ResEdChat Ep 84: Creating Moments of Magic for Roompact Schools with Matt Unger

Dustin Ramsdell:
Welcome back everybody to Roompact’s ResEdChat podcast. If you’re new to the show, every other week we feature a variety of topics of interest to hired professionals who work in and with university housing, resident’s life, residential education, whatever you might call it. But every once in a while we do kind of these special episodes, just sort of internal with folks on the team talking about what kind of work is happening, new things that are going on at Roompact, just digging deeper in the company, the culture, the things that Roompact does and cares about.
So kind of came up with a sort of clever topic, I feel like, for this one of creating moments of magic. I think just the way that sort of a community supports each other, validates each other, cares about each other, I feel like all kind of lumps together in something like this idea of creating moments of magic. But I won’t steal your thunder, Matt, the fearless leader of Roompact here to talk about this topic here. So I’m curious though, that was my take on this topic, but how would you define moments of magic and then we’ll dig into more detail of how that shows up in the Roompact world.

Matt Unger:
There’s a good story I read about from Disney. So there was a family in Disney World and the family, it was like a family of four or something, and they all went and got scoops of ice cream and it’s probably, what, like $10 a scoop these days. So one of the little kids walked away from the ice cream stand, took a lick of the ice cream cone, and the ice cream immediately fell onto the ground and the kid started crying. There was a huge line behind the family, so they couldn’t get back in line to talk to them and ask if they could get a new scoop.
But the family turned around and there was a cast member, someone who works at Disney, there with a new scoop for the kid. And what happened was Disney just has so many people working around and they’re trained so well that someone noticed that there was an issue and it was a lower level staff member, it wasn’t a manager or anything, and they noticed that there was a problem. It was going to be pretty cheap to resolve, so they just walked right into the ice cream booth, scooped a new scoop, and gave it right to the family.
And it was significant because they didn’t need to get approval from anyone. They knew that that was the kind of company culture that they were aiming for. And I think that little story embodies kind of what we’re going for with a moment of magic because that family, the emotions that that family felt, they will remember for a very long time. They had a really low low and then someone brought them back up. They didn’t need to ask for it. It just happened and they’re going to remember that for a while.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, and I guess real quick, I feel like there’s portions of that, like you said, they didn’t need to go through a whole approval process, but it’s also that idea of the empowerment or sort of the responsibility, because there could be that idea of, well, yeah, there’s a bunch of people working in any area at any given time. You could imagine that there’s a scenario where somebody just is like, “I’m sure somebody else will take care of this,” or whatever, even though they might’ve had part of their training, saying, “Oh yeah, try to create moments of magic, help people have a great experience.”
So is there an aspect of that I guess, just to sort of zero in on it, that idea that you’re really trying to empower people to take action and feel responsibility to be like, “I can take care of that really quickly, cheaply, and I’m just going to do it and not assume somebody else is going to”?

Matt Unger:
A hundred percent. The empowerment is such an important piece. You cannot micromanage. You have to trust the people that you work with, and it has to be truly a part of your values and your culture as a company for it to work. And when we think about it, we had always kind of done it at Roompact, but we never really put it to paper. It’s now one of our official values of we aim to make moments of magic. But before that, it was just something we did.
And I think the way that we kind of quantify it internally, it’s hard to quantify because it’s more of a feeling than it is anything you can measure, but there’s a few things that you can do to create the moment of magic. One is exceptional service, so you can go above and beyond when someone is using your product or working with you in a way that they wouldn’t have expected.
Then another one is gifts. If you know that someone recently had a new child or someone is moving to a new job or something like that and you send them a gift, no words spoken, it just shows up, that can really make an impact. And then there’s kind of a third hidden one that I would consider, and that is product design. So you can create little almost Easter eggs in your product where a specific subset of people would say, “Oh man, that is really cool that they did that in their product.” I think that’s pretty specific to software like ours. I don’t think you can do that in all companies, but it can be very impactful.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, that’s what I think is interesting is part of that is that’s why the moments of magic is a very good descriptor. It’s the flourishes. It’s sort of that idea of when you do a certain thing, just the way that it pops up or there’s a little joke or whatever, it’s just, “Oh, it’s fun.” It’s sort of recognizing, like you said, a certain subset. It’s like, “Hey, you just did a thing that’s really cool.”
I guess I know sometimes, because I think you’d maybe see this most in customer service or hospitality or something is that they try to create those little Easter eggs if it’s like, oh, in your room, maybe, yeah, they put a little… Certain resorts or whatever, they put little towels and shapes or if there’s different things like that, it’s like those flourishes.
But it’s the idea of I guess all of this feels like… We did an episode a while back that was talking to somebody about this Disney philosophy like customer service, but this is starting to get a little bit more tactical, which I think is good, that idea of, “Okay, we want to train and empower and sort of reinforce with our team to take that responsibility to address”… I guess we’ll try to keep it within the sort of software world, but if there’s a bug or some sort of issue or problem or question, everybody feels willing and able to address those things and do it as it’s appropriate in maybe a fun way or authentic and just genuine human way because those are ways that you show a level of care and you show just an empathy, show respect and just all those sort of things.
But I guess because this is sort of my second question, that idea of what makes this so important when it comes to the Roompact experience, clearly, I guess, yeah, it was part of your thinking and it was sort of an intangible thing for a while, but I guess observing where it’s always a small team and just those sort of things that you felt like it was just more important to do because you were small or just what was that sort of thinking of why it felt like it was a bedrock thing that eventually is now a foundational company value?

Matt Unger:
I mean, the fact that we’re small definitely I think encourages it because when we are competing with a much larger company, a much larger company will typically have a very corporate environment where they almost keep their partners at arm’s length and they have more of a transactional relationship. And that was never something that we were or are interested at Roompact. We want to go all in. And really, we also have a very long-term view of Roompact. So I want to be working at Roompact for 10, 20, 30 more years and doing these little things makes it fun. The other route is the corporate route, and I think that’s just a little bit… It’s a lot boring. I’m not really interested in that.
A couple other important pieces for us are just the fact that when you do create a moment of magic, you’re creating a feeling and it’s easy to forget a lot of things when you’re working with a vendor. So it’s like, yeah, at the end of the day, we’re giving you a software product. That’s not sexy, that’s not necessarily cool. It’s a tool and you need to use the tool for your job and it better work. And that’s really probably what most people care about at the end of the day. But like you said, when you can add a little flourish, you’re adding this feeling, a certain moment in time that people can remember for a very long time. And I think that’s really important because I’ve experienced it with companies or people or friends or family, and those are the memories that stick out to me the most.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, I guess it’s even the thing of maybe they did not remember exactly what you did. It’s that notion of they’ll remember how you made them feel kind of thing and that idea of that being an important bedrock of just building durable relationships, which I think if it’s like, yeah, we recognize the dichotomy here of vendor and institution. That’s what the setup is here, but you would hope that it can be a true partnership and relationship and that sort of emotional piece, I guess, yeah, would be the driver that would enable these relationships to sort of last and be fruitful and impactful and all of that.
But yeah, I think because maybe I’ll just do this as sort of a brief follow-up too, but I think it gets to my next question too, but the idea of, well, the feeling is ultimately the most important thing that matters. If they feel cared for, they feel respected, they feel like they had a little bit of fun in an otherwise just sort of routine day or whatever, to me, that should hopefully help and motivate people to… It can be very small thing, that idea of like, “Oh, well I got to send everybody a gift or something, but what gift or does it have to be a big thing?”
So what’s your thinking on that of just the overarching, what the acts are, so the size of them or the shape of them? Just speak to that a little bit, then we’ll get into more just any specific examples you can think of, but just that notion of that might deter people or it’s like, “Oh, I feel it’s kind of daunting or it would make me anxious I guess of it feels like it might be bigger than me of these moments of magic.” What would you say, I guess, to somebody who’s feeling reticent in that way?

Matt Unger:
Well, first I’d probably say you can’t fake it. So if you’re feeling like it’s just not something that is coming to you, don’t worry about it. That means that that’s not kind of your moment to make. But then beyond that, it doesn’t have to be huge. Sometimes it could just be a text message or an email like, “Hey, happy birthday,” because I think especially in professional environments, people aren’t necessarily used to that. So if you can put a personal touch in a professional environment, I think that’s really helpful. So it could be something as small as an email or a text message, but then if you do want to get a little bit bigger, like sending a gift, we use the website Goldbelly.com to send folks food.
As far as gifts go, you never know what size somebody is, you never know what they’re going to be into or what they like. Generally people need to eat food. You might run into someone who has food limitations, and in that case hopefully you would know that, but just picking out some food for somebody and sending it to them I think can be a really good moment.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, that’s a good call out and we’ll put the link to that organization in the show notes. But yeah, that idea of everybody loves snacks, just the idea, even if it’s not… They’ll appreciate, again, they’ll get the feeling of like, “Wow, that was so nice that they sent it.” Even if it’s like I tried it and was like, “Not my thing,” it might be like, “Hey, maybe my spouse or my kids or my friend or whoever, I’ll bring it into the office, I’ll put it in the break room,” those sort of things, the idea of hopefully it’ll be eaten because people have to eat and a lot of people like a lot of things, so don’t even get too in your head about that and hopefully, yeah, if you have different mechanisms to know what folks might like, you can zero in that target a little bit easier.
But yeah, it’s send a card, that idea of like, oh, it’s handwritten, and that sort of has a little bit of different vibe, because that’s what I think is the idea of you send an email or whatever else, it’s calling it a birthday or like you said, a particular life milestone, a couple of sentences, and it’s personalized to that content. It’s like that’s the idea. It is brief, but it is personalized, and that doesn’t mean that it has to be a whole essay and sort of long, drawn-out thing or some huge expensive gift. It’s just that thinking of you. That’s why there’s the whole section of greeting cards and stuff where it’s just because and all that.
That’s that idea. It can be, like you were giving that example, it certainly can be triggered by something if it is in that idea of like, oh, a problem came up, like a bug in the software, I can squash that, and you might want to just make it clear if it came up because of a help desk ticket or something, that idea. Somebody felt empowered to address that and it was super quick and just being like, “Hey, I saw this and I just want to make sure I got it taken care of for you,” and all that.
They’ll understand obviously that that was a level of care and creating that moment of magic of like, “Oh my gosh, you addressed that so quickly and you just solved it and that made my day,” because I maybe was hitting a wall, I was trying to do something and I couldn’t, and now I can. This is great. I didn’t have to sit around twiddling my thumbs because I was trying to get this task done.
But yeah, any other examples, I guess? Because I feel this is part of it, I guess, getting into that kind of tactical piece of a moment of magic can be a lot of things, so hopefully just giving as many sort of anecdotal examples of the way that you’ve navigated this or seen it navigated elsewhere, hopefully can just start getting the juices flowing and people thinking and brainstorming. So any other things that you could think of that you’d want to share of examples of how you’ve done this for your customers or I guess seen elsewhere?

Matt Unger:
I think the first one, which is the most cookie cutter, is gifts. So like I said, sending food to someone. If you don’t know if they have any dietary limitations, you can send a gift card. But that requires you to have kind of a good rapport with your clients. So if you know that a client recently had surgery or like I mentioned earlier, had a baby or something like that, that’s a really easy, generally, moment for you to make one of these moments of magic. And I think it’s important not to give them a heads-up so it just shows up. It might show up in their email inbox, it might show up in person, but having it show up I think is significant for that. So that’s kind of the easier end of the spectrum.
You mentioned thank you notes earlier. Handwritten cards are very important. My colleague Paul Brown is really good at that. When we send an end of the year card to clients or a thank you note, it’s never going to be just like a plain card with our logo or something like that. It always has something like student affairs pop art or just something that’ll be cute to put on your desk. Our goal is that if we send you something, even if it’s a card, you’re going to want to put it on your desk because it’s neat.
Same goes with business cards. We don’t just have business cards. On the opposite side of our business card, we have what’s called a student affairs trading card with significant folks from the field of student affairs. So we don’t want to just create paper to have paper, whether it be business cards or notes. We want it to be kind of neat. That’s one.
And then another one is you mentioned bugs with coding or programming our software. There was a really cool moment at our last users meetup where it’s in October every year, and we met up, and Paul, my colleague, was presenting at the front of the room on a brand new feature that we had just released. And our engineers were sitting, our software engineers were sitting in the back of the room and as Paul’s demoing the software, we had one of our partners, someone from a partner institution raise their hand and say, “Hey, it’d be really great if you added this to the new feature.” And Paul said, “Yeah, that would be really great,” and he made eyes with our software engineers in the back and there was communication, nonverbal communication there. And by the time Paul was done presenting, the engineers added that feature and released it. So at the end of the presentation, Paul said, “Hey, great news. That was a great idea for this new feature, and we’ve already added it,” all within an hour or so. It was really neat.
And then I think kind of another one, which is more day in and day out, is that exceptional service piece, so going above and beyond what people are used to working in kind of your field. So for us, we’re compared to other software vendors, so folks work with software vendors quite often in higher education, and oftentimes you’ll need to submit a support ticket via email or something like that. And I think nowadays people are used to relatively slow turnaround times. If I send an email to a vendor, I hope to hear back by tomorrow, but there probably won’t be a resolution. It’ll be something like, “Oh, I’m reaching out to this person,” or, “I’m handing you off.” So it generally I think takes a long time to get a response and a resolution from a software vendor. And our goal is to just destroy all of those benchmarks and come in way under and answer people very fast and answer them effectively. So I think doing that really surprises people.
And there’s another kind of taking that even further. What you can do is if one of your clients is in a bind, I think that’s an option for a moment of magic. So one example is one of our clients, they’re in the middle of closings. It’s a Friday evening, it’s like 5:00 or 6:00 my time, and someone reaches out to me from a campus, well, they reach out to our help, our support email, and they say, “Hey, I just realized that we sent you the wrong data this morning, and all the data that is in Roompact is not right. We’re doing checkouts tomorrow morning starting at 8:00 AM and I don’t expect you to do anything because it’s too late. It’s totally my fault, but I hope by Monday you can get this resolved for me.”
And even if it’s a little bit late, if it ends up being 7:00, 8:00, 9:00 at night and it’s a Friday and I see something like that, I’m going to do it. I’m going to take care of it. I’m going to fix it, because that’s a moment where someone, one of our clients thought that because of their own actions, they were in a bind and it wasn’t really their fault. So we’re going to step in and we’re going to fix it even if it’s outside of business hours, even if it’s not expected, because when you do that, they’re going to remember it for a long time when you’re able to help get them out of a jam.

Dustin Ramsdell:
And part of my thinking with this is, I don’t know in that example how long necessarily it took you to fix that issue, but my mind was like, if I catch a request like that, if it’s going to take me five minutes or less, it’s a quick thing for me, but it’d be hugely helpful to them because again, I mean, it seems like they would’ve been pushing forward amidst that sort of discrepancy or whatever, but if it was something where they were hitting a wall, I know in my background there’s a lot of instances where somebody was trying to register for something and there’s an error and it’s like, “I can easily fix this for you, but you’re going to be stuck until somebody helps you.”
But what I’m thinking of too though is what you were talking about, how you’ve recognized that as a smaller company and being more nimble and flexible and all that, that was a big differentiator and that you’re really trying to harness that potential and everything. As we close out, because I think that’s the idea of if you as an organization, college, university or otherwise, can try to embody that as much as possible, imbue empowerment, that responsibility, that ability for directors of departments or whatever to do that versus it needing to go through however many levels of bureaucracy, that is I think a sort of a call to action is that sure, you might be a big organization, you might feel like, “Oh, well, we can never do anything like that,” but if you start to zero in on each department, they would know how to create those moments of magic in their context and try to support them in doing that. So if you want to elaborate I guess on an idea like that of just advice that you would have for others incorporating something like this into their practice.

Matt Unger:
I think I’ve more or less said them throughout our conversation, but just to sum them up, one of them is you can’t fake it. So you can’t just say, “This is now a value that we’re going to go for as a department.” I think you need to actually care about it. You actually have to want to do it. You actually have to feel it. This is a cool thing that you want to do. I don’t think that you can just write it in a handbook and it happens. And I think it’s important for leaders of a department or an organization to do it themselves, to set an example of this is what it’s going to look like.
Another piece is, I think you like have mentioned, Dustin, every team member, regardless of their standing in the organization, they have to have latitude to do something like this without worrying about negative repercussions. So from a departmental standpoint, you might say, “If there’s anything that you can do under $20 or under $50 or something like that, just do it and then we’ll talk about it later and I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
And then I think another one to pay attention to this is something that we need to pay attention to at Roompact is not to let something like this impede on your other values. And I say that almost in opposition to one of the examples I gave where I don’t want people at Roompact staying up at 8:00 or 9:00 or 10:00 PM looking at our support line so that they can make a moment of magic. I think it’s really important that work-life balance and all the other values that we or whatever department might have, they’re very important too. So there’s a little bit of a juxtaposition when it comes to creating these moments of magic with some of the other values that you might have, so just keep an eye on them.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, and I think that’s a helpful reminder because I think if there’s sort of a serendipity or this moment where, “Oh, I just happened to catch this, I’m recognizing it’d be hugely impactful for them, not take me too much time or cost that much money,” or whatever, because that’s what I think certainly maybe certain people or certain departments or certain organizations would need is like you said, okay, if it seems like we need to put a dollar amount to it so it helps people to get it right in their heads or amount of time of effort or whatever else, certainly that level of structure, that really actually can just depend on the context.
But yeah, I think that’s for me sometimes, I liked to always peek into my email inbox when I was working with students every once in a while just to quickly scan and certain things, it’s like, “They’re fine. This can wait,” other things, “I can take care of this quickly, and that’ll be hugely helpful to them.” So I think it’s kind of trying to hone that discernment and have, like you said, that value be authentically integrated into your organization.
And I think as time goes on, you’d hopefully be able to leverage different examples and say, “Hey, that one time that this guy on the team did this, that’s a good example.” This time was like, “Well, I don’t think we want to set that expectation that it’s required to be staying up at all hours and checking,” so that can be part of it is knowing if you can start somewhere and try to get some momentum and really reinforce it, you’ll start to, I think, bridge the gaps I guess in people’s understandings or if they’re feeling reticent about trying to do things, put the structure in where it makes sense and then start to uplift and celebrate the examples that you’re seeing from the team.
But yeah, I think it’s all really good advice and I think it’s a really good tangible manifestation of just like, “Oh, we pride ourselves in giving good customer service.” It’s like, “But how?” It’s like, and this is all really good examples of how, so appreciate you sharing those.

Matt Unger:
One last resource that I totally forgot to mention is the book Delivering Happiness. I think it’s by Tony say Hsieh of Zappos. So it talks about how Zappos did this in their early days before they were eaten up by Amazon. They had their own corporate culture. And that book has some really fantastic examples of how to do this while you are selling shoes over the internet. And that’s where we got a lot of our inspiration from as well.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, I feel like that one’s a classic one. It is, I guess, funny in hindsight where, well, yeah, they’re just part of the machine of Amazon now, but it’s like, sure, whatever, but how did they get to a point to be valuable enough or appealing enough for a company like that to be like, “We want you. We need that. That’s so great,” or whatever. And there’s other business school lessons to be learned about acquisitions and those sort of things.
But yeah, the idea that was something that was a huge kind of badge of honor for them, and there’s many other organizations I think that have taken inspiration over the years where that’s just a net benefit for us all that I think it is now such a powerful example that they were able to set and that they almost kind of have this playbook to follow and it’s great stuff.
But yeah, so we’ll link out to that. The other stuff that we mentioned, have ways to connect with you folks, maybe want to ask some follow-up questions and stuff in the description, show notes for the episode here, but just thank you so much for hanging out and sharing all that you did and obviously just helping to create moments of magic in the world. It’s great stuff and just appreciate your time.

Matt Unger:
Of course. Thank you, Dustin. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.