How did Pilot mitigate problems of service business turnover, customer churn, and inconsistent customer experience, with or without software?

I don't think they saw a big correlation between turnover and churn. If you were using Pilot, you did probably like the person who did your books, and you did have more or less usually the same person doing your books. 

But the experience that you had was like when you had a question you would write to Pilot. You'd get an answer from anyone. So it was less deeply connected to that person. It was more of a general experience. 

The bookkeepers worked really hard to define specifically what is different about each customer, and that would be in the product. If you were going to start doing the books for a customer, the first thing you would look at is there are these 10 things about this customer that's special, and you need to understand this before you start doing the books. Then, the rest of it was all basically the same. Overall, that tended to work pretty well. 

We did have one breed of bigger customers, and they were really difficult to manage since they had more of these bespoke aspects to them. There were a couple of customers that people in the office would be like, "We got a problem with so-and-so. It's just a total nightmare." Their expectations would be really high and it would be harder to scale because it's a more complex business. As the businesses became more complex, it became a little harder to scale and those things tended to get routed to a few of your really good people.

I don't know how the company would have managed without having that echelon of just really, really strong bookkeepers around, because there were enough hard problems about, "What do we do for this customer?" that you needed a handful of experts.