As a provider of digital publishing solutions, we live and breathe in the world of technology. We love learning about new developments that can help improve the way we work and live. On the 29th of October, Agnethe Løkke Madsen, Head of Customer Care, held a presentation at the event “Beyond Social” at Aarhus University, School of Business and Social Sciences (BSS), where she talked about some of Visiolink’s experiences with the subject ‘Podio in Visiolink’.
The purpose of Agnethe’s presentation was to explain and exemplify how Podio has helped improve our cooperation with customers. As for most businesses, it’s very important to Visiolink to keep improving our relationship with our customers. Due to several years of rapid growth, the need for better documentation has become more and more clear. When Visiolink was a small startup in a phase of great growth, there was this saying between Visiolink’s customers:
“Great people – lousy documentation”
Even though it’s incredibly positive that we are liked among customers, the ‘lousy documentation’ definitely had to go. Back in the day when we needed an overview of customers, we had to consult the sales department’s reference sheet. This was by no means ideal and a problem to both employees and customers.
The Implementation of Podio
Agnethe started her career in Visiolink in 2012, and her first task was to implement Zendesk to build a customer service setup. Her job took a turn to include the development of a knowledge sharing process. The goal was to have a systematised method for transferring employees’ knowledge from their individual day-to-day methods to one centralised system. The rationale behind this process was that knowledge is crucial to an effective and proactive customer service.
After evaluating different alternatives, Podio was chosen to help achieve this goal because of its flexibility. One of Podio’s advantages is that it makes it possible to create and configure workflows, instead of forcing the organisation to fit into pre-fixed workflows. In addition, Podio has an open API, which makes it possible to integrate third party software.
This started a process where employees began to systematise, automate and standardise their work processes. Today, Podio is the tool that organises and controls all projects, apps and data. When a project is handed over from one department to another, it happens through Podio.
Integrating Different Platforms
Implementing Podio also started the process of integrating all third party apps in order to store data on one platform instead of spending time checking data on nine different platforms. The main goal was to minimise manual work in the documentation process, which these integrations have helped achieve.
For example, we use the third party app, Appbot, for monitoring reviews of our 900 apps in App Store and Google Play. In practice, this means that our Customer Care Specialists get a notification every time ePaper readers write a review or rate the ePaper. These notifications are of great value as they enable us to resolve potential bugs and improve our products proactively. In addition, the integration between Appbot and Podio enables us to track the tendencies across different platforms and products.
These are just two examples of how Visiolink has systematised, automated and standardised data processes. The implementation of Podio has clearly resulted in more effective knowledge sharing internally as well as externally. Instead of spending time on creating data, employees spend their time on analysing the data and proactively share their knowledge to the benefit of co-workers and customers.
Podio as a Transformation Tool
Other stakeholders have shown their interest in the extensive transformation process Visiolink has been through. There are several reasons for this. Podio is not a classic CRM-system, which makes it a big decision to swap from a regular CRM-system to Podio. The curiosity arises because some of the benefits are obvious; open API, personalised workflows and basic functionality from Social Media, which makes the entrance barrier low.
In Visiolink, we have used Podio as a transformation tool in the process from being a startup to become a more settled company.
