Thence: The Product Success Company

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

GetActive is a workplace wellness company. We started in 2009 as a company that promotes physical activity with gamification and employee engagement. Over time, we moved into corporate wellness. We collaborate with multiple providers who are on our platform offering their wellness services to the organization. We use a lot of social strategies to make wellness work within organizations.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with WinkTales?

We are primarily a product company that builds and sells products. Our core expertise is technology and enterprise sales. We didn’t have any design expertise on our team.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We initially engaged them for our website design work. Then, they started helping us with some of our mobile application screens. They have also helped with branding. Since we work with various wellness organizations, our communication needs to be drafted based on those organizations’ guidelines.

Often times, wellness as a strategy for employees is something new to these organizations. Often times, they need to create their own wellness brand for interaction with the employee. Together with WinkTales, we discuss with the organization what they would like to represent the brand. Then, WinkTales starts executing and creating it.

Almost all our design requirements are taken care of by WinkTales. As we expand, our design requirements and our engagement with them also expand.

What is the team composition?

We started working with Alok, who is one of the founders. We still meet him once in a while to review the work. We work with 2 managers under him including a design head who works with a few graphic designers and copywriters. He is the guy who understands our requirements and then leads his team to deliver the work to us. At any point in time, there are 3–4 folks from WinkTales who are engaged with us.

How did you come to work with WinkTales?

WinkTales was referred to us by a friend who had heard good things about them. We met them and explained the kind of company we are and the kind of support we were looking for. We started by having them design a couple of small things for us. We set a quick turnaround time to decide if they were a company we could work with.

How much have you invested with them?

We pay $2,000–$2,500 per month or $20,000–$25,000 for the whole financial year.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in June 2016 and the work is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

They produce the work with a quick turnaround. They understand our philosophy and our product. They bring all of that in the design. It has worked out really well for us. We have a lot of communication and design requirements almost on a daily basis. They’re able to quickly deliver all those things to us within the timeframes.

Sometimes we push them really hard and very rarely have they told us something wasn’t possible for such a small timeline. More often than not, they delivered. They feel like an arm of our company. Any time we take on a new design phase, we are assured that WinkTales is there to deliver it for us.

How did WinkTales perform from a project management standpoint?

It has worked well, but there’s always room for improvement. Whenever we have a detailed requirement, it’s my responsibility to create the requirement from our side. Then we share it with them via email. If it’s an important assignment, we have a meeting prior to that to explain to them what exactly we’re looking at. Then I document it in a requirement document and send it to them.

For smaller, day-to-day work, we use email and we also use WhatsApp, where we exchange notes in a group. They deliver to us on software called Zeppelin where they share all the designs and assets us with us, which we use to then implement.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Prior to WinkTales, we worked with other design firms. When we started with WinkTales, they were a young team with fresh ideas. That worked well for us because many designers come with their own baggage of what they think is right and our message gets lost. Since WinkTales is pretty fresh, it was easier to work with them and explain to them what we are really looking at and get them to design the way we want it.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We’d like to see them expand their expertise like content creation so that we could get more of the copy work done through them. We’d like them to venture into different territories around design so that we can have just one entity to work with instead of engaging multiple entities.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Focus on the long term. It takes time for them to understand your values and philosophy. The more you work with design firms, the better they understand you, and then that starts showing in the design. If you choose a different design firm for every project, the messaging and branding gets confused. If somebody were looking at working with WinkTales, I’d recommend giving them a longer duration. Many of these professionals will end up being your extended teams.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Silver Oak Health is a behavioral health organization. We use cognitive sciences — specifically in psychology — to improve quality of life. We have diverse solutions in the mental health area. I`m the vice president of marketing.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with WinkTales?

Specifically, with our corporate clients, we were moving into the area of “mindfulness,” which is the practice of focussing our attention on living in the present moment, in order to reduce stress. We had already been conducting events such as workshops, seminars, and other engagement activities, but we realized that we needed something to take these initiatives forward even after the events. This is when we came up with a mobile application which could be used for habit formation amongst corporate employees.

Two of the top-performing mindfulness apps on the market are Headspace and Calm. We wanted to build something similar, but anchored around an Indian voice.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Our corporate clients engage with us primarily through the web. WinkTales designed a web-based, non-native Android app, and our internal technology team developed it.

We went to WinkTales with just an idea and a wireframe we’d sketched out on paper. As we don’t have any internal user experience personnel in our organization, WinkTales helped with this and designed a couple of different custom flows. They printed out different scenarios, and we tested it on a few sample groups of people who went through the entire flow of the app. We made many changes based on the insights we gained from this exercise.

We were looking for an app which would showcase the different tracks we had recorded with our mindfulness coach, as well as provide a useful engagement tool. We also have a diary/reflection tool within the app and a feature that provides a report on the status of the user’s mindfulness journey.

Our app features guided and unguided tracks. In guided tracks, the app’s mindfulness coach leads users through different kinds of mindfulness techniques. These are largely meant for those who are relatively new to such practices. The unguided audio tracks are primarily targeted at more experienced mindfulness practitioners. We also have a four-program series in the form of curated tracks which users go through every day, in order to develop the mindfulness habit.

What is the team composition?

We primarily interfaced with Alok [Co-Founder & Director, WinkTales] and Mangala, a client service representative. Our development team also worked closely with their lead designer Sudheesh towards the end of the project.

How did you come to work with WinkTales?

A partner organization recommended WinkTales to us. We initially used their services for some offline creative work to help us design brochures and exhibition stalls for a national conference we were attending. We were happy with their work, so the app was a natural progression. Proximity was also a deciding factor, as they’re situated only 15 minutes away from our office. It was easy for us to meet, strategize, and stay updated on the progress of the project.

How much have you invested with them?

The cost of their work has been around 340,000 Indian rupees ($5,200 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in early 2017. The app is currently available for Android and iOS.

The iOS version launched three weeks ago and is still undergoing some beta testing. It still requires some amount of work as we’ve temporarily just replicated the Android design for iOS. Going forward, we will need to go back to WinkTales for a more structured iOS design. They’ve been helping us with some screens and adaptations over the last few months, but at this point, the Android version is 90% closed, with only one testing/review meeting pending. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Qualifying the results would be a little difficult at this point because we’ve hardly done any marketing. At present, we’ve reached around 4,000–5,000 downloads after promoting the app for two months. It’s been primarily a B2B push to our existing corporate clients.

There has been a lot of positive feedback on the app, which in effect pushed us to roll out the iOS version.

We do have a lot of issues from a functionality perspective, but this is more on the development side of things, as opposed to design. We’ve received some fairly good feedback on the app design during this phase.

We went through many iterations in the beginning as we weren’t happy with the initial versions that came out, but we’re happy with what we have now. Our organization’s founders had a specific idea in mind when we started the project, which was different from the initial draft WinkTales sent us. After a couple of iterations, we were able to get on track, and our expectations were met.

How did WinkTales perform from a project management standpoint?

Their responsiveness was one of the primary reasons we went back to them after the first project. Alok, in particular, gave an equal amount of interest to us as to their larger clients. Things were managed based on timelines, and we didn’t have any complaints on any of these fronts.

We communicated via phone and email, had in-person activities, and transferred assets using Zeplin. We were able to review everything quickly, as well as download assets and colors without any hassle. The Marvel App was used to share designs.

What did you find most impressive about them?

WinkTales had a certain amount of business and strategy input for the app’s development which helped a lot. We changed some of our flow and content based on the initial strategy meetings we had with their team, and this made a substantial difference. Most other creative agencies we’ve worked with in the past only provided design support, as opposed to WinkTales’ slightly more holistic offering.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Very early on in the project, we lost track a little bit in terms of what we wanted versus what they were providing. Alok’s stepping in rectified that minor detour quickly. He understood our vision and design style a lot better than the other people we’d interfaced with. It’s not a strong negative because this does commonly happen with other agencies too, but avoiding it could have saved us a bit of time.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Clients should spend a lot of time providing explicit references of what they want to do initially. This is the one place where we went a little wrong, but the moment we were able to present other apps and design styles as references, we were able to get back on track. Giving strong references of what is required will help the team align with the project much quicker.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are a global provider of IT services with 20,000 employees and clients in a number of verticals, including banking and insurance.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with WinkTales Creative?

We needed help with employee communication. Around 4 years ago, we started looking at employee engagement and communication more seriously and started centralizing all our requirements in the area. We needed a plan for effectively communicating with employees, in order to ensure we had more engagement as a result.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We initially started with fliers and posters — the minimum level of communication done with employees. We've expanded the scope to include an array of their services, such as video and audio editing, social media integration, and creating unique content for specific product launches. They also run our official engagement social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter and have created a couple of applications for certain launches.

We have introduced a social platform for employees to interact within the organization, and have built awareness around other office tools. They help us create communications, share interfaces, and applications to help create that awareness. This includes creating microsites and applications, depending on our needs.

What is the team dynamic?

Initially, they were a smaller team, and we had interactions with the actual resources. Now that the team has expanded, I have a dedicated client service manager whom I interact with on an almost daily basis.

How did you come to work with WinkTales Creative?

We reached out to various vendors across the industry and found them based on a referral from our leadership team. We had an initial discussion and were impressed with their portfolio and the amount of hard work they’d put into creating meaningful communication and delivering on time. Any communication we undertake reaches out to all our employees, both in India and abroad, so it was important to be stringent in selecting a vendor.

How much have you invested with them?

The cost of their work in 2015 and 2016 was 15–20 Indian Lakhs [$23,000–$30,000]. Before that, we had more sporadic requirements. Our communication expenditure has grown by 50% from 10-15 Indian Lakhs [$15,300–$23,000] in 2013 and 2014. We have been doing a lot more work in 2017, but I am yet to know the total.

What is the status of this engagement?

We had our first discussions with them at the end of 2013 and started the work at the beginning of 2014. The collaboration is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Our engagement levels have gone the initial 12–13% to currently being at 25%. When we started out, there wasn’t enough attention being given to communication. We have seen many changes to what things looked like 4 or 5 years ago, and we have been slowly improving.

They helped us differentiate between the many ways communication can be done within an organization, in order to increase awareness and participation in events and activities. From a collaboration perspective, they’ve helped us identify our loopholes, how we could improve designs and creatives in order to produce meaningful communication. We have used all the available mediums to reach out to every level of employee, from top to bottom.

How did WinkTales Creative perform from a project management standpoint?

There is a lot of back-and-forth around design and creative requirements. We haven’t had any issues in terms of communication.

Because they were a smaller company in the beginning, we had many issues with taking projects at our pace. They have grown their staff quite a bit, and the project management has been streamlined as well. We share briefs and scopes of work, so I know what will be done and when.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their ability to understand client requirements during the first discussion. It’s also important for us to have interaction on a day-to-day basis and build a level of chemistry, which they provide. They have been one of the agencies which understood what we need in a short span of time and delivered it within our timelines.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We didn’t really have bad experiences with them; nothing that would require escalation. They constantly interact with the customer, in order to ensure that nothing was missed, but they need to look at how the client is charged for certain services. There are many vectors available online and clients are becoming wiser in how communication is created, for a cheaper price. For the more standard, rudimentary levels of communication, they should not be charging what they currently are.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Nothing in particular comes to mind, however, the more our business will adopt the cloud, the more our employee interactions will change. This is true for the entire industry, and it’s important to see how mobile will become the method of communication. There is a lot of attraction to it, which we’re seeing every day, and we have to bring the medium into consideration, looking beyond what it is at the moment.