1: Let's start with some personal questions. How are you and your family doing in the COVID era?
Quite busy actually! We just finished construction on our family home and moved in. So we kept ourselves occupied during the lockdown. Painting walls instead of meeting with friends...
2: Can you tell us about how you founded this company?
A classic story really: I started out as a freelancer, working on smaller projects. Websites, e-commerce, and the like. It just grew from there. When work was beginning to be too much for me, I started bringing in other people to help and soon enough we formed the company as it is today.
A couple of years ago we decided to cut back on small projects. We have always felt we have less of a creative and marketing focus that was needed in website development, but a much more business and technology focus instead.
Nowadays we focus our efforts in two areas: digital transformation and custom business solutions (ERP, supply chain and inventory, HR, etc.) and digital product development, mostly for start-ups.
3: What makes your company unique from others in the field?
We spend a lot of time to deeply understand the needs of our clients, finding the best solutions, and actually educating them. We’re not afraid of turning them down if we feel what we can deliver is not what they need.
We also do a lot of collaborative work with clients, when preparing a project, borrowing techniques and methodologies from fields like UX design or service design.
4: Has the coronavirus pandemic affected your business and if so, how are you adjusting?
Fortunately, we have been able to actually grow the company during 2020. We increased both our revenues and team size.
The most challenging aspect was the uncertainty of last year. Our usually busy months were scary quiet. Instead, we signed a couple of major clients right before Christmas, which never happened before.
5: What do you think are the major trends in your field?
Of course, you have your usual suspects, such as AI or IoT. The pandemic brought us IoB (Internet of Behaviours) which is really interesting, but also raises lots of privacy and security concerns.
The biggest trend we see in our field though is no-code solutions such as Amazon Honeycode or Google AppSheet. I believe that in a couple of years these solutions might revolutionize business software in the same manner as Squarespace or Wix have done with websites.
6: What are the keys to customer success and satisfaction and has that changed in the era of COVID?
Empathy is key. Businesses now more than ever have to be able to react quickly to customers, listen to their needs and pain points, and offer tailor-made experiences. A cookie-cutter approach just won’t… just won’t cut it anymore (pun intended).
7: How would you see your company ten years in the future?
Two things. We want to grow into a company that has the resources and expertise to take on projects of any complexity, while still maintaining familial company culture. We’re also actively working on several products of our own, which will hopefully be successful and make a significant impact on how people work.
8: Your final thoughts.
If you want to be successful, try to think with your customers' minds. What are the actual challenges they face? Their wants and needs? How could you solve them? What are their fears regarding possible solutions? If you find answers to these questions, you’ll be much closer to customer success.
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