Connected in the cloud: Customer engagement from any location
Posted on 09. Dec, 2010 by Pauline in Huddle, Huddle Life
As a member of Huddle’s customer engagement team, my role is to manage our public sector customers and help them get the most out of Huddle. I spend around 80 per cent of my time out of the office meeting with our government customers across the UK.
The technology I use enables me to constantly be in touch with my customers and colleagues, regardless of where I am. My ‘can’t live without’ list includes: laptop, mobile broadband, iPhone, Skype, Huddle and Salesforce.com, which is our CRM system. It’s another cloud-based tool which enables me to access all the information I need on our customers from any internet-enabled device.
In a customer-facing role, it’s important to be readily available to your clients. Regardless of where I am or what I’m doing, I need to be able to respond quickly and efficiently to my customers. Working flexibly with technology that enables me to always be connected allows me to do just that.
Here’s an insight into a few typical days in my life:
Friday:
I work 9am to noon on a Friday from home which means I get to pick up my daughter from school and spend the afternoon with her. This morning I rattled through my outstanding customer calls in Salesforce.com. I use Salesforce to ensure that each of my customers are pro-actively contacted on a regular basis to find out how they’re getting on with Huddle and make sure they’re happy. I also had a conference call with members of our commercial team and uploaded some of our new Huddle Getting Started guides in to customer’s workspaces so they can distribute them to their users to help them get up and running with Huddle quickly.
Even though my official work day ends at noon on Friday, it rarely happens like that; one of the challenges of working part-time in a customer-facing role. I had a customer with a renewal due and they e-mailed the order form across to me this afternoon which I picked up and processed all from my iPhone whilst in the middle of a kid’s softplay birthday party. Don’t tell my boss that though!
Monday:
This morning I’m off to a meeting with one of our NHS customers to discuss how we can make their implementation of Huddle successful. By the time the meeting had finished, it was too late to get home and get the train into London so the best use of my time was to work from my local Starbucks for the afternoon. The free Wi-Fi means I can work as if I’m in the office, so it was business as usual. I speak with colleagues that I need an immediate response from over Skype.
Tuesday:
Today, I have the rare luxury of having no meetings in my diary so I work from Huddle HQ on Bermondsey Street. On average, I spend half a day a week in the Huddle office, but it’s important for me to catch up with everyone and feel like I’m part of a great team.
Wednesday:
Today, I have two customer meetings in London. I leave my laptop at home because I can’t use it in government offices to connect to the internet due to security restrictions. I use the customer’s laptop to demonstrate Huddle. I have the meeting agendas and presentations I need for the meetings uploaded in my personal Huddle workspace so I can just download what I need from the customer’s laptop. The other advantage is it saves me from having to lug my laptop around London with me!
So there it is – a typical week for me. Given the recent snowfall and icy conditions in the UK, it’s certainly a real benefit being able to work remotely!
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