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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#661: Creating a world-class student experience with Mike Milliron, IMG Academy
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Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
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Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.
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Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
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Strayer University Announcer
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Podcast Host Intro/Outro (Greg Kilstrom)
Welcome to Season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and martech platforms as as we explore marketing technology, AI, e commerce and whatever's next for the Omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. Now onto the show.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
We are recording live at Qualtrics X4 in Salt Lake City and seeing and hearing all about how to create and enable amazing customer and employee experiences. If the student experience is the heart of a world class academy, what happens when you realize there's room for improvement? And what do you do about it? Today's guest is Mike Milian, Chief Operating Officer at IMG Academy Campus. Mike has played a key role in reimagining and transforming the student experience at IMG Academy, aligning student and employee experiences to create a seamless, enriching environment for everyone on campus. We're going to dive into how they created integrated feedback loops, broke down internal Barriers and. And shifted the entire campus culture toward an experience first approach. Mike, welcome to the show.
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Mike Milian, COO at IMG Academy
Thank you. It's great to be here. Appreciate you having me.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Great. And great to do this in person. It's always good to be able to meet. I do so many remote interviews here. Good to be able to see a face to face.
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Mike Milian, COO at IMG Academy
Absolutely. And thanks again.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Yeah. So before we dive in, definitely want to hear about the story here, but why don't you give a little background on your role at IMG and a little bit about your background.
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Mike Milian, COO at IMG Academy
Sure. As you mentioned, my role is chief operating officer for our on campus operation that we have located in Bradenton, Florida. So we have a little over 1100 staff members there. We have a lot of tremendous experiences that we provide for our students, for our campers. As you know, we have a world renowned boarding school, 1500 student athletes from around the world, robust youth camp program with probably 10,000 campers that come to train with us and really have a great kind of training destination home for tournaments and events and pro sports. So my role is to somehow work with the team, empower the team to make all of that great and seamless and as we like to say, unrivaled. So that's a little bit about me. I've been at the academy. What I will say is that I've been there for basically 13 years and have had the opportunity to really start from an entry level type role and work my way up to where I am today as a chief operating officer. So I think that that has helped me really kind of understand the business from the bottom up and the top down and as I today, from the inside out as well.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Yeah, yeah, well. And I would just say, I mean, being able to work your way from entry level to coo, I think that says something about the organization as well. So.
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Mike Milian, COO at IMG Academy
Yeah, yeah, that's without a doubt. And that's one of the things I love about IMG Academy. With everything that we do, a lot of those elements that I had mentioned earlier and our desire and continued growth, you can have multiple careers and never leave the organization, especially with how complex our operation is. So I've been the lucky beneficiary of that. I timed it just right as we began to grow and must have done some things okay. To continue to earn opportunities. But I'm so grateful for that and it's fun to work at a place where you know that that can happen.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Yeah, yeah, that's great. So, yeah, let's dive in here. And I want to start with this idea of integrating customer experience and employee experience. And we all, we've heard lots about the importance of each sort of individually, but one of your core priorities was integrating the two of them. And so why was it so important to improve both at once? And how did you approach it?
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Mike Milian, COO at IMG Academy
Yeah, great question. And I think for us is really a part of our experience commitment. Overall, as we look at experience at IMG Academy, we really bucket it as campus experience. And it doesn't matter who come through. We're a gated campus, so we always say it doesn't matter who comes through the gates. If it's an employee member, if it's a teacher, if it's a student, if it's a camper, if it's a parent, it doesn't matter. We want to have unrivaled campus experiences. We also know we have really great people. Our people at IMG Academy is what makes us who we are. And we made a commitment when we were really going to begin our journey of creating these unrivaled experiences that EX and CEX had to be married and they had to be equally attended to. And we've remained committed to that because we know that happy customers equal happy employees. Happy employees equal customers. We felt like it was just the right thing to do and we're proud of the work that we've done in that space.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Yeah. So maybe to dive in a little deeper on that, what exactly did improving the employee experience mean for your staff and how did that influence then the student experience?
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Mike Milian, COO at IMG Academy
Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think there's a number of areas for our staff that was, I'd almost say low hanging fruit. Great opportunities for us to win. We created a program called Mission ucx. It's all about delivering unrivaled campus experiences. And a big part of that was how do we make it cool to care for employees? And it was, the answer was actually really simple. Let's celebrate all the great things our employees are doing. Let's provide opportunities for our employees to have a voice and a seat at the table irregardless of where you are in the organization to drive improvement in the employee experience. And let's find ways for actually our staff members to celebrate one another and to give each other high fives. Because we found, and candidly I found this through some of my own experience, when you get a high five from a colleague or a peer, it just means something different. It feels a little bit different than maybe getting it from a boss. And I felt that a few times I even Got some high fives. And I was like, wow, this is great. So those were some of the areas that we really kind of focused on, making sure they were celebrated, making sure they're recognized, making sure there's a voice at the table for improvement. And we've been able to see some gains now as it relates to our employee nps. And we're heading in the right direction. We're not where we want to be, but we're heading in the right direction. Direction, which is great.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Yeah. Yeah. And so back to that point of making it cool to care. I mean, I think that's. It's underrated in the sense of, you know, I have a hypothesis at least that I think even, you know, there's the people that work to live and the people that live to work. And so it takes a mix of both. But even the people that, you know, work to live, they still want to find some value in their work, and they want to know that what they did eight hours a day, sometimes more, is of some kind of value. Right. So how, I mean, is that. Is that kind of what that's predicated?
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Mike Milian, COO at IMG Academy
I would say that's dead on. And the thing about making it cool to care, first of all, with us and our brand and who we are and what we do, if you know anything about IMG Academy, now, granted me, this is a biased opinion. We are cool, and what we do is cool, and what we do is innovate, and what we do is special. So if we're going to improve experience, it better be cool to be. To be a part of it. But we have found with our staff, our staff is so purpose driven. Like, our purpose of empowering student athletes to win their future literally resides in the chest and the heart of a lot of our staff. So it was actually easy for them to get on board and to see that their work was making a difference. And as we kind of ramped up transparency and alignment, it made it a lot easier. And then the momentum just started kind of building across the masses of our staff.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, culture change or any type of organizational change is driven. It's certainly driven at the front lines, but also driven by leadership example. And people are looking to those leaders to kind of walk the walk. How did you ensure that leaders were modeling the behavior that was needed to drive this kind of transformation?
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Mike Milian, COO at IMG Academy
Yeah, I mean, first of all, like, I'm not naive. We're lucky. In addition to myself being in the role that I'm in, but also our CEO, Brent Richard, like We're all in on experience, and I know not every organization has that buy in from the top. So in addition to ourselves, our senior leadership team is as well. So we knew that if we were going to ask our staff to put experience at the center of everything that they do, we needed to model it. And so we came up with some commitments. And the commitments were simple, they were clear, and they held us accountable. And it was everything from initiating customer callbacks. So sometimes when there's not a great customer experience, the executive doesn't always call them back. We wanted to make sure that that happened to actually feel and understand the pain points that existed and see if we could learn from it and act. We have an awesome executive shadow program. So we created a program where it's almost like Undercover Boss if you think of it. Our executive team would go and spend a half a day in various departments with the frontline staff to really get a feel and understanding for what are the pains of our staff. Where are we seeing that we can improve the experience for our staff while also seeing what it's like from the customer vantage point as well? That program has led to a number of changes, a number of investments, which then directly makes our staff feel good because it's like someone's noticing and they're listening and they're learning. So we have a lot of commitments in addition to those two. We do executive huddles. And so it was important for us to model, and we knew that was the only way it would actually work. If we didn' model, it wasn't going to work and we were going to lose credibility and we're going to lose trust, which we are not going to do.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
You know, another component in addition to the leadership component is just the idea of disjointed or disconnected. You know, silos are often talked about and for a reason. Right? Because they exist. You know, even departments that are doing great work but doing great work independently need some more cross, you know, across campus. In this case, coordination. What were some of the. Maybe start with some of the challenges. What were some of the biggest barriers to breaking down some of those silos?
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Mike Milian, COO at IMG Academy
It's a great question. And I would say some of the barriers that needed to be kind of broken down or we needed to push through honestly, was just building the muscle of making sure that this is how we now operate. Our staff, as I mentioned, our staff has great people, great intentions. Everyone wants to be great in what we do, but sometimes the muscle memory wasn't there of actually engaging a broader audience and Engaging people, as you say, from across campus. Because then there would be situations that we found where there are already great efforts being actioned in one area. The other area wasn't sure that that was happening. So sometimes one plus one didn't always equal two. But man, if we could bring everyone together and align on the initiatives and really converge our go processes to make meaningful changes, we could amplify all those efforts. And one plus one can now equal three. And then once individuals started seeing that and realizing it and feeling, it became a heck of a lot easier. Now we're a little bit spoiled. We started an experienced team led by Lauren Burkle, who's on our team and does a tremendous job. And her role and her team actually forced and required teams to come together through journey design and through different work groups as well. So that really kind of helped build that muscle much more quickly. Quickly than maybe some organizations can. So that was a little bit of our secret sauce there.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Yeah. So having that experience role was actually integral to.
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Mike Milian, COO at IMG Academy
Without a doubt.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Because, I mean, sometimes that can be sort of a. Almost attacked on thing to help and it can be incredibly helpful. But so that was kind of at the. That experience role is at the center of things.
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Mike Milian, COO at IMG Academy
Yeah, that was at the crux of it. So that's where our experience work, all of our customer needs, customer journeys, insights, everything as it related to experience enhancement. It all was born out of the. That team worked cross functionally across academics, athletics operations. It really didn't matter which group, but they really were the magnet, if you will, that brought everyone together and started getting people used to working together and having conversations and being honest with one another and aligning on what they're going to work on. So that's been a catalyst for us and allowed us to kind of realize some results much faster than anticipated.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Yeah, yeah. And so how does some of that breaking down those silos translate to the student experience then? What have you seen?
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Mike Milian, COO at IMG Academy
Well, the hope is. And what we've seen is directly, because what we've seen is at the end of the day, all the work that we're trying to do is with the campus experience at the center of the discussion. So when we bring groups together and we work cross functionally and we break down silos, it's with the intent of improving the experience of the student or the parent or whoever it may be. But it's all about the experience. So we've been able to see some gains in that regard. We've been able to align work that was maybe already occurring and now it's like, wow, we didn't know that was in place because it was occurring in the silo. Open it up and it's like it's got some momentum that's built on that. So we've seen a number of examples that have come to life to improve the student experience. And I talked about this a little bit earlier. One example is something that we call an idp. So an individualized development plan for every student athlete. We have one. And what that is is it's really a plan that aligns the organization on that particular student and their growth and their development. So personalized experience at scale, we have 1500 students that was born out of a lot of the work that came from that cross functional work. So now academics, athletics and other areas can feed into that. And it's a much richer experience for that student, for that parent because it's so personalized to their development and has a plan in place.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, and that kind of brings back to those teams doing great stuff, but siloed, you don't quite get that one plus one equals three until they are aligned. Certainly people and process are a big part of that. What role does software and technology and data and understanding play in this?
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Mike Milian, COO at IMG Academy
So a massive part. And we've made a lot of progress in that regard. But one of the first things that we did, which was I think very, very powerful, was the ability to, as we say, democratize the information that we get from the insights. So years ago, if I turn back the clock, two and a half years, we had, you know, a quote unquote listening program that was in place. It wasn't great, but one of the biggest issues with the program that we had in place is staff didn't have access to the information. So just through new technology, a new listening platform, we were able to train nearly 100 staff on campus to be able to access that information in real time. So that that small piece of technology has brought a lot of efficiency in our regards to now. It's not our staff putting together reports every single week or various levels of them. Staff is actually empowered to go in there, see it for themselves, realize it, and then act on it as quickly as possible. So that's certainly one piece of it for sure.
- [16:54]
Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Yeah, yeah. So I mean you've got leadership, support from the top, you've got enabling people to see the data in real time and the data that they need and then supported by that CX kind of in the center. It sounds like a pretty good system there.
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Mike Milian, COO at IMG Academy
So that's exactly what it is. We have a very powerful system that has everything that you mentioned. It has customer experience items in the middle, employee experience items, all under this umbrella of what we call Mission ucx. And it just feeds off one another. It's a nice little flywheel and once it gets spinning, you can do some really cool stuff pretty quickly.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Absolutely. So how do you look at measuring success in this?
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Mike Milian, COO at IMG Academy
It's a great question. Right now there's a few areas. I mean, you can look at NPS and you can look at our scores across our different journeys or different experiences. We have is one area and I think that directionally starts to show where you're going. You start to look at business results as well and start to see how are we doing on referrals, how are we doing on customer retention, you know, what do those metrics look like? But also I think a big part of it is, you know, just looking at the work that we're doing and making sure that there's efficiencies and there are alignment across the org, because those types of things will also help drive employee experience, which will help drive employee retention and satisfaction as well, which we know kind of feeds into it. So there's a number of different metrics across both the employee side and the customer side that we look at as far as success in this, in this area.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Well, and I would imagine then looking at them first, aligning CX and Ex and then looking at them holistically, you're able to see, I mean, there's revenue gains obviously from new customers, but there's also savings from employees either not doing redundant work or doing the right thing at the right time. So, you know, so there's savings and revenue gains, right?
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Mike Milian, COO at IMG Academy
Without a doubt. And within that, what we have found is it's super interesting, we're not fully there yet, but I'm on this mission where I think we can unlock it is if we through those efficiencies and that alignment, what does that then unlock for the other talented staff member that now has a little bit extra bandwidth and can go and attack different areas to really drive impact. And there are probably areas that they're passionate about. So there's all sorts of really nice byproducts as a result of doing this that may at times maybe seem hidden, but they come to life and they ultimately, I think, end up driving that employee experience.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Yeah, absolutely. So, as we wrap up here, two questions for you. First, just want to. I know we're not quite done with the event yet, but what's been a highlight so far at Qualtrics X4.
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Mike Milian, COO at IMG Academy
The energy. You know, this is my first time that I've been here, so just the opportunity to be in and around the energy and the commitment and also the forward thinking, you know, some of the sessions I've been able to sit in on, it's just really kind of inspiring and gets you, gets your mind going. So I would say that that's been the personal highlight for me.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Love it.
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Mike Milian, COO at IMG Academy
Love it.
- [19:55]
Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Well, and last question, I asked this to everybody. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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Mike Milian, COO at IMG Academy
Great question. And I would say for me, what I try to do is I try to be super intentional of having conversations with I don't want to call them random staff members, but various staff members that I know across our organization. One of the beauties of being with the team for as long as I have been. I know there's a few people that think differently and I love just to pick their brain and I know how well researched they are and I know how creative they are. So I really like to tap into team members and I have a placeholder, to be honest with you, on my calendar to make sure that I don't lose it, but just to listen and learn and talk and maybe provoke some conversations to see what the reaction is. And it helps me kind of generate my own thoughts, which then leads to maybe some learning or some additional discussion. So that would be something small that I try to do in my job on a daily basis just to remain agile. It also helps me really kind of keep a pulse on what's occurring across our org. So there's multiple benefits, but that would be one thing I'd highlight.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Yeah, love it. Well, again, I'd like to thank Mike Miliron, Chief operating officer at IMG Academy campus, for joining the show here at Qualtrics X4 in Salt Lake City. You can learn more about Mike and IMG and Qualtrics by following the links in the show Notes.
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Podcast Host Intro/Outro (Greg Kilstrom)
Thanks again for listening to the Agile brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagilebrand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me. If you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.greggkilstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
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