My various roles at Talkspirit lead me to use every day a dozen of digital web apps to interact with our entire ecosystem or participate in various business processes.
Among these solutions, I use daily:
- Salesforce for our business
- Trello and Github for project management and product management
- Zendesk, Intercom for support and the relationship with our customers
- Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and their associated tools for content publishing and join conversations on social media
- Google Drive and Dropbox
- Google Calendar
- The email for external communication
- Our social network for our internal communication and external community management
Since we run our social network, we have been able to overcome the email for all our internal communications, have been more transparent and efficient.
But the use of multiple dedicated web apps, each for a specific problem cause the following difficulties:
1. All these applications are information and knowledge silos only accessible to users with a license (excluding public content)
In particular :
- Impossible to search and access the history of all the information shared without a user license. And adding colleagues who do not participate directly in the associated business process is expensive.
- People who might be interested in certain activities and status within these tools (eg, the status of a commercial lead, the status of the resolution of a bug, the status of development of product functionality, …) are dependent on someone or a meeting to get the answer they need with a more or less significant delay …
- More and more external interactions are requiring an internal action: a response of an expert on a specific question, an improvement on a feature of the product, a problem to qualify and resolve… These external interactions need most often numerous copy paste from a tool to another one to share the case with the right teams. We use our social network to expand collaboration when needed. All these copy paste and goings and comings create delays that negatively impact the customer experience.
3. Notifications are ineffective
- All webapps mentioned above generate “bell” or “mail” notifications. The proliferation of these notifications generate significant pollution.
- A notification is useful to be informed but the benefits stop here: we cannot interact directly on the associated activity without opening the app that hosts it.
This situation has become untenable. Admittedly, each business application has allowed to increase efficiency, productivity, working within its field … But the benefits end here.
We have identified a challenge: facilitate communication and collaboration between external and internal and between internal teams regardless of tool problems.
Our goals :
- Being much more open and transparent
- Increase productivity and overall performance
Ultimately, improve significantly the experience of customers through more effective collaboration of all resources involved in related processes.
This is our mission, the challenge we have set ourselves, that drives us, fascinates us and we are trying to solve.
We will deploy a new Talkspirit on this path soon. Stay tuned on this blog and on twitter.
Philippe
