James Hoare joined Hyperscience in January 2019 in an implementation role based out of Sydney, Australia before moving to New York in July of that year. In March, he started a new role on our Customer Experience team as Director of Partnership Operations, focused on enabling Hyperscience partners and ensuring that they’re learning from each implementation to deliver better – and faster – results for our customers.
We spoke with James about the partner certification bootcamp, his favorite part of working with clients, and what the future holds:
Establishing Our Partner Certification Bootcamp
We came up with the idea for a Partner Bootcamp as we started working more closely with Reveal Group in Australia and Canada. We wanted to upskill our partners to handle some first-level support for our customers in regions where we don’t have a physical office and drive customer implementations as an extension of the Hyperscience team. It’s about enabling our partners to better support our customers.
We’ve developed roughly 20 hours of content for the certification program, delivered over four weeks in a mixture of both live Zoom sessions and pre-recorded on-demand lessons. We split courses out into a few different segments of interest, starting with how we deal with structured documents in the first week, semi-structured documents in the second week, more technical and infrastructure details in the third week, and then higher-level implementation model discussions in the final week.
One of the sessions is a training back to us where one of the consultants is nominated to train us on Hyperscience as if we were brand new customers. It’s quite fun putting on the customer hat and asking all of the same kinds of questions that a customer would typically ask while seeing how much of the training sunk in.
It’s very important to us that Hyperscience customers, no matter where they are, have an exceptional experience. As we grow globally, it becomes difficult to juggle time zones. Having knowledgeable and effective partners on the ground is essential. It gives organizations comfort knowing they can purchase our solution and have dedicated boots-on-the-ground support no matter where they’re located.
Managing Change
Often, a lot of the processes that we are integrating with or replacing are very entrenched. We face resistance or reluctance to change a process that’s been there for decades and is still working — it’s a bit of an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. It’s been interesting to see the evolution as our product has evolved to handle more of what our customers are doing, rather than just plugging in at a single place to solve one very particular piece of a puzzle.
For example, we started out solving the extraction of handwritten text off structured documents, and we still do that, and we’ve done that very well for a very long time. But as the product expanded, we’ve added things like our semi-structured capability, or we’ve added the ability to classify documents that may not have any kind of structure to them. And, it makes our work alongside partners even better because a lot of them are so entrenched in the automation ecosystem already.
More Than ML Magic
We do a lot of magic in terms of Machine Learning. We have a lot of very, very clever algorithms that absolutely amaze our customers. It never gets old hearing customers remark “How did this page match?!” or “That page was so poorly scanned, how did that work, and then how did you extract that word from that?!”
But one aspect of our offering I constantly thank Product, Design & Engineering for is the thought that goes into our user experience. At the end of the day, Hyperscience is designed to automate manual processes, but we also recognize that automation works best with a human in the loop, so I love the little things our team brings into the product to make the experience better for human users.
The most recent example that came out in version 28 is what we call single click mode for semi-structured documents. For example, when an invoice comes in and you’re asked to identify the invoice number, previously you’d have to use your mouse to draw a box around it. Today, you can just click on the invoice number and we draw that box for you automatically. It’s a nice to have that adds a productivity boost to manual tasks in addition to the benefits gained from automating. And I think it’s what makes Hyperscience a thoughtful product, as well as one that delivers on the promise of automation: remembering that humans are involved and shouldn’t have a crummy experience in the product.
Looking Ahead
Continuing to onboard and certify new partners is key, particularly in different geographies.
We’re also focused on streamlining the program, so it’s a bit more like “Hyperscience University” with a diverse course curriculum. There are different kinds of partners – or even roles at the same partner organization – with specific focuses that it makes sense to go deeper on. We think it’s important that all of our partners understand the core aspects of our product and how it works, but not everyone needs to know the nitty-gritty of how to use the API, for example. We’re thinking about some of the exciting changes coming to the Hyperscience Platform later this year and the other opportunities that may be available to partners as well.
Interested in becoming a partner? Get connected with our team.
