The new era of collaboration
Rhonda Ridge, director of Ab Initio, talks about the importance of collaboration to ensure customers don’t have to compromise.
Perhaps understandably for companies operating in a competitive marketplace, there is a culture of playing your cards close to your chest. But sometimes it’s better for business to open up, share information, and collaborate.
Collaborations can extend the reach of a product, give suppliers a stronger proposition and increase sales, and of course benefit customers by removing compromise.
In the retail arena, there are plenty of brands that have collaborated with varying degrees of success, but Apple has a reputation for doing it well. The brand expanded the reach of its iPad into the professional arena by collaborating with the New York Times; it worked with Hermes to make its Apple Watch more fashionable; and it has enjoyed an almost 20-year strong collaboration with Nike on various health and fitness projects. Do suppliers in the home improvement sector have something to learn from the likes of Apple? Rhonda Ridge would argue they do.
Ab Initio has embarked on several collaborations with relevant partners to enhance the user experience of its already successful installer management system, as Rhonda explains: “Our collaboration in 2022 with Pricepoint Sales – an online system that helps installation businesses sell their products. The collaboration was so successful we decided to continue the strategy.
Benefits without compromise
“One of our most ground-breaking collaborations since then is our partnership with WhatsApp. Consumers now expect to be able to communicate with their installation supplier using the messaging tool and it has great potential because of the immediacy of the messages and the level of personal interaction it offers.
“However, the downside when it’s used by an individual within a business, is that those messages sit on one device and are not necessarily shared immediately, if at all. The integration of WhatsApp now means AdminBase users can use the app with confidence because all messages sent and received are centralised within the system for any relevant user to retrieve when needed.”
The company’s strategy to collaborate didn’t stop there as Ab Initio remained on the lookout for other relevant software partners that were a good fit for the business and would be beneficial for AdminBase users. Rhonda goes on to explain how the company’s next collaboration came about after close customer consultation: “Some of our users had highlighted the fact that they were enjoying using the industry quotation software, Tommy Trinder, but were finding it time consuming having to manage data in one piece of software and then transfer the necessary information over to the other. The two pieces of software can now talk to each other and quote documents can automatically be attached to leads held in AdminBase.
“It was a similar situation with Windowlink, another well-established software expert in the fenestration industry. Windowlink offers installation companies a one stop solution for 3D design, quoting, ordering and automated pricing and once again we wanted our customers to be able to enjoy the benefits of this software without having to jump between Windowlink and AdminBase. Full integration allows our users to benefit from both sets of software with no compromise.
“Our most recent collaboration is with another non-industry app, What3words, the app that can accurately pinpoint your location,” continues Rhonda. “Coordinates from the app can now be entered and stored for every job held in AdminBase and can be used to help installation teams navigate to those more obscure projects.”
Rhonda concludes: “AdminBase has been going strong for 30 years and we put a lot of that success down to our positive working relationships with customers and more recently, other software suppliers. Collaboration does require a different way of thinking, but we have always been committed to doing whatever we can to make our customers’ lives as easy as possible, and this approach is definitely enhancing our offering and making the AdminBase user experience even better.”