Direct Supply

It’s a wrap! TELS Summit 2026 has officially come to a close, and what an incredible week it was. To old friends, it was so good to see you again. To new friends, it was a pleasure to meet you, and I hope to see you again next year. And for anyone who couldn’t make it this year, stay tuned. We had several exciting launches across the TELS ecosystem, including new product launches, new services, and new ecosystem partnerships designed to help senior living maintenance and operations teams drive better performance. More to come. #TELSSummit #ConnectingTeams #DrivingOutcomes #SeniorLiving #Operations #Maintenance #Milwaukee # Direct Supply

Excited to represent Direct Supply at the 75th annual Arkansas Health Care Association trade show in Hot Springs!

I've spent the past several months in the field with senior living's largest owners and operators, from the frontlines to the C-suites. The same conversation comes up every time: The biggest bottleneck in senior living right now isn't technology ... it's labor. The frontlines are short-staffed, and it's only getting worse. The gap between the media hype around AI and the reality in the field in sizable, and evident the moment you walk into any given senior living community today. That disconnect is what shaped how we think about building our business going forward. Instead of asking "what new technology should we deploy," we started asking "what do our customers need to succeed?" We re-oriented the entire business around customer success, and we learned more about our customers than we ever imagined. We didn't have great ways to measure our customers' success, so we invented a term that we call "CKPIs (Customer KPIs)" to help quantify our customer's success metrics in a way that differentiates them from our internal KPIs, and we built data tracking mechanisms in our products and in our CRM to measure. For example, our senior living C-suite KPIs are typically related to increasing revenue, increasing resident satisfaction, reducing costs and reducing risks. Whereas our frontline maintenance director KPIs are related to completing their resident work orders as well as regulatory tasks on time. We also learned that many of our customers don't track KPIs themselves. So we invested time educating them on the value and skill of leveraging data, accountability and clear success metrics to drive better business outcomes with less toil. Now, it's one thing to say we are now aligning our success to our customers' success, but it's a lot harder to operationalize that strategy. But that's exactly what we did. For example, our product managers are now killing any products that don't drive measurable outcomes and doubling down on those that do, our sellers are now consulting in business reviews to help our customers close the gap wherever it might be, and our marketers are now producing content that educates the market on how to drive best-in-class KPI performance based on our unique industry benchmark data. That's also the lens through which we apply AI. Not as the headline strategy, but as a tool in service of driving measurable outcomes for TELS customers. To help frontline teams do more with less. To reduce the friction between departments. To give building-level teams better visibility so they can get ahead of problems that get more costly over time. This shift has been instrumental in our business, and perhaps for your business, too. When customers win, we grow. P.S. We're hiring at Direct Supply . Reach out if you're as obsessed with driving customer outcomes as we are. https://lnkd.in/gBkUVBT2 #TELS #SeniorLiving #OperationsPlatform #OperationalExcellence #KPI #CustomerSuccess #AI #DirectSupply

I had the opportunity to bring together a session at Direct Supply with Colin Murphy , Chief Customer Officer at Zendesk, and Sunil Kripalani as part of our Engaged in Technology (E.T.) series. With more than 300 Direct Supply Partners attending, Sunil led a thoughtful discussion with Colin on how AI is reshaping customer experience and what that means for companies like Direct Supply as expectations continue to rise. A theme that stood out was that the companies pulling ahead are not just adopting AI; they are rethinking how work gets done to deliver a better overall experience. At Direct Supply, one of our values is to Provide Outrageous Customer Service. We are actively using AI to evolve the customer experience, and we will continue to do so in ways that improve speed, insight, and ease while staying true to the trust and human connection our customers expect. Appreciate Colin for sharing practical, real-world perspectives and Sunil for leading such a strong discussion. #CustomerExperience #AI #DigitalTransformation #Leadership