Melissa Angio, VP Global Channel Strategy @ Kenshoo
Just over half of the nation’s workforce is now working from home. This is an abrupt change from just a few months ago.
Based on the 2019 National Compensation Survey (NCS) from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, before the pandemic, just around 7%—about 10 million of the nation’s approximately 140 million non-governmental workers—had access to a “flexible workplace” benefit or telework.
The results of this new, normal workday are mixed. Some workers report lower productivity and motivation while others say that they are working more hours than ever.
Kenshoo has always been a customer-led company and focused on solving the biggest challenges in advertising. Whether that’s around bid optimization, reporting & analytics, or even how to remain productive and stay connected in these unprecedented times, our product team is dedicated to helping marketers do what they do better.
Within a few weeks of the stay-at-home orders/recommendations, our product team wanted to see how we could help ease our clients’ transition to working remotely and separated from their teams. When we thought about where the biggest need would be for marketers, it seemed to be about how they could better stay connected.
“There’s a lot of important intangible knowledge sharing that goes on when marketers work together,” says Kenshoo’s Director of Performance Marketing, Lily Rotter. “Even though we work with a lot of colleagues and external partners outside of our office, the face-to-face time you get with coworkers is invaluable. You end up catching tiny things that you may not have learned otherwise. When working remotely during this pandemic, our team still tries to maintain that spirit and stay connected in regular team and one-on-one meetings.”
The first place we decided to focus on was how we could either build new features quickly or adapt existing functionality to better serve the stay-at-home marketing teams.
“More collaboration tools have been on our radar for some time,” says Roy Feig, Kenshoo’s Sr. Director of Product. “But with the onset of COVID-19, so many of our clients are now working from home and many are having trouble staying connected. We knew that we had to raise the priority level of solving this issue. So, we had a mini-hackathon to focus our team on this problem, and we were able to quickly build out new features as well as to adapt current tools to offer more collaboration functionality within the Kenshoo platforms.”
One of the new features that came out of the hackathon was Team Comments which was inspired by the comments functionality of Google Docs. It enables Kenshoo clients—whether on Kenshoo Search or Kenshoo Ecommerce—to add comments to Campaign entities just as they might do to a Google Doc. Kenshoo Social clients get the added benefit of adding comments not only to Campaigns but to Ad Sets and Ads as well.
Clients can also reply and tag others to streamline communication and stay connected even better. This enables them to have remote discussions on highly granular parts of their accounts.
Some examples of how Team Comments might be useful include:
Alerts are a core functionality that Kenshoo has enabled for some time.
Clients can create rules-based triggers to notify them when certain conditions are met based on anything that can be filtered in our main performance grid which includes most of the standard channel level functions. This is just a few examples of the myriad of alerts you and your team can set up:
Although Alerts aren’t new to our clients, they may have only been used previously for an individual team member to alert themselves. However, based on recent events, we’ve let our clients know that Alerts can also be used to email an entire team when certain criteria are met.
“Team Comments and Alerts help marketers better stay connected,” says Christian Tabing-Dalit, Kenshoo’s Senior Product Marketing Manager. “Digital marketing is a complex art and science, requiring tight collaboration. Ensuring that teams are well connected and on the same page at all times is critical to success.”
Some experts believe that the working from home trend will somewhat persist after the pandemic is over.
According to Global Workplace Analytics:
“We believe, based on historical trends, that those who were working remotely before the pandemic, will increase their frequency after they are allowed to return to their offices. For those who were new to remote work until the pandemic, we believe there will be a significant upswing in their adoption. Our best estimate is that we will see 25-30% of the workforce working at home on a multiple-days-a-week basis by the end of 2021.”
If these projections are even partly true, more marketers will be working remotely more often even after things return to the new normal. With features such as Team Comments and Team Alerts, Kenshoo clients can work better when they aren’t working side-by-side.
If not, maybe you should check out what Kenshoo has to offer?
Team Comments is just one of the many innovative features in the Kenshoo suite:
Contact us today for a brief demo to see what else you might be missing by not using Kenshoo.
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