Valtech

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder of a wearable tech company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Melon?

We needed help augmenting our wearable tech watch product.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Melon performs several backend tasks involving development and testing on our advanced platform. They help out with a lot of different tech resources that we lack in-house. The team creates new solutions and updates to optimize the customer experience. For example, they’re helping us create a feature to make sure people social distance from each other in response to COVID-19.

What is the team composition?

We work with 3-4 people from their team.

How did you come to work with Melon?

We found them through our CTO’s network.

How much have you invested with them?

We spend $25,000 per month.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in February 2019, and our work is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Overall, the work they’ve done has gotten very positive feedback. The team is professional in terms of response times. It’s important for us to be ad-hoc and add new things, and they’ve been very good at adapting to our change in direction.

How did Melon perform from a project management standpoint?

Their CEO is fast and responsive. The service level is always fantastic. Overall, their flexibility has made our life easier.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Other vendors sometimes say one thing and the delivery is poor, which is not the case with Melon. They’re far better than anyone we’ve worked with.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, nothing I can think of right now.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

My advice is to be transparent about your strengths and weaknesses as a client. The fact that we’ve been very transparent has helped them to work in a very agile way.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CIO of a nonprofit health insurance firm.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Kin + Carta?

We previously didn’t have a native mobile app. We had a portal that served us well when we were smaller, but it didn’t have the capabilities or personalization that we needed now, nor did it render well on a mobile phone. We made a commitment to invest in native mobile app capabilities, and we partnered with Kin + Carta.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We didn’t have a wireframe for the app itself, but we had an idea that we wanted an approach of human-centered design. They built the app for iOS which has launched, and we’re delivering the Android version soon.

What is the team composition?

We work with a team of people — we’re 100% agile across our whole enterprise.

How did you come to work with Kin + Carta ?

We had a significant RFP and RFI process that was robust.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together beginning in January 2018, and the work is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The app hasn’t had a measurable business impact because it hasn’t been live during open enrollment, but we’re pushing it during this period. We feel great about the quality of the app going into open enrollment. We have some early adopters who are already actively using the app. We’re seeing significant velocity because of them.

How did Kin + Carta perform from a project management standpoint?

I reject the word project because it was an agile process. However, they’ve proven themselves to be incredibly flexible operating in this blended manner because that’s really important to us. They’ve led us on the design approach for the app early on, as we’ve transitioned to take more leadership leveraging their design expertise.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their experience of their group on human-centered design for digital and consumer engagement assets across platforms is impressive. We used their human-centered design to digitally engage our consumers. They helped us go beyond the average of health care to meet the expectation of digital.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They have a really strong culture, they add value, they have strong experience and a commitment to design. We had to roll some people off that didn’t meet this quality, unfortunately.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

The human-centered design approach to testing the opportunity with the customer takes a while. You have to be prepared and willing to listen to the feedback, which challenged some aspects of our business.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the Co-founder, CEO and product manager at Slick. Slick is a web-based booking platform and workflow management tool for hair & beauty salons and other appointment based businesses.

We have around 3k users of our platform from 700 businesses in the UK. We are partnered with L'Oreal for distribution and also have some integrations with them to enhance the experience for L'Oreal salons on our platform.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Melon?

We have had an ongoing relationship with Melon right from the start of our business around 2.5 years ago.

Melon have provided us with front end developers (CSS and React Native) and back end developers (Python, Django) to help us build out our platform and evolve all of the features.

We have flexed between 0 - 6 Melon developers over the past 2 years and they have worked alongside our in house development team of 2-4 people.

What were your goals for this project?

Our platform has to be usable across a range of devices and browsers and it also needs to be incredibly user friendly since the majority of our target customer base is switching from a paper diary to digital.

Since our customers are using Slick to run their entire business daily, the platform must be super reliable, stable, and fast when performing quite complex tasks.

In addition most parts of the product require information/actions from other parts of the product, so there needs to be a good understanding of how everything fits together and seamless performance across the platform.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

Our CTO had worked with Melon before and was confident in the quality of the developers, their availability and flexibility, and also the cost. He had a good working relationship with the CEO of the business, Krum, and was confident that this is the best agency he has ever worked with (having worked with several before), so we were confident this was the right choice.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

The team at Melon have worked across a variety of features such as online booking, stock management, financial reporting, payments processing integration, client data management.

Some of our features have been built almost entirely by the Melon team from scratch and others have been co-built with our in-house team.

The Melon team have also worked on some of the custom L'Oreal integrations such as a salon locator hosted by L'Oreal which links to online booking for salons using Slick.

What was the team composition?

On average we have been working with 1 backend developer from Melon and 2-3 front end developers. This has fluctuated over time according to our financial position and our product needs.

The great thing is we have always been able to work with the same developers at our request, so there is continuity for us. The Melon team have always been fully integrated with our in-house developers and we work together as a team.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

Thanks to work on usability improvements across the whole platform from the Melon team, we have reduced bugs reported from our customers by almost 70% in the past year.

A module that was built almost entirely by Melon developers was our marketing module which has resulted in an average of 20% increase in revenue per customer for us.

The Melon team have gone over and above what is asked or expected of them in order to help us meet delivery deadlines, and i am always confident I can rely on them not to let me down.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

The Melon team are all offshore and also for the past year our entire team has been remote. This has never been a problem and the team have excellent communication and exceptionally good english language skills so we never have misunderstandings.

We communicate primarily through Slack, hosting a standup call daily at 9:30am and a sprint plan every fortnight. We each then have 1-1 contact and catch up calls to discuss problems or share progress. We use Jira to manage tasks and workflow and then we use Github.

The melon team easily picked up our processes and adapted well to any changes. Their communication is always excellent and they are very reliable on deadlines or letting me know if there are any issues meeting them and why. Usually though, they do whatever they can to meet deadlines, so I am never disappointed.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Excellent communication from the top down - I have met with the CEO and CTO in London which is a classy thing for them to do to ensure we are looked after as a client.

Resource management always responds almost instantly and they are incredibly accommodating for our needs, always trying their best to get me the developers I want to work with. The quality of the developers we have worked with is outstanding.

But also their work ethic and communication skills are excellent - it's clear they receive very good training, guidance and support from Melon and it's clear they respect Melon as an organisation and enjoy working for them.

Honestly I couldn't be more complimentary about Melon. They have supported us the whole way, but most especially when times have been tough for us. They are very understanding and collaborative to help us achieve our goals. I absolutely love the developers we work with and they feel 100% part of our team.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Genuinely struggling to think of anything that needs improving - things work perfectly exactly as they are! The only tiny thing I can think of is maybe giving a little more advance guidance on national/public holidays for developers in their respective countries and what the expectation is around working/not working.

And also what the guidance is for holidays (annual allowance, notice of requests) ie is this something Melon specifies or I should specify. It's not caused any issues at all to date; I'm just not sure what the developers' expectations are and who has responsibility for this ultimately.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a senior manager at RARE, a conservation and development nonprofit.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Melon?

We hired Melon to add additional features to an Android app written in Java that has a backend admin system. They worked on the front- and backend.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

The app is a fisheries' catch recording app. We work with small scale fisheries in developing countries and try to get fisheries data in our project community to record their data. What we're trying to do is to replace traditional methods of recording fisheries data and move that into a digital platform. We've developed an Android app to collect catch data in small-scale fishing communities.

Melon was brought on when the previous developer had other responsibilities and we needed to continue development. We get feedback from users, filter what’s feasible, and then pass that on to the developers to add requested functionalities.

They fixed a lot of bugs and built a feature to track profit, aimed at fish buyers. The tool is a financial one, that assists the buyers with managing incoming income, expenditures, and profit in order to motivate them to use the app and continue to provide the fisheries data that we need for managing fish stock and enhancing ecosystems.

What is the team composition?

We usually had one person working on the backend and one person working on the frontend. There’s a project manager as well, and 4–5 people join our weekly meetings.

How did you come to work with Melon?

They were recommended by the previous developer. He put us in contact with us and we seemed to fit.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested about $50,000 so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in December 2017, and are still working together.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Adoption rates of the app might be our best qualitative metric. We’ve seen continual increase and usage of the app until March 2020, when it dropped for obvious reasons. Once the app is adopted, users tend to stay on the app. This is largely due to the new features that Melon has been assisting us to develop.

How did Melon perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re great and very thorough. They provide constant updates and prepare progress reports for our weekly meetings. I can’t complain. They’re efficient, get the job done, and stick to timeframes and cost points.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’m impressed with the way they go about their work and the knowledge they have about what they do. They haven’t let me down ever.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No. I’m happy with the way they work.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be as thorough as possible on the project brief. I’ve been guilty of giving too vague of a description. Make sure you have enough detail for them.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of a social networking platform.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Melon?

We were looking to outsource the development of our app.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Melon came on board to help us build the iOS app from the ground up. There is no Android version. They were effectively responsible for the backend, frontend, design, and everything else we needed.

We provide a video calling technology, and they helped us build the video capabilities, the payment solution within the app, the scheduling system, and all the other typical functions of a typical marketplace app.

Our chief engineer led the project and managed their team from Melon, but they had a team lead on their end as well.

What is the team composition?

We had three people from Melon working on this fulltime: one iOS and two backend developers.

How did you come to work with Melon?

It was a referral from someone in Bulgaria.

How much have you invested with them?

The cost has been $250,000–$280,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Melon in November 2019, and we will continue working with them.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The success metric for us is delivering on time, and they’ve done so for every sprint so far. They handle minor changes and bug fixes as part of the everyday process.

How did Melon perform from a project management standpoint?

We have a daily call to make sure everything’s working well and to plan for the day. Their performance is fantastic. We use traditional management tools, including Jira.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They deliver everything on time and let us know if they don't understand something. They’re honest and genuine people who're passionate about what they do. It's clear that they care about the client’s success and satisfaction.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Not at all.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

It’s important to be organized.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the regional marketing manager at a machine learning and AI-based consultancy.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Frakton?

We needed a revamp of the websites. We needed to position ourselves correctly in the market to deliver a stronger brand to market and the older website was not getting the point across.

We were looking for a solution provider to get the right positioning out and be creative with graphics showing what our position was. That’s not easy to do as a machine learning AI-based company dealing in multiple industries, because we don’t have a product per se and everything we do is tailor-made.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

It was a creative collaboration of sorts, although it was pretty clear what I wanted. They made quite a few edits as we went along because it’s quite tricky to get our branding message out there and pick the right graphics to go with it.

What is the team composition?

About 90% of the time I worked with one project manager and they’d invite a designer on the call if there was something specific to be discussed.

How did you come to work with Frakton?

We did some organic research and I spoke to numerous firms. After a great conversation with Frakton, we said let’s give them a try.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began work in May 2019. The main site was ready to go months ago, but we brought them back on to build another specific page and that work is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

One of the main metrics is based on emotions — once the site was up and running we sent the site out to a couple of customers to get their thoughts. We received lots of positive reviews, social proof that the site was really working for us. We were really happy to hear that. Our team internally liked the site as well because they did a great job of keeping our brand characteristics out there in a clean and simple way.

If you want to look at content and numbers, the average page visit time has been drastically longer. The average person spends 35–45 seconds and visits at least three pages, which is fantastic.

How did Frakton perform from a project management standpoint?

All communication was done every week or two weeks depending on how the project was going. I’m very communicative myself, but I was happy with how things were handled. It’s no big deal, but perhaps they could’ve communicated over Trello or another project management software.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I liked their flexibility. There were a lot of changes and amendments to the project. The benefit of having someone like Frakton was that they were flexible with their time and flexible chopping and changing from both sides. In addition to their great flexibility, I was very happy with their communication and pricing.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Nothing stands out specifically. They were quite successful overall.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I would definitely start with branding guidelines. Make sure you know exactly what you want, like what colors, what the tone of voice, how loud the design should be, what types of images, etc. If you don’t have that, it’s going to get messy.

After we did the branding guidelines, everything went quite well. Frakton was a great partner, especially if you’re looking for a vendor while going through a complete redesign.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a project manager for a financial services and insurance organization.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Spire Digital?

The project involved creating a digital marketing as a service product essentially.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Spire Digital provided us with a go-to-market strategy for our product. Their team created a digital strategy to roll out our digital marketing as a service product to potential customers.

Spire Digital also provided UI/UX design and web development services. Their team built the site from scratch, covering all of the documentation and wireframing. They built a scalable microsite based in Marketo with React for the frontend. We can spin off the platform into multiple microsites that are individually branded for each of our partners.

What is the team composition?

I'm in contact with one person from Spire Digital who’s my go-to if I have any questions or concerns. I also interact with their design lead and a handful of their development resources too.

How did you come to work with Spire Digital?

We completed an extensive RFP process amongst firms based in the central to west coast area of the US. We found Spire Digital through Clutch. They had great ratings, so we extended the RFP to them. Their team had experience with the exact type of product that we sought to launch.  

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent between $100,000–$200,000 so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began the discovery phase in December 2019 and the project’s ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Our team loves working with Spire Digital. We’ve found a lot of value in the quality of their deliverables. We really appreciate their partnership and leadership. They always lean in to provide strategy and best practices in areas that aren't described to the letter of our scope.

How did Spire Digital perform from a project management standpoint?

Spire Digital used GitHub for their development tool. They provided status reports weekly and adapted to any formatting requests. The report format changed a couple of times over the course of our project but their team was understanding. We appreciated that.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We’re still contracted with Spire Digital. We signed on with them for managed services, which speaks to how much we appreciate their partnership.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We had a number of constraints on our project especially time. It would have been nice to have more formal documentation. But we didn’t require that in our scope of work because we needed to get an MVP out as quickly as possible.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO of a mobile solutions company in the UK.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Melon?

We needed software engineers for web development.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

They’ve mostly done development work for us, working on Node.js in the backend and HTML JavaScript on the frontend. It’s a complex system that diagnoses faults and issues in mobile phones. They’ve also done design work and the testing structures are handled exclusively by Melon.

What is the team composition?

We’re working with 4 people currently, but some of the teammates have changed at different points in the project. There is a senior engineer and senior test engineer who have been overseeing the project remotely.

How did you come to work with Melon?

We were looking for companies throughout Europe, as it’s difficult to hire locally. A contractor working for us referred us to Melon, so we went with them. 

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent between $250,000–$500,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together in March 2019 and our engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We demonstrated the project to the customer and we’ve been pleased with how it works. Their work has been mostly on time and within budget, too. 

How did Melon perform from a project management standpoint?

Project management has largely been handled on our side since we hired someone experienced in managing remote teams. To communicate, we use Jira and Slack.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Unlike other service providers I’ve experienced, Melon has a good combination of professionalism with the processes and flexibility within an agile environment. We had some initial concerns about having a remote team, but it’s worked so much better than expected.

They’re flexible and willing to help. For example, we had a delivery recently that they happily did extra runs on to ensure proper testing and made any fixes or changes needed.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, there’s nothing. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

With any outsourcing or remote work, you should be clear about your needs and skills. Organize the project so it can be done well remotely. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the Blue Badge parking scheme service owner for the Department for Transport in the UK government.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Valtech?

The Blue Badge parking service was previously online for members of the UK public to apply for. It was the most complained about online service from the Department for Transport, and we needed to deliver a service that completely met the user’s needs.

The “user” means both the members of the public who need a blue badge and the 206 councils dotted around the UK (so they could administer and enforce the scheme). 

We are looking to actually improve the efficiency of UK councils and ultimately save them money and generate benefits.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

They delivered it in partnership with us at the Department for Transport. There were central government standards and criteria that needed to be met, and Valtech has been key in that area.

In terms of technology and software, the service was completely developed based on user-centric design. It was also a complete service based in the cloud. We use AWS where we host all the environments associated with this service. 

The other important feature that Valtech supported was their knowledge and expertise in designing an open-source and open-code API integration. 

What is the team composition?

It changed over time, but there were about 24 people who worked on the project.

How did you come to work with Valtech?

Since we are a UK central government department, we have strict procurement and commercial guidelines to follow. We didn’t award the work to Valtech as a direct award — we had to use a framework. That framework went out to the wide market, and then it was up to third-party suppliers to actually submit the bid. 

I had the overall responsibility of choosing, but I had to ensure that we adhered to guidelines. There were four members on the evaluation panel where we scored and critiqued the responses we received from a number of suppliers. 

We did that independently and then moderated together to discuss each of the scores for every supplier that submitted a bid. Then, a selection was made, and we drilled down and progressed to the next stage of suppliers.

Bringing on Valtech was a result of us collectively agreeing to award the contract based on the quality of the bid that they submitted. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Valtech in August 2017, and we are still working with them.

The original contract with them lasted around 14 weeks, and then to align with the procurement guidelines and the government, we then went back to the market.  Valtech was successful in that tender process again. 

At the beginning of this year, the scope changed to where we needed a supplier to provide digital expertise, continued software development, and also technical support. We went back to the market, and Valtech won that contract once again.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
Valtech allowed us, as a department, to deliver something of value that remained within cost. 

They have really supported the department in delivering and designing a service that is now a multi-award-winning service (which we were never looking for as a government department). The service has won awards for collaboration because we had to onboard 206 local authorities and educate them about how the online services are designed. 

We’ve been able to back that up with real facts and figures in terms of performance. Digital take-up has increased from 33% to 58%. The online completion rate of application for members of the public in the UK has increased from 31% to an average of about 70%. Processing time, where local authority or councils have to process an application, has reduced from 29 days to about 19 days. 

Also, their support with the API integration was really key in terms of onboarding a number of councils across the UK to ensure they were fully integrated with the central service that the government was offering. 

How did Valtech perform from a project management standpoint?

The Blue Badge digital service was the first digital service at the Department for Transport, so there was a lot of learning involved. Valtech helped by nurturing us as a customer. They did a lot of work to instill the culture of agile delivery within myself, and they also helped me gain needed buy-in from the ministerial level.

They were very open, very honest, and extremely transparent about what needed to be done. It was helpful that Valtech understood what our objective was as a department and worked hard to understand the blockers. The delivery team from Valtech and I worked quite hard in the early stages to identify those blockers and look at actions of how we could overcome them.

For project management, we purchased licenses with Atlassian, we used Confluence as our knowledge hub. We used Jira as our backlog management tool to move ideas, features, and improvements from a ticket into development (this worked well). Valtech was really helpful in ensuring that this software was embedded as a collaboration tool between us.

The other thing that is worth highlighting is that we use Slack as a communications tool, and we rolled out Slack to all councils in the UK. Now, we now have nearly 900 members on the Slack channel. Valtech supported the Department for Transport in administering Slack and keeping it working.

What did you find most impressive about them?

A key strength of Valtech is their ability to share knowledge and transfer skills. They worked very closely with me and my team from the department to build our knowledge and expertise in digital services. 

They were really good at engaging with other government departments as well. They also supported me when I had to look for data-sharing opportunities with other government departments. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the vice president of marketing and operations for an insurance company. We are a group of insurance companies that provides mostly commercial lines insurance, commercial auto insurance, and commercial property insurance, as well as workers’ compensation services.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Spire Digital?

We were looking to redesign a customer-facing—this means for our retail agents—commercial auto rater. The goal was to create a product that would let them go online and write up a commercial auto risk assessment, get a quote, and bind the policy. We’ve been using in-house software for about 10 years, and, although we knew that it was time for a refresh, we didn’t have the design talent to build a good UX.

Insurance is pretty static, and it's hard to change things too much without disrupting the way that agents do business. Because of this, we asked Spire to think outside the box and see if they could help us do something different from the rest of the industry. We initially hired them for design and development, but ultimately decided to keep all of the development in house.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Spire Digital completed the ideation phase and design work for the project. They created designs mostly from scratch, although they did take some ideas from our old site. The team provided wireframes using InVision, which they used to discuss potential changes and make adjustments based on our feedback.

We also asked them for some guidance regarding the question flow within various parts of the product. They didn’t deliver anything new in terms of content, but they did offer some feedback about the wording of some sections.

What is the team composition?

There were two main individuals that we worked with on the design side and three or four other managers that we would occasionally touch base with. We worked with the executive management team, as well.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around $130,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

This is an ongoing project that began in November 2018.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The product did well in user testing, and we’ve gotten some positive feedback from other stakeholders. Our developers are still working on building out Spire’s designs, so I can’t comment on their effectiveness yet.

They’ve helped us take a step in the right direction—toward innovation—and I’m very excited to see the product in action. Spire has done a fantastic job, and we’re considering another project with them that would be more focused on content.

How did Spire Digital perform from a project management standpoint?

They were fantastic. The team stayed in touch with us throughout the project. We’ve been going through a shift to agile development with our in-house team, and Spire has been very patient with us despite some challenges.

They met with us every week to let us know how the project was going. We also received frequent demos, which allowed us to provide feedback and ask for adjustments. We used Microsoft Teams as well to manage tasks. Spire was great about pushing back against our ideas when they weren’t useful and steering us in the right direction when we went off-track.

Our primary method of communication was WebEx, but we also spoke to them over the phone while sharing our screens. We also had a number of in-person visits where they came to our office and sat down with our team. This seemed to help them learn more about our products and our business goals.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Spire went above and beyond to take care of an external problem that we faced at the beginning of the project. Initially, they found a developer to build the website using their designs, and that individual ended up being a poor fit. Spire wasn’t aware of this, and we eventually brought to their attention the fact that the individual’s work and hours billed did not make sense.

I couldn’t be happier with how they responded to the situation. This could have been a huge detriment, but instead, we were pleasantly surprised with the outcome. This shouldn’t reflect poorly on Spire, because, frankly, this could happen with any contractor, and they went out of their way to make things right for us. I really appreciated that level of service.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I don’t think so; I was very impressed with them throughout the project. Design is something that we do not have much expertise in, and we’re thankful that we’ve been able to utilize Spire for that. I’ve been very happy with their work and their design process.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

We came into this project having never done something like this before, and Spire immediately put us at ease. They came to our office right away to get to know our team and quickly learn our business. My advice would be to share with them as much information as you can at the outset so that they can figure out how to translate that into real results.