Business Description
We are in the transportation industry; we like to travel. We still think that face to face is by far the best way to develop relationships, impart knowledge, conduct training, and ensure our clients can get the best out of our solutions. One of our recent blogs (Link) noted how our release planning had been amended to provide functionality and tools to assist in minimizing or responding to the impact of Covid-19 uncertainties. Things have changed. History has taught us that such seismic events as a global pandemic accelerate change inexorably and have permanent impacts on how business is conducted. We continue to consider what this might mean for client services and implementations/delivery. Each year we have our RTS Summit in some world city, Lisbon last time in 2019, where we can connect and enjoy time together, the local customs and food, as well as share ideas and gain insight into what our clients would like from us and how we can improve our services. We are missing those enjoyable and productive few days. Based on these interactions and client feedback, it was clear that they would like to have more content online, and potentially some form of user community. Now, we have tried this before but in all honesty, received little traction or use. This was quite a while ago now, so maybe the time and technology are ripe to invest more time in this and try again? Of course, webinars and web conferencing have been around for years, but perhaps we have not exploited them to their full potential. A first response has been to create CONNEXIONS. This is a portal for our Passenger clients and provides quick and easy access to information on each new PAX Velocity release. Currently the main content is introductory videos and brief descriptions of the key changes or new functions, along with the release notes. This helps our clients decide if they want to take the latest release immediately and assists them creating their UAT testing scenarios and plans. Subsequently, we have posted the User Manual to CONNEXIONS, which will provide permanent access to the latest version as this is updated with each release. We have held some client Webinars about forecasting in Covid-19 and this content has been posted to CONNEXIONS as we envisage it becoming a wider repository for all things PAX Velocity. And we therefore reach our little conundrum on how much time we should invest in expanding and focusing on online educational content and remote conferencing versus maintaining our on-site face to face approach. Will travel budgets be slashed and the expectation of remote training become the norm? We are certainly appreciative of the overwhelmingly positive response to CONNEXIONS although still feel the connections made when together remain invaluable. For the immediate future, we will continue to provide new release videos and look to expand our digital output as additional educational for key functions/settings and self-help content sections and increase the number of regular interactive conferencing sessions across the client base, keeping us connected. Undoubtedly, we will be deliberating this for the rest of the year as we determine our long-term vision for the future. But as ever we will be guided by the clients and will be consulting together to best decide the future direction. No doubt a valuable balance will be struck. https://www.rtscorp.com/
