Talkify

Cloud based small business communication solution

Talkify, your business phone has never been simpler. Talkify is an exciting new venture aimed at the small business market segment. A segment that typically falls out of scope for Mitel, but has massive market potential.

My role on this project encompassed all aspects of the users experience from the application and platform side. From journey mapping, to research, prototyping, testing, UI design and implementation across all dev teams.

 

Test markets and Insights

Talkify was a challenge to the company within. A chance for the UX and CloudLink teams to prove the viability of their platform, a chance to expand beyond our typical sales focus. We focused all effort on a hyperlocal experience. One market, one mixed with a unique combination that fit nicely with our goals.

Portland, OR was our focus. We hired a local marketing firm to drive naming, branding, website development and ad design/rollout. We carried out 3 research sessions, first to best understand the local atmosphere, to best understand what makes Portland unique. The following visits to onboard our first customers, following them through the journey (at first) to learn and understand where we needed to adapt. 

The outcome of the sessions really helped the team to validate certain aspects and to tweak others in an effort to help smooth our on boarding process. We learned about our marketing approach, how to speak to the small business owner and send the right message.

Future sessions are planned as we continue to roll out new features and adapt to our markets needs and wants.

"SMB communication is Immediate, Informal, 
Direct with a Can-Do attitude"

Adapting to research

As feedback, insights and discovery visits carried on we learned a few key take aways that we used to better inform our path forward. 

Small business owners are stretched thin, they wear too many hats and don't need the weight of a communications platform over their head. This caused us to shift focus in our Workflow tool and mobile apps, aiming more at 3rd party integrations as we aimed to reduce the stress of managing all their forms of communication.

Mobile first. Many of these business ran off of a single cell phone, we needed to be a power house but not a burden in their pocket. But when that owner had to step away, they didn't want the burden to be placed on someone else's phone. This feedback started to show up in the app in details like identifying the call path on the incoming call screen. It showed up when we focused on a mobile experience for our admin functions as well. We also heavily deprioritized any sort of desktop experience. It wasn't welcome.

We learned that owners know certain things are complicated and that the tools need to be complicated but they were asking for help. We designed out set recipes or flows to really help them customize their communication experience while reducing knowledge ramp up.


Discovery to dial tone in 5 minutes

A core challenge we set for ourselves with this project was to be able to take someone from discovery to live dial tone within 5 minutes. A fraction of what our setup time for on premises systems was at the time.

"Small businesses want to feel big."

 


A powerhouse under the hood

Businesses all have unique needs. Needs that are hard to tackle, everyone wants to work differently, run different hours, manage who can answer the phone at what locations, who manages social media replies, and more.

We set out to build a simple to use, drag and drop, powerhouse tool we call Workflow. Workflow needed to be customized to simplify the experience, companies want a call centre experience but never want to call it a call center

Through our testing to date, Workflow has proven a great success that's been intuitive and easy for first time users to understand. It's one thing to onboard a customer within a few minutes and its another to let them build that, unique to them, customized communications experience in the same few minutes. 


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