Ep. 132: Liza Rodewald, Founder & CEO of Instant Teams, Innovating Customer Experience Through Military Spouses

Leaders, what if I told you there was a secret talent pool that could revolutionize customer experience? Instant Teams, a CX talent platform specializing in military spouse talent, is that secret solution. Founded by Liza Rodewald and Erica McMannes, Instant Teams is a talent marketplace that enhances customer experience teams by integrating military spouses from their extensive talent community of over 68,000 members across the entire customer experience lifecycle.

For industry leaders, here is what’s incredible about Instant Teams - they go beyond a freelance talent marketplace and use freelance models to revolutionize a core business problem - customer experience. Liza and Erica could have easily created a self service talent marketplace that matches military spouses with employers similar to the traditional marketplace model. Instead, they went above and beyond, understanding that a self service marketplace wouldn’t work in this case. 

For customer experience leaders, Instant Teams enables a superior customer experience, specifically: 

• 24/7 coverage with US support staff, since military spouses are all over the world

• High retention, with 7.5% churn compared to the industry standard of 30%+

• High customer satisfaction, since military spouses have a wide range of experiences, enabling them to connect with people across vasts parts of the population

• High quality customer experience use cases, for example customer demo’s, cyber fraud detection, and booking a flight

In this episode, we’ll dive into Liza’s journey, the evolution of Instant Teams, the development of customer experience, and her insights on the future of work.

We’ll understand: 

• Why the traditional Business Process Outsourcing model and staffing processes are broken, and how a remote first solution like Instant Teams doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but rather innovates a better solution.

• Why Instant Teams didn’t build a self service freelance marketplace, instead opting for a talent platform that leverages part time, full time, and team creation capabilities.

• How customers scale from interested to fully embedded customer experience teams through Instant Teams 3 step process.

Some key takeaways:

1. Liza and Erica were uniquely positioned to see this challenge and connect the dots of military spouse capabilities to customer experience.

2. While remote work has been getting slack in the news, remote is a powerful force if harnessed correctly. In Instant Teams case, this level of customer experience wouldn’t be possible through default in person office environments. But it requires founders like Liza and Erica who have both felt the pain, are in the military spouse environment, and know how to combine the right people, processes, and technology to leverage remote work within a customer experience environment.

3. Instant Teams uncovers a massive business model innovation that all freelance platforms can have. In this episode we call it the ‘SaaS-ification’ of talent platforms. 

4. Customers are Partners, and Instant Teams provides a Partner experience and relationship rather than being another vendor.

5. FOUNDER MAGIC - what is it? Why is it MAGIC?