Posts tagged mailchimp

Keen is a solution, in large part, designed to remove the burden of software and IT resource management for our print service provider customers.  The fact is that most companies we work with find it prohibitively expensive and difficult to deal with in-house software infrastructure.  This is where Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is the ultimate equalizer that can solve complex problems while being accessible to any size customer.

We believe in this model so much, that our entire company runs on a combination of well-known and niche SaaS solutions.  This is truly “eating our own dog food” and we wanted to give you a little insight into some of the online services we use to run Keen: 

Google Docs (email, calendars, and document sharing) - the now ubiquitous service that allows us (and much larger organizations) to avoid having to deal with buying servers and dreaded Microsoft Exchange just to host email.  Instead we happily pay a negligible monthly fee for each of our employees and enjoy a maintenance-free, reliable email experience. 

RingCentral (phone system) - this virtual PBX system allows us to have the convenience of an infinitely configurable VoIP phone system without dealing with hardware beyond our desk phones and our normal in-office networking routing.  We always enjoy the latest features and can do phone routing only dreamt-of just a few years ago. 

Highrise (contact management) - although Salesforce.com pioneered the CRM category, we are big fans of 37signals products and use this system to stay up-to-date with our customers and partners.        

Campfire (group messaging) - a simple service that allows our team to have a constantly-open chat room. Discussions can happen asynchronously and various engineering and support notifications post automatically.  This is a great way for everyone to stay synced up without spending endless hours in meetings. (Another great 37signals product.)

Zendesk (online help desk) - part of our customer promise is superior customer support. The way we’ve actually made it work is by integrating this great support system right into our application.  Our customers can ask questions without ever leaving their account and requests instantly forward to our support and engineering departments. (Of course good support extends beyond the communication tools, but we’ll leave this for another post.)

MailChimp (email marketing) - time-to-time we send email announcements to our customers, prospects, and partners.  This system integrates well with our various contact databases and provides us with great analytics on each campaign.

Geckoboard (dashboards) - it goes without saying that a modern software company has to track a number of marketing and performance metrics.  This online service allows us to combine a multitude of statistics from different systems into dashboards formatted for a big (hanging) screen.

Pivotal Tracker (software development project management) - we are a true Agile software development organization (the Scrum flavor to be exact).  This means, among other things, that we plan and publish updates and enhancements to Keen on a daily basis.  To manage this process, we use what has quickly become the industry standard tool.  

Additionally, our engineering team uses a number of other tools to track everything from server performance and uptime to hosted code repositories.  We won’t bore you with the geeky stuff here.

So as you see, if a modern software operation can run entirely in the cloud without spending a dime on servers and maintenance, odds are, so can you. 

Does your company use online services it cannot live without?  Share them in the comments!