Meet the team: Ella Hill, Implementation Manager

Brands like Yumpingo are a single, unified entity, but behind those brands are multiple different people performing roles that play to their strengths. 

To help you understand the people behind the Yumpingo brand, we’re grabbing a fresh coffee, stacking the cookies high and finding out what makes them tick.

This month, we caught up with Ella Hill, our Implementation Manager.

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So Ella let’s start with the easy questions! How long have you worked in the hospitality industry? 

I’ve worked in hospitality for over 10 years in roles that cover everything from server to general manager level. This helps with understanding why clients come to us (what they realize they're looking for from our survey insights and what they need that they haven't realized yet) and the shorthand of hospitality. I recognise that hospitality workers are time poor and will need clear support implementing a new service, which informs me on the best approach to helping them. 

I’m always on the lookout to identify causes of friction and mitigate them. This may be creating a simplified project board for the customer, clear timelines, getting ahead on partner integration where possible or a host of other things with the client's specific requirements. 

What does the implementation team get up to, day-to-day?

Bigger picture stuff? We increase the value customers can get from our software and consultancy support from the start of their journey with Yumpingo to increase the number of happy guests. 

And my role is to get customers from day one to live as soon as possible to create those happy guests. 

Sales have worked hard to show them the outcomes they could achieve with Yumpingo and I want them to get to their goals and see the value in the data with the least amount of effort and time taken on their part as possible. 

Describe your strategy for getting a client live, once they’ve decided to use Yumpingo?

The one thing you don’t want your clients to experience when going live with software is any delays which can effect the energy and effort they also put towards making Yumpingo a success in their business.

In the past 2 years since I joined Yumpingo, I've made that  a focus of the onboarding process. We’ve looked at every aspect of what it takes to get someone live and the things we have learnt can be summarized as;

• Make it simple
• Make it clear 
• Make it achievable 
• Get everyone involved 

What does this look like in practice?

People working in hospitality, and in particular the restaurant trade, have a lot going on in their business. Rather than requiring them to make a lot of decisions from the outset we use our own experience. Yumpingo has been making more happy guests for over seven years now and we have set up a large mix of restaurants and groups. And we have learnt quite a few best practices along the way.  

That means we can take all of that experience and our knowledge of what works for other clients and apply it so that they get the best out of our product. This is from the best questions to ask (in our 1-minute surveys), how to brief the serving team and how to display the review. 

We can walk clients through the process, but also take some of the options out of their hands. We don’t want to overwhelm anyone with options at the start of the user journey with Yumpingo. 

How many projects have you worked on in your time here?

I have been part of over 250 projects at Yumpingo, so I’ve learnt a lot!

What keeps a project moving and delivering the customer’s needs?

Focusing on actions not blockers keeps the momentum of a project going and keeps it feeling positive. Timelines tend to be easier to keep when you look for how any blockers can be worked around and what needs to be done to keep things on track. 

Realistic timeframes from the outset mean no time delays, as well. From our experience we know at the start of a project how long it will take. We’ve created scheduled task boards based on this to keep everything on track and highlight if something is slipping. 

You have to be clear and straightforward with clients, then?

We do. Clarity in what we need to get a client live from the outset and the timeline we need it in will always guarantee project success. By setting this expectation from the start not only does it prevent delays as clients begin to get the information needed, it also stops things feeling like too much effort because they know what is coming and we aren’t dropping any surprises on them. 

Some of my actions may be in the background, but I’m continuously checking in with our team and the client to help maintain momentum and enthusiasm for the project. This can sometimes be as simple as ensuring nothing becomes too much of a burden (nobody wants the new tech to start dragging down their productivity) by trying to take anything away from clients that we can, keeping their effort low.

What are the additional requirements that some clients need?

We get a mix of needs and timeframes that we’re always ready to accommodate. No two clients are the same because everyone builds their business differently. For example: with an additional location we can get you live in 30 minutes when needed. But we tend to work on a 4 week turnaround from completion of sale to go-live. When I first started at Yumpingo, this was around 8 weeks. 

What’s changed from when you started working in hospitality to now?

My priority has remained on delivering the best guest experience. It’s just that I do it through a different method to the time I worked directly in venues!

If I had to say what one thing has changed, it would be the industry itself. Tech solutions like Yumpingo are doing a great job to deliver better guest satisfaction. Obviously I would say that!

But I keep the client at the core of what we are doing and always want to get the best result for them. We want to see our hard work pay off by reviews flowing in and the client to really see the value in the product from the start.