Vanilla News - November 2019 Edition!
Hi Vanilla!
Welcome to the third edition of Vanilla News. The previous post is available here. This month is a slightly slimmer version as a few teams are still working on similar projects to last month.
Sales
The Sales team continues to grow! We welcome Natalie Bauer, Sales Development Representative who brings years of experience in the world of calling to the land of "not looking". We look forward to her making an immediate impact.
October was an excellent month in terms of upgrades and expansions, including Experian moving from Corporate to Enterprise, thanks in large part to the tremendous customer service provided by our CSM and Dev teams!!!
As we head into Q4 of the calendar year, we must be mindful of US Thanksgiving and the Holiday Season which reduce the number of selling days we have. Common objectives we hear this time of year include; "we need to wait for 2020 budget", "it's become a 2020 initiative", "execs are travelling" etc.. We are on top of it, focused, and determined to make this another excellent quarter regardless.
Product
Team Supreme
Team Supreme continues to work on sub community support for the knowledge base which also has some setup changes for the general community side. Setting up products may be a bit confusing, but the end user experience is not. We'll be adding documentation on this in the near future, but you may want to be aware of the changes too.
Internal Combustion Beavers
The Internal Combustion Beaver Force has been killing it on support. October was our biggest month for security and support issues, but the team closed 166 of them in October. That's a net gain of 16 issues over the monthly intake! Closing more issues than are opened each month is how the team will methodically bring the support backlog down to zero. Things may still seem really backed up because we had a big hole to climb out of, but I want to stress the fact that the team is paying off that debt.
Professional Services
Lazer Unicorns
The Kanban virus has spread to Services! We've been running this new system with Lazer Unicorns since the middle of October and so far its working well! We had an extremely productive month of October, and in fact completed a record number of billable hours. So congratulations to the Lazer Unicorns for knocking it out of the park, especially in a month where we had no Project Manager and were trying a new and unfamiliar workflow.
Support
We've hired Elize Rowe to handle our 3rd shift! This brings the support team to 4 people and gives us the ability to offer almost 24/7 coverage.
Marketing
October was a very active month for marketing trade shows. We attended the TSW Las Vegas and the Incite Customer Service Summit in Brooklyn, NY. We were so pleased with the Las Vegas event that we renewed our contract for next year and even doubled down by including a sponsored talk track for both shows.
Adrian will be tasked with finding great customers that will want to share their stories in front of a group of executives that care about delivering exceptional customer experiences. If you know of any customer that fits the bill, please let us know.
Marketing has invested in a video marketing platform to help us accelerate lead generation across all digital platforms. We are also hard at work for our much anticipated 2020 Community Predictions, featuring 31 thought leaders. This will be our BEST one yet!
Our big items for November are:
• Ebook: Updated Community Manager Survival Guide
• Webinar: Managing a Pan European Community Team
• Webinar: Built to Belong: The Community Investment Trends of Top Organizations in 2019
• Virtual Event: Vidyard's Fast Forward Summit
Success
SuccessTeam is starting to take an Agile approach to customer onboarding. We meet each Monday to discuss our onboarding customers to see how they are doing and round-table ways to improve the experience and push them through to launch. This work is being tracked on a Kanban board in Trello.
We are rolling out a CSM-Success Community schedule. There will be rotating weeks where a dedicated CSM is assigned to watch and respond as necessary in the success community.
Internal training modules are moving forward and CSMs will begin taking training this month. These sessions should also yield updated and new documentation for the SuccessTeam.
Operations
Alex has deployed the first production version of our new monitoring system to all of our virtual machines. This change gives us extremely detailed insight into the system performance of every server in each of our environments, and brings us a step closer to shuttering our old "agent".
Frank and Eduardo have deployed the first version of our asynchronous image optimization system to all of our clusters. That means all uploaded images are being automatically "optimized" in terms of their compression level and dimensions. We're saving the original image as well, so in the future we will be able to offer "click to expand" functionality.
Finally, we have deployed database optimizations to all clusters. These should dramatically reduce the chances of databases getting overloaded and running out of RAM, which in the past has resulted in significant outages especially for larger customers with multiple sites on a single cluster.
Thanks for reading!