Part 2 of the Fíonta 15 with Jeffrey O’Brien is focused on The Immigration Project (now renamed Mobile Pathways), a Salesforce-supported tool designed for the immigration law market and those served by immigration lawyers.
Transcript
Karin Tracy (KT):
Right. Yeah. I know that you’re working on an exciting new project using Salesforce. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Jeffrey O’Brien (JB):
Yeah. Probably two years ago, I discovered that the technology of Salesforce is so powerful that it really needs to get into the hands of other people, especially immigration practitioners. There’s a couple of reasons why it’s powerful. One is because it can bring down the costs. I think that it’s allowed us to create some efficiencies that really it’s pretty rare, I believe, in immigration. One of them is creating these documents like I was explaining to you earlier about the forms, and certain documents that the government only accepts on paper. We can run those through. We use Conga Composer, which is another fantastic app for us, to create customized forms, and documents, and submissions.
So, Salesforce has the ability to bring down the cost, but it also has the ability to bring up the level of service we provide because it can help us track multiple aspects of a person’s life that otherwise are very complicated to do. I can talk a little bit more about that in a minute, but basically, if this technology is available and it can help immigrants, we need to use it. The immigrant advocate communities that I’m a part of as an immigration attorney, we’re large in number. We have at least 20,000 in the United States, and there are also tens of thousands of people working at nonprofits helping immigrants across the United States.
Unfortunately, there’s no kind of unified system to help people work together and to kind of manage the technology. It’s very loose and no one really has an answer for the best way to use technology. So, the Immigration Project is a way to develop a technology using Salesforce and then distributing that technology to people who need it, which is most of us. There are things that it can do that we just simply can’t do on our own. We can’t track certain things about a person’s life, a person’s case without using something more sophisticated that probably 99% of us are using.
KT:
Great. Is there a timeline?
JB:
As soon as possible. The timeline … of course there’s a timeline in every immigrant’s life in the sense that people right now are nervous. They’re worried about being deported, rightfully so. There are certain protections that people have had, many people have had, for up to 20 years that they’re now losing. They’re losing, under the Trump Administration, they’ve decided to stop certain protections. For example, there are a couple hundred thousand people from El Salvador or Honduras and other countries that are going to be losing a temporary status that they’ve had for many, many years. These people have put down roots. They have purchased homes. They’re part of our communities. Their kids are in our schools. Their kids are citizens.
When you ask about a timeline, I think that the most important thing is before something bad happens. Right now they haven’t implemented what they’ve talked about, this deportation force. In reality, everyone’s timeline is somewhat different in the sense that they need to do something to act. What will start happening in the future is that people will slowly start to get picked up by the system and likely put in deportation court. In terms of the project timeline, we have a couple of timelines we’re looking at. We’re looking at one to implement something before the end of September, a second one before the election, and then we have a third timeline where we’re trying to build out kind of the major technology behind this probably within about a year.
In terms of just getting started, getting something that people can communicate with, getting awareness by the immigrant community, by immigration advocates that there’s technology out there, we’d like to do as much as we can before the election.
KT:
Wonderful. Clock is ticking.
JB:
Yes, I know. The upcoming election is also going to provide us an opportunity because there’s a lot of anti-immigrant rhetoric right now. So, there’s a lot of passion right now. We’re going to try to harness that passion if we can to kind of make this move quickly at this point.
KT:
Sure. That makes total sense. In fact, I wanted to ask you about changes. There, of course, have been many political changes since the Trump Administration came into power and since Election Day in November 2016 … ’16. Sorry, I’m losing track of my years, since November 2016. It sounds like the Immigration Project is one way that you’re reacting to that. Have other processes changed for you in the last 18 months as the climate has gotten so scary for many of your clients?
JB:
Well, absolutely. This is another way that Salesforce can really come in to help out. Because we collect data and we use apps to reach our client, we can then take an entire community, for example, the Salvadorian community, which has lost its status about approximately one year from now. So, September 2019, it’s going to be completely gone. The ability for us to then jump into Salesforce and then communicate with them, we pull all those names out and then we use a texting technology, which was also kind of the heart of the Immigration Project going forward. The reason why texting is so important is because our clients aren’t used to using email. They just don’t have email accounts, and they’re not used to using computers. They’re not used to surfing the web.
The one thing that they all do when they come to the United States, or even if they’ve been here, is they all have a cell phone and more likely than not it’s a smartphone. So, the ability to reach them consistently using phones, using text messages, and we can talk about other technology that we use too with their phones, has been extremely critical for a lot of reasons. One I’ll just tell you is that people work a lot of times during the day, so you can’t necessarily have an appointment, you can’t have a phone call. So, being able to send them a message that they can then read when they’re on their break or on the weekend and then they can respond at their own time allows us a much greater communication.
If we get something in the mail they need to see, we can text them an image of it and vice versa. If they get something in the mail from the government that we say we need to look at, they can take a picture and send it to us. Those things … The business community probably doesn’t think of using the cell phone in that way amongst the business customers necessarily just because we’re so used to using things like email. With our immigrants, that’s the heart of how we communicate with them.
KT:
That’s fantastic. You mentioned another app. Are you using WhatsApp to communicate with them?
JB:
We have various texting apps. The Immigration Project right now actually started like two days ago using Live Message. Live Message is a Salesforce app, and then we’re using Facebook Messenger within that. So, right now we’re using texting in Salesforce Messenger to experiment. Hopefully, we’ll be able to use WhatsApp in the future as well because that one is probably the most prominent followed closely by Facebook Messenger. Kind of distant is actually text messaging. There’s reasons for all of these things, like why they use those is because they’re free in their own countries. So, they come here and then they just use what they have been using.
KT:
Right, right. How else can clients communicate with you? Is it really a text-based relationship?
JB:
In immigration, there is so much on-hand communication we have to do with a client that the primary way is them coming to the office. This adds to the labor, but we are trying to get to the heart of who they are, what their stories are, why they need to be in the United States. That’s not something we necessarily do over the phone or using text message. The reason the text messaging is critical is because an immigration case contains so many other administrative things they need to get done, documents they need to sign, appointments they have to go to with the government that we need to be in constant contact with them about all these moving parts.
That’s another reason why we need a system like Salesforce is because each of immigration case has a couple dozen moving parts to it outside of just that hands-on, “We need to talk with you. We need to spend two hours with you, you’re meeting. You have all these other things you have to complete for your case to be finalized.”
KT:
I see. How do your clients find you?
JB: It’s word-of-mouth. We’ve never done advertising. I had a simple philosophy at the beginning, which was, “Do good work, and be fair with our prices.” I figured if we can do both of those things, then they would tell their friends and family, which is true. We don’t have any need for more cases here just because there’s so much need out there.
KT:
Right.
JB:
Again, that goes back a little bit to why we’re doing tip is because we can’t … we’re at capacity here and we need this technology so other people can handle increased capacity as well.
KT:
I see. I really like how you seem to be very respectful of both to meet clients, to engage, to have a personal relationship to learn their story, but then also to be very respectful of the fact that it’s expensive for people to take off of work, or transportation costs are expensive, and that where you can shift that communication to something like text, smartphone just seems like a wonderful combination of using technology and the personal touch at the same time.
JB:
Yeah, the immigrants need help wherever they can get it. If we can reduce the costs for them … I mean, they’ll need that money, the little money that they earn.
KT:
Right. One thing that I read in the blog that I really liked is how you were very clear that the immigration law arena needed a disruptor and needed someone to come in who understood technology and understood how to use technology to move the space forward. You’ve done that. Are your competitors catching on and doing the same thing, or are you seeing a trend in the immigration law community?
JB:
There’s a movement toward technology, that’s certain. There’s not a movement towards Salesforce, and there’s a couple of reasons for that. The move to technology is slow, and there is not a standard tool to use. I could tell you a lot about the competitor’s products if you want to look at off-the-shelf technology, but basically, they’re all very limited. They cannot adapt like Salesforce can. So, there is a move towards technology, but I don’t think it’s going to be disruptive at all. Is there a move to people using my technology, Salesforce? No, because they don’t understand it, and it’s too costly. I don’t mean the cost of licenses, because that’s actually not much different than the off-the-shelf software. The cost comes in development.
If you have to develop your entire business practices around Salesforce, you need someone to do that. You need someone to get in there and get their hands dirty. When you’re dealing with an industry with very low margins like ours, it’s going to be very expensive for you to do that. It’s been expensive for us, but it’s been a commitment. So, when I say it’s expensive, it’s probably taken about 50% of my time. So, the last year in the last 12 months, I’ve probably put a thousand hours into developing Salesforce. So, it does come at a cost, but the benefits far outweigh those costs.
KT:
Sure. Is there a point in which in the future one can determine there or rely on an investment like Salesforce?
JB:
I mean, I think that they would notice it immediately if they had something … The Immigration Project hopes to give them basically a project management tool and other tools so that they can understand the case possibilities. Case possibilities is another thing that is very sophisticated and not well managed by anyone right now. If you had a case project management tool, like what I mentioned earlier, TaskRay, I think they would see that immediately. There’s no doubt that that is going to manage it better than what they are using. I’m certain.
The problem, again, is to get people the exposure to it, which they don’t have right now, and then to also train them. The cost was one aspect, but also the time investing in training is another issue. Again, we’re so busy right now, most immigration lawyers are so busy that the thought of taking on another big project is not really in most people’s imagination.
KT:
Right. I’m glad you mentioned training. When new lawyers and new staff come onboard at O’Brien, do you have a Salesforce training system? Do you train them hands-on? Do you have documentation? How do you manage that knowledge transfer?
JB: We do spend a lot of time training, but luckily that training doesn’t … I mean, we get the ROI on that so quickly that I’m never concerned about it. We do have some documentation, but most of it actually doesn’t need much documentation. For example, the TaskRay Project Management Tool, the reason why we gravitate toward it is because it’s so instinctual to use. It’s really not complicated. It’s very sophisticated in what it can do, but for the end user, it’s very simple … things like that. We use RingCentral as another tool. Those take a little bit of time to learn. We have, as I mentioned, Congo Composer. Everything we do here runs through Salesforce, so there definitely is training, but it’s not extensive.
KT:
That’s great. I imagine that now you guys, and not only you of course, but your staff couldn’t imagine living without Salesforce as the backbone of everything they do.
JB:
Right. Yeah. I mean, we’re like most businesses in the sense that if the internet goes down, what do you do?
KT:
Yeah. I had a feeling you might be going there. Yes. Yep. Slack went down nationwide a couple weeks ago, and everyone at Fionta was like, “What do we do? How do we talk to each other now?”
JB:
Yeah.
KT:
You get used to your systems.
JB:
We had an issue. We were on the Salesforce NA12 Server. What that meant a couple of years ago … it went down, so our internet was working but Salesforce went down, which at first I couldn’t believe. That just doesn’t happen. They have to have a backup that would kind of jump in there. Well, we were down for maybe half a day. If you go back and you Google NA12 and Salesforce and Marc Benioff, the CEO, he was so sensitive about that that he actually gave out his own email.
KT:
Wow.
JB:
… to take public comments. That was his kind of way of saying, “Look, I am listening.”
KT:
That’s really admirable.
JB: It is. Things like that increase your faith in the company. We got through it, and of course, there was the official apology and stuff. Yeah, we can’t live without Salesforce. We could not move to another system. If we did, we would … I don’t know what would happen.
KT:
Well, it’s just not happening.
JB:
It’s not happening.
KT:
This is so wonderful, Jeff. I thank you for giving me this time. Do you have anything that you’d like to kind of conclude with?
JB:
Not necessarily. I think that I’m fortunate. I see myself as very fortunate as understanding as much as I do about the possibilities of Salesforce, and then the place where I am in the community where I think I can bring in technology. So, I really hope to just be a part of that in the future.
KT:
That’s great. Well, thank you so much.
JB:
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.