Last week we sent an email campaign to users who subscribe to the Springshare marketing list, reminding them about our new Springy Consulting service. This new Consulting service is all about us spending quality time singularly focused on helping customers with specific projects. Having Springy expert hands and extra one-on-one help with projects is a good thing, especially in these overwhelming times. Our goal is to make the lives of our librarians easier and free up your valuable time.
Thank you to all who emailed us expressing gratitude and relief for officially offering the Consulting option to everyone. (We’ve been doing the consulting gig off and on for a while now, just not on a large scale.) Many of you already signed up for the program, and we’re busy helping you with customizations, content management and implementation strategies, and personalized training, among other projects. This indicates we’re making a positive difference for you, and that’s really great.
Thank you, also, to several customers who wrote in wondering aloud with a teeny-tiny bit of concern about what the Springy Consulting future holds. Does promoting our Consulting service perhaps indicate that our awesome (and free) Springy support - that you’ve been enjoying and benefiting from throughout the years - will now be less awesome and less free? Since we truly do care about each and every customer’s voice, allow us to provide some clarifications on the difference between support vs consulting.
First, we want to reassure everyone that the awesome free Springy support is not going anywhere. In fact, it will only continue to get better as we grow and have more resources to invest into it. As we do for product enhancements, we welcome and listen to customer suggestions when it comes to our services and implement ideas or new service options based on our size and resources. Over the last 18 months, our Customer Experience (CX) team has grown to ensure that your quick-and-helpful support remains just as available and helpful and so we can do more to support our customers.
Over the last several years, the CX team has improved our synchronous, asynchronous, and self-serve options. We’ve reimagined our product documentation (including introducing Springboards), expanded our training session offerings / recordings, created SpringyU for self-paced learning, enhanced SpringyCamp, implemented a new Lounge platform…and now officially launched Consulting. Of course, we’re always working on improvements and expansions! Look for more “new” in documentation, SpringyU courses/projects, training opportunities, Lounge engagement, and SpringyCamp experiences in the future.
So, rest assured that nothing is changing with regards to the quality of the Springy support and training programs that have been our hallmark over the past 14 years. (Gosh, has it been that long? We still feel young at heart and like we’re just getting started.) 😊
Our consulting program came to be based on conversations with clients. We talk with libraries and librarians all. the. time. We’ve done this since 2006, which is how the idea for LibGuides sprouted. These conversations happen across the company, from top to bottom. When you hear from the Chief Springy, as many of you do, it’s because he loves chatting with customers and asking what we can do to serve you better. These conversations are how ideas for our products came about, from LibGuides right through the years to LibConnect…and for Springy Consulting, too.
Over the years, you have asked us about spending a meaningful amount of time and effort on a one-on-one basis to help you with projects/customizations that you either didn’t have time or know-how to get done – and you offered to pay us for this time. We have done this sparingly due to staffing limitations, though have been happy to help where we could. We did not formalize the Consulting program before now because as a small team, we did not want to risk potentially impacting the quality and responsiveness of our support. Now that the team has grown (still small, but mightier!), we feel we have sufficient resources to dedicate to these one-on-one consulting projects, which go above and beyond providing traditional support and regular how-to training on our tools.
Customer Experience has always been one of our main differentiators in the market. It is our secret sauce, if there is such thing. The CX team is the largest team in the company and is staffed by librarians, which means we understand your issues, complexities, joys, and dreams. Our support, training programs, SpringyU, Lounge community, and SpringyCamps will continue to get even better, more plentiful, more readily available – and will always be free. The Consulting program is an available option if and when you need more personal, detailed, and in-depth one-on-one assistance with projects that cannot be effectively done via support or training interactions. When you do not have the time, resources, or know-how to undertake certain projects - like building look-and-feel customizations, developing content management / best practice strategies, providing customized group training, detailed map-creation and hotspotting, etc. - we’re here for you.
If you are not sure whether you need consulting or whether regular support or training channels will get you where you need to be – just ask us. And don’t be surprised if you hear back from our Chief Springy, either. He’s everywhere, we can’t get rid of the guy. 😉