When you run into someone in the hallways of the Leaseweb’s offices and say ‘Hey, how’s it going?” the most common answer you will get is “Great! But busy!”
It’s true, we’re all so involved with whatever it is we’re doing, literally running sometimes day and night to meet deadlines. From my point of view, you really need to be smart about striking a balance between meeting those deadlines, while still taking your time to be creative to bring that extra something into your work.
I find the best way to do so is by team work – and I mean that in the broadest sense. Point in case: I was asked one day to bring in some new ideas for our Customer Portal, but I was just too preoccupied with the unread emails in my inbox, flights between different continents and three large projects I was running. I didn’t have time to sit back and be creative, so I decided I needed some help.
It started as an exciting experiment. I was looking for someone fresh that was not involved with our systems 24/7, someone that uses our Customer Portal on a regular basis, knows our products inside out and most of all: would like to enrich the Customer Portal with new features. So who matches that description? Our customers of course!
Twitter was without a doubt the best tool out there for this assignment. So the very day the idea hit me to crowdsource for inspiration, I tweeted the following on the @Leaseweb channel:
“Give us some cool ideas for our Customer Portal features! Best one wins a (super cool) Leaseweb helicopter! RT!”
It didn’t take long before I had some amazing suggestions come in, such as:
- Buying new services through the customer portal
- Domain transfers automated with authorization codes
- More detailed network information per server
- Full IPv6 management
- Real-time streaming bandwidth graph
- Detailed statistics
We received so many good suggestions, we actually added a total of 30 new feature requests to our list! But there was one feature we liked the most, which was submitted by @johanbeckers:
“@Leaseweb Mobile version (Android preferred :p ) with possibility to reboot servers on the road :) #SSC”
We loved it so much that we’ve already have developers working on it and I can’t wait to introduce it to you! For his winning idea, Johan Beckers won the Leaseweb helicopter. He already told us his kids are having a lot of fun with it!
The rest of our customers who tweeted great suggestions got a small ‘thank you’ note from us, which were shipped all over the world:
So thank you for helping me bring in some great new ideas and for being such great team players. And if you’re not already doing so, be sure to follow us on @Leaseweb to become part of our global team!