Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Shannon Vander Muelen: What I learned is that it's 90% of customer service is really about training.
You know, people talk a lot about customer service and they talk about fitness. You know, like,
let's have popcorn for people, let's have music, let's make sure everybody's really friendly. And
that's really important when it comes to customer service. But what people really want is
competence. They want to be matched with the person who has the right training to solve their
problem, and they want to be in and out as quickly as possible.
[00:00:29] Jeff Dillon: Welcome to another episode of the EdTech Connect podcast. Today's
guest is someone who knows a thing or two about transforming everyday systems into
streamlined, customer focused experiences. Shannon Vandermeulen is the co founder and
CMO of Waitwell, a tech company that's revolutionizing the way visitors connect to services,
whether that be a government office, a medical clinic, or a student service center.
Before launching white whale in 2020, Shannon managed a busy government service office for
over nine years where she developed a deep understanding of the operational challenges
service organizations face. With a background in education and a passion for process design,
Shannon brings a rare mix of people centered leadership and digital innovation. She's also been
an instructor and held leadership roles at Bow Valley College.
Under her marketing leadership, Waitwell has helped over 100 million citizens access services
more efficiently and equitably.
Shannon, it is great to have you today. Thanks for being here.
[00:01:36] Shannon Vander Muelen: Thanks for the invite. I'm looking forward to the conversation. Jeff.
[00:01:39] Jeff Dillon: So let's start off and tell us one thing that people might not know about
you that they wouldn't find on your LinkedIn profile.
[00:01:50] Shannon Vander Muelen: I guess they wouldn't know that I am a hockey mom first and foremost
and a tech founder second.
[00:01:56] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, I love that you're opening up in Canada, right?
You've had a unique journey from education, nonprofit boards leading a high growth tech
company. What inspired the leap into founding Weightwell?
[00:02:09] Shannon Vander Muelen: The idea for Weightwell actually came because I was running a really
busy public service office.
So where we live, public services that would normally be delivered by the provincial government
or the state government, where you are, are delivered through a network of private registry
agents. And I was one of those for about 10 years.
And I just spent a lot of time sitting in my office looking at people waiting their turn and watching
the behavior and how that affected staff when people got to the counter, you know, maybe not
prepared for the service, maybe in the wrong lineup.
And I just had a lot of ideas for how that could be made better. I looked at some of the software
that was out there and I just felt like I could build something a little bit better. And that's where
Waitwell came from.
[00:02:51] Jeff Dillon: You've spent nearly a decade leading the East Calgary registry, which put
you right in the front, front lines of high volume public service. Aren't those environments like
where operational efficiency is really directly impact people who are waiting stressed?
I would say, like, how did that experience shape your views on operational efficiency and
customer service?
[00:03:16] Shannon Vander Muelen: You know, the 10 years that I spent at East Calgary registry were really
incredible learning years for me. I had a lot of chance to sort of observe how people felt in that
environment and it was a really high stress environment. It was a high stress environment before
the pandemic, but after the pandemic hit, it just became, you know, know so much more. So,
you know, what I, what I learned is that it's 90% of customer service is really about training. You
know, people talk a lot about customer service and they talk about fitness. You know, like, let's
have popcorn for people, let's have music, let's make sure everybody's really friendly. And that's
really important when it comes to customer service. But what people really want is competence.
They want to be matched with the person who has the right training to solve their problem and
they want to be in and out as quickly as possible.
Nobody walks into a public service office. You know, if you're going to the DMV or permit office,
if you're doing a renovation or whatever, you don't expect to be served the moment that you
walked in, but you do want to have an idea of what to expect next. If it's going to be 15 minutes,
you want to know it's going to be 15 minutes. If you're going to be there for two hours, you want
to know it's going to be there, you're going to be there for two hours. So what I learned is that
most of it is about training and that what people are really craving is to be served by someone
who's competent and also to know what to expect.
[00:04:31] Jeff Dillon: Right. You started your career in education, which is such an interesting
foundation for someone now leading a tech company.
Teaching, which requires clarity, empathy, the ability to translate complex ideas into something
people actually can understand.
So those skills often show up in leadership and product communication in ways I think people
don't recognize. What lessons from your time as an educator still influence how you lead or
communicate in tech today?
[00:05:02] Shannon Vander Muelen: I think my time as an educator probably impacts how I do everything in
my life as an educator. I think one thing that you're always thinking about is sort of the
scaffolding of skills. You know, if we need people to be able to do this working backwards, what
are all of the skills that they have to learn in order to be able to achieve this?
And that's not a lot different than, you know, product requirement document. So like, really being
able to break down complex concepts into smaller steps is really important. I think in technology,
it's important in education, it's definitely important in leadership. You know, one of the key
learnings that I really got from my time I worked at a school called Bow Valley College in Calgary
and I worked at the ESL department and I spent a lot of time with the learners who are kind of at
the upper levels that were ready to transition into academic upgrading or go into their
professional programs, worked with a lot of professionals that were ready to transition into their
careers and needed to get certified or pass a certain level to prove proficiency in English
language.
And they were balancing so much, you know, balancing part time jobs, balancing full time jobs,
parenting, caregiving with being a student. And so a lot of, when I think about weightwell and the
problem that we're solving, a lot of it is really about those people and respecting their time and
helping them to connect to the services that, that they need faster. And that's a lot of what I hear
when I talk to student service professionals as well, is really about meeting the needs of those
really complex students who have so much that they're juggling and maybe are on campus,
maybe are off campus and really helping them to connect those student services they need to
be successful.
[00:06:36] Jeff Dillon: Right. Many organizations, especially universities, are still managing wait
times and service demand with tools and processes that we're, we were never designed for
today's expectations.
[00:06:50] Shannon Vander Muelen: Right.
[00:06:50] Jeff Dillon: So for listeners that are unfamiliar with weight. Well, how would you
describe what it does in the core problem you're solving?
[00:06:57] Shannon Vander Muelen: Yeah, well, I mean, the core problem that we sought out to solve was, was
waiting, getting rid of lineups. People don't like waiting in lineups. Students, just like everybody
else on this planet, you know, they expect, you know, they, if they're hungry, they order a meal
on doordash. If they want to go somewhere, they order an Uber. They're used to sort of that
instant response, that instant communication being, you know, ordering things on demand.
And so they carry those expectations into higher education. And when they go to a student
service office, you know, they're really expecting that kind of digital experience that they would
get anywhere else in their life. So what we do, you know, we started off getting rid of lineups, so
we allow people to scan a QR code, join a line and get instant updates on their phone about
what their wait time is going to be. And that's what we do kind of for the end user. What we're
doing for staff is we also do booking and check in. And so what we're really doing is helping to
facilitate the way that services move through the service center. So for example, you might have
student workers who have only been trained on how to do a couple of more simple services.
And so you can route those simpler inquiries to student workers and then save those more
complex inquiries that you have for staff who might have more training. And so that really
creates a lot of operational efficiency for the staff, which can really help to bring down those staff
stress levels.
Student service centers are typically very sort of cyclical, very seasonal, right. They have, they
have times where they're crazy busy, inundated. Everybody has a question, everybody wants to
drop a course, add a course, you know, have questions about their financial aid, and then they
have quieter periods. And so waitwill really helps to sort of even out those sort of troughs and
valleys.
[00:08:37] Jeff Dillon: They are the busiest complex environments on campus.
[00:08:41] Shannon Vander Muelen: I think, I think student services, you know, we work with governments, we
work with higher education, we even work in retail and medical.
But student service offices, they are very complex, especially when you're looking at the one
stops who are really delivering services on behalf or in collaboration with a lot of different home
offices. And so those staff have to have. There's a lot of cross training that's, that's needed and it
is very complex.
[00:09:06] Jeff Dillon: When organizations implement new service tech, there's often a moment
where they shift from just managing lines to actually understanding, improving the entire service
experience. What's the aha moment you've seen clients experience once they implement
Waywell?
[00:09:25] Shannon Vander Muelen: Yeah, well, I mean there's a lot. The biggest feedback that we get that
makes us really happy is that the transition was smooth. We can talk about our training and our
onboarding and we really do pride ourselves on that. So that's a big aha moment that we get.
But we also hear a lot about the value that we provide for these teams in how they talk to
leadership. So leadership is always looking for metrics and reporting on how service operations
are going. And that's something that Waitwell delivers in Spades. We have 40 plus reports. And
so if the student service manager is being asked on a weekly or monthly basis to provide data
around, you know, how long are students waiting or what does appointment utilization look like?
Or what does student satisfaction look like? We're giving that to them and that's something that
really makes their job a lot easier. They're not having to dig through 40 plus reports because
they can actually just use our. The AI that's built within Waitwell, we call it Whelo, in order to ask
those questions with real language.
[00:10:22] Jeff Dillon: What's it called again?
[00:10:23] Shannon Vander Muelen: It's called Whelo. Whaler is actually a character, so you can check it out
on our website.
[00:10:27] Jeff Dillon: All right.
[00:10:28] Shannon Vander Muelen: We just launched Whelo last week and it's really interesting. You know,
some of our customers are, you know, really, really large colleges with very large staff and
student bases and they're able to ask questions like, hey, we need to close the one stop for half
a day next month in order to do some training. What would be the best day to do it that would
have the least impact on students? Student wait times, and Whelo can analyze the data and
give a recommendation like that.
[00:10:54] Jeff Dillon: I think rolling out a public facing technology gets tricky because success
depends on both staff adoption and how comfortable your students or customers are using the
tools. Especially when the digital literacy widely varies. How does your team approach adoption,
especially with public facing technologies where that digital literacy is kind of on the spectrum?
[00:11:20] Shannon Vander Muelen: I would say when it comes to universities, that is probably the least
challenging environment for us. When it comes to end users, I don't know that we've ever had
any feedback that students had any difficulty figuring out how to scan a QR code or join the line.
We see more challenge, honestly, with other customers that we deal with. But having said that,
we do think that the secret sauce is all in the setup. And so we spend a lot of time with
customers. You know, we have a kickoff call where we learn more about what their use cases
are. We map out what the proposed flow is. There's often multiple meetings where we'll lay out,
okay, here's how we think it's going to look. We'll get feedback, we'll change it.
We create a sandbox environment. It's really, I think whatever technology you're rolling out, it's
really important to spend the bulk of your time at the beginning because otherwise you're going
to spend so much more time fixing it at the end. We really believe in a one to one service model
so, you know, a dedicated account manager so that you're not having to sort of explain, okay,
here's the context, here's what you don't know about why we chose to do it this way. We think
that that's really, really important.
[00:12:21] Jeff Dillon: You brought up a good point. I haven't really thought about the
generational difference where students are probably expecting to have an app to manage their
queue at some point, much more than I was at my healthcare provider the other day. And the
line to get your prescription is crazy, but I look at the line and, like, I'll bet a lot of these people
would rather wait in this line than get an app. Like, it's just a completely different mindset. The
public service organizations often have a unique mix of legacy systems, established processes,
institutional cultures, which can make this transformation both, I think, technically and
organizationally complex. What have been the biggest team technical or cultural barriers to
digital transformation in the. In the public service sector?
[00:13:06] Shannon Vander Muelen: I think a lot of it is what I think of as kind of tech fatigue. Right. Like you
say, okay, we're going to introduce a new tool, and, you know, the response is another tool. So,
you know, I already used 20 tools every week, and now I'm going to have 21 tools. So I definitely
think that there's some fatigue. And I think the. The solution for that is really to help to make sure
that everybody is on board and understands how this piece of technology is going to work with
all of the other pieces that they're using. And then if at all possible, you know, can this replace
something that they're using? Because I think a lot of times if they're using 20 tools and you can
remove even two of them and add one, and then that's one fewer, and that can really help a lot.
But I don't, you know, the student service professionals in particular, you know, I know how
many tools that they're using, and it really is a lot of.
So I think it's important to approach that as well with good understanding.
[00:14:02] Jeff Dillon: Yeah. Building and scaling a company comes with, I think, a lot of
milestones. The most meaningful ones are often tied to real impact on customers or teams,
communities.
What's been your proudest moment since launching Weightwell?
[00:14:18] Shannon Vander Muelen: The one that stands out for me, honestly, is the day that we got the
contract for University of Manitoba. It was our very first large customer back in 2020.
I remember getting the call one afternoon and almost fell off my chair. I was so thrilled. I couldn't
believe that they'd selected us. We'd only been around for probably even less than a year at that
point. That was a real moment that I'll never forget in our company. But then just last weekend, I
went to visit my son. He Goes to the University of Alberta, and I met his roommate. And his
roommate, the first thing he said to me is, oh, I used Waitwell on campus last week. You have to
go talk to financial aid advisors. And.
And that I love. I love getting feedback. You know, I used it last week and I didn't have to wait in
line, and I could, you know, I could sit in my car and listen to Jeff's podcast or whatever instead
of wasting time standing in line. That really thrills me. I love when I hear that we're actually able
to make people's lives just a little bit better, a little bit more enjoyable, give people back their
time. Time's precious.
[00:15:15] Jeff Dillon: Have you heard any stories where we will change an experience for a
student or someone that really surprised you?
[00:15:22] Shannon Vander Muelen: Well, actually, something kind of funny happened last week. So Whelo, in
addition to providing service analytics, service insights can also be customer facing. So end user
facing, so visitors can actually ask it. So visitors can arrive and instead of being presented with a
menu of five options for lines that they can join, can interact with it using real language. And so
we actually saw an interaction on a beta site where there's a. The student arrived and was really
frustrated and was expressing this to the AI agent, to Whelo, and Whelo actually was able to
give it the background information that it. That it needed. The end result was actually quite
sweet. The end result was, you know, oh, okay, now I understand it better. Thanks. Yes, please
do add me to the line.
So, you know, those are things that we don't often get to see because we're not in the student
service office or the government office, but because it was happening with the agent and in a
beta environment that we were looking at, we were able to see that interaction. So that was
really, really pleasant. But a lot of times, you know, what we hear from staff is that, you know, it
used to be harder to do this job because people would be frustrated when they got to the front of
the line. So by the time I'm, you know, and I have nothing to do with any of that, I can't make any
of that better. But they get to my counter and they're already in a bad mood. And so what we
hear is once we started using weight, well, we noticed that people were less frustrated and. And
so that service interaction started off on the better foot.
[00:16:46] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, I think organizations operate with assumptions about demand and
staffing and customer behavior until they finally start measuring service interactions and wait
times in a meaningful way. Once they start tracking wait times and service Interactions. What
insights typically surprise the leadership the most?
[00:17:05] Shannon Vander Muelen: Well, sometimes they will pick up on, you know, we talked about the sort
of the peaks and valleys of service demand and I think a lot of times they're approaching it kind
of anecdotally like oh, we know the first week of school is really busy, but once they start using
Weightwell, sometimes they'll identify other peaks and valleys that they weren't aware of. And
then also once they have it in black and white, they've got the data, they've got the graphs,
they're able to make some better decisions about how to allocate staff. And so we do hear about
being able to make a business case for hiring more student workers to offset some of the high
demand periods, for example.
[00:17:39] Jeff Dillon: I think we all hope that we invest in new tools to improve service speed
and efficiency, but it often doesn't always translate into better experiences. I've seen what's the
biggest mistake organizations make when they try to modernize student experiences or reduce
wait times.
[00:17:58] Shannon Vander Muelen: I think sometimes moving too quickly and not taking the time to have
those conversations, particularly I think with staff, but also with students as well and surveying
them to find out what they really want.
I was at ISSP in November and one of the things that the ISSP conference does that I really love
is the student panel where they bring in the students and they ask for their viewpoint about about
student service operations.
And some of the insights that they have were just the simplest things, like if you're going to send
me a text, use my name or if it's really important, put it in all caps. They're very simple things but
if you don't ask what matters to them, then you don't know. So I think taking the time to really do
genuine discovery into all of the stakeholders perspectives is really important.
[00:18:47] Jeff Dillon: I really believe that strong customer experiences don't really happen by
accident. They usually reflect values, the habits and the expectations that leaders are building
into their teams every day. How do you build a team culture that reflects your passion for
customer experience excellence?
[00:19:09] Shannon Vander Muelen: That's a really interesting question because it is what Waitwell does.
Waitwell was built to deliver a better customer experience, but that really does carry through how
we've organized our team as well. So as I mentioned before, we believe in that single point of
contact for service. And so when a new school comes on, they're assigned an account manager
and that person builds out their workflow, tests it with them, implements, does is responsible for
the training and is their central point of contact whenever they want to you know, make a major
change. We give people the keys of the castle. They, they don't have to go through us if they
want to change the text in a text template or whatever. But we're also really there to support
them. But one thing that we've done that I think has been a real source of success for us is that
our support team and our development team are very closely meshed. They meet weekly and
that gives our development team a chance to hear firsthand when we've rolled out new features.
How are people actually using it? What are they saying about it? What do they like? What do
they not like? A lot of the innovation within our platform has really been driven by our customers.
So like even Whelo, for example, what I was talking about with being able to, to query the
database with real language and ask it questions like, hey, when should we close for half a day?
Or how do I improve staff efficiency? Or whatever, that came from our customers who said, like,
yeah, your reports are great, but it takes a really long time for me to go pull all of these reports
and then put it into a format that my leadership wants. And so that's where we realized, oh, okay,
this is a place where AI could really help. Real language would make a big difference here. We,
we're not a solution that's looking for a problem. We always try to be, you know, to be focused
on that problem and making sure that we're developing a solution that solves a real problem.
[00:20:55] Jeff Dillon: You started touching on this with AI a little bit, but I think we're all shifting
more towards digital. There's no one debating that we're data informed. We expect data driven
decisions and experiences. With AI and automation starting to play a larger role in how colleges
manage demand and personalize supply support, how is the student service delivery evolving on
higher ed campuses? How does, how do waywell address those trends around AI automation
and where is it critical to keep a human in the loop?
[00:21:25] Shannon Vander Muelen: You know, I think that's a really interesting question. I see a huge range. I
think it really depends on the school. You know, like, for example, I think a lot of schools are
really looking for, we want students to find the answer on the website first. If they can't find the
answer on the website, then we want them to use the chatbot. If the chatbot doesn't help, then
let them chat with a real person. And if that doesn't work, then have them come in. We hear that
a lot. That's sort of the efficiency model that they're looking for. Where they really want to only
have students talking to a real human when they're not able to find their own answer. So they're
really sort of trying to build that self sufficiency. But then on the other hand, we hear other
schools that are like, no, we want to get back that connectedness. We want people to come in,
you know, our leadership is saying, make popcorn, have bowls of candy on the counter, like
encourage people to come in. Incent students to come into the school student service center
because we want them there in person. We want to have that human interaction. So I think it
really depends on in the school where they're at, what their approach to student retention is,
what the leadership really values. I really see both sides. And the great news for Waitwell is that
we can really do a job, a great job of both things. WH can really help with the help students to be
self sufficient and find those answers online as much as they can and not take up a real person's
time. But we also do a really great job of connecting students to a real person.
[00:22:41] Jeff Dillon: Well, I love that perspective. And tell us now, Shanna, what's next for
Waitwell and what keeps you personally excited about the future?
[00:22:51] Shannon Vander Muelen: Well, I think what's next for Waitwell? Like I said, you know, we have
always, from day one, really tried to be a solution that's focused on solving a real problem. We
don't develop technology just because it's fun or it's cool, or we think this is how people should
use technology.
We really try to be very close to the people who are using our solution and understand what kind
of problems they have and how they're using our solution and get insights from them on how it
could be a little bit better. So, you know, as much as we're rooted in that, we are really excited
about the potential for AI where it makes sense to actually make service better. What we're very
committed to is really staying true to that core value, which is, you know, we exist really to make
services better for everybody, whether it's a student or a citizen.
What was the second half of your question?
[00:23:37] Jeff Dillon: I'm just, what are you personally excited for?
[00:23:40] Shannon Vander Muelen: Yeah, I get so excited to see the list. We have flags on our, in our, one of
our meeting rooms from schools that are using weight well, and I think it's around 50 now.
We don't have 50 flags yet, but I think it's around 50 schools. And you know, there's so many
more, you know, small schools, large schools. So I get really excited about thinking about all the
students that are getting getting a chance to use waitwall to make their waiting experience better
on campus and all the things that they might be doing with that time. Hopefully they're reading
the classics.
[00:24:09] Jeff Dillon: Great Shannon. Well, it was really great to have you on the show. We will
put links to Shannon's LinkedIn profile as well as you find way well on EdTech Connect and I
want to thank you for being on. That was a really fun conversation. Shannon.
[00:24:25] Shannon Vander Muelen: Thanks Jeff. I enjoyed it.
[00:24:27] Jeff Dillon: As we wrap up this episode, remember EdTech Connect EdTech is your
trusted companion on your journey to enhance education through technology.
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