About Us
On August 30th, we organized a customer forum. Facilitated by a moderator, four of our clients engaged in a discussion about crisis management and our services. The entire Merlin team was present and listened attentively. It was a remarkable experience! It is truly insightful to simply listen without immediately reacting… In this blog post, I will share five key learnings.
To ensure that skills remain sharp, we send our clients' loggers a refresher exercise every 6 weeks. We will continue this practice! We received excellent suggestions to make these refresher exercises more engaging and challenging, and also to develop refresher exercises for other crisis roles, such as crisis team members. We have immediately begun implementing these ideas.
From day one, CrisisSuite has placed CrisisSuite 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 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 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, participants at the table inspired each other with questions like: "How do you approach that in your organization?" and suggestions such as: "You should try that too!" This evidently sparked a desire for more, as the idea of organizing customer days where clients could ask questions and share best practices was immediately proposed. This is a fantastic idea that we had considered previously but had not yet implemented. We will certainly pursue this!
We also posed the question: "What are we doing well?" We were extremely pleased to hear that our clients appreciate our personal commitment. This appreciation extended not only to relationship management but also specifically to our back office, which provides support to our clients. Communication channels are direct, and we always strive for clear communication. Hearing such feedback during a customer forum truly makes one leave the building with a big smile. 😊
Our sincere thanks to our clients Marijke Koekkoek (Máxima Medical Centre), Jeroen Jansen (Public Prosecution Service), Johan Visser (Eneco), and Mark van Not (St. Antonius Hospital) for their valuable contributions to the client forum. We also extend our gratitude to Martijn Vinke for his excellent moderation of the discussion!
