The Future of Business Is Kid Stuff

The Future of Business Is Kid Stuff

At SpringAhead, collaboration is at the core of everything we do because we believe it's the future of business.

A few weeks ago, I asked my little sister, a high school junior, if she needed help studying for her AP exams. Focused on her laptop screen, she said no, and that she was doing just fine. I peeked in over her shoulder and was amazed at how these kids were working together. She was working with her classmates on Google Docs. The entire study group was contributing, flooding a communal page with notes in real time while discussing the material in live chat. It was teamwork at its finest. What they were accomplishing remotely in only a few minutes would have taken hours, possibly days of email coordination just to set up when I was a student. Where was this stuff when I was in business school? More importantly, why isn't this stuff applied universally in business? By the time my sister's class enters the workforce, it has to be. They'll expect it.

A Higher Standard

Expectations of software are changing. Social software has changed the way we communicate with our networks. Real time collaboration and teamwork are technological realities that are redefining how we work and do business. Delivering instant results and immediate rewards is a good start, but for software to be truly efficient, it has to be intuitive. If my sister's study group needs an instruction manual to use your application, you've already lost. When software fails to work exactly how customers want it to work, word travels fast.

Referral Society

The social connectivity of the customer base changes much more than the speed of business - it changes how quickly we're judged and consequently, how we sell. The hit-making marketing formulas of the past that relied on scarcity of options no longer apply. It was once possible to force feed product to the masses simply by monopolizing aisle space, but that's impossible now because virtual shelves are endless, offering unlimited choice and filters that allow consumers to shop based on relevance. Pushing your wares is futile. You have to draw people in by creating something they want to use. We're living in a referral society where customer satisfaction is key and you need to create customer evangelists. You're never performing for a single customer, you're performing for that customer's tribe. Favorable online and word-of-mouth reviews can bring in more revenue than the best direct sales campaign. Conversely, an unflattering blog post or tweet can spark overnight migration. You may be the darling for now, but irrelevance can happen in an instant. The difference between being yesterday's My Space and tomorrow's Facebook is how you approach feature design. Companies that successfully engage their customers as active participants in a collaborative design process are best positioned for longevity. It's about meeting real world needs, and the easiest way to ensure you're always creating relevant features is talking to your customers regularly. Don't just address them, start a conversation and listen. Invite feedback.

Collaborative Customer Service

Open communication is essential in maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction. At SpringAhead, we thrive on feedback and are implementing systems to harness it to improve the way we serve our customers. Any customer can post suggestions for improvements to existing features or new features they'd like to see added. The entire customer community is allotted a handful of votes that they can use to move the suggestions they like up the priority list. But this is just a start. We never want our customers to feel like they're dealing with corporate middlemen. We prefer working without a curtain and take great pride in providing one-to-one customer service with a human touch. If a customer contacts us with an issue or suggestion for a specific feature, we make sure to include the engineer that coded the feature in the dialogue. By facilitating and encouraging ongoing two-way communication, the customer's evolving needs will always be addressed in a timely manner and the engineers have the unfiltered insight they need to design intuition into every feature and update. It's our way of ensuring SpringAhead is software our customers want to use because it works exactly how they expect it to.

The Next Generation

When I compare how my sister's study group works to how my friends at large companies work, it makes me wonder. At what point do we adults develop such a high tolerance for software that doesn't make our lives easier? Sure, Google Docs has its minor issues, but it's a collaboration and teamwork friendly application that in the end, frees people up to get more done in less time. The same can't be said for the majority of today's enterprise-level workplace applications. Many of these behemoth back office "solutions" are collaboration deficient and end up creating more busy work. The slow moving software giants that snub the merits of social software won't be able to rely on scarcity of options to maintain their share for much longer. Nimble up and comers are tapping into the lessons of social software and are developing features that will make the next generation's workforce feel right at home.

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To learn more about SpringAhead, visit springahead.com