There’s a popular fast-casual restaurant near the Apptegy office that I just can’t bring myself to revisit. The food itself was good the first time I went; the problem was the ordering process. No matter who you’re with, you have to walk up to the window and order individually. 

I realize this is not an uncommon setup—that’s why my whole team gives me a hard time about my distaste for this place. But it drives me crazy for one simple reason: It’s maximizing efficiency for the restaurant, but causing inconvenience for the customer. It’s not just about the lack of table service, which means waiting in line. It’s that people don’t tend to eat alone at restaurants. This system slows down the ordering process for groups. It breaks up conversation. It makes it harder to share food, and it means your food will come out at different times. The trade-off for internal efficiency is a worse experience for the customer.

Once you start noticing that kind of thing, you realize it’s everywhere. A lot of companies, if we’re honest about it, are organized around one question: How do we make this more efficient for us? But the best ones ask a different question. 

I’ve spent my career thinking about what it means to actually serve someone—not just respond to them, but know who they are, anticipate what they need and be willing to do what’s best for them even if it’s less efficient for us. At Apptegy (as at many of your districts), we call this “hospitality.” While customer service is reactive, hospitality is about making someone feel valued. That means knowing the people you’re serving so well that you understand what they need before they do.

Apptegy works with more than 5,000 school districts. Our team is dedicated to helping them communicate with families, handle emergencies and manage their brands, often in moments where there’s real pressure on the other end. So here’s the question we always come back to: Who are we putting first right now—ourselves or our clients?

Beyond the Fifth Star

The gap between an okay experience and a genuinely good one usually isn’t lack of effort; it’s lack of knowledge. You can’t give someone a great experience if you don’t know them. 

For years, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has used a framework he calls “the 11-Star Experience” to help hosts go above and beyond. At an Airbnb, if the door code works, the place is clean and nothing went wrong, you’ll probably leave a five-star rating. But imagine the rating system went beyond five stars. If your favorite wine was on the table when you arrived, you might give your experience six stars. What if you found a surfboard waiting in your room because you mentioned you like to surf? How many extra stars would you give your hosts then? The exercise keeps going until it gets absurd, but here’s the point: You cannot get past five stars without actually knowing the individual.

We push our team to know their clients on a deeper-than-surface level—not just their role and renewal date, but what’s going on in their district, what they’re trying to accomplish and even who they are outside of work. We want to know your hobbies, your kids’ names. Then, when we’re walking you through a product or helping you through a support issue, we’re not just doing it because it’s our job—we’re doing it because we know and care about you. And because we care, we already have a sense of what you uniquely need.

The 51% Rule

It’s easy to talk about putting clients first. The real test is what happens when it’s inconvenient.

A few winters ago, a major storm hit the eastern part of the country, and school districts were trying to push emergency alerts to thousands of families. Our systems were straining under the volume. I sent a message to the team, and everyone hopped online, even though it was evening. We worked until 10 p.m., got through the backlog, put fixes in place and called it a night.

But here’s the striking part of this story: The next evening, people got back online to help again, before anyone even asked them to. No one waited to be told what to do. They just jumped in to help their clients—not because they had to, but because they genuinely cared.

That says something to me not just about our expectations of our team, but about the kind of people we hire. In his book Setting the Table, restaurateur Danny Meyer writes about something he calls “the 51% rule”: the idea that more than half of any hiring decision should hinge on emotional intelligence. As he points out, you can train technical skills, but qualities like warmth, empathy, integrity, self-awareness—those are much harder to teach. At Apptegy, we hire for the 51%.

An Extension of Your Team

There’s a communications director in Florida that consistently recommends us to other districts in his area. I’ve heard him say it on multiple occasions: “The products are great, but with Apptegy, you’re also getting an extension of your team.” 

When you hire the right people and encourage them to follow their emotional intelligence, the relationships you build are different than a typical vendor’s. Last year, a school communicator from Ohio came to visit our Little Rock office and made a beeline for the support team—people he’d only ever interacted with through chat. He knew their names. He wanted to meet them in person. And they were just as excited to see him.

There’s a version of client experience that’s a department, a ticket queue, a response time metric. But there’s also a version where the people doing the work genuinely care about the people on the other end. At Apptegy, we’ve tried to build the second version. It’s more work for us, no question—but that’s what true hospitality is all about.