part of this feedback loop is that positive reinforcement. Feedback loop is that positive reinforcement when people do something good and there's a result. They want to see the impact of that result to their contest, to their leaderboards, to their daily challenges. That information is coming back as close to real time, as we're getting the data and letting them know. You're in the lead right, there's only an hour left and you're in the lead. Give it a little bit more of a push. We also beyond. That is, in the achievements. We measure records and what else?

Andrew Reimers:

Well, milestones.

Jimmy Chebat:

Well, milestones we talked about earlier, but personal bests.

Andrew Reimers:

Oh yeah.

Jimmy Chebat:

Records.

Jimmy Chebat:

Well, it's records, but there's a difference between your record for your own personal best and the department record, which everybody wants, and then we've even expanded that, so it includes it's just not a single record, it's a daily record, weekly record, monthly record, all-time record, annual record across all of the KPIs, and same thing for personal best, and our notification system lets people know. You're this close to this, you're this close to that, giving them that additional motivation, that incentive. And that's part of this automation that we talk about is we want the data, we want to present the data, but we want that data to be as actionable as possible.

Andrew Reimers:

Yes, one of the automated ways. Gamification is more than just leaderboards and literal gameplay you talked about earlier. You mentioned competing against yourself. One of my favorite features of ZIZO is the daily, weekly goals where your agent comes in, your player, whatever you call them, your employee. They log in to ZIZO. Not only do they get to see what is expected of them that day, but they're challenged to beat themselves. So, whether it's inbound calls, outbound calls, number of deals closed, whatever it might be, they get daily challenges to compete against themselves. And the coolest part is when they reach that goal, not only do they get a reward, another goal shows up Now.

Andrew Reimers:

I made a joke on a previous episode about how my only reward for doing well at the post office was more work. This isn't the same thing, because level two shows up. So not only does it combat complacency and that feeling of like ah, I, I did what I had to do and you know, uh, I'm done for the day. Yeah, pat on the back. Of course, you know nothing like that. It gives me something else to strive for. And what comes with that? A bigger reward. And then I hit that one when it happens, level three, and it goes all the way up to level five. We have daily sets. You get five, let's say, kpi shown to you for your daily goals, your top three that are highlighted specifically for you in areas that were identified that you need to improve on, or maybe today you need to do a little bit better on, and you can hit level one on all three of those. You get a bonus chest with even more rewards in it.

Jimmy Chebat:

Yeah, there's constant rewards being placed in front of you. Complacency is one of the byproducts, in a negative sense, of gamification, and you know you give somebody a goal, a target, and then you reward them for hitting that target. What happens in a lot of cases is people get really proud of themselves and maybe they did it in a very quick manner the first two hours they hit their goal. Maybe it was a big deal that they closed and they get really comfortable after that and they say I've already done my job for the day, I don't have to do anymore. And so we want to try to offset that by constantly giving stretch goals, but not just to say, hey, go hit this because you already did that.

Andrew Reimers:

It's, we'll give you more, We'll constantly reward you, we're not moving the carrot, the proverbial carrot. No we are, we're letting you have one, and then, guess what? Here's another one.

Jimmy Chebat:

And it's a bigger one. Yes, and because we we recognize like it takes effort to get to your goal, and so we know it's going to take a little bit more effort and you shouldn't get a small little reward. It's we're not measuring the increment between the rewards, we're measuring the fact that, hey, you did a lot more, you deserve a lot more, and we keep doing that. So, yeah, that's a great feature.

Andrew Reimers:

And it gives that that. Again, you know we your. Well, your tagline again for e-whiteboard, it's micromanagement without the micromanaging Yep. This gives people a chance to micromanage themselves because they look every single day and they can see where they are. I mean, if they're not even 50% of the way and it's three o'clock PM and they're not going to hit that level one, well, not only do they see that, everyone's going to see that, it's a way to push towards the end. So we have daily goals and weekly goals, which you know work very similarly, and that hits them more in the short term. But you mentioned earlier milestones. Can you elaborate? Because milestones is one of the most interesting features of ZIZO because and this is something that no one else is doing People can look into our competition. I couldn't care less because nobody's doing this.

Jimmy Chebat:

Yeah, milestones was one thing that I really wanted to utilize and leverage as a game mechanic to retain talent for longer periods of time and to keep them constantly engaged. And we talk about that carrot increasingly getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Historically, time has always been one way to reward tenure or loyalty and time alone. Yeah, it's good. It makes sense because attrition costs money, right. If somebody leaves, you have to hire and train somebody new and it's going to take some time before you get the same sort of value from somebody who's been there for a while. So if you can retain your talent, you're going to get increased productivity. And if you can engage them and recognize them for the time that they've been there and combine that with performance, that's where you're going to get the most. And that's how we design milestones.

Jimmy Chebat:

Reward, early reward, often make it meaningful, you know, but understand, like, get them addicted to that. That reward that carrot, right, and every carrot is going to be bigger. And you know we have. It's a very complex algorithm, like you said. I don't want to share my intellectual property here, but not every KPI is equal. Not every KPI is treated or rewarded equally, but every KPI is rewarded and there's two different rewards Whenever you hit it or if you're performing at a higher level. And we put date stamps on every milestone, so if you hit it before that date, you get a bonus reward.

Andrew Reimers:

So it might take the average person three weeks to hit 1,000 outbound call. I'm just using arbitrary numbers here. Three weeks to make a thousand outbound calls. Well, we're saying, if you can do it in two and a half weeks, there's actually an extra bonus in there for you. If it takes you three weeks, you're still going to get your reward.

Andrew Reimers:

But if you can do it a couple of days early, here's something extra for you and that is really special, and letting them know how close they are to, whether the expiration date and the performance level.

Jimmy Chebat:

So somebody is informing them. If you had manual labor doing this task of checking people's statistics and letting them know, like hey, you're this close to missing this bonus and you only need three more talk-offs and you've got two days left, let me help you get there. But if you're doing that manually, it's going to take you a workforce of at least 10 full-time employees. We're doing that like this. It's automated, it's in real time, and we're doing this across all of the different game mechanics, all of the different functionalities and features, whether it's contests, leaderboards, milestones or challenges.

Andrew Reimers:

We keep talking about rewards, I'd be remiss if I didn't say we should probably say what kinds of rewards they could earn within ZIZO. Tell me a little bit about the rewards, because I know that there's three things you can earn Two monetary one if anyone's a gamer out there they'll know what it means and those being XP points or XP excuse me, it's like saying ATM machine, it's the worst Pin number.

Jimmy Chebat:

Pin number yeah.

Andrew Reimers:

So there's coins, there's Z bucks which are backed by real dollars, and then you can earn experience points. Talk to me a little bit about the philosophy and the theory behind those.

Jimmy Chebat:

The currencies were born from the idea that, hey, not every prize is wanted by everybody. Meaning, if I'm going to put a new pair of Beats headphones, I may already own a pair. What am I going to do with that? Sell them. And so, same thing if I'm going to give away Bills tickets, I may not be a football fan what am I going to do with those? Give them away or sell them.

Jimmy Chebat:

And so we wanted to make sure that people are rewarded with tangible goods that they want, and so we made sure that we built the reward store where people could redeem their rewards and we've talked about it in earlier episodes in terms of the different personas, savers and spenders getting that instant gratification or saving up for that big reward. And you give people that option that they can spend it the way they want it. The different currencies gives us the opportunity to really leverage and I don't know we didn't talk about this yet our 3D avatar system. And our avatar system gives individuals the ability to present themselves in a unique Web3 format right, this next generation. It's like emotes, but on steroids that it was borrowed from a game called Fortnite, which I did my first experience, and I think I may have shared this before. When my son asked me for real money to go buy fake currency, to go buy fake dance moves and digital clothes, I was like at first I was like what the heck is this? And then, when I realized how successful it was, I'm like this is genius. And I wanted to leverage this in our own in this platform. And so we put coins as there's a secondary currency and we do have plans to add even more currencies in the future clan points where people can clan up, and then you can redeem those clan points in different ways mentorship points so there's a whole host of new ideas for the future about expanding our currency system.

Jimmy Chebat:

But experience points was the way where people can earn points for us to create that objective promotional periods. Right, it's not. Hey, I think you're good, you're ready for that next level. No, there's points. You get those points by accomplishing your daily goals, your weekly goals, your monthly goals, your milestones. You're getting on the leaderboard. So when you show that you are able to perform at or above your current expectation levels, well, you're earning more points, you get promoted, your challenges get more difficult, your rewards get bigger. So it's all designed for a game experience a fair and inclusive game experience and, I think, one that can scale across any organization Nobody can complain about. This isn't fair. It's 100% fair.

Andrew Reimers:

It's 100% fair. That's right. No, that's so cool. You brought up the 3D avatars. When I started, we were still in 2D avatar phase, so that was a big deal around here. When we went up to the 3D avatars, and you know what, it wasn't just a big deal for us, it was a big deal for our customers too, and I can't wait to share. We'll have to grab some clips and just share while we're talking here some of the best avatars that we have across companies. We won't share any names or anything, but just some of the coolest animations. So we have those. You can be creative, you can show your individuality, but these frontline workers, man, they're doing these repetitive tasks every single day. It can be mundane, it can be tiring, it can be you can burn out.

Jimmy Chebat:

You can burn out.

Andrew Reimers:

We've gone over that in the past. So we have coins, we have Z-Bucks, we have XP and, especially when it comes to the coins and Z-Bucks, what are we going to do with those? You go to the reward store.

Jimmy Chebat:

The reward store, you say Go redeem those coins, those coins, those Z-Bucks.

Andrew Reimers:

Well, what about the ZIZO

Jimmy Chebat:

reward store? Can you tell us a little bit more? That's part of what you do on a daily basis.

Andrew Reimers:

I was hoping you would say that Please.

Andrew Reimers:

I personally love the reward store, not only because every single product that is in there I have somehow either literally physically touched or touched online by placing orders digitally, but every single item that's in our store has literally come from suggestions from our customers. Everybody is different, Like you said. Not all KPIs are the same. Not all people are the same. People are driven. We mentioned it in the previous episode the spenders, the savers, there's all kinds of personas, and whether it's a Barbie dream house, whether it's a set of weights, whether it's a frigging swimming pool, Do you know how many swimming pools we've sold out of the ZIZO reward store? It's crazy. My assistant, your son Chase, helps me out with amazing ideas that young people unlike me actually want, and he's constantly like I'm always. I'm sorry, I'm going to your son for ideas for our reward store.

Andrew Reimers:

That's what he's there for that's what he's here for. That's what he's there for. But we, you know it's so cool and to see the excitement when we have some customers that are local and I get to deliver rewards, like I get to play Santa Claus, and, to be honest, it makes me pretty cool. But even the messages that I get from people who are like, oh my gosh, all I've ever wanted was a Litter-Robot. I just never would have spent $600 on that. I can't believe you had that available in your reward store. Thank you so much.

Jimmy Chebat:

My house doesn't smell like shit anymore. That's a really, really good point right there and that was one of the reasons why we wanted to create these digital currencies that feel like points. It's that guilt-free incentive because if you give people money and you put it in their paycheck, it goes towards their bills and they never really get that extrinsic feeling, that motivation to want to repeat that book, because they prioritize as they should, you know, their personal bills. This year is above and beyond compensation and we hope that everybody's fairly compensated in. What they're getting paid helps them pay their personal bills. But this is an incentive and should be rewarded personally with things that they want personally that they would normally not spend money out of their paychecks to get and we're talking about frontline workers, we're talking about a younger generation. These are people, for the most part, are living check to check, month to month, you know, and so they are very cognizant of how they spend their paychecks and this is one way for them to earn as much as they want there's no restrictions, there's no limitations and then redeem them and it's a pay for performance. So you know the right people are getting these incentives because they have to perform in order to earn them.

Jimmy Chebat:

So we love the reward store and I want to expand on it. It's not just tangible goods, right. It's not just 3D assets that you can use to enhance your 3D avatar, but we encourage companies to add perks right. Sell PTO, you know, put that in your rewards. They can add their own products. They can add their own company perks. You can even sell a raise, right, so put it in there. There's valuations that will help you create the proper valuation where there's a return on investment keeping them there, retaining them for a certain period of time, and so they can buy a dollar an hour raise. They can buy dinner with the CEO. They can buy that VIP parking spot right next to the front door. You can get so creative.

Jimmy Chebat:

The executive bathroom, not mine but Andrew's. But yeah, you can get very creative with what you can add to the reward store. The more variety, the better.

Andrew Reimers:

Yeah, you're right, and we do have another feature that I want to cover and that's our reporting page. And that's for our leaders and our supervisors, our managers, executives that are behind the scenes and they want to be able to do everything that you talked about in our last episode in part one of the ZIZO Origin Story with the e-whiteboard. Everything you were building, everything that you were creating through Excel, all the filters, breaking it down, getting it as granular as you possibly could Well guess what we have that built into ZIZO as well. There's a full reporting feature that I'm sure we're going to be showing as we talk here, but I'm going to tell you that I've been using this feature a lot, so this is just maybe getting into more detail than we need to, but I'm helping one of our customers with competitions right now. They're just, you know, tax season collections. They were just. I'm giving them a hand. They're a little overwhelmed.

Andrew Reimers:

So this, this reporting tool, has come in handy because the thing is, zizo is so damn easy. I don't even work there and I'm like helping manage their operation and it's great and it's not a knock on them. I'm happy to contribute and happy to do it, but the reason I'm able to do. It is ZIZO's reporting tool for me to look at past performances, for me to check trends year over year, month over month, to be able to look by day, to identify where the slow periods are, and then I create competitions that are meant to push that. So we just saw they had the best Friday in their history last week and that's usually a really slow day for them. So the reporting tool. But before I ask you more about that, I want to ask you again, for those who maybe didn't tune into the first episode or maybe didn't catch part one, what was the biggest downfall of the e-whiteboard?

Jimmy Chebat:

Data accuracy and so having making sure that data is accurate and it matches everything that's in your system.

Andrew Reimers:

And I know you touched on this a little bit earlier in this episode in this conversation but can you tell me about how you solve the data integrity problem?

Jimmy Chebat:

I know that you guys have. We have an episode coming up next week with you and Zach. We do. I'm really excited to see you. It's going to be the first episode where I'm not going to be a part of that and then we're going to have one with. But I have a special guest which we'll tease maybe in the next episode. But the integrations we directly integrate with the systems of record and we pull the data, the relevant data metrics, into our data warehouse, and we do that as close to real time as possible. So we do this in order for us to be able to sell trust. We want our product to be effective, and in order for it to be effective, it has to be accurate, and so that was one of the primary objectives for us when I decided to build ZIZO.

Andrew Reimers:

Absolutely, and I've seen what it's done. I've seen how it's made people's lives easier. So, jimmy, you always say we want to turn managers into what.

Andrew Reimers:

Into happiness engineers, happiness engineers and ZIZO allows them that opportunity. I've watched it. I've seen growth. I've seen productivity boost. I've seen the increase in motivation and engagement with our customers. We have a customer who went a full year without losing anybody. In fact, they're growing and they utilize ZIZO to its fullest ability to manage their system and to manage their business efficiently. And everything that you went through and everything that you experienced really comes to light and shines so brightly through the current platform. And I know I always find myself putting this disclaimer out there. I'm not just saying that because I'm sitting here with the visionary and the founder and the CEO of ZIZO, but I can tell you it is making a real difference in people's lives and I love watching it.

Jimmy Chebat:

Thank you. Yeah, and I think that's probably one of the most fulfilling components of this. Of course, you know when you're building a business, when you're building something, you know there's a purpose to bringing that vision to life. But you want it to be effective. You want it to make a difference and change other people's lives the way it changed yours. So I'm excited. I want to share this with the world. I want to grow our user base. There's so much more that we are adding to this in the future and for anybody that wants to learn more about it, please reach out to us. But the manager experience is coming next. The executive experience is coming soon after. There's so many more agent features that we're building into this. That's going to enhance the effectiveness of this. There's a bright future ahead for Zizo, for our customers and for anybody who wants to join our team.

Andrew Reimers:

Well, I can tell you how I feel about this one feature we have coming up, so I can't even imagine how you feel about ZIZO as a whole, because there's a feature that's my baby that you know is getting real close. You know, Jimmy, I'm sure this has been really cool for you. I talked about the emotions that came up selling monster trucks with my son. To talk about all of this and to go through your history and everything you've been through the hurdles, the triumphs, the successes, the failures, what was your favorite part in the product development phase?

Jimmy Chebat:

I don't know if there's a single favorite moment, because they happen all the time and every time I feel that same. When I share my vision with our product team and they start to bring that vision to life and you see it in the interface, it's mocked up. That is that first moment, like yes, and you see it live in the screen and it doesn't currently work. Then that next evolution is when you actually see it working, when a development team actually programs that in and you see that first moment where you click on it and it does what it's supposed to do and you're like yes, works as expected.

Andrew Reimers:

As expected.

Jimmy Chebat:

And then the next moment is when our customers begin to use it and they give us the feedback. We love this feature and those are happening all the time. So those are the moments that I live for and those are the things that I want to continue doing for our team, because I know that everybody is intrinsically motivated to bring that value to life to our customers and to get that feedback. I know I see you glowing every time you're doing our demo and you talk about the success that we've had with our customers and what the feedback and the testimonials and the case studies, with all of the improvements and all of the metrics that we promised the ZIZO effect that we promise our customers they'll get when they implement our product. So it's not just one moment, it's a bunch of moments.

Andrew Reimers:

Awesome. Well, I think that's good. Would it be fair to say your most exciting part of the entire journey is the future?

Jimmy Chebat:

That would be fair to say what the unknown and what could be, and I'm looking forward to it. I'm excited.

Andrew Reimers:

Awesome. Well, jimmy, it's been great getting to know you even better hearing your story. Thank you so much for sharing it with us. I think there's so much valuable insights. Hopefully, if you've been tuning in all along and you're interested in gamification, check out our website, wwwplayzizocom, or find us on any of our social media platforms. Right here, we'd love to talk to you. We'd love to chat and share even more. Jimmy, it's been a pleasure. Until next time, see you down the road. As we wrap up this two-part series on the ZIZO origin story, we've looked deep into the inception and evolution of this groundbreaking platform, from its humble beginnings to its transformative impact on workplace dynamics. We've uncovered the fascinating journey of ZIZO and the visionary behind it all, Jimmy Chebat. Join us next week for an insightful conversation with special guest Zach DiaPaul, who will share his expertise on integrations and data integrity, a crucial aspect of modern business operations. Until then, stay inspired by innovation and remember it's game time.

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