It has been a couple of months since our last product update, but rest assured, the Stinto team has been working hard to deliver a number of new and cool developments and features that we are really proud of. Here is an overview of what we have delivered in the last two months: Android Many people have been requesting an Android version of Stinto and now it’s here. Available in the Google Play Store. Stinto on web Our frontend developers have been crunching hard to release the first ever web-based version of Stinto. Check it out on web.stinto.com! Groups We have released our new and requested Groups functionality. Now Stinto users can create groups with their existing Stinto contacts to share group members contact details. We have big plans for this functionality in the coming months, which will include the ability to create public and private groups, communication via the group message board, and the ability to invite non-Stinto users to groups. We are very excited about the possibilities to bring more value to our users via this functionality. QR Stinto has made sharing contact details even easier, via the availability of personal QR codes. To send your contact details in an instant, simply generate your personal QR code and hold it in front of the receiving party’s camera. The QR code will automatically transfer your contact details to the pending list of the receiving party. It can not be easier! Call identification Finally for this update, a small feature that brings big value to our users. Stinto can now identify inbound calls coming from your Stinto contacts. This really kills the final excuse for using a traditional IOS or Android phone book, compared to Stinto. We sincerely hope that our users enjoy these new features, and as always we would love to hear any and all feedback on support@stinto.com.
The cost of poor contact data
Stuart Wynn, CEO of Stinto What exactly is the cost of poor customer contact data for a business? This is the question we are regularly confronted with when speaking with current and potential customers. It’s a good question, but extremely difficult to answer with any level of precision. There are however a number of key questions that can give an indication of the cost, and lost commercial opportunity, connected with poor customer contact data quality. If you work for a B2B company with a direct sales force, then the successful management of customer relationships plays a big part in the commercial success of your company. Regardless of how well you think your product or service fits the need of a particular market segment, at the end of the day, your success or failure will be largely determined by a series of commercial touchpoints between your sales team, and the customer. Like it or not, business is fundamentally a social activity, and as such, success is increasingly determined not by what you know, but more by who you know, and how well you know them. Unfortunately however, this is the start of a major challenge for most companies unable to answer the question: “who exactly are our customers?”. Whether they are aware of it or not, a company’s network of external relationships is one of its biggest intangible assets. Access to this network is managed by employees. Unfortunately the tools provided by companies, to employees, for the purpose of managing this network, are not fit for purpose. As a result, most company’s important commercial contacts are typically scattered across a number of different locations, including contact lists in Outlook, in the address book of employees mobile phones, on email signatures, as a pile business cards on employee desks, or as connections on LinkedIn. Everywhere except where they should be; updated in the company’s CRM! Even in instances where the data does successfully reach CRM, the static nature of this data means that it is in decay from the second it is entered into the system. To understand the result, you need look no further than Salesforce.com themselves, who estimate that 80% of all data contained in their sales and marketing cloud is “dirty” (incomplete, incorrect, duplicate or otherwise of a poor quality). “Accurate information is the life blood of an effective sales force. Without it, management doesn’t have the data to make good decisions, sales reps don’t have the tools to turn leads into customers, and the company will find it difficult to reconcile CRM data with data in other systems. The result? Lost opportunities and revenue, and frustrated customers.” Stinto’s value stairs: Assessing the value of digital contact management So, back to the initial question, what is the cost of poor customer contact data? At Stinto, we have identified four clear questions that you can ask yourself in order to start determining the unnecessary cost that poor contact data has on your business: 1. What do we currently spend on physical business cards? While it might seem like a strange place to start, most businesses would be shocked if they discovered that most spend approximately €30 per employee per year on physical business cards. These costs typically go unnoticed because the procurement of business cards is most often decentralised, and posted as “miscellaneous costs”. Important to remember that 88% of business cards are thrown away within a week of being received, without the data ever reaching the intended system – which begs the question, what is the point of them? 2. How much time do we currently spend updating customer and contact masterdata in CRM, and are we compliant? An average sales person spends 6 hours a week updating CRM – this equates to 15% of their time or approximately €12.000 per year. Approximately half of this time is dedicated to opportunity management, and the other half to customer and contact masterdata. Given that investment, you need to ask yourself four additional questions: a. is the time used enough to cover our entire customer base? b. if not, how much extra time is required? c. what are the additional costs of not having all customer and contact masterdata in CRM? d. are our current practices GDPR compliant? 3. How does our current solution impact our brand image in terms of “digital” and “sustainable”? Almost every company on the planet is in the midst of a digital transformation, and, it looking for ways to reduce their environmental footprint. No matter which business process you look into, converting paper to data is the most effective way to positively impact both goals at the same time. Or, said anther way, if your company cannot digitalise a tiny piece of paper, how will you ever succeed with the more ambitious initiatives on your sustainable, digital journey . 4. Do our current practices for handling customer and contact masterdata support our ability to defend and grow the top-line? Your commercial success hinges on your ability to defend and grow existing customers, as well as winning new customers. With that said, how can you defend, grow or win customers, if you do not know who they are. Your sales people come and go, as do all the people working within your customers organisations. With all this working against you, what would it be worth to have live connections to your customer contacts, that notified you of changes in real-time as they occurred, and allowed for easier contact management, and all the commercial activities related herto – including campaigns, account planning, sales pitches etc. While the answers to these questions probably give rise to some scary internal reflections, it is even scarier to consider a future where you as a company do not have control over your network of external relationships. Not only do you continue to be non-GDPR compliant, and miss commercial opportunity, but, your success or failure will reside exclusively with the behaviour of your commercial team, and their willingness to manage and share
March 2019 Product Update
Another big month of development at Stinto that has bought some big, but essential changes to our product. Here is an overview of what we released in March: Pending list Stinto is now easier than ever to manage your inbound connections. When receiving cards from your contacts, they will now appear in a “pending” list, under “My contacts”. From here, you can “accept” or “decline” the card. Not only does this feature increase transparency in relation to receiving new cards, but it also paves the way for other important features being released this month, including: “find duplicates”, “introductions”, “shout-out” and “reassignment” Push notifications Stinto now also supports push notifications right to the front screen on your mobile device. The latest release of Stinto was developed to handle three push notifications: “Card received”, “Contact details changed” and “My card was forwarded”. This feature will deliver more immediate awareness of the activities occurring on the Stinto network to our users GDPR compliance for non-users Stinto already ensures GDPR compliance when sharing contacts with your company’s CRM between Stinto users, and now, we have gone one step further and have enabled the same level of compliance for non-Stinto users. Now, when sharing the contact card of a non-Stinto user (manual connection) with your company’s CRM, the contact will receive an SMS or email notification, making them aware that their personal data is now being stored in your company’s CRM, and providing a link to your company’s GDPR privacy policy. Improved flow for non-users Finally this month, we have been working hard to optimise the experience when receiving a Stinto card as a non-Stinto user. This is in order to ensure that contact details are shared quickly and efficiently to non-users, and in an attempt to convert them to Stinto users as quickly as possible Over the next month, we will start focusing on more new functionalities, including: a completely new onboarding tutorial, a fully automated email onboarding campaign for enterprise users, call identification when Stinto users are calling, easier sharing with CRM and much, much more! As always, we are really excited about the time ahead, and look forward to bringing you great new features in the coming month!