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Our Software Does What?

July 19th, 2018 - Posted by Jamie Thomson, Managing Director

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Just last week I found out about a feature of our software that I never even knew existed. That might not seem surprising, I am sure the CEO of Microsoft doesn’t know every feature of MS Office, but if you know me then you know I am hand’s on with all the feature developments we release. I am part of the team that writes the development specification, I always test out new releases when they are in our development environment and I give feedback on how they can be improved even before they are released to our customers for end user testing. So it was a surprise to me that a feature exists that I didn’t know about.

Don’t get me wrong, I am constantly surprised about how our customers use our software and about how our support team and account managers use various features in combination to get what our customers need from the software. Every week an email will go around with something like “Our customer wants to do this and that. Any ideas?” and all sorts of try this and that replies come from the team. It is not just knowing the feature list, which covers 90% of our customers’ requirements, it is about putting features together in innovative ways to solve that final 10%.

So if I can miss a feature when I am so involved in the process of developing them, how can a customer hope to know everything about our software? The honest answer is on their own they can’t and in reality nor would they want to. Yes we train our customers with the most used features of the software and yes we offer online learning for all of our features so that customers can always stay up to date as the software is updated or learn about features that they just didn’t need when they did their training. We also strive to make our software easy to use. Can we get to the holy grail of the simplicity of an iPad, that doesn’t even need an instruction manual? Probably not, but it’s a good target to aim for.

That’s not enough from your Web to Print provider though, we have mentioned in blogs before that some of the worst things our customers can do when they are pitching a Web to Print solution to their potential clients is either a) say the software can do something that it can’t or b) say the software can’t do something that it can. With the feature set of software constantly expanding you have to have the right support behind you who know about the lesser known features and also be able to combine them together so you can say yes most of the time.

At RedTie we pride ourselves in being that support and when it comes to Web to Print we just love solving problems. When you go through your account manager or the support team it is much better to be working with a company that sends round a request for “Any ideas?” and even better when they get lots of responses.