Vanilla News - October 2020 Edition!
Hi Vanilla!
Welcome to the latest edition of Vanilla News. The previous post is available here.
CEO Update
I've been working with department heads and with Finance on our plan and budget goals for next year. As we grow, we find ourselves looking at a growing list of priorities and finding the right balance of attention and budget to devote to each priority is always a challenge. The uncertainty from the impact of the second phase of Covid and the unknown trajectory of the economy make planning even more difficult.
Another initiative that might interest some of you is an overhaul of our services agreement, privacy policy and website terms of use. We have been using legal language that was drafted near the beginning of our company's founding when Vanilla had a freemium self-service business model. We'll be releasing the new sales agreements soon for new customers. Existing customers will remain on existing agreements even at time of renewal.
Finance
Many moving pieces on the finance side this month.
First off, the Nexonia expense management tool is now live! Lots of hard work was put into this launch, and I'd like to give a big shout-out to Carolina and Sussan for getting this project up and going.
We are now well into the implementation of our new accounting system, still on track to be launched on January 1st, 2021. We are also looking into changing our payment processing system to sync both systems together for seamless transactions.
Development
Internal Combustion Beavers
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Team Supreme
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Chimeras
The Chimeras have updated the migration estimate process to accelerate turnaround time for these estimate types. Migration estimates can be requested using this form. The team is currently working on a similar process update for theme estimates.
Some noteworthy accomplishments took place in the last few months! The theme for SmartSheet, an enterprise client, finally went live at the end of September 2020. The Oracle migration project was completed, with significant effort from Patrick Desjardins on the migration side and Alex Brohman on the theming side.
Two members of the Chimeras are participating in the Team Supreme Sprint in October, for the purpose of knowledge sharing around Foundation themes, and to develop a Featured Categories Widget.
Success
Oracle has launched (this is worth mentioning as often as possible)! A huge effort from Shauna and the rest of the team covering for her while her time was occupied by Oracle.
Our team is growing, we have a posting up for a new CSM. If you know anyone that might be a good fit, please pass your referral along to Lindsay either by email or by submitting the candidate as a referral on our careers page.
Sales
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Marketing
October is the month of events. With our usual 2 webinars, we are attending multiple events including CMX Summit, TheCR Connect, and the TSIA's events. Adrian and Victoria will be presenting content for community managers and conducting product demos. In addition, Mike and Adrian will be presenting Sarah's exclusive research on Self-Service Support preferences to the CXPA at the end of the month.
Victoria kicked off the win/loss program and has started reaching out and having calls with lost & churned accounts to get more intel on our strengths, weaknesses and opportunities to improve both product and process.
To help with our continued efforts to move upmarket and get leads from the right kind of companies, we have been working with a new advertising partner. Their advanced targeting is allowing us to run lead-gen and advertising campaigns focused on key decision makers in companies that match our ideal customer profiles. So far we have received nearly 300 of these highly-qualified leads and are nurturing these accounts through to requesting a demo.
Last but not least, Haya and Irina will be unveiling this week our Conversations by Vanilla Event Microsite. Watch your inbox as you will be receiving a promotional banner and link to include in your email signature.
Support
Just a quick thank you to the support agents for working through such a busy month!
Human Resources
Here are the most recent wellness survey results and sorry that I am sending them out so late. Thanks to everyone who took the time to complete it. The comments section is really helpful in interpreting the results. The more information you provide the better, so I really encourage including anything that is important to you in the comments section of the next survey.
A quick reminder to please check in on your vacation balances and make sure you are planning your time off for the remainder of the year. If you're feeling stuck and not sure when is a good time for you to take vacation, speak with your manager to come up with a plan that you're comfortable with. All your vacation days need to be used by the end of the year. Thanks!
Operations
The Operations team is hard at work on the global search overhaul project (preparing to roll the new search out to all customers), which involves significant updates to our message queue and the search microservice itself.
We’ve also started building IBM’s “EKM” project, which will be used to encrypt the data within their database using keys that they control, giving them the ability to lock down their data at any time (even from us). We expect this to be a much sought-after feature in the upper Enterprise market when complete!
Thanks for reading!
