Dr. Andreas Gniffke
HEAD OF CLIENT SERVICES
Summary
The RoamsysNext products as Software-as-a-Service tools are highly flexible when it comes to customer wishes and individual requests. With regular application releases, these improvements are implemented quickly to ease pain points as soon as possible. Our goal is and always has been to provide software for the users, that make their daily work easier without the need to learn a new tool from scratch or joining endless training sessions.
This blog post shows, how the product development team led by RoamsysNext veteran David Houstek and his colleague Adrian von Wendt gathers the input, weighs and prioritizes it and adds it to the development roadmap. Even for RAEX schema releases provided by the GSMA and its users and working groups customer feedback often leads to schema amendments to make the standard more flexible and widely accepted.
Over the past weeks, RoamsysNext Insights offered a lot of up-to date information related to fraud and security topics. To let this settle a bit, this blog post is dedicated to some intimate company insights. It describes the processes we have established to make sure that your ideas and needs will find their way into our applications. This may sound simple but the devil is in the details. And yes, we want to encourage you to share your ideas with us, as our tools get better with each release and many valuable new features came into it based on customer’s feedback.
In RoamsysNext Insights our experts share their views on extensive industry topics and possible solutions we can offer.
Listening from the beginning!
The release planning at RoamsysNext is organized by the Product management team led by RoamsysNext veteran David Houstek, who has been with the company since the beginning in 2007. So he can tell us the whole story: “Our very first tool and initial step into the industry called “easyRAEX” was quickly enhanced to our first roaming management system (RMS) based on the feedback we received from early adopters. The goal of our tools has always been to make the transition to the RAEX standard as smooth and comfortable as possible with easy-to-use applications.
From there things went very well for us: our application suite as well as our customer base are ever-growing. To keep up the pace, we have reorganized ourselves to stay in touch with our customers, understand their needs and make sure that their ideas come into our tools as quickly as possible.”
The whole team keeps an open ear for any customer feedback, be it Management, the Client Service team or the Sales department, but it needed some infrastructure to ensure that feedback doesn’t get buried in meeting minutes or support tickets.
David Houstek
HEAD OF PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
David’s team member Adrian von Wendt is the gatekeeper for feature ideas: he brings all the information into line and takes care that nothing important gets lost. “Sometimes it’s a challenge to align the input we receive with the existing product roadmap,” admits Adrian who is also helping customers in the support team. “We are working with an agile and flexible roadmap that’s reviewed regularly. It’s important for us that there’s always space and resources left to add features that mitigate users’ current pain points. Consequently, nearly every release of our software contains features based on ideas and feedback we have received from our customers.”
The whole company is eager to fulfill all wishes, but to make sure that the most important features are developed as soon as possible, the feature requests must be weighed and prioritized. For the whole roadmap planning, from general decisions up to single features, a dedicated tool is in place that helps management and team leaders with many reporting functionalities to set the right priorities and make the right decisions. The roadmap is fully transparent to keep e.g. marketing initiatives always in line with the releases.
From pain points to automated task management
“One huge factor for new features is the sales process”, explains David. “All customers have their particular requirements, and we receive a lot of information about pain points mostly related to specific solutions they have been using in the past. Our goal is to understand their internal workflows and provide highly customizable tools that automate as many tasks as possible. As the industry is moving fast, we keep listening and add new features on a regular basis. As we are in the Software-as-a-Service market, it’s a huge benefit for our customers to have flexible solutions that grow with their requirements.”
But our efforts do not end with RoamsysNext’s products. Even the users of the GSMA RAEX Tools application can benefit from a close relationship to the GSMA, as David reveals. “More than a decade ago, we started developing RAEX Tools on behalf of the GSMA and our business ties are really tight. Of course, the various GSMA working groups have to discuss and approve the change requests that have been officially raised by the members. But we always try to align all improvements that come into a new RAEX schema directly with the GSMA, be it IR.21, IR.85, IOT or OpData, so we can tell them about the feedback we have received from our users all around the globe and make the user experience better with every release. The more we know, the better the standard gets. And in the end everybody wins.”
The next release of the RoamsysNext tools is planned for September 10; the focus of development has been on the IOT and discount management tool that’s been on the market for a short while. With the new release, some important features will be added to fulfill the needs of our early adopters, e.g. full support for inbound discounts. As you can see, we are listening to you!
Andreas Gniffke is well known in the community for providing customer support at RoamsysNext since 2012. For more than three years he’s head of client services responsible for all customer related issues like application support, account management, data capturing and the setup of trials and customer accounts. With a PH.D. in German language history and a background in journalism his experience and skills make him also an essential part of the RoamsysNext marketing team.
Two-Factor Authentication rules!
For some time now, we have introduced 2FA and have contributed our share to provide more secure access to our tools. Norbert Becker, Head of Software Development, picks up the thread and provides engaging insights into his area of responsibility.
Introducing: The RoamsysNext Network Configuration Optimizer
Learn how the RoamsysNext Network Configuration Optimizer enables MNOs to switch safely to full automation and growing roaming revenues by providing effective and secure data management of all roaming related business information.
Introducing: The RoamsysNext Wholesale Roaming Manager
The RoamsysNext Wholesale Roaming Manager provides powerful collaboration and reporting tools for all roaming partner relationships by converging everything from service openings to the user’s roaming footprint, test SIM cards and tariffs, document and contact management.
Don’t fear the breach – three more ways to avoid configuration errors
Three ways to bliss: take bold measures to automate processes as much as you can, check your firewall’s security logs regularly and enforce centralized authentication mechanisms.
We’re in this together
In the second part of our interview with Alexandre De Oliveira, POST Luxembourg Cyberforce, he highlights major pain points in fraud detection and stresses the importance of global information sharing via the GSMA T-ISAC initiative.
Mastering today’s Fraud Landscape
Learn how Alexandre De Oliveira’s team at POST Luxembourg Cyberforce is mastering today’s fraud landscape with penetration tests, security assessments, the Telecom Intrusion Detection System (TIDS) and the Telecom Security Scanner (TSS).