About Us
On August 30, we hosted a customer forum. Facilitated by a moderator, four of our customers engaged in a discussion about crisis management and our services. The entire Merlin team was present and listened in. What a special experience! And you learn so much when you just listen and don’t respond right away… In this blog post, I’ll share five things we learned.
To keep our clients’ skills sharp, we send them a refresher exercise every six weeks. We’ll keep doing that! We received some great suggestions for making these refresher exercises more engaging and challenging. We also received suggestions to create refresher exercises for other crisis roles, such as crisis team members. We got right to work on this.
From day one, CrisisSuite has placed a strong emphasis on crisis management. However, the Incident Registration module—which we developed in collaboration with our clients—has broadened our scope. As a result, the platform is now used not only by the crisis management team but also by operational centers, control rooms, and reception desks, for example. Because incidents and crises can be managed within the same platform, we are bringing these organizational units closer together. We discussed how a minor incident can have a greater impact than initially anticipated. Where does an incident end and a crisis begin? And how can our software better support this transition? We will certainly be focusing on this in the coming year.
It was good to hear that our customers view CrisisSuite as a mature application. Over the years, we have not only developed useful features for more effective crisis management, but also to simplify application management and save time. We received suggestions for further improving application management. For example, we discussed the onboarding process for new users, even more import and export options, and integration with other applications. This last point in particular can save application administrators a tremendous amount of work. For instance, it is already possible to link CrisisSuite to an HRM application to synchronize employee contact information. We remain focused on this, so that our customers have to perform as little duplicate work as possible and thus save time.
During the customer forum, the participants at the table inspired one another: “How do you handle that in your organization?” and “You should try that sometime!” It seems to have left everyone wanting more, because the idea of organizing customer days where customers can ask each other questions and share best practices was immediately suggested. A fantastic idea—one we’d considered before but hadn’t yet gotten off the ground. We’re definitely going to make this happen!
We also asked, “What are we doing right?” We were thrilled to hear that our customers appreciate our personal commitment. And this didn’t just refer to relationship management, but also to our back office, which provides support to our customers. Communication lines are short, and we always strive to communicate clearly. When you hear things like that during a customer forum, you leave the building with a big smile. 😊
Thank you to our clients Marijke Koekkoek (Máxima Medical Center), Jeroen Jansen (Public Prosecution Service), Johan Visser (Eneco), and Mark van Not (St. Antonius Hospital) for their contributions to the client forum. And thank you to Martijn Vinke for his excellent facilitation of the discussion!
