Vanilla News - June 2020 Edition!

Hi Vanilla!

Welcome to the latest edition of Vanilla News. The previous post is available here.

Long Service Awards

This month we were pleased to recognize these team members for 5 years of great contributions to Vanilla!

Ryan Perry

Kaci Bastet

Patrick Kelly

Joseph Fleming

Melanie Attia

Finance

We are currently shopping for a new accounting system that we hope will integrate with Salesforce to make customer management, especially around invoicing and billing, easier, more reliable and less time consuming. In the future, we’re hoping to extend these integrations to include customer success as well.

We'll keep you updated on advancements!

Development

Internal Combustion Beavers

The ICB force plugged away at the support queue, but also found time for some product improvements. They added some nice API improvements, application logging improvements, and got to work on some addons in support of the launch of Codename: Herald. Fair warning: sitemaps got a bit of an overhaul. The changes are behind a feature flag right now so we'll take our time rolling it out.

Chimeras

The Chimeras have been busy pumping out services for our customers. The theming lane is working on a new theme for Callaway and is using the new Foundation theme framework to do it, which is exciting!

Migrations are getting back up to speed with Olivier now full time and becoming more familiar with the process on a daily basis.

Customizations are flying and so the team has started looking at items further down in the backlog, as well as sponsored development tasks. Also some tweaks for support!

Team Supreme

Team Supreme has delivered some new features over the last few months including:

• Community Events
• New Pocket settings
• Guest Voting in KB
• Zendesk KB Sync

TS continues to work on the new theming system, so please continue to submit your feedback. This is an ongoing project. TS is now focused on improvements to Accessibility and Search.

Success

We're making good progress on refreshing our docs! We've created or edited 19 docs so far, with 4 currently in review and 11 more in progress. By the end of next month our goal is to have fixed every customer facing doc that we thought needed fixing due to inaccurate, out of date or too sparse information. 

We've iterated on our process for creating docs to ensure that they are reviewed by another CSM before they are published, so that the information is accurate and all the articles maintain a consistent tone and style.

We have also created “The Matrix” (nbd), that is a central repository for all Customer Success documentation. We will be expanding The Matrix to include all Customer facing documentation and all internal documentation from the Success department.

Sales

There is no doubt we are seeing the impacts of Covid-19 on our pipeline. Companies, unsure of what’s to come, have moved into spending freezes, tech stacks are being scrutinized, and projects are ultimately delayed.

Nevertheless, the Sales Team remains focused and had an excellent month of May to put us in position to have another strong quarter!! Brendan and Gabe each had a strong May, including Brendan closing TekSavvy -- a great local name on our Enterprise Plan.

We are now settled into our new sales territory model and are working closely with Marketing on plans to more aggressively attack the 'land of the not looking' with Account Based Marketing and outbound selling.

Finally, we continue to work through finalizing the IBM deal, which will add another massive brand to our rapidly growing list.

Marketing

Our Vanilla Conversations event was a resounding success with over 2,000 registrants from 53 countries. Of the 2,000 registrants, 900 attended part or all of the conference. From this event, 13 new opportunities were created so far, with a value of $33,392.00. We got to feel the love on social media from many thought leaders and community experts.

Partly as a result of this event, we smashed our marketing targets across the board with 177 SQLs (target was 155). We have regrouped and are planning for our next big event in November. Stay tuned!

In addition, we are working on exclusive new research. We surveyed just under 300 individuals on their personal preferences when it comes to customer service and experience. We're excited to present our findings to you this summer. 

As you peruse the website, you'll notice that we are bringing our examples up to date, refreshing our case studies and redesigning our content library - soon to be live. Our next big project is the blog.

As always, please check out our Learn section on the website for all the upcoming webinars and new ebooks as they happen. 

Support

Freshdesk is the new ticketing system at long last! Happyfox is dead, long live Freshdesk!

Operations

As usual, the Operations team is working on several projects simultaneously.

In support of the Oracle contract, we are working closely with R&D to completely change the way we handle searching within Vanilla Cloud. We’re ditching Sphinx and building a centralized Elasticsearch-powered search service which should, finally, give us real time search!

Last month we deployed our “Kill the Worker” and “Kill Papertrail” projects which both aim to reduce our costs. In the case of Kill Papertrail, we’re also gaining a massively increased log search window and the ability to search logs from all layers of our stack, not just app servers.

We’re also working on a utility service for the product that will allow it to call itself on a regular schedule, kind of like a “cron”. This should help R&D to build features that are time based, like scheduled posts or email digests. Since we’re very creative, we’re calling it “the cron”.

Finally, we’re upgrading the underlying servers in our Canadian cloud. We expect an increase in performance and a reduction in price per “compute unit”. We’ll also be standardized with our hosting provider’s other physical hardware which will make replacements and expansion easier and quicker.

Thanks for reading!