We got him here last year. I can see him walking into the clubhouse with his shirt button down, his bats, and his. And here I am, boys. I remember it well. But he's been great. I mean, he's been a really, really good player for us, obviously. The on base, the tough at bat, just kind of personifies what I think of our guys as hitters. He makes it very difficult for the pitcher, obviously the ability to hit for power on top of it. And then just what he's brought to our team from an energy standpoint, to the way he's fit in with the guys, to the way he's received and loved in that room, and the way he's just kind of, you can tell, loves being a New York Yankee.


Good afternoon for the second presentation today this afternoon Kelly Robinson is who works at in the account security team at Twilio will be presenting So a warm welcome for Kelly Does that work excellent? I Could just try shouting, but this room's a little loud even for me awesome So I'm gonna be talking about contact center authentication and I don't know if any of you are SNL fans circa eight years ago But this talk has everything it's got my social security number my mother's maiden name everybody get their pens out The email that I used in college like 11 years ago and some accidental fishing and I will tell you what that means because trust me It is a good story some people try to fish companies. I don't do it on purpose It just happens because it turns out contact center authentication is not very good And so I set out to do some of this research and I didn't really know what to expect But it's been really interesting to Basically call all of these companies and figure out what people are doing to try to authenticate you over the phone And different companies have tried different things and they've built different systems to do this But it hasn't seen the same rigor that we've built into some of our web authentication systems And so the goal of this talk is to talk about what people are doing currently and give you some recommendations For all you can do in your companies to make your phone and contact centers more secure My name is Kelly Robinson I work at a company called Twilio if you haven't heard of Twilio were a communications company And so we build APIs for things like SMS voice email and also authentication I work on our authentication products So if you've ever heard of offy Twilio acquired offy about five years ago And so that's both the consumer two-factor authentication application But we also have APIs for adding things like 2fa into your applications Most of my time, I just spend thinking about how we authenticate users online and Since Twilio does a lot of stuff with phone systems I started thinking about how people can authenticate over the phone to and it turns out that's not really a thing that most people are doing right now I'm also on Twitter where I make a lot of bad password jokes. I'm particularly proud of this one If you want to tweet at me during this come this presentation My boss sent me here very nicely so if you say nice things about me on the internet I can keep coming back to conferences like this All right, let's talk about the research that I did So first of all, I had to call a bunch of these contact centers right to figure out what people were doing And I'd figure out who to call and so I had to have an existing account at the places I was only trying to get information about myself. I wasn't trying to fish anyone else There had to be personal info tied to my account that was behind some kind of authenticated system And so that was something like orders personal data information about the account itself The company had to have a customer support hotline, which is not something that's like necessarily a given these days And I did focus this on mostly USA based companies and USA based phone numbers because that's where I live I live in New York Finally I focused on inbound calls And that's inbound into the contact center There is also the situation where contact centers will call you and that's just a whole different scope of Authentication problems that I could talk about an entirely separate talk But I wanted to focus just on how when you called into a contact center, what happened then With a few exceptions. I always Bypassed automated systems So I wanted to talk to a real person at the end of the day and I always called with my own phone number I wasn't trying to do any spoofing or anything like that And that also led to some interesting Authentication ideas behind so how some people recognize the phone number that you're calling with I Would occasionally ask for additional information about the security on my account But I avoided letting people know that I was doing this for research purposes So for all they knew I was just calling in to get information about my account Everything that I did was mostly information gathering There was a few places that I did try to change things on my account and that did sometimes trigger additional security Which I found interesting and I think that makes sense right like sometimes we you know when we're designing software products We have laxer restrictions on read restrictions and we do on write Write permissions and abilities and I could see that having the same type of impact in and over the phone system Here are just some of the places that I called overall I've called about 45 to 60 if depending on how you counted companies at this point and that might not sound like that many but you know Like when you get put on hold with CVS for 40 minutes and then they hang up on you as soon as you get through You know this stuff adds up the research took time I will talk about some of these companies later in my talk So if any of you work at these companies that might be interesting for you, but for all intents and purposes here I'm probably gonna name the people that are doing things well But I probably won't name the people that are doing things especially poorly If you do are curious about some of those questions our companies you can come find me at the bar later All right getting in touch So there was a few different ways that I could get a hold of these companies And there was a couple of commonalities around how people do that most retail insurance banking lives Consumer driven companies have a customer support number that they make readily available These are places like Home Depot and Comcast State Farm for insurance There is this feature that's becoming more common with more sophisticated tech companies where they will basically put a call me functionality on their website and that's where you can input your phone number and when an agent is free They will call you this lessons hold times lessons call center costs And so this is something that they can take advantage of to hopefully save them some time and money And then finally there's a lot of companies that don't have a public-facing customer support number And so companies like Facebook lift in the US doesn't have a customer support number for dry or for riders at least So that's an interesting thing when you call I found a number for Facebook And they do have this kind of automated system for saying like if you want to talk to any one of our subsidiaries, you know What's that? Oculus Facebook press the appropriate number and when you get through and talk to Facebook They just straight up tell you we don't provide over-the-phone support Please file a ticket online and I think that makes sense right like Facebook is a company that is built online They always existed online anybody that is calling about something to do with Facebook is going to have an online account And so they've made the decision not to support Customers and customer service requests over the phone For consistency, I focused on option one. I was always calling into companies And then once you're on the phone There are a lot of similarities between how companies build out their customer support lines So you might hear me use this term IVR. That's an interactive voice response Most companies do that and that is the same type of thing It's like press one to talk to sales press two to talk to marketing press three to reset your password And so there's a lot of automation that people will do in this type of thing Usually you can bypass that by pressing zero to talk to a human But it also is interesting because rarely what you input in there If there's any kind of information gathering before you do get on the phone with a human Rarely do companies actually take that into account by the time you're connected with a human And that's just some like flaws with how a lot of phone systems are designed And a lot of the ways that these customer support centers and all the different sources and communications channels that they have Have been kind of cobbled together over the years But when you do end up talking or getting on the phone with someone There's a few different ways that they try to initially identify you and this is not the authentication process This is just the initial identification so they can look up your account Often it's automated with a phone number. I kind of talked about that already So they'll look up the phone number that you're calling in with and basically trust the caller ID and look up your account that way you might input some kind of account number into the Into the phone and so that might be if you're calling a bank a credit card number when you're calling Apple They have you do this with your device ID number if you're calling about a device if you call an insurance company sometimes they will do that with Your like insurance subscriber ID and so there's things like that that they can automatically look at that up after you input something And then finally a lot of places just you have to get on the phone with an agent And they'll ask you for some identifying information so they can look up your account But that's just the identity right identity is not the same as authentication identity is information about you And that's things like your date of birth things like your email things like your phone number and that stuff probably isn't gonna change Even if you get a new email address the one that you previously had is still kind of an identifying information about you You know and if I give you my phone number there There's a lot of people that have my phone number like how can you prove that that's actually me An authentication on the other hand is that kind of secret factor? It's the proof of identity And that's usually with some kind of like one-time password Some kind of secret that you know if you're talking about the actual factors of authentication Something you know something you have or something you are and that's hard to do over the phone And that's one of the reasons that we're having such an issue with this Because identity and authentication are not the same thing But we're constantly using identity to prove our identity and that's not authentication Most over-the-phone systems are basically asking for to sometimes three pieces of identifying information And that's like proof of who you are, right? I can't even tell you the number of times that somebody asked me to verify your identity Please provide your date of birth and I'm like that's not actually verification, right? Like that's a piece of information about me that I happen to know but again There's a lot of people that know that information and so it's not an actual authenticating thing But I'd really like to see that change. I'd love it if I never had to give out identifying information about me ever again I'd love if I never had to give out my social security number ever again, but this is a hard problem We can't reasonably expect people to type in passwords over the phone And we can't expect them to do that even if they have access to a computer or mobile phone There's just a different platform that we're dealing with here And I think that's one of the reasons that we've struggled with this And one of the other problems that phone systems often predate the computer systems, especially for some of these older companies They had phone systems and customer support hotlines for many years before they had an e-commerce website or something like that And so the authentication systems might not be unified correctly There might be all these different sources of data that they're dealing with and it is a hard problem I do want to acknowledge that All right, let's take a look at what I found Starting with the types of identifiers and occasional authenticators that I saw in my research So this is a little hard to read but on the left You could basically get the most common types of identifying information that's things like phone numbers emails Your physical address your name your account number And then it starts to trail off with things like social security number date of birth I basically just tallied up the number of times that people were asking me for this type of stuff Unsurprisingly phone numbers were the most common type of thing. Everybody's calling in with a phone number It would be make sense that people would be asking for that as a piece of identifying information Account numbers that was the types of things that I grouped together that had to deal with some kind of Identifier that was specific to your account order numbers or not order numbers But like account numbers insurance subscribers device IDs that kind of things so those got grouped together there Sadly only a few places Actually used any kind of secret to authenticate me and so the examples that I saw of this were one-time pin numbers SMS based 2fa and so that was either like reply to this method message if you're trying to like contact Amazon comm Service codes, I'll show you what that meant one company actually just straight up asked me for my online password That wasn't like a phone password. They just asked me for my website password and then I hung up I Then Verizon when I called them which is a telecom provider in the US they they said in order to authenticate you We're gonna call you back at the number that we have on file for you And that is a form of authentication right because then I have to have access to that incoming call But this is like very few of the things that I saw right there's not a lot of people that are actually doing the authentication here And so this is where I want to see that change I want to shift the authentication to be the things that we see often and we're still going to have identifying information They have to have something to look up your account with or something like that But you deem both an identifier and an authenticator in order to do this well All right, let's take a look at some of the more qualitative data and break it down into some what some companies are doing Well all the way down to some of the things that kind of scared me So the good this is not that hard. It's anybody that was actually authenticating users I set the bar pretty low here once I kind of collected all this research So any kind of one-time code Refusing to disclose personal information. This one is key There was a utility company that I called and I was like I called in and they looked up my phone number And the automated system was like hello Kelly Are you calling about your account at 123 Main Street in San Francisco, California? And I was like oh god good thing. I'm moving and this is a call to cancel my service But like your service should not do that many of you may know how easy it is to spoof phone numbers If anybody had my phone number and spoof to call my utility company in San Francisco They would then be able to get access to my home address and that is not something you want to be giving out And then just like a random bonus delight I was put on hold a lot But Apple lets you like choose your hold music and so they're like do you want to listen to jazz or pop? And I'm like cool. I don't really care But like this is kind of a nice thing if I'm gonna be put on hold you're giving me some autonomy to choose how I'm gonna spend the next 10 minutes So an example of somebody that's doing an actual authenticated process when you call into Netflix They're automated interest says welcome to Netflix for faster service Please log into Netflix comm and find the six-digit service code at the bottom of this web page This was not something I had seen before so I go to Netflix Scroll down to the bottom and there's this button for a service code When you click on it it Reveals a six-digit number and this shows up in an authenticated session. This is some kind of time-based code It's not a session base. So I tried logging out and logging back in again I still haven't gotten the answer from anybody at Netflix how they actually implemented this But I think this is pretty cool So this is kind of some kind of time-based authenticator when I looked the next day the code had changed And so it does rotate it some way which makes it more secure than just having like another passcode on your Attached to your account but this is a really easy way to kind of speed up the authentication process when you get on the phone with someone and Provide an actual one-time secret and a code that will change in order to tie that back to your account and because this is in an Authenticated session you can take advantage of things like the username and password that the person is using on their online account Again, Netflix is a service that requires you to have like a computer and a website And so it's a reasonable expectation that people might have access to this is a way to speed up the authentication process Another example of good authentication when I called AmEx This was actually an interesting one because initially I called and I was just trying to get some information about my account And when they looked at my account, they did only do it with some identifying information But then I actually needed to have them send me a new credit card And when they when I was asking for them to take action on that they won They connected me with a security specialist And so they have a subset of agents that were specifically trained to do this kind of more risky behavior Which is doing things like sending to someone a credit card is a riskier Move that you would have somebody asked for over the phone And then that person sent me this SMS message and then I had to read the code back to them This is a pretty good way to handle Authentication when you're on the phone with someone I did have access to my phone number And so this is something that I was able to share back with them and actually authenticate me Most of the places like I called fell into this category and this was stuff that was like fine maybe they'd done kind of the analysis on the security of the stuff that they had and realized that Implementing more strict security wasn't worth it But I still think there's room for improvement here And so there is a lot of the stuff here falls into kind of the user experience Aspect of this and so doing things like recognizing the phone number you're calling in from I understand that there are security risks with that Trust me, but it is it does provide the end user a lot of benefit for not having to type in an additional account number If you're only going to be using identifying information At least verify more than one type of personal identifying information and then prompting with relevant account actions Is something else that I think is it makes For the user experience better and then if you can try to drive people to automated processes the less chance you have that somebody can Fish you by getting in touch with an agent So United Airlines is someone that I called that all the time that does this and so they can say things like you know I see that you're flying from Montreal to Newark. Are you calling about that flight? And so I can say yes, I can I can go through that path This does reveal a little bit of personal information about me It does reveal that I am currently in Montreal, but I think that's fine because that's kind of ephemeral data It's not something like my personal address that they're giving away All right, here's where it starts to get a little dicey And this is I saw you know from a lot of places as well And this is you know, they're only asking for one form of identifying information Maybe they're only asking for your phone number and then you can get additional information back about other things that you Are attached to your account If they're only asking for identifying information, maybe they are asking for two pieces But it's like your phone number and your date of birth like think about how many people in your life know those two pieces of Information or how many people in your life or not in your life could Google those things about you like it's surprisingly easy to find that Type of information through like some basic open-source intelligence work and Then requiring a social security number. I am just not a fan of that And I this is more specific to the United States But I think this is something that we really don't want to do because especially in the United States like this is something That was built for tax purposes it wasn't built to be an identifier and this is something that you don't want to have attached to you because of Reasons like Mrs. Hilda Schrader-Witcher. So does anybody know who this is? So I got one person nodding down here So this is interesting because she was a secretary for the CEO of a wallet manufacturer in New York State And this wallet manufacturer when social security cards came out They wanted to advertise that their wallets could hold a social security card well And so they asked Mrs. Hilda to help design this social security card and in doing that She put her own social security number on this sample card and distributed it into tens of thousands of wallets that they sold throughout the US And so she had to change her social security number, but as recent as 1977 there were still 22 people using her social security number as their own and So maybe the social security numbers don't apply in Canada But like it's still a thing that you can think about how these identifiers are not actually Authenticators and then like what are your identifiers and how are they actually generated because with social security numbers? They were generated serially until eight years ago So if you want to like everybody raise their hand that was born in 1986 You guys all probably have like pretty similar social security numbers that you'd group up. It'll be fun exercise. I promise So that's bad, but that's not like the worst of what I saw. This was a fun one I called into somebody and they were like all right. Can I confirm that I'm speaking with Kelly Robinson? cool to verify your identity Please provide your full name and I literally gawked at the guy. I was like, are you serious right now? And he was like, well, it's like, you know policy I was like, were you supposed to give me my name? And he was like, I know it's weird, but like we have to ask I'm like, no you don't like you literally just told me who I am So some of this I know like I never blame the contact center agent for this type of stuff, right? Like they are trying to be helpful and we have built like we as the Engineers and security analysts and researchers that are designing these systems We are the ones that are responsible for making it easier for them not to screw up, right? But it gets worse So a lot of places, you know, they're giving out identity information I called one financial institution to reset my two-factor authentication because that's the thing that you had to do over the phone and In that call they both let me reset my password and gave me my username Without me asking for it and I was like, oh, that's not good, but All right, at least I reset all these identifiers and I'm me, but whoo not not great and then There's a lot of places that did that type of thing that were allowing account changes without any authentication and So this is a story of how I accidentally fished a major hotel chain So I had called a hotel that I had stayed at the previous week to get a copy of my receipt essentially and When I called into their their customer support number They said we couldn't find the account associated with the number that you're calling from and that was part of the automated intro So I was like, okay must not have my phone number attached to this account or something like that I'm not totally sure what happened, but then they provided an opportunity for me to input my phone number To look up my account that way. And so I did that I input my phone number that would be attached to the account And then I you know navigate some things in their IVR and eventually I got on hold with a with a customer support person I tell her that I'm looking for my receipt for my most recent stay Give her my email the dates of my stay the specific hotel that I was at She looks up the stay sends me the email and says, you know, it might take a couple minutes for this to arrive I'm like, okay. I get that like email API's. I know how this might work I didn't get the email right away But again didn't think too much of it in the meantime. I asked her I was like, oh when I input my phone number Did that actually bring up my account? Was that how you were able to find my account and she said no I looked up your account with your email address and I was like, oh, okay Like is there not a phone number associated with this account? And she said no there is and I was like at this point I was just kind of confused and so I asked her what the phone number was and she gave it to me And it was not mine. I wrote it down and At this point, I'm like, thank you. You've been very helpful I still haven't gotten the email with my receipt But you know maybe that'll come through eventually and so I hang up the phone And I look up the phone number that she had given me and it wasn't my phone number It was belonged to a Kathy Robinson And so oh I forgot to tell you the best part about this story though And so once I was like, oh, that's not my phone number She was like, oh, well, that's cool. Would you like to change it to be your phone number? And so I was like, yes, please and so I gave her my actual phone number And so I hang up and I find out that I had Kathy's phone number looked up my actual account There was no phone number attached to it. So I was like, oh oops That was bad And I'm guessing what had happened is that she had looked up she'd misheard or I had misgiven my email address She had looked up Kathy's account Given me Kathy's phone number changed Kathy's phone number to be my phone number If any of you are named Kathy Robinson, I apologize I can talk to you about that later and tell you which account you might need to change But what's that? I could do that, but I'm trying not to be too creepy Don't think I have that phone number stored anywhere anymore But yeah, it's it's a it's a situation that like again I don't blame the agent for this like there's an explanation for what happened There weren't the guardrails in place to prevent that from happening But like you shouldn't be able to accidentally change someone else's account information And so I do have some recommendations for how to fix this Just a side note everybody in stock photos of contact center agents always looks so happy So like if you ever call into somebody and they're grumpy like just picture this and it's like They've got copious amounts of natural light. They're sitting in a like a room like this. It's great So first recommendation is to to match the rigor of your web authentication Like you would never let somebody log into your website by just giving you their name and their date of birth Like you ask for some kind of passcode you ask for some kind of secret identifier You're doing something like you maybe you're sending them a one-time code or a magic link through their email There is some kind of secret involved in this process And so you need to understand that somebody needs to be able to provide that and work within the The confines of the user experience and so you can do things like take advantage of the voice platform And honor user settings for things like 2fa There's other factors here that you can use to authenticate that aren't just pass codes You can do things like verbal pass codes. This is something that vanguard a financial institution does And so you can basically set up a verbal pass code And i'm not saying that like the voice platform is the most secure way to do this But it is an option that you can use and it's better than not doing anything So amazon overall did a really good job Like they are definitely in like the two thumbs up category is a company that does Authentication over the phone really well, but i think that they are also someone that i can pick on because They do this well, but there's still some things that you can keep in mind here So before the call they actually make it pretty hard to find out where to call them They do this like call me feature But i found it How that you can find their general help number it's kind of hidden at the bottom there And then they basically expose this toll free number that you can call into Once you call into amazon you do get this automated text message before you're ever talking to an agent and this is great It provides some context there. It says are you calling amazon? I really like that the the amex example that i gave earlier didn't do that Which is something that i prefer about the the amex or the amazon examples because they do provide that context of saying like Reply yes, if you are calling amazon and this is also something that's like There's a way that you can give feedback to this experience. You're not going to probably accidentally type yes If somebody is trying to fish you and so this is like a pretty good sms 2fa type of situation But this is the way that they were verifying my identity when i called them And i was kind of wondering in this process like what happened to my my totp i have trend Time-based one-time passwords set up on my aughty account I don't allow sms 2fa on my amazon account This is slightly more secure and so they never asked me for this passcode when i called them And so this is like one of the ways that they're not quite matching the same rigor of the user preferences that i had set in that account And that's because these systems are fragmented, right? You know and i do hate to pick on amazon because overall they did a really good job But this is something that you might want to keep in mind Is thinking about how people have set up their authentication preferences and the more security that you need around your system The more that you want to pay attention to stuff like this One of the other funniest things is after i got off the phone with amazon I had asked about the security on my account because i had asked about the totp thing when i was talking to the agent And so i don't know if she like flagged the fact that i was concerned about security on my account So i got this message from customer service saying if you have concerns regarding your account security The best action you can take is to choose a strong password And i was like what what? That isn't nobody ever asked me for my password here and like again I don't blame the agent like probably just flagged This is an email that needed to be sent to me because i was concerned and they wanted to make me feel better But this doesn't make me feel better, right? Changing my password on my amazon account would have done nothing for the situation that i was in Authenticating over the phone and so you want to keep that in mind as you're trying to Take into account all the different ways that people are securing their accounts So there's some strong authentication options here things like one-time pass codes I mentioned voice recognition and verbal pass codes Which is strong for the medium that you're dealing with and then there's this thing that i'm calling hybrid platform security Which is something like we saw with the netflix example But you might have also seen this if you've ever tried to log into like youtube if people seen this when you log into a smart tv So i think this is something that uh you see a lot when you're logging into a television It's you know similar. There's limitations to the platform there, right? Like if you only have a remote you're not going to be wanting to type in a 16 digit random character password into your tv Instead what they do is they display the passcode on the tv and then they tell you to go log in on The computer and then that sends basically a web hook back to the tv to say this person is authenticated You can proceed and i think that's a really good way to handle some of this type of stuff Because there are the limitations for how you can do the authentication on the platform But you could take advantage of something like this and use it over the phone as well Asking somebody to go to something like your website like netflix did asking for a eight digit code is something It's easier to do than asking them for the entire passcode that they were using on their account My next recommendation and this is a big one i've talked about this a little bit is basically we want to build those guard rails for the agents It's really easy for them to be helpful. They're trained to be helpful But we want to make it harder for them to Give up information that they shouldn't and make it harder for them to get fished And so this is things like limiting the amount of information that's available to them You know, why does does an agent need to know my home address in most circumstances? They don't and so if they are able to if they don't even have that information in front of them Then that limits the exposure that you're giving your agents in your company In being fished and getting information and having callers get information that they otherwise shouldn't Uh, the other option is only exposing information after the user is actually authenticated This obviously takes a little bit more development work But this is an option to make sure that the user has properly authenticated before you expose any information about them The amix example here having only a small set of agents that you do train specially to handle the high risk situations And then there's this idea behind silent authentication contact centers are often optimizing for cost and to save time And so if you don't if you as much as you can do behind the scenes to authenticate users And their services like pin drop that do this you might know of others Um, this is not something I've done a ton of research into yet But they'll basically do a risk analysis. Uh, you can do vocal analysis There's ways that you can kind of get a risk score for how risky a call may be based on what the Things that somebody is asking for And so that can all be done behind the scenes Maybe you can do that before you somebody even gets on the phone with an agent so that you can flag things as higher risk And then if a user is too risky or they're displaying these types of uh, Risky behaviors, you can either terminate the call or send it to a specialized agent And so here are two options for a dashboard. You could show an agent Um, I think you know agent dashboard two is the one here that doesn't it makes you input the user's Email instead of having it available to you and the reason that this might make Make things better is uh when I called into an e-commerce website They asked me they they looked up my account with my phone number and they asked me for my email address to verify my identity Uh, and so I gave them my email address and they were like, no, that's not it And so I was like, well I don't know what address I email address I use for that account I gave them like my work email my old work email another email that I gave them like three or four emails And the guy was finally just like well, you know, it's like Here's like the tld like the domain of the email and it was like my old college email and I was like Oh, well now that I have half the email address I obviously know which one it is like I only had one email in college And so I was able to guess the rest of the email or give him the rest of the email after he provided that to me And again, this agent was just trying to be helpful But it was because he had that email address in front of him that like if I had been an attacker That would have been it really easy for me to get that email Address because if he gives me half the email like somebody else any attacker that was trying to get into that account Would also be able to know the rest once given the domain But obviously example number two or agent dashboard two here is going to take more time Like there's issues you might have typos here that you would type it in You might miss here the person on the other end of the phone And so this is going to take more time And so that kind of bleeds us nicely to the next point Which is you do need to consider your threat model, right? It it depends a lot on like what you're trying to protect if you're a bank or a financial institution where people can Do things like transfer money over the phone You want to have a lot of these more secure things in place If all you're doing over the phone if you're an e-commerce institution and somebody can just like get their order information Maybe that's not as depending on what they're ordering, right? That that's not as like necessary to secure that highly And so you have to do that consideration into your own business model And think about what you're allowing people to do over the phone There was one company that I called that I tried to change the address that I had on file And when I tried to do that they were just like no, you can't do that over the phone like log into our website and change it there And I think that's fine, right? Like if you have a website that makes it easy for people to do the things like that Online then maybe you just don't support that over the phone. That's a very legitimate option And it kind of depends on how much you want to support and what you the profile of your customers is And if you want to go through the extra effort to have that additional Channel for customer service Again, everybody is just so happy in this photo So there's more options here. So the the future of call center authentication and can include things like an app authentication This is an example that we're playing around with with aughty right now of how you can basically build aughty into your application So that you can verify it when somebody calls into a contact center And so this is an option that you might start to think about If the user already has the app installed they can verify their identity from their device That's turns into something that you have factor And we do have a lot of data about users. I think we'll see more of that like fingerprinting and Advancements and kind of that behind the scenes identifying and authenticating Since we can do more fraud detection than call centers with that type of stuff So some of the takeaways from this is identity is not authentication If it's all at all possible use real authentication in your contact centers Never provide additional personal information to the caller. They don't need it. That's not your place to give them Think about how you've built your authentication for your app or your website and apply the same rigor to your phone Authentication on our user settings for things like 2fa And you must consider the user experience of the phone platform here Telling people to just input their password over the phone isn't gonna end well Make it hard for your agents to mess up. Don't let them access more information than they need And finally figure out what makes sense for you and your business If this is interesting to you, I did write this up in a blog post. It's available at that link I will also tweet this out to you after this talk Like everything there's no perfect solution here But I hope I've given you some ideas for thinking about the security of your over the phone authentication systems If your company has a customer support line, call it See what happens. Try to get information about your own account I think that's a really good way to start by evaluating your own system Come find me after this if you have any questions. We do have plenty of time for questions now Once again, my name is Kelly Robinson and thank you for listening


Chrissy says, I'm in a new relationship and he and I are both independent. Should I be worried about not knowing what he did last night? We spent Friday night together and talk during the day on Saturday. Well, if our, it depends on whether you should be worried. It depends on what you guys have talked about. If you're not in an exclusive relationship, then it's really none of your business, what he's doing. And if you are in an exclusive relationship, then you guys should have some agreements on certain things. And if you want to, if you're in a relationship, like a committed relationship, then you should have communication about what's going on. And if you're interested in what's going on with him, he should be open and honest with you about what he did last night. And so that's kind of the scale of where you are. If you've never talked to him about being exclusive, then you need to start having that conversation. Otherwise it's really none of your business. And so you, if you're not, if you're in a committed relationship, you need to start having communication with him about what's going on and start having clear, more transparent communication with him. It sounds like it's more of like a kind of a new type of the thing. I don't know, but and if it is, then you want to kind of figure out where you are in that spectrum.


All right, so welcome everybody. Today we're going to talk about how to negotiate higher salaries during the pandemic. My name is Dr. Nancy Lee. I help people transition from worker B to a product manager and business leader. And today I just want to give you a quick bonus is I'm going to show you how to advance your career with what you want and through negotiation and selling yourself and solving all the challenges so that you will not going to have any bad impression if you try to negotiate higher salary.  So as millennials speaking right now, you're getting distracted by Instagram and TikTok. So I want you guys to put away all the distractions for 45 minutes because the specific strategy I'm sharing you today, you probably you haven't heard about something like this before. So it's going to change how you see salary negotiation and how you start to get more as well. So pay close attention. And another reminder to all of you guys is that so the way to build a strong brand is start sharing even before you get to that position. Same thing as if today you learn something new about standing up for yourself or negotiate or influence. I encourage everybody to share directly on Instagram or LinkedIn. Feel free to tag me directly. So the branding really comes in when people start to talk about your interests and more people realize that you are more interested in the leadership position standing up for yourself and gradually you're going to learn what's the best way to apply the strategy. During this talk, you're able to understand what I mean by here. Okay, so let me ask all of you guys a question today. So feel free to comment on the chat. So why you're here today?  If one is you, press one in the chat. The number two, the second reason you're here today was because you're afraid to ask for more and people may dislike you, but you hate being underpaid. If two is you, comment two on the chat. And number three, the third reason you're here today was because you feel like people underestimate your capabilities and you want to learn how to stand up for yourself. So I guess there's three reasons you're here right now. So let me know, comment on the chat. One, two, three. If there's a fourth reason which I didn't cover, please comment on the chat as well. Just tell me why you're here today. The reason I asked you all those questions was because I really want to serve this 45 minutes purposely to you, to your needs.  Okay, so when you comment, make sure you comment directly to everyone so that everybody can see your comment. So I see comment coming in right away, that's awesome. And so it's Martina. Martina says three and Lexi's two and three, two, two, two. I see many two and three, two and three, that's great. Very, very good. So if we see two or three, they are, which means they are directly free to ask for more or you feel like people under ask me your capabilities and you want to learn to stand up for yourself. Okay, great. I see most of you guys are two or three. Yeah, yeah, in that case, I'm going to cover more regarding the emotional aspect and how to actually get paid more without leaving a bad impression. Something very quickly about specifically who I am. So I am Dr. Nancy Lee. I am a YouTuber, I'm also a director of product. I'm also a product management coach focused on high efficiency. And on top of that, I'm also a negotiation expert. I'm an immigrant. I am actually the first person graduated from college in my family and also the first like female engineers or any majority of the first in my family. My, actually my personal interest is foreign dancing and my favorite TV show during pandemic is Mandalorian. So feel free to comment on the chat regarding introduce yourself as well. And let me quickly go through here about specifically who I am, how do I get started, why I'm teaching you. Actually when I got started myself and I was the youngest engineering PhD from Boston University, but I didn't really like my first job at all because my first job, to be honest, this is a picture of me working in the oil field as like systems engineer. I didn't have any like customer interaction. And when I found out that actually I was underpaid compared with my peers, all those male coworkers, I felt very sad. And to be honest, and when I realized that companies sometimes they purpose to take advantage of me, maybe because I didn't stand up for myself or because I looked too young. So many different reasons. And they throw down the green card application process on purpose as well. And whenever I just try to go out into different new positions and people always point out that, oh, you don't have it.  And the frequent feedback from my managers and whoever always say that, oh, you did very well in terms of performance review. As lots of you guys right now are going through the performance review process, right? So people are thinking, well, you know what?  You did well, but you're just not good enough. This is totally a vacuum to me that, so you know that I did well but you never pay me well enough. And when I ask you how can I improve, you always just say that I'm not good enough. To be honest, this is like something nightmare to me. Sounds like I had another tiger mom that had very high standard image always saying that you're not good enough. This is very, very confused. And what I decided to do is that, so if you cannot change the environment, you need to change yourself. It is true myself as an immigrant and also minority woman in the oil gas industry and people may not fully respect me. It's very difficult for me to stand up for myself but I can just not leave the control power up to other people. Is there anything I can do by myself? Then I start to learn was the best way to negotiate a higher salary. So it turned out my first job actually was in a year into my new job, I asked for more salary and actually I received 15% more money, a 15% raise in the second year and on top of that I also had the second highest bonus in my company. And during the pandemic when I switched to new jobs so I directly, I really wanna get into the leadership position and actually I directly transition from individual contributor to director product in four years and when I made the transition, my salary also went up by 40% and during COVID I got four offers, three offers of director product offer. So what the message I wanna tell all of you guys is that there are room to improve. There's also more strategy and better strategy to get you where you are. So while I'm teaching you all those strategies today, just to be very honest with you guys, my long-term goal is to build hundred schools in China to teach kids from middle income families entrepreneurship. This is speaking dearly to my heart was because I belong to one of those kids before to be honest. I never had a family vacation until age of 20. My family just never want to spend their money beyond food and education. And to them, like going on vacations, the rich people are gonna do, it's like luxury. For a little while, to be honest, I felt it's very difficult to admit that I was poor and came from nothing because everybody around me seem to be very successful, very wealthy, especially in the US, but gradually I start to face it and start to understand that you cannot change where you're coming from, but you can change where are you going? And I started to embrace that, the fact that I came from nothing, but how can I start to improve myself? And few years later, after I became director product, guess what? I started to be proud of where I came from because the people who are reaching the mean now all work for me. So therefore the message I wanna deliver to all of you guys is that doesn't matter where you came from, it matters where your future goal is and how would you be able to accelerate and reach your goal fast? Okay, so as you know, there is no way I can just go back to China immediately, build nonprofit for poor kids like me, like immediately because the US-China relationship is pretty bad, even if we have a new president, I feel seeing the relationship become bad, especially now the COVID is going on right now, right? So I cannot go back to build nonprofit immediately. However, I start to look around, is there any urgent problems and the needs I can solve right now, immediately? Guess what? I see something very interesting. So as a director of product cox and x, Verizon, x, Shell Oil employees, I was the only female manager out of 100 people product management organization. And on top of that, when I look around, what about other like international professionals or immigrant? Are they in this like leadership position? Are they on the decision-making table? Frequently they are not. So that's why we're always underpaid, we didn't know how the salary structure was formed, we didn't know how to stand up for ourselves, we're afraid we might lose our H1B or any other visa sponsorship just because we didn't know what's the best strategy to execute. And on top of that, we didn't have a role model. So therefore I made a decision, what if I started teach others because now I hire people for my own team, I've negotiated salary like 15%, 40% each time when I move around, was in my company for jump ship, let me start to teach you. So that's why I started to teach those kinds of negotiation workshops for free. And as we are speaking right now, I have taught over 600 women how to negotiate, actually both women and women, I wanna teach more women, but men always join my workshop regardless because they are very ambitious and aggressive in terms of getting paid more. So I taught 600 people so far. So my goal is teach 1,000 people in next year. So please help me out if you know any nonprofit organization, they want to hear the same strategy as well. Okay, so therefore I start to make YouTube channel and actually today's special day, my YouTube channel broke 2,000 subscribers. Feel free to take a screenshot of this page and there's a special bar code you can scan later on. So my YouTube channel has a lots of free content about different kinds of negotiation strategies and hopefully it's gonna help you down the road and also teach you how to get promoted as well. All right, so in the summer, when I got into the director position within four years and actually I got promoted twice within four years to become a director. So I started to teach people how to get promoted as a female minority. You can watch the YouTube live replay on my YouTube channel as well. All right, so today let's laser focus on how can we get the compensation we want together? What's the best strategy to move forward and especially answer your questions so two and three, how to not get a pushback and also do not leave a very bad impression, right? So let's get into strategies today. Here's first of all, when we talk about negotiation don't you feel like, wow, this is kind of like aggressive, right?  What if people don't like me, right? Don't you feel this way? But I wanna show you the first mindset change. When you see negotiation, what about you immediately reflect in your mind saying that negotiation is influence? Yes, in real life and real work, negotiation is influence. There is a specific quote, I recommend all of you guys to write it down or take a screenshot. Actually, this one invented by myself by Dr. Nancy. I think it's very, very true. So people do not pay for what you deserve, they pay for the value you sell to them. Let me say it again. People do not pay for what you deserve, they pay for the value you sell to them. So let me elaborate a bit more here. So let me, why don't you guys put comment to answer this question? What do you think is negotiable? So what do you think is negotiable? And so comment on the chat because in the next page, I have an answer for you. Then we can apply the framework to the things you want to negotiate. Okay, so comment to the chat and reply all so that more people, everybody can see your comment. So I see Matina said pay and title and Lin said project and Sunny said everything. Lisi said bonus and Jingwen said position. Martina said, oh, title I read already. Belle said everything compensation, exactly. Negotiation, if you see everything is negotiable, you open up so many doors. Let me read it back to you. So in my opinion, everything is negotiable. Let me give you something very tangible so that you can apply the framework right away. Everything this year is negotiable, including very obviously a pay salary, sign on bonus or your annual bonus, your green card, I negotiate green card as well for my second employer. With the first employer, they intentionally delay my green card and lend a lesson. So I apply the strategy to negotiate my green card with the second employer. And you know what, exit package. Exit package is more popular for someone who's in the leadership position. In this case are directors or VP above position. And if you're also in the senior level position, you think about exit package. Exit package means usually like senior leadership position if somehow you're laid off for some kind of reason living in the company. You can negotiate how much you're paying you before you even join the company. So usually company can pay you like up to like, I think somebody receive a year. Within a year, I'm going to, if somehow a director or above level living my company, I'm giving you one year salary so that you don't work for my competitors or some terms against, hey, to be honest, I'm happy to get one year salary for some reason I'm leaving my current company. I believe I can get offers way faster than a year. So that's the exit package. People do not talk about.  You know what? Something else about tuition, I want to remind you guys, there is another specific case study. Someone else already executed this before. For example, you're doing an MBA, right? You can ask a company to pay for your MBA directly, right? Or part of your position or tuition. And on top of that, instead of paying you the, for example, the annual bonus, send the bonus directly to the school. In that case, you're saving 30% of the tax, pay directly to the school, you don't pay for tax. You know what I'm saying? There is a tax strategy behind it, 30% immediately, even if it's the same amount of money to the company. Everything is negotiable, okay? All right, post-series. A salary means if you join a startup and people are like, oh, we do not have money right now. That's okay. Let's negotiate post-series A salary. Once you raise funding, what's my new salary will be. As long as you promise me it's gonna be the market rate, I'm fine, right? You just start up when they get started. They don't really pay you well. Let's negotiate post-series A salary, severance package, anytime, here's the thing, tips to you guys, anytime, as long as it's not your fault that the company let you go, you can negotiate a severance package, you can negotiate a really good severance package as well, legal contract, everything. To me, in day-to-day life, actually I practice negotiation once per week just to brush up my skills. To me, in my opinions, they're like, who cleans the dishes at home with your husband? Who cleans the bathroom? All those are negotiable in real life. On top of that, if you directly apply this to small businesses, actually I received 20% discount and Macy's without sale, nothing was on sale. And for a price item, I received 20% discount. And the crazy part is I also negotiate free croissant at the bakery store. That wasn't just for the purpose of taking advantage of them. I'm just trying to check it out how good I am. After I received the free croissant, I never negotiate in the bakery store anymore. It's all the crazy stuff. Yeah, and also buying properties. And of course, myself, I bought a property during COVID. So it depends on your negotiation strategy. You can negotiate discount as well. Myself, oh, I have a video on my YouTube channel talking about how I negotiate 15% off a macaroon as well. You guys should check out the video as well. Okay, so now you understand everything is negotiable, right? There's no glass ceiling for you anymore. Everything is negotiable. Okay, cool. Another mindset shift I want you to understand before I teach you all the strategy is that you are as good as others. What does this mean? So let me give you a real case study. This is coming from Stanford, okay? So the case study what happened was they put people into this specific two rooms, two groups, group one, they said, you know what, we are directly going to negotiate on behalf of TJ Maxx, all right? But in the past, at TJ Maxx, so women are a lot of fashion, they're better negotiated. Usually they negotiate really good deal. In group two, both grown men and women. In group two, they still negotiate on behalf of TJ Maxx, but this is something opposite. They said, you know what, in the past, men are very tough and they're never afraid of having been pushed back by the vendors. So they usually are better negotiator, right? So the total two groups, different things before they even go out to negotiate. Then they say, okay, everybody with this in mind to go out to negotiate, do your best. So I want you to comment on the chat and guess, who did better? Is a man or a woman? So comment on the chat, let me know what you think. Who did better? I see same, okay. So Wei said the same, Xu said the same, Martina said the same, Lassie said the same, Lin Jing said the same son is a man or Lassie said woman, okay, great. Kay said woman.  You vote for woman, men vote for men, that's funny. So let me tell you the right answer to this. This all based on Stanford research, okay? So the answer is, you are as good as others. For the first group, they said, oh, you know what, women are better. They love fashion, women do better. For the second group, they said men are tougher, men in general did better in the past, men did better. You know the difference? What triggered the difference was what they put in your mind.  Before you even go out, they told you, woman can do better, now you did better. They said, men can do better, or the men did better. So that's the difference immediately. So therefore I discouraged any woman, those always felt like discouraged, everything. No, if you know how to use the right strategy and you believe that you can do as well as men, you'll get the same result of them. Okay, that's very important mindset I want you to understand. If you put the wrong glass ceiling in your head, you get worse result than others, regardless how hard you push. Now, let me teach you how to use the right negotiation framework. Okay, so here's something very interesting. They, within the negotiation framework, what I teach is very different from other people. Their specific framework, four set framework in it is the right timing and build a reputation before you ask and research and mark your value and talk about your value as well. Let me walk you through this specific negotiation framework and also give you specific examples how to do it. Okay, here's the thing.  Let's say right now, including myself, we're doing performance review in the company, right? December best time for performance review, everybody's doing that, or most company, let's put it this way, most company doing performance review. Now next part, do you think you should ask right away as the performance review? Wrong. You need to socialize your achievement whenever it happens, okay? Do not wait until negotiation and the performance review. That was too late. You need to build your credibility before that happens, okay? So let me also quantify, let me let you know, what do I mean something you can share with others that people know about your achievement? For example, product launch. Anytime you launch a new product, so I specialize in product management, so product launch is something very important, all the product managers need to talk about it. And engineering breakthrough, if you are data scientists and engineers, like all the breakthrough, you should let other people know. If you have January had a breakthrough, let other people know, or any kind of problem you have solved. And on top of that, if any customers send you a thank you note forward to your boss right away, and your boss is likely to forward it to his boss as well, because it will make him look good as well. So all of those, and on top of that, you should save it, not just forward it, you print it out, you save it. And at December performance review, you say, hey, if my customer sent me a really nice letter, I print it out just in case you forgot about it, okay?  Now next part, you need to build a personal brand before you ask. Okay, so let me ask you this question. What's your personal brand? How other people describe you? Do people describe you as someone who is a confident, problem solver or leader, or someone describe you as someone who is very nice, team player, very good at crunching numbers, very good at behind the desk, getting job done. Let me ask you, what kind of reputation this kind of personal brand is going to get you paid more, okay? So I challenge all of you guys try to think about what's your personal brand. Personal brand is defined as, more than what you think your personal brand is, it's also what other people describe you, your personal brand, okay? So please comment on the chat, what is your personal brand? If you know, or put this way, if you do not know, but at least what kind of personal brand you want to build, okay? So comment on the chat, what's your personal brand? And encouraging, you're saying the talk is encouraging, yes. Yeah, yeah, talk is encouraging. Thank you Grace. Please comment your personal brand, put your personal brand in the chat for, okay. Pixel said, innovation, you mean innovative, yeah. Sheen said, problem solver, Matina said, reliable, that's great, that's all great personal brand, creative, Grace has a very good one, creative, yes. Yeah, exactly, right? So, up-beating, yes. Great, reliable, Jingwen said reliable, Lassie said proactive, people connected. That's great, Lassie said, that's very great. Grace said also positive, all of those are very good personal brand. So I encourage all of you guys to pick, I'm gonna send you today's personal brand, this way you are right now, and pick the type of brand you want to either continue or get into, right? For example, if your currency, your personal brand is creative, but in order to get promoted more or being perceived as a leader, you wanna be someone who is very assertive as a woman, or you wanna be perceived as someone who is very confident, or you want someone to say that, oh, she is a good poppy speaker. For example, I was known for, I'm a good poppy speaker, with my American coworkers, not just within like our own immigrant, just American coworkers knew that I'm a good poppy speaker, right? Very confident. And so I'm gonna send you current brand, if you got the future brand, where you wanna go into and leave through your future brand starting from today. Don't wait until you get there. That's a very important message I wanna share with all of you guys. Don't wait and you become a manager, then you start to learn how to lead. Learn to lead even if individual contributor. Don't wait, you are like direct level, then you learn how to negotiate. Don't wait until you're underpaid, then you learn how to negotiate. You should lead through the brand at the beginning so that you can accelerate your career. Okay, future brand right now. Okay, so next part is research your market value. Okay, market value is very straightforward, right? Let's say you want to jump ship to a new company, or you don't want to jump ship, you wanna stay in your current company, right? So you can still just trying to show others what's your best market value. So at least you understand I underpaid or not, right? So you can Google, figure it out. So one of my favorite website is blind. It's called teamblind.com and you guys can take a screenshot and go to blind.net on the app. The website version is teamblind.com, right? Over there is all anonymous information about your salary. There's another website called level FYI. Level FYI is mainly for fan companies, which is Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon, those kind of fan companies, but I think not everybody work for fan company, right? So therefore blind is a better and more inclusive website. So understand your market value. Now, let me show you as an example what I found out. What does this mean? Once you know how much can go, then you have a confidence to ask for more. Okay, let's say you are a product manager. So because of her thing, I help people to become a product manager and I also help them to negotiate higher salary. I know lots of people salary, okay? So the number I gave you is very legit number. As a product manager, people's salary in general is between 120 to 300 grand. Which means your monthly salary is between 10 grand to 25 grand. Your sign-on bonus could vary between five grand to 100 grand. Those are individual contributors. 300 grand is more towards a fan company. Like the lower on 120 is more non, just non-fan company, to be honest. And this doesn't include startup. Hey guys, startup can go really low. Startup can go like 60 grand, whatever. It's relatively very low, but give you lots of like equity. But who knows, maybe the equity could be the next Airbnb, you know, who just went public. So this is very difficult to estimate for startup, but in general, the bulk number I give you is the right one. And if you want to know how much product managers get paid, because specialist in product management, check out my video on YouTube. You can just go to Dr. Nain City. Anywhere is Google Dr. Nain City. The top 10 result is on me. Just go to any of my videos or lead you to either my website or my YouTube channel. Just Google Dr. Nain City. You can watch this video, how I broke down, how much people get paid, and some of them getting paid like half million as individual contributor in Google as well. Okay, so another part is, when you go into the negotiation, you need to understand what's on the other side of table. 80% of the battle was done before you conduct your negotiation in person. Okay, this research was on the other table belongs to the 80%. The fact that you walk into negotiations, the rest is only 20%. But people always reverse. People always say, Nain City, what's the best strategy to ask for more on the spot on during the performance review with my manager what the exact script I should use? Okay, it's not like that. It is totally wrong. The best way to do it is to research before you even walk into the negotiation room and sit on the table. Okay, so you need to do research regarding what's on the other side of table. So what's that budget? What's the competition? You think you're doing well and you see your co-workers seriously. So what do they value? Maybe you think you're a very good building mathematical model, but they appreciate client interaction, driving revenue for companies. They appreciate something different. You also should understand what is negotiable. Okay, maybe something's fixed. The, maybe let's say for lots of companies actually, the base salary relative speaking has less room to move, but they can move a lot more for sign-on bonus, different kind of bonuses goes against. You need to research about what's negotiable, what's in the package, what's in the entire package, not just the money, could be vacation time, could be other stuff, especially for women, you know what? Flexible working hours is very critical, especially if you want to raise your family. Maybe money is not important to you. I just want to be flexible, okay? That's part of package. And also you also need to develop smart question to ask if you cannot find out all the answers, but usually I will find out as much information so I can even before I walk into the room to do the real negotiation. Okay, now here is the 10, oh, sorry, eight negotiation tips. We do not have time to go through each of the tips. This is last for a really long time. Hey guys, I have a six-hour in-depth negotiation training go through each of this, but today let me share with you the number one. You need to understand this. It is illegal for HR to ask your current salary in Massachusetts. Research as a state, I think New York, New Jersey, California has the same rule. So anytime HR, HR likes to do this. They like to low-ball you. So there's also how much you're getting paid right now. Let's see, you tell them saying that in the phone, on the phone saying it is illegal for people to ask me how much you're getting paid in Massachusetts. I don't want you to be to put you in the wrong spot. Okay, you say that right away. Especially if you know your current salary is towards a lower end. It's pretty low, 60 grand, like 80 grand. It's already pretty high, 20 grand higher than the old one. That's pretty good. No more to give them any more, okay? So never tell them how much you're getting paid unless if you work for a fan company, okay? You're already getting paid half a million dollars or 300 grand. Yeah, tell them, tell them because you're already towards the higher end just tell your competition how much you're getting paid. That's a special case. For any other case, you do not work for a fan company. You know that you're getting underpaid. Tell them it is illegal for HR to ask your current salary in Massachusetts or any other states. Okay, now you need to package your value, right? Here, let me give you a real-life example. My student Annie herself was a senior scientist working for startup in San Francisco and she received 40% raise. Let me give you the step-by-step framework we have used and how exactly we make it happen. Okay, here thing, value examples. Okay, so what happened to Annie was that she got a low-ball offer. Low-ball offer means currently, let's say this is to protect her information for the full transparency. Let's say she's getting paid 100 grand. She's getting paid higher than this to be honest. But let's say 100 grand, right? As a senior material scientist. Her new offer is the same as her current salary, 100 grand. Why on earth when you jump into a new company, you're getting paid the same amount of money that a total low-ball offer? So Annie felt very undervalued. Okay, then what we did was that, let's compare with your market value. And let's say material scientists in Bay areas getting paid between 120 and 150 grand is clearly she can reach out to something higher, right? This is her bad market value. And the third part she did was, how can we do some internal research about what's on the other side of table? We discovered with at the startup, the new company. She's jumping from one star to the other star basically. So the new company she was about to join just raised $300 million, that's a lot of money. And they have super good life work balance. So that company, to be honest, they're working, they're taking every other Friday off. Which means that life of balance is doing very well. So they are not short of money. They're treating the employer very well. Yeah, which means they have money on the table. They're ready to pay them, means the budget is really higher, right? And then Annie started to package her value. What's the value you can sell to the employer? She discovered that in the specific startups and she had a unique contribution, she had experience working on 90% of the equipment. And on top of that, she also had experience leading a team. She also had so many PhD publications. All of them were truly appreciable she had. So that's her value. So she started to pack her value and pitch her value to the HR. And she also did this and she brought HR on her side. So the funny part was when I help her and I go to her side is she told me exactly which are what the HR said and I told her how to respond back going back and forth. So what we did was we told HR that we really like your company. Can we work together, right? So what do you think the hiring manager wants? In the reality, HR always wants you to accept the offer to be honest because their compensation is linked to the fact that you are actually accepting the offer. They want to help you. So you need to show that you're on the same boat. Hey, I wanna join this company, but you know what? I deserve more because ABC reads and the market value, your value, your pitch to the company. And then you bring the HR on your side saying that I just wanna work with you. How can we work together? Just let me know. So what do you think the hiring manager thinks? Why do you think the hiring manager gave me such like low ball offer? Just bring her on your side. So eventually we were able to get 40% raise not just for the money power. Hey guys, because I personally focus on career development as well. Money is one thing. Your growth is also sometimes more important than money in my personal opinion. And guess what? Any transition, not only the money-wise, she transitioned from someone working for bike startup to a flying car company. That's cute. Hey guys, I think this is way cooler product to work on. Anytime you go out and say, what do you work on at bikes? Or the next time I get a new job, what do you work on? Back in the future type of car. So it's a career progression for her, not just for the money. So knowing how to negotiate and package your value is key and do lots of research. 80% of battle happens before the battle actually starts. Okay. Another very quick example, just more real estate example. And for today's sixth time, I do want to leave time for Helen. For real estate example, I will just quickly go through this without going in depth. So basically there's another student of mine to protect her information. Her name is Megan. So real estate agent, anything, right? So do not judge on this. This is Massachusetts price. Massachusetts single family is 600 grand. If you live in San Francisco, please add one more zero to it, do not laugh at the low price in Massachusetts. Okay, take it easy on us. So the original, the listing price of the house was 600 grand. It was sold for 700 grand. Oops. And someone drew a line on my PowerPoint. That's interesting, but let's keep going. And however, because she actually sold more, 100 grand higher than the original value, however, she can only get 1% of commission. The reason was because original was 3% in total and she has to give 2% to the seller's agent. She only kept 1% for herself, which means through this entire process, like selling the property for 100 grand more, she only gets $7,000. She deserves to get paid more. So what she decided to do is that she understands, she understood her original value, additional value to her client, 100 grand more, her, she asked for additional 1%, another 7,000. So her total value she brought her client is $93,000 on top of that she also learned how to build relationship and selling the future like relationship and deals with the client as well. So at the end, she was able to get paid more. And on top of that, let me also share with you another insider information. And this is just again, protect all the situation, people's information, but this definitely happened to a friend of mine. So somebody let's say his name. Could I hear you a little more? Yeah, I think that Nancy's network connection is probably broken. So while Nancy is offline right now, I believe that this is a very informative presentation for everyone. So if it is possible, could you, we'd like to play a game with you. So if you are interested, please scan the QR code in my back or put in what you learned today in the link that I shared in the chat. So really, okay, Nancy is back. Hi Nancy, you're on mute. Hey guys, sorry, my internet got cut off. So every 10, 45 p.m., my internet got off because my husband wanted me to go to bed. So that's a hint. Auto-shada every time. So let's, can you make me host again so that I can represent? Okay. Sorry about that. Let me see, I'm the co-host, but can I? So I'm not. Jomin, can you make Nancy the host? I don't seem to have the permission. Or Jiwen, let me ping them. Yeah, or you guys can enable me sharing screen again. Let's see. I don't have to access right now. I think maybe Jomin, she can. Yeah, maybe you guys can enable the screen share, at least. Yeah, sorry guys, yes. Yeah, let me see if I can share. Yeah, totally fine. Let's see. I think that we don't have the access for now. Is it possible that you share the slide with us and then we can present it? Yes, I can do that. I will put it in the chat. Sorry guys, technical issues. Yeah, totally. So thank you guys. Thank you everyone for your patience. I think that we, okay, got it. Thank you Nancy. I have your slide, I'll present here. Yeah, go to the slides with Zhang, then we can continue to go to the next slide once you present. Thank you. Yeah, sure. Let's see, slide this one. Yeah, right here, yeah. So that's Zhang's example. So therefore the message to all of you guys is that, so actually companies want you to negotiate. So next slide. All right, so the question I have for all of you guys is when do you think you should ask for a raise? When do you think you should ask for a raise? So comment on the chat. So when do you think you should ask for a raise? Performance review, yeah. Job loss performance review and ways that promotion when we have competing offer anytime, when it's the right time for promotion, right after major accomplishment, suddenly said before the performance review. So here you think during 101, hinted during 101, that's a very good answer. So there's a, let me show you this negotiation calendar. Next slide. So the answer to this question is that there's several examples. When you jump ship to a new company and also when you switch to a new role in your current company or ask for a raise before decision is made. Let me elaborate on ask for a raise before decision is made. So let's move to next slide showing the calendar. Okay, so this is a negotiation calendar. I also have a YouTube channel and showing you how exactly to use a negotiation calendar. What do I mean by when before decision was made? Okay, so as a hiring manager, I know how exactly decisions were made. Let's say performance review is in December, but do you know that for some companies the decisions was made before December, before your performance review. It's likely, let's say the decision was made in November your manager and HR will start to talk about how do they distribute the bonus or the salary increase this year. The decision was usually made before the performance review. In the performance review, they communicate with you but decision was made, let's say in November. All right, so in November, the number is locked down. So therefore in December, when you ask for more and it's likely you're not going to get what you wanted but different company has different calendar. So let's say the timing for this company, your current company is November and the performance review in December. But in reality, you need to get asked in like September or October so that they can think about it, they can go back and forth and when the decision is made in November you already put your information in and remember you said the glass ceiling, the mindset directly into your manager's mind before he was able to make the decision. Okay, and then there's something else. What I did personally was that I started a few months before September, right? So in the summer, when I felt like I had all the credibility, reputation ready I started conversation with manager even in the summer. So I understand was missing how to improve it and in September, I will officially ask it and now in November, when they made decision, they know they already have the number ready. And then finally by the end of like performance review I already get the numbers I wanted. That's how I got my first 15% raise within the same company. And I also get 20% a second highest bonus within my company as well. Okay, so that's what's going on. And next slide. I think I am the host right now. Maybe we can switch directly. Do you want to stop sharing? Yes, sorry guys, let me switch sharing. Now let me share with you Michael's example. And oh, sorry, present, sorry guys. Okay, cool. All right. So one of the tips I wanna give to all of you guys is that this is how rich people become richer. Investing in yourself is the only thing with guaranteed return. Michael was actually one of my student who asked me to help him to become a product manager. So when Michael reached out to me earlier this year I was a little bit shocked. I was like, you know what Michael, you are very experienced and I'm a minority, I'm a woman. And to be honest, when he reached out to me he said I already doubled mine. I was very shocked. I was like, you already doubled mine, sorry. Why you even reached out to me, asked me to teach you. What I learned was also the biggest learning I wanna share with all of you guys. Without me teaching others, I wasn't able to discover the truth that's how rich people become richer. So rich people really love to invest in themselves because to them knowledge is investment. And then they are turning the knowledge to increase their value, their capabilities to get into higher position, to get pay more. That's why when Michael came to me I asked him a question, why he came to me? He was like Nancy, you're very good at selling yourself and you have lots of experience as a product manager and you know how to go to higher salary and you get promoted much faster than most Americans. I wanna learn all the top scales from you so that I can get paid like three times more. So okay, that's very ambitious goal, right? So, but that's a pattern. I see this again and again in lots of student I teach. That's how rich people become richer because they see invest in themselves. It's only thing with guaranteed return. So I want you guys to really remember this message. If you don't remember anything of today's talk you gotta remember this one, most important thing. Now, let me just encourage everyone again and feel free to share this message if you think the content and tissue tonight need to be heard by anyone else who will help someone else start to get paid more and start to build confidence in terms of how to stand up for themselves and get paid the right amount and feel free to share this content with anybody else who really needs any help. And all the replay of this talk is also going to be on my YouTube channel. And I also myself also have a negotiations consulting service so I can help you to negotiate higher salary and I charge you 10% of the game. The first $5,000 is free myself because I teach actually my main thing is I teach product manager accelerator. I help people to become product manager in tech industry. If you're interested you can get $10 off using the code negotiation and go to my website Dr. Nancy Lee to learn more. This is my contact information. So feel free to contact me, take a screenshot, go to my WeChat account or my email Dr. Nancy Lee YouTube channel. Feel free to take a screenshot and let's get connected later on. I also have a group, actually two groups, LinkedIn group for mock interview and also the product manager referral groups and I do referrals for free for people. Feel free to join these groups as well. So we can take a screenshot and let's get connected later on and join the group. And finally I have one last story I wanna share with all of you guys is that do you remember at the very beginning I told you guys my first company intentionally delayed my green card and it took me 11 years to get a green card. I got my green card in September 2020 like two months ago but the message I wanna deliver to all of you guys is that most people over estimate what they can accomplish in a year. They underestimate what they can accomplish in a decade. So I encourage all of you guys to set a very clear goal regarding where you want to go and use the best strategy to accelerate and get to your goal very fast. So again, at the end, if you think anybody want to need to hear my stories and all this knowledge I share feel free to send them my YouTube video to them. Actually, this is just a YouTube video on my website where I talk about my experience and the lesson learned regarding getting a green card after 11 years. Okay, now let me turn this back to our host and I also know Helen is going to speak right after me. It's gonna be a great Q&A session. I'm gonna stay around just in case any questions you wanna ask me about. But next session is our star, Helen. I'm gonna turn it back to them right now. Yeah, thank you very much Nancy for the informative and refreshing presentation. I believe everyone must have learned a lot from your presentation. And just a heads up for everyone here because this session is broadcasted on Dr. Nancy's YouTube channel. So if you would like to revisit this presentation, you could go to Dr. Nancy Lee's YouTube channel later on and this video will be uploaded to her channel.