There are a vast range of sectors that Channel businesses work with — healthcare, leisure and travel, education to name but a few. And each sector will have its own priorities for what it needs from a technology provider.
The important role of the Channel, therefore, is to listen to those needs and build the right solutions to serve them, ensuring any special considerations for that industry have been taken into account.
Flexible solutions
A company with plenty of experience in this area, Intreface is a gold partner of workplace operating system (OS) vendor monday.com and has been working closely with Monday for around a year. With offices in London, New York and Hong Kong, Intreface offers businesses tools for collaboration and communication — its latest project with vendor partner Monday being to develop a flexible solution to be used in the law sector.
“There seems to be quite a gap in the market, essentially lawyers are spending a lot of time on admin tasks and not enough time on billable matters,” said Damian Edwards, commercial director at Intreface. “A lot of law firms are using spreadsheets, or very basic systems, to manage the tasks that they need to do to deliver matters.
“When we teamed up with Monday, we realised that actually we had some history in developing legal solutions and this would be a perfect platform to do that on.
“The reason why we like pre-built solutions is that in general, the projects we get involved with are quite different, so every one we get asked to do is different from the last and that requires a lot of scoping out of the project — a lot of implementation, new work that’s probably not been done before, and a lot of training and supporting,” he told Comms Business.
“So there’s a lot that goes into each project, when you look at solutions like this, you do all that work upfront but the benefit to us is that we can sell that over and over again. The benefit to the customer is that they get a lower cost, because we’re spreading the development cost over a number of different clients, and they also critically get a much faster implementation time.”
Anna Chermyanina, channel partner manager for the UK and Ireland at monday.com, explained how the solution was developed based on customer requests.
“We were looking for the niche, the gap, what the most demanding requests were from the customers and we sat down with the account executives and the management team just trying to understand where we can fit in the best way,” she said.
Edwards said that one of the reasons monday.com was found to be so well suited for this solution was its visual, intuitive and customisable nature, which also makes it low-cost and quick to implement on.
“Monday is very easy, flexible, easy to use and you don’t need to be particularly data and tech-savvy in order to use it,” added Chermyanina. “This can be a big benefit to our clients and customers.”
Identifying requirements
An important part of the process for developing a solution of this type for a specific industry was the consultation process, drawing on key areas of customer feedback to refine the solution.
“We were quite keen to develop time management features and billing features, but actually, law firms need task management — that’s the key part of what they need — so in order to keep focused on this target market, we scaled back our development of the time management and billing side,” Edwards said.
“I think we always try to get clients to focus on what’s critical to them at the moment. We often get a long list of requirements and it’s our job to break that down and find out what’s important to them.”
By doing this, he explained, a go-ahead decision can be achieved much more quickly and any additional features can be phased and added in at a later stage.
“The key with building solutions is to build a viable product and get that out there, then have a mindset of continually improving that solution, so that’s the way we work — we continue to get feedback from clients and we update the solution so it’s always improving.”
Effective partnerships
Chermyanina concluded that overall, the key to a successful partnership is the appetite and desire to do business together efficiently.
“The key word that Damian used is feedback, because this is how we do business every day,” she said. “Without the feedback, we wouldn’t be able to be where we are at the moment.”
This interview appeared in our November 2022 print issue. You can read the magazine in full here.