As social distancing becomes our new day-to-day realities, it’s technology that is helping to keep us connected, entertained, and productive. I think I speak for a lot of us when I say that I’ve never FaceTimed so much in my entire life. I’m still watching movies with my friends, only now it’s on Netflix Party. And I’m still in collaborating with my team, just not in person, instead we’re using online tools that make it easy.
With that said, it does seem a little weird to be writing blog articles about how our technology can help to make venues ‘better’ at a time like this, but it’s times like this that reinforce the importance of technology and the impact it has on our lives. Given the nature of our business, I think it’s fair to say that the Vantage team is comprised of a few ‘tech enthusiasts’—if there is software out there to help streamline and simplify our days, we probably use it.
The person who usually finds these new and helpful tools is Aaron, our Director of Customer Success. If we need to talk, he’s made it easy; I can chat with him over Slack, call him on Zoom, or go old school and text him.
Aaron has amassed an entire stack (did I say that right?) of technology for Vantage that he has been more than happy to share, along with how we use each to make our jobs easier. Some of them are more targeted at developers, some are more general collaboration tools, and a few fall under the category of ‘helpful to have’.
Product
How We Use It
Collaboration
We drive all of our product management decision-making through Aha! It allows us to create and manage our goals, initiatives, and user stories in a way that drives product vision.
Vantage uses apps to drive guest experience and operational efficiency. Amplitude helps us understand how people use the apps so we can make things easier and better in the future.
Appfigures helps us understand how people are consuming and downloading our apps. It helps us know what types of devices are being used and where the apps are used.
NextCloud is kind of like a personal Dropbox. We use it to keep specific sets of files in a location that we all have access to.
Developer
Adam.ai is used to manage our meetings. This piece of software tracks all of our participants, agendas, action items, and minutes in one interface.
We love AppSumo. This is a great way to find new services and software to try out at amazing prices. Some of the items on the list have been used exclusively because of AppSumo.
Vantage uses Trello as a way to visualize our product roadmap. It allows us to communicate with our clients and potential clients as to where we are within the development process.
Vantage uses Zapier to create connections between disparate applications. We manage support tickets with our customer CRM to ensure everyone on our team is in the know.
We use Zeplin as a repository for all of our user interfaces. It keeps our management team, graphic designers, and developers in sync to ensure the final outcome of our UI/UX meets our needs.
Helpful
All of our video-based e-learning is housed at Coassemble and allows us to create tracks of education for client onboarding.
Dashlane is a great password manager. It helps manage best practices for keeping your accounts safe online. Vantage uses it as part of a team password manager. Shared accounts can be seen by team members while also keeping personal accounts separated from the larger team.
Fireflies.ai is an awesome AI transcription service. It understands different voices and gets you a searchable transcription of the entire meeting.
GitHub is simply the hosting provider that allows us to keep all of our developers on the same page.
Krisp was an awesome find, especially when working remotely on site or at home with the dog barking. Krisp utilizes noise cancelation to ensure the folks on the other end of the call hear crystal clear audio.
While a lot of Vantage is built around software, we also are a hardware company. MiniMRP is a system that allows us to manage all of our Bill of Materials and products.
Rollbar helps us manage bugs and understand what is working and isn’t working within our apps and software.
Business Intelligence is core to the Vantage product offering. Often, we utilize native charts and visualizations. However, for complex data visualizations, something like Tableau makes life extremely easy.
We hope that our list provides a little inspiration and that you find some of our suggestions useful for your own teams. The ingenuity of people to create problem-solving solutions for everything from remote collaboration to noise cancellation and beyond inspires our team to continue evolving Vantage’s data-driven platform for venues of all shapes and sizes.
