Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Yulia Vasilyeva, Chief Executive Officer at Intelocate:
Q: What is Intelocate?
A: Intelocate is an operations-enablement platform built from the ground up to tackle the issues faced by multi-location businesses. Coming from a background in multi-location retail, I had first hand experience in dealing with the problems arising from using dozens of decentralized platforms to carry out day-to-day tasks.
From spreadsheets, to emails, to help desk/ticketing systems, to store health data, there were just so many tools, and none of them connected directly to each other. It was a logistical nightmare, and definitely no way to run a complex business.
Since Intelocate’s launch in 2017, we’ve been helping multi-location businesses to address these issues, and take advantage of our intuitive, centralized interface to really streamline those tasks, remove needless busywork like constantly moving data from one platform to another, and gain a much clearer, real-time insight into the health of their business.
For us it’s about providing businesses with a way to achieve more with less… More actionable data, with less time spent gathering it. More accurate insights, with less stale information. More issue reports from frontline staff, with less headaches submitting them, and less time spent being unproductive while waiting to connect to a helpline… It’s just a better way to operate.
Q: Any highlights on your recent announcement?
A: We’ve put out a couple of over the last few weeks that we’re really excited about! One just before the Holidays, announcing that one of the United States’ largest T-Mobile Premium Retailers, Connectivity Source, has been seeing incredible results since integrating Intelocate. Their COO, Jason Brandenburger, was extremely positive about us, saying “Intelocate is a partner that we can rely on to help us reduce complexity, get issues resolved, and tasks completed”, and that really means a lot to us!
This month we were also able to announce similar success with another authorized retailer in the telecommunications space, this time one of AT&T’s fastest-growing National Authorized Retailers, Portables. We’re so proud of the work our team did in getting the platform fully integrated across the entire Portables organization within just 3 weeks of signing them on!
The feedback has been incredible, too, with Co-CEO William Beg saying “By helping us to better engage with our teams throughout the organization, remove the focus on email for internal communication, and completely rework our issue reporting and resolution processes, Intelocate has allowed us to deliver a solution that benefits everyone in the organization”. We live for that kind of feedback from our customers!
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Q: Can you give us more insights into your offering?
A: Absolutely! Beyond what I touched upon earlier, Intelocate is a platform that allows our customers to build all new processes and efficiencies that just aren’t possible with other systems. One of the biggest benefits, right off the bat, is that Intelocate allows businesses to consolidate many of their existing tools into our platform.
At a time where organizations are running hundreds of different SaaS applications across different departments, we can offer a route to immediate savings. With Intelocate, there’s no need for the dozens of internal communications tools that many businesses operate, as one example. Instead, we offer secure, centralized communications directly within the platform dashboard – keeping discussions focused on the task at hand, and cutting through the noise and distractions that come with email.
Beyond that, we create efficiencies when it comes to issue reporting and resolution – an area that is a major pain-point for pretty much every multi-location business we’ve ever spoken with! The biggest issue we find here is that frontline employees typically don’t report the vast majority of issues due to a lack of responsiveness, inconvenient or time consuming processes (like waiting on hold for 20 minutes just to speak to someone), a feeling that nothing is done about the reports anyway, or any number of other problems.
With Intelocate, it’s as simple as opening the app, selecting the topic, describing the issue, attaching a photo or video if applicable, and then hitting submit. From there, it’ll get automatically routed to the relevant department, and the staff member can communicate directly to provide additional information via the on-issue chat.
Our customers see a huge increase in the number of issues being reported within just a few weeks of implementation – which is a really positive sign. It’s better to know about the issues, and have the opportunity to address them, than have them go unreported doing untold damage to your business and brand!
That’s only scratching the surface, too — we’ve got best-in-class task assignment and management, global announcements, detailed reporting tools to see which locations are compliant and which are struggling, visual merchandising departments love our real-time photo upload tool, we’ve got the ability to add troubleshooting guides that’ll display contextually when a frontend employee starts submitting an issue ticket. There’s just so much to the platform, and our development team is always adding new features, improving the user experience, and looking for ways to further increase efficiencies for our customers.
Q: What can we expect from your company in the next 6 months? What are your plans?
A: We’ve got some incredible new features coming down the pipeline, as well as some surprises in terms of our user interface that have gone down really well during closed testing. We’re always working with our customers to identify ways we can help them achieve more with less!
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Q: What is the best thing about your company that people might not know about?
A: That would definitely be our Customer Success department. Unlike other SaaS products that either leave you to figure things out by yourself, or rely on expensive third party set-up solutions, we look after everything in-house, as part of our white-glove service. From setting the platform up in a way that makes the most sense for your organization, to building out integrations as required, and then providing your entire team with the training and support they need to get the most out of Intelocate, we go all in.
For everyone here it’s about the long-term success of our customers, and doing everything we can to help them establish the processes and workflows they need to truly make a difference in the way they operate day-to-day.
