About

Phil Verghis

• University of New Hampshire, early 1990s

  

  My first job out of engineering school, in the early 1990s, was at the University of New Hampshire, doing tech support. I’d realized I liked working with people on actual problems, and tech support was where they came for help. I’d come to technology late, and once I saw what it could solve I was obsessed with it. From the start I was trying to build one of the first AI-powered knowledge bases to handle the questions that kept coming back. The technique was called case-based reasoning — one of the early AI approaches, where the system learned by matching new problems against the shape of problems it had already seen solved. What I learned in the process was that the technology wasn’t the hard part. The people and the process were.

  I scoured for tools and training on how to set up a help desk well. There was nothing: no books, no courses, no community of practitioners I could learn from.
  
  This was before the web was something you could search, before any of it was written down anywhere a junior engineer at a small state school could find.
  
  So I wrote what I needed myself, and I shared everything I learned with anyone who asked. Eventually I put it on BITNET, the network most universities ran on before the web. By the time I stopped updating it, over a decade later, it had spread to 103 countries.

  By the mid-1990s we’d also stood up one of the earliest online help desks at UNH.

• Duke University, late 1990s

  

  Duke was where the work got serious. The CIO I’d worked under at UNH had moved to Duke to lead IT across the campus and the medical center. The two sides had different priorities, processes and ways of buying technology, and groups within each had their own silos. Their leaders wanted to work together where it made sense, without pretending everyone did the same job. She asked me to help make that possible.

  The medical center needed information and support that could affect patient care. We used to say it bluntly: babies could die. Campus IT served faculty, staff and students on a different rhythm. We needed knowledge to travel across those boundaries, and people who were used to working separately to start working together.

  I created and ran DUNK, the Duke University Networked Knowledgebase, working with a partner in the medical center and people from across the university. The business and law schools eventually joined in. We built the knowledge, processes and self-service around emerging web-based tools, so a small frontline team could do much more. My view was that the people answering customers should have access to the same tools and information the specialists had, and more. Otherwise we were just passing the customer along.

  First-contact resolution, the share of problems the frontline solved without passing someone along, rose from 60% in September 1996 to 90% a year later. And in 1997, instead of students spending weeks after arriving trying to get connected, all incoming freshmen and most returning students were connected before classes began; the rest were connected within the first week. Two student employees did most of the work to streamline that process, at less than half the previous year’s cost.

  DukeNet, the campus network supporting those services, was a co-winner of a 1997 Network World User Excellence Award. A PC Week photoshoot had me dunking on Coach K’s court, with a strategically placed stepladder.

• Akamai, 1999

  

  A colleague from Duke had been turning down offers all through the dot-com boom — he wasn’t going to leave Duke. Then he did. He joined a small MIT spin-off nobody had heard of, called Akamai. A few months later he called and asked me to join him. I did. The IPO that October was one of the largest of the era — heady, for someone fresh out of academia.

  Until then I’d helped serve university communities. At Akamai, customers were paying us to keep their businesses working, while telecom partners around the world supplied the networks underneath us. We were building a new category of infrastructure, inventing the technology and the service operation while we ran them. I built Support and Service Delivery as customers arrived faster than we could onboard them. When I joined, the network had hundreds of servers. By that October it had grown to 1,475 across 55 networks, and by the end of 2001 to more than 13,500 across over a thousand networks in 66 countries. The work kept changing beneath our feet: more products, more customers, more partners, new countries and new kinds of problems. I was out of my depth in plenty of it, surrounded by very smart people who were figuring it out together.

  When 9/11 happened, we lost Danny Lewin, one of our co-founders and the mathematical mind behind the algorithms, on the first plane hijacked, before it hit the World Trade Center. The Founder’s Award I’d won the year before was renamed the Danny Lewin Award in his honor. In the weeks that followed, with the company under pressure and the telco networks we ran on collapsing, I was asked to take on Global Network, Operations, and IT on top of Service Delivery. I’d never run a global network before. The people who knew those technologies were the experts; I had to make their work add up with our commitments to customers and partners. I stayed through the dark days, helping the company shift its customer base from dot-com to enterprise and move toward profitability as part of the extended leadership team. The support team went on to win HDI’s 2004 Team Excellence Award for External Support.

  It was a profound crucible. I came out of those years with relationships, lessons and a way of seeing the work that I’ve carried with me since. Many of those colleagues have gone on to become CEOs of their own companies.

• On my own, 2004

  

  By January 2004, Akamai was stable and on a clear path to profitability. I left to start the first version of Verghis Group. I wanted to see what I could do without that kind of safety net underneath me.

  What I was thinking about in those years was the same thing I’d been working on at Duke and Akamai: what happens to work when it crosses between groups, and what changes when those groups own it together. I wrote about it. I spoke about it. The Ultimate Customer Support Executive came out in 2005. IBM commissioned a report based on it, designated me an IBM Thought Leader, and flew me around the world to talk about it.
  
  Engagements followed from the IBM talks, other conferences and workshops, and companies doing interesting work: Fortune 500s, mid-market companies, PE firms, higher education and startups.
  
  Invited talks and keynotes since then have taken me all over the US, to Canada, and to Europe (Finland, Italy, Sweden and the UK), the Middle East and Africa (Dubai and Egypt) and Asia-Pacific (Australia, India, Japan and New Zealand).

  Along the way I chaired HDI’s Strategic Advisory Board and worked closely with the founding teams of two companies in the field.

• Klever Insight, 2013

  

  In 2013 I closed the first version of Verghis Group and co-founded Klever Insight. The goal was software that put what we’d learned into the hands of leaders and service teams, so they could share knowledge, solve problems faster and keep improving the operation themselves.

  Our first two paying enterprise customers were UCOP and HPE, joined later by Salesforce. UCOP, which runs operations across the ten University of California campuses, Berkeley and UCLA among them, came in through a former Verghis Group client who’d moved over as a senior leader. HPE came in from a long relationship that ran back to those earlier consulting years. Both shaped the algorithms underneath what we were building.

  Early versions of ServiceDNA™ looked for patterns in working conditions. Time to Smile, which I first wrote about in 2017, gave us an outcome to work toward. And with peers in the field, we developed the Open Customer Metrics Framework to connect measures across functions to customer outcomes. Underneath all of it was the same idea: guiding, not grading.

  Klever ended in 2023 — didn’t quite survive COVID. The software never shipped as a product. Many of the principles have stayed.

  I’m grateful to the team who joined me, the investors, the board of advisors, and the early customers who took a chance on what we were building.

  During this period I joined the advisory boards of TSIA, Support Driven and TSANet.

• LuxCreo, 2023

  

  Mike, one of my friends and colleagues from the Akamai days, had become co-founder and CEO of LuxCreo — the 3D-printing platform behind medical-grade dental devices for same-day chairside printing of aligners, retainers, night guards, and surgical guides. Work that used to take a dental lab weeks. He brought me in as a consultant first; a few months later I joined full-time as inaugural Chief Customer Experience Officer.

  It was a chance to take responsibility for an operation again, this time in an industry I’d never worked in. The work spanned hardware, AI software, materials, and global logistics, pulling dental manufacturing out of specialized labs and into the dental practice itself, where it could happen chairside in a single appointment.

  We pulled every group together around one thing: Time to Smile. Engineering, manufacturing, logistics, sales, IT and support all held to the same outcome.
  
  There, it was the moment the customer’s technicians were printing on their own after we left. We could see it on the connected printers.

  We chose DevRev for the platform underneath all of that. It supported the work across every group, including the reseller-ready portal we needed to take the support operation from consumer-grade to enterprise-ready.