Cintas Corporation (NASDAQ:CTAS) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Faiza Alwy: Great. Thank you. And then if I could just follow up on the — you mentioned the Google partnership. Maybe give us a sense of where you see that partnership going over the next few years? What some of the benefits might be as you think about your digital transformation strategy?

Todd Schneider: Certainly. Our relationship with Google gives us a better, faster, smarter, cheaper way to store our critical data. But we see it as it can do so much more, due in large part because of the relationship that Google has with SAP and the relationship we have with SAP and now Google. As you all know, we have had a very successful relationship with SAP for over a decade now. And we’ve spoken in the past that it is much more than just a customer vendor relationship. It’s a strategic relationship. So you combine that with just a couple of months ago, SAP and Google announced that they have an expanded partnership. And what that’s going to do is it’s going to allow our SAP data to be connected with the Google Cloud Data and analytics technology, which will give us access to their advanced AI and machine learning capabilities.

So we’re excited about that. It’s going to — we think we can benefit for many years to come as this type of relationship. But you asked Faiza for a few examples. So I’ll give you a few to help give a little color around it. We see having these technologies connected, the opportunity to put in front of our sales organization instead of calling, I’ll say, more blindly on who to try to sell our services to, we call it next best prospect for our sales team to have real technologies to push in front of them. Here’s where you go spend your time. We think that’s significant and can have an impact on our productivity and our retention and morale productivity, all those things. Next best product for the customer. So instead of just trying to figure that out, we can put that in front of our sales team to — and our service team to make sure that they’re talking to our customers about the next best product that would fit based upon other customer behaviors.

We think certain customer service functions could be enhanced nicely over the coming years. There is — we all use Google Maps, and we see an opportunity to leverage Google Maps to even further enhance our Smart Truck technology to make routing even more dynamic, which will save us time, saves us energy, saves us — allows for more time in front of our customers instead of on the road. And then just one more, I would say is that, our service team, we’re blessed to have a lot of customers. We want to make sure that they’re spending — they’re in front of the right customers at the right time. And we see the potential to leverage that type of technology to point them in the right direction to make sure that they’re focused on any at-risk customers and customers that we need to enhance the effort with them with the people in front of them.

So hopefully, that gives you a little color around it. Again, this is not — we don’t see this as an event, we see this as a process and the coming years, we think it can be very impactful for our business and our customers.

Faiza Alwy: Great. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Operator: Next question comes from Ashish Sabadra with RBC.

Ashish Sabadra: Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to turn down into the First Aid and Safety Services we saw some material acceleration in growth there. I was wondering if you can talk about what’s driving that strength. And then as you think about ’24 any puts and takes that you would call out? Or how do we think about that momentum going forward? Thanks.

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