Spoke Product Awards
At the end of last year, when we were all feeling a bit reflective, we sent a survey to our customers. We asked users to vote for the Spoke product changes that made the biggest impact on their daily work, and workplace interactions.
For starters, it’s a great way to get customer feedback, and to focus on outcomes and not just outputs. For another, it’s a great way to celebrate even the small features that we didn’t really stop to notice. Sometimes you’re running so fast and you feel like there’s so far to go, that you don’t appreciate how far you’ve come.
Which of Spoke’s product enhancements had the biggest impact on their experience?
In fact, 2018 was really our starting point. I sometimes have to remind the team that it was a mere 8 months ago that we launched our product, and that when we did so, we didn’t have a single one of the features below. Back in March, we knew each one of our beta customers by name, and our customer success team probably knew their families, too. Since then, we’ve been lucky to work with hundreds of teams and companies using Spoke to make it smoother, faster and easier to give and get help at work.
And so, it feels appropriate to kick off 2019 with a celebration of our customers, our product, and of our team’s journey so far. Read on for what we cheekily called the first ever “Spoke Product Awards” 🏆
It’s part yearbook-superlative, part listicle, and partly, a way to share a bunch of gifs we really like 😉
1. Most Improved in 2018
Slack Notifications
Shortly on the heels of our public launch, we released Slack notifications, realizing that people who live in Slack, want to stay in Slack. Staying up-to-date on new requests and replies is great, but our customers told us that employees really just wanted to do more in Slack.
This year, we’re kicking things into high gear with the ability to reply in Slack! We also plan to double down on a few more Slack actions to make it dead-simple to use Spoke as your help desk and knowledge base in Slack.
“Slack Notifications is a game-changer. Let’s face it — Slack is better than my email, so getting my ticket notifications there is ideal, but unfortunately isn’t always a given on service desks.” — Rose, Inside Track
Runner up: Bulk Actions on Requests
2. Most Potential to be Awesome
Analytics Dashboards
As our customers grew, so did the need to scale up how we measured and reported ROI. Today, our customer success team helps larger customers build analytics dashboards, which has in turn helped our customers advocate for change in their companies. That change comes in the form of new self-serve resources, new internal processes and sometimes new headcount! This year, we plan to make dashboard metrics available to more customers.
For those who prefer to dig into the data personally, we also shipped the ability to download request data via CSV. Go nuts!
Runner up: User Profiles (powered by HRIS integrations)
3. Most Likely To Win Friends and Influence People
Slack Action to Turn Messages into Requests
When Slack released their app actions, we figured it’d be a good safety net. What do I mean? Well, old habits die hard, and we figured that even with a great product, people would still DM and ask questions in Slack that should really go to Spoke.
We released the first Slack action in August, to help teams go the extra mile in consolidating, tracking and resolving all the requests they get. If you haven’t tried this one out yet, give it a shot! With this being one of the hottest features, we’ll be bringing more actions to Slack, including:
- Turning a Slack message directly into a Spoke search
- Creating KB resources from Slack messages
“As a Startup, we are growing quickly and are constantly disseminating information. Slack app actions allow our admins to provide quick responses in a direct and efficient way.” — Tekema, Opploans
Runner up: Private Notes
4. Most Understated Yet Powerful
Zapier integrations for workflow automation
Platforms like Zapier have made it really easy for teams to plug different systems together. We partnered with Zapier in August with triggers and actions based on new resources and requests. It’s been impressive to see all the ways people have connected Spoke. For example, one of our customers has connected Google Calendar to Spoke, to automatically create a request in Spoke when a certain type of invite is created.
This year we’re adding new Zapier triggers and actions, and we’re also releasing a REST API so you can really go to town.
Runner up: Turn replies into KB resources
5. Spoke team favorite of the year
Request Types & Forms
One of the biggest investments we made this year was building out Request Types and Forms. The first clear benefit is the ability to have forms in Spoke, and make it super easy to collect additional information and cut down all the back-and-forth.
Additionally, Request types can be used as your Spoke service catalog and to track and triage requests based on their category. But what gets us really excited is that this will be the foundation for where we’ll go next. Speaking of which…
6. Most Likely To Be A Game Changer in 2019
Approval workflows
When we first launched in March, most of our customers used Spoke within only one team. Today, over 80% of customers have 2+ teams, and 25% use Spoke with 5+ teams!
Understandably, we get a lot of requests for features to make it easier to work across teams. From onboarding requests that should spawn other requests, to obtaining approvals from Finance, Legal, or managers, we’re excited to start with designing better and simpler Approval flows.
Runner up: Personalized KB by audience. Hang on to your hats: this year, Spoke will be able to give different responses to the same question, all based on who’s asking.
If you’ve made it this far, and you’re not already using Spoke, we should definitely chat 😉 We’re hiring, throwing events, and giving awesome demos.
Drop us a note or give us a shout via Twitter, and let’s do this together!
