Dedicated to zero distance

He discusses the latest support metrics, the launch of my.typefi.com and coming updates, the latest changes to Typefi Cloud, and the new Managed Workflows for Standards service package.

Transcript | Presenter

Transcript

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00:00	Intro
00:44	Impact of lockdowns
01:41	Professional Services team values
03:44	Zero distance focus
04:44	Customer satisfaction
05:45	my.typefi.com
08:53	Typefi Cloud changes
09:43	Managed Workflows for Standards
10:41	New website
11:12	New approach to project management

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Intro (00:00)

JASON: Hello. It’s really great to see everyone again, face to face, and also to meet people face to face, which up until now had been mostly an anonymous Zendesk icon, or help desk icon as you guys would call it.

I’m up here as Chandi said, for two reasons really. I’m gonna tell you a little bit about the changes that have happened within Typefi’s Professional Services team, which is the team I’m honoured to lead, since the last user conference in 2019.

And then, of course, to introduce you to Marie, who will be our last speaker of the day. And she’ll have two jobs, to tell you about project management and introduce you to a cocktail. So that’s where we’re at now.

Impact of lockdowns (00:44)

Now, aren’t we all a little bit sick of seeing this little fella?

Like a lot of you guys I’m sure, the team at Typefi had to simplify our ambitions a bit over the last few years. For what felt like a really long period of time, it came down to three basic questions, really. Were we all healthy? Did we all have plenty of food, and plenty of toilet paper? And, do we have plenty of work?

As many of us around the world were lucky enough to emerge from these versions of lockdown, unfortunately our colleagues in the Sri Lankan team got to go into act two, which was a complete political and financial meltdown in their country.

These are pretty big events to happen, completely unexpectedly, really.

When such big events like this sweep past you, they do bring changes and you may not like those changes, but they also bring an opportunity to reset, reevaluate what matters most, and find a new approach.

Professional Services team values (01:41)

So for us, at Typefi, we began this process by looking at what we do from the ground up again in the Pro Serv team.

At the end of last year, the Professional Services team met to refocus and we talked explicitly about what mattered to us now, not three years ago, but now after all of these events, what matters to us now.

The outcome of this was a very clear, renewed clarification of the team’s purpose, which is collaboration. We as a team exist to improve our product, improve our revenue, we are a company after all, and to improve, most importantly, the customer’s processes through unique solutions.

During this meeting as well, the team clarified a lot of our key values.

They believe in transparency, honesty, working together and having a really supportive team around them, stretched across the globe that works together to make the customer happy. They all agree that they enjoy the satisfaction of doing a job that they love.

Now, I was humble to facilitate this. Oh, I’ve skipped ahead and given away the trick there. *laugh*

I was really humbled to facilitate this conversation, but, the outcomes, these weren’t me. These were not my words. They weren’t Chandi’s words, they weren’t Caleb’s words, so they didn’t come from the leadership team. These were the words of the team themselves.

And it was really no surprise though that they rated customer satisfaction so highly, both in the values and also in the mission that they’re trying to accomplish.

I’ve been at Typefi for nearly eight years now, and I can tell you this has been the way ever since I joined. And I was a customer before that for a few years. And it was that way before I joined when I was a customer as well.

It existed from the beginning when there was a small group of people including Chandi and Caleb, who are still with the company now, both here today, who worked tirelessly to transform this quirky small Australian startup with a big idea into the global team that we all have today. And we can hold a conference with such a great company.

Zero distance focus (03:44)

Now, internally, we have really always focused on this connection between customers, consultants, and engineers.

I mean, I’m trying to think of, Marie will have a slide that will show this in a second, but I’m sure there’s someone in here who whenever you joined as a customer, Chandi probably wasn’t just the CEO, he might have written your transform.

So I mean, there was this notion that customers, consultants, and engineers sometimes work so closely together, they could almost be the same person. And we believe that togetherness and openness, even as we grow, is really important and it adds in immense value for the customer.

Last month these efforts were recognised by Typefi winning, drum roll please because no one knows what the next slide is, the Zero Distance Award!

These awards identify and celebrate the work of organisations around the world in eliminating the distance between their operations, their employees, and their customers.

Customer satisfaction (04:44)

Now, Typefi’s been achieving really outstanding customer satisfaction scores for years. And I’m really proud of that as the head of the customer experience team.

These particular numbers that are up here now are just for the last five quarters. We report on them monthly, look at them every quarter as a group, and they’re always outstanding.

And a really big thank you for everyone on the help desk tickets who, you take the time to rate that as in a thumbs up or a thumbs down. And especially when you leave a comment to give us a little bit more information about what we’ve done well or what we could do better. It really does make a big difference.

So going back to last December when we met, why change anything?

We’ve implemented many complex workflows for lots of you in the room. We’ve worked with a variety of customers around the world, some absolutely fabulous people, which you all must have seen today networking with one another. And we’ve built some really great relationships out of this.

We could quite easily just say slow and steady and stay the course, but we wanted to make life better for you guys and also for the team that we work with.

my.typefi.com (05:45)

Specifically, we wanted to make it easier for our customers who had started to work remotely during the pandemic to collaborate more easily with us and also with each other.

Now Caleb and Baz’s recording about Project Marcoola has already shown how this has really been integral, and as well with Guy and the online authoring, this has all become integral to future product development, but it’s also become really important in the way we deliver our services and our customer support as a team.

As an automation company, we are constantly asking the question, how can we simplify things? How can we make it easier to work with Typefi and how can we make it easier to work for Typefi?

Well, one of the first things we launched, right at the start of the pandemic really, was my.typefi.com. And if you haven’t used this platform, please do go there. You should be able to get into it with your normal Typefi credentials.

Regardless of what your status is in your organisation, whether you’re a user or a manager, you should have access to it. And it really does put a lot of information at your fingertips here. And a lot of this would’ve been behind the scenes. We at Typefi would’ve had access, but it wasn’t open and transparent for all of you.

So we’ve automated a lot of these manual processes to bring it to the surface. And so as a customer, you can log in, you can see the amount of time you’ve used, whether that’s on a support pack or a service pack, what sort of tickets you have, just a quick summary there.

And if you can click on those tickets and go to the help desk to make any comments, manage your users, and also you’ve got, you know, just in case you’re feeling a bit lonely working from home, you’ve got nice friendly photos of us just to keep your company.

And, funnily enough, it doesn’t show it on this screenshot, but there’s even a little email icon. So you can immediately just reach out to us and drop us a line if you have any questions about any of this information or anything else.

Like a lot of the other developments we’ve trailed today, we’ve got more in store for this one as well. One of the things I’m really excited about is soon, with the telemetry data that was mentioned in a couple of the earlier presentations, you can opt in to get your page counts and that sort of job information pulled into my.typefi.

So you can see the amount of pages that you’re producing. I think that really just will show the power of the software once it’s there. And also there’s gonna be more information that’s available such as your licencing information in case you have any questions about that.

For a lot of our customers, it’s quite simple, but there are some of you who might have two or three different licences and development licences and that can get a bit confusing at times and they’ll be summarised nicely here.

And another thing as well, and this ties in a lot to some of the stuff that Marie will talk about later, we’re doing more and more with our project management including project plans, meetings, et cetera. And we want to create a document portal as part of this. So instead of going to the FTP to download different things, you can in one place get all the information related to your Typefi experience.

And on that note, if there’s any other features you can think of, just drop me a line. We really do want this to make your experience easier working with Typefi. And we’ll add it to the future roadmap.

Typefi Cloud changes (08:53)

Couple of other things as well that have come up. Again, in the spirit of collaboration, a lot more of our clients moved to remote working during the pandemic. That’s no big surprise.

We’ve had quite a few who went from one type of software package to wanting us to host it centrally so that different colleagues could access it more easily. So we’ve reframed our Cloud offerings.

There’s more information coming from the sales team on this, but basically, it’s a response to this change in the workforce of our customers. And it’s scaleable, the new Cloud is scalable to suit whatever your needs are, storage, volume, price, et cetera.

And the big thing is that you don’t need to involve your IT team. Other than downloading the Designer plugin or the Writer plugin, our IT team will manage everything else for you.

Managed Workflows for Standards (09:43)

Now, at our last conference, which was still three years ago, believe it or not, we launched a product called Standards Cloud. Now, the concept behind this was simply to give a platform for smaller national standards bodies to adopt ISO adoptions, really cheaply and even free to begin with as a trial.

We do a lot of work in the standards space. There’s a couple of standards customers here today. One new package that we are offering now is a services package called Managed Workflows for Standards.

And a bit like the Cloud it’s trying to put more of that responsibility on us as opposed to your teams. So we take on the job of managing your ISO adoption workflows and keeping them up to date with the latest features that ISO might implement at their end.

So if you’re interested in that, get in touch with me afterwards or talk to Chandi. I would’ve said Stephen, but unfortunately he’s away with Covid. That fellow we saw at the beginning of the presentation.

New website (10:41)

There’s also gonna be a new website coming in the new year.

This is very much to help make it easier for you guys and also future prospects to find information about Typefi, wherever you’re at in that journey.

All of that sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? And when I put it together myself, I thought actually we’ve done quite a lot over the pandemic. It’s been a bit of a crazy time, but I think we’ve made, we’ve made a stronger team. We’ve made stronger platforms for all of you.

There’s a lot of stuff going on with the product as well to help with collaboration. But really all of this is just the hors d’oeuvres.

New approach to project management (11:12)

The main course and the biggest change we’ve made in Pro Serv over the last year is around project management, which I’m gonna hand over to Marie in a second to discuss.

All of these changes at one level or another have been driven by feedback we received from a customer.

Whether it’s at an event like this, through the help desk, emails, whatever it might be. We love getting the good feedback and getting those high ratings I shared earlier. But also we really do welcome suggestions, even the ugly ones. We like to know whenever something isn’t quite working right and how we can make it better for you.

The Pro Serv team said it themselves. Their mission is to look after you, by helping to improve your processes and using our expertise to make you happy.

So please, any feedback, please let us know.

And on that note, I would like to welcome my colleague Marie to talk about project management.