Strategy, launches, teams. What is next for TFB?

Author: Alexey Kutsenko

With the end of 2020 just around the corner, now is a good time to reflect on what’s done and plan what 2021 and onwards will look like. As a company, we have come a long way over the last decade. One of TFB’s key strategic decisions was to move away from custom development and focus on building a strong portfolio of products. Although the hardest part of the process is already behind us, we will maintain this strategy for the next year.

Do not get me wrong - we are still developing custom solutions for clients, but we are now more strategic about it. For instance, the new rule now is that when a request comes up, our team evaluates how well it fits into the company's overall strategy, how common the request is, and how much resources it would take. We will no longer jump on any development task that we receive, which gives us greater freedom to evaluate and analyze what we have now, what is missing, and prioritize the tasks.

More importantly, such change will enable us to develop a partnership with brokerages, where we work together on solving their complex problems, and not just provide them with plugins to cover up an existing issue. Therefore, the services are of much higher quality, and the knowledge that we gain along the way is invaluable.

Luckily, we were able to continue showing steady growth in terms of both clients and the revenue that they bring. With the growth of the customer base comes the inevitable dilemma of maintaining the service levels. AT TFB, we pride ourselves with top technical and sales support. To make sure nothing changes on that front, we now have new team members whose job will be optimizing, automating, and monitoring the processes, making sure our rapid growth does not turn into an inconvenience for our partners.

As a part of our systematization process, we have recently launched a customer support portal. It is a single portal for all client needs: you can submit feedback there, open a ticket, review previous tickets of our company, and, most importantly, we have a catalogue of articles there. We believe that sharing is caring, especially when it comes to knowledge. Clients can already go to the portal and read articles about some of the most common queries that our support team receives. The plan is to further expand the knowledge base by adding more articles, videos, webinars, and more.

With the up-to-date technical documentation library, the support team's load will go down while simultaneously raising satisfaction levels of clients, who will be able to browse the portal and find the answers to their questions whenever it is convenient for them.

You cannot build a successful business without the right people. The TFB team is more than just colleagues, so laying someone off was never a possibility for us. Luckily, we managed to get through the turbulence, keep every employee, and even significantly expand the team.

Each office now has new employees who joined the company just before or during the pandemic. We are a software company, so switching to 100% remote work was not an issue, and we continue to successfully hire, onboard, and work with newbies remotely. Many of our team members have reported increased productivity during these times.

Still, human beings are social animals, and it is important to stay in touch. To keep the spirits high, we regularly run company-wide calls and presentations, where we share our news, plans, successes, and other company-related topics. Another activity that we have tried and plan to repeat in the future was running a virtual team building. Last time we hired a company that organized an online quiz, divided everyone into groups, and ran a little competition. It proved to be a fun way to spend time, get to know your colleagues, and unwind. Undoubtedly, now is the time to invest in such little treats for your teams. It helps to have an informal fun time together while staying safe and work more productively as a result.

We hope that you’ve enjoyed this article. For any questions, please email us at sales@t4b.com.