It takes a bit more than a collection of awesome people to make stickee the company that it is. Although our staff are at our core, they need the right tools to make us one of the UK’s leading comparison businesses.
We’re not talking keyboards and monitors (even though all of our team members have them), we’re on about some of the software and processes that help us provide services to our clients. But what tools keep stickee ticking? Our team will lead you through them now…
Project Management: Trello
Handling a number of projects for some of our biggest clients, effective project management is key to ensuring that we can provide the best service possible. One piece of software which is regularly used by our Project Managers is Trello.
Helping stickee keep a track of every task that needs handling, along with allowing access to ‘boards’ for each of our clients, Trello is a simple but incredibly effective tool. Project Manager, Charlotte Kertrestel is one of our in-house experts on the software.
“I started using Trello a few months ago and since we adopted it at stickee it’s transformed my life! The platform is really easy to use as it’s so visual, which means it’s great to keep clients and external partners in the loop about on-going projects.
“I’ve created boards for all of the products and projects that I manage, which I can access wherever I am, and I even use Trello to manage both my daily work and personal to-do lists”.
Project Development: JIRA
Project development is a tricky task, but to ensure that we’re handling everything to the utmost of our collective ability, we use JIRA. Helping us keep our agile team in their workflow, JIRA is used to help our development team and project management team stay on the same page.
Jennifer Hendriksz is our in-house JIRA expert, who uses the software on a daily basis to keep up her connection with various project happenings.
“As a business, we use JIRA to help us plan our development cycles. This in turn has helped us improve our planning and organisation, and encouraged us to start thinking further ahead.
“This allows us to be more proactive and improve workflows for our clients, as well as improve our own internal productivity”.
Digital Performance Analysis: Google Analytics
To ensure that our work is hitting the mark, analysing our performance is an important task. This means that we need to keep track of how our services are being used and how successful they are in a live environment, this is why Google Analytics is so important for us.
Joe Ip, stickee’s Digital Performance Manager highlights the importance of the analysis software:
“Google analytics is a must have for anyone with an interest in web analytics. It’s a great tool to track, measure and optimise our websites giving excellent visibility of digital performances.
“With its simple to use features and fantastic graphs, it really is the foundation of conversion rate optimisation”.
Business Monitoring: Cyfe
stickee runs a number of different services for numerous clients, as well as handling in-house projects. To help monitor all the different areas of our business, we use Cyfe, which is displayed on screens throughout our office. Helping us track website performance, individual workloads and even displaying our in-office parking rota, it’s a great tool for keeping the stickee office in the know.
Gregory Pinnington, stickee’s Head of Technology, is the man who helped bring the software into the stickee office, and explains its uses.
“Cyfe is a customisable dashboard application we’re using to power large displays in the office. We use it to display KPIs across our brands, such as visitors or goal conversions, as well as internal company information like staff holidays and events.
It’s able to pull data in from a wide variety of sources and helps us present it in a form everyone can see and understand”.
Document Management: Sunbird
With so many clients and so much information to process, stickee needs more than a simple filing cabinet to keep all of our documents accessible and secure. That’s where Sunbird comes in, a tool which we use regularly to keep information safe and sound – whilst also letting our team manage them effectively.
Managing Director, Damian Carvill, goes into more detail about the Sunbird tool, citing its importance to stickee:
“stickee’s talented development team built Sunbird as a Document Management System and designed it with versioning and control measures to manage our policies, audits, compliance and regulatory documents. It’s a central tool to how we manage our ISO 27001 and 22301 certifications and the way Sunbird has been built has made this a much less painful exercise for us.
“We like to name our systems after birds with Sunbird joining the flock in 2012 and since then, it has become a core tool in our operational and compliance management. We can add, edit, download and retire our policies, audits, records and other documents in a controlled, compliant and managed environment. Sunbird has recently had new modules built into it including invoicing, sales records and forecasts and a basic CRM system and there are plans to build it out further, meaning it will be even more central to how we manage the business”.
Sales Reporting: Convert
Reporting on the work we’re doing as a business is a great way of keeping an eye on the ball regarding our success as a company. By tracking our business operations, it gives us as a company a great insight into not only maintaining our levels of performance, but improving them as well. Convert is the tool we use to help track our sales reporting, a piece of software which our Development and Reporting Manager, Rich knows all about.
“Developed in house, Convert.co.uk is stickee’s very own sales reporting and business intelligence tool. We use it to enable decision making in response to current trends and historically, as well as opening up the platform to affiliates to empower their business operations with the same insights.”
“Featuring Google Analytics integration, up-to-date sales data, promotional scheduling, and affiliate account management all built in, Convert is an extremely powerful tool”.
Website Management: Bugherd
Bugs are a day-to-day issue with any company dealing with IT, but at stickee we use a tool called Bugherd to track and resolve these issues as quickly and as efficiently as possible, helping our clients avoid problems affecting their business.
David Bristol is one of the web developers in our team who’s well-versed in the use of Bugherd.
“Bugherd is a simple bug tracker we use with clients when demoing sites or features. Its USP is an extension that clients can install into their browser that takes screenshots of what they see.
“This means that when a client finds an issue, they can tag it, automatically have a screenshot taken, and describe it to us quickly and in one place, which means we can see exactly what they see and what they want. This significantly reduces communication overhead trying to understand issues”.
Website Development: Hydrogen
The final tool of our round-up is one that’s a major part of our website management and development services. Hydrogen is key to our framework and content management, whilst also offering high-end security for our clients.
Gregory Pinnington once again offers up a great explanation for the system, having built it himself.
“Hydrogen is stickee’s combined framework and content management system. The main design goal has been to make a system that’s easy to use for both developers and end users.
“The framework side allows us to rapidly create and maintain our websites and affiliate systems by providing a shared platform that can be adapted to each new website. The CMS side makes it easy to create and update the content by using front-end widgets instead of a traditional back-end login area”.
Are you interested in working with the tools of stickee? Why not join us? Find out more about us and get in touch.
