Charlie, here we are on the rooftop of the Valletta Design Cluster, above the hustle and bustle of Malta’s beating heart – the capital city. Is there a particular reason you’ve chosen this location to conclude our conversation?
All our discussions leading up now to really form the foundation of NetRefer. And the pathways here really depict where our future is going relative to the NetRefer experience.
Right so, it’s an interesting analogy that this garden, with its lovely trails and pathways and fauna, is the right metaphor for what you’ve been describing today.
Absolutely. So, we’re really looking at becoming more intimate with our user journeys, and tying those user journeys back to Customer Experience.
Looking ahead into the near future for NetRefer, what can you tell me about the plans for business operations specifically.
We’re still going to have that robust Program Management to ensure that we delivering on time, and also that Reporting and Monitoring Analysis to ensure that we are doing things on time and within budget. But we’re also going to be focusing a lot now on the Service Design and the ecosystem that we are building for all NetRefer stakeholders. So, we’re looking at building a brand-new Learning and Certification Centre. This will house all our Knowledge Base content, FAQs, and how-to videos. And it will be much more interactive. So, through the Virtual Assistant, we’ll be able to understand the type of user that’s engaging with the content and push information in their direction. So again, it’s about sending the right message at the right time.
This means that there’ll be an intelligent agent that clients can interact with directly.
Exactly. That Virtual Assistant will act as our first line of support. So, if there’s a general question with a specific answer, the agent will be able to communicate that right back to the end-user. And we’ll also use that same facility to push certain messages to our users while they are in our Learning and Certification Centre.
We’ll be going even one step further with the Certification piece itself. We’ll have different levels of certification, so that when somebody reaches the highest level of certification, they can also become a contributor to our Knowledge Base.
There’s clearly a lot of development happening and upgrading of systems. You’ve moved into the Cloud recently. So, there’s probably a migration operation that’s being added to the future plans as well. Is it fair to say that?
Well, we finished migrating the Platform over to the Cloud this year. Obviously, this opened up a lot of opportunities for us. Because now, we are obviously in the Microsoft technology stack, which opens up the possibility to utilize a lot of the out-of-the-box functionality that comes along with Microsoft. So, we’ll be leveraging a lot of those technologies, we’ll be fixing a lot of data transfer procedures and our reporting procedures.
All of this needs to be packaged up in that NetRefer ecosystem. And we need to bring all these different journeys together – whether you’ve been a NetRefer customer for one day or 15 years. We need to bring that all together, understand the different pathways and user journeys, and ensure that, as a business, we’re delivering value back to our customers at every step in that pathway.
Obviously, you’ve got a diverse set of users paying for your product and using the Platform. What’s in store for the community to bring them together as a whole?
That is something that will be launching as part of the new NetRefer ecosystem. It’s an element of user community. So, that user community will be tied to the certification process. Everybody will be able to engage and then, we’ll have certain levels of certification, where people can participate as moderators: they can drive discussion. And again, this should give us that closed loop full cycle visibility into what our clients are saying, so that those requests and feature requests can go into the product so it continues to evolve.
Charlie this was great! A very helpful and interesting explanation about what’s happening with NetRefer’s Business Operations Team. I’m really looking forward to the next Walk & Talk in the series. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Watch the next entry in our Walk & Talk series with NetRefer’s Head of Product Delivery – Mark Scerri Pace.
A special thank you goes out to Andrew Bonello for conducting the interview.