Introduction
Building an internal communication tool is no easy task. It's like building and maintaining a separate product, which can be a nightmare for engineering managers, project managers, and developers. Yet, you push through because you need flexibility, control over your communication workflow, and a solution that seamlessly works with your product.
But what if you could have all those benefits without the hassle of building and managing an entire infrastructure tool? With Fyno, you can achieve this effortlessly, without worrying about resource allocation, code maintenance, and building new integrations.
Whether you're planning to build or have started building an internal communication tool, or have been maintaining an internal communications tool in the hopes it will get easier some day—Fyno can help you.
In this blog post, we'll discuss the challenges faced by companies at various stages of building their internal communications tool and how Fyno can help them simplify the process.
Challenges faced by companies at each stage of building an internal communication tool
New build: A tool that is not completely live yet
Challenges:
At this stage, a company would've just started to build their notification infrastructure. The primary challenges they'll face at this stage are:
- Resource allocation: Significant engineering resources are required to develop the MVP version of the tool
- Technical bandwidth consumption: Early-stage development can consume a lot of technical bandwidth, diverting focus from core product development.
- Deployment difficulties: Setting up the initial infrastructure can be complex and time-consuming.
Impact:
The deficit in resource bandwidth and the prolonged timeline to get a working version of the tool ready will slow down the product growth and will also affect the the customer experience.
How fyno helps:
Fyno streamlines your customer communication workflow, enabling you to quickly set up your notification infrastructure without heavy engineering efforts.
You can integrate all your existing communication channels, set up delivery workflows, and manage all your content templates from a single location. The best part? Fyno provides a single API that seamlessly integrates with your product, ensuring that any backend changes won't affect your code.
By using Fyno, you save valuable resources and can focus on refining your core product.
Recently built: Live but with limited usage
Challenges:
For companies who've recently built an communication tool, the challenges lie towards maintaining their systems and adding more features. This include:
- Low engagement: With minimal usage, it's difficult to gauge the effectiveness of notifications.
- High maintenance costs: Maintaining a system of such scale can be costly and resource-intensive.
- Limited flexibility: Adapting to new communication channels or customer preferences can be challenging.
Impact:
With limited features and flexibility, it becomes hard to experiment with new channels and workflows. Often times, the team will build with an assumption that a particular communication channel would work great, but by the time they finish building the tool, another channel would've become popular. In that case, whatever they built the tool for becomes less useful. They'll again go back to the drawing board to include the new channel into the tool. It's a time-consuming and tiring process.
How fyno helps:
Fyno's modular infrastructure allows for easy scaling and adaptability.
Its centralized template management and cross-channel workflow orchestrator enables businesses to experiment with different communication strategies and channels without significant overhead. This flexibility helps in increasing engagement and optimizing costs.
Young build: Live with growing active usage
Challenges:
When a company's notification system gains traction, new challenges emerge. This include:
- Scalability issues: Managing an increasing number of notifications and users can strain the system.
- Complex workflows: Creating and managing complex communication workflows becomes necessary.
- Data silos: Integrating data from various sources to provide a seamless experience can be difficult.
Impact:
Scaling your system and integrating data from new sources demands significant resource allocation and meticulous planning. But, the most critical factor of all, is time. As your customer base rapidly expands, you must scale swiftly to deliver timely notifications through the appropriate channels prefered by your users. Failing to achieve this can negatively impact customer experience and place immense pressure on your development team.
How fyno helps:
Fyno's technical architecture is designed to rapidly scale to your growing needs. And, our built-in integration with various communication platforms allows you to seamlessly pull data from your current platforms and sources. This makes it easy for you to send notifications to your users without wasting time on adding more virtual machines or building new integration APIs.
Growth stage: Frequent usage, established user base
Challenges:
For companies with an established user base, the focus shifts to maintaining and optimizing the notification system:
- High maintenance and upkeep: Constant updates, bug fixes, and optimizations are required.
- Compliance and security: Protecting sensitive customer data and ensuring compliance with industry regulations is crucial.
Impact:
You'll end up spending a lot of time, money, and resources in managing the tool and in setting up processes to adhere to compliance regulations.
How fyno helps:
Fyno offers robust security features, including data encryption, access management, and fraud prevention mechanisms. Its centralized template management ensures consistent messaging, while the analytics and insights feature helps in optimizing communication strategies based on data and user preferences. By reducing the maintenance burden, Fyno allows businesses to focus on delivering high-quality customer experiences.
Mature stage: Widespread and frequent usage
Challenges:
At this stage, the notification system is mature, and millions of notifications are sent to thousands of users. This doesn't mean the system will have less challenges. On the flip side, they'll have more complex challenges to tackle. Here are a few:
- Technical debt: Accumulated technical debt can hinder further development, optimization of the product.
- Innovation stagnation: Keeping up with new communication trends and technologies can be difficult as it takes meticulous planning, allocation of funds and resources, not to mention time taken to build and test new features.**Impact:**With a complex notification system that serves thousands of users, it is difficult to make critical changes immediately. You'll have to careful plan and execute adding new features and 'quality of life' improvements. It can take several weeks to a few months to add a useful feature to your current system.
How fyno helps:
With Fyno, you don't have to worry about spending months to add new channels and features to your notification system. We closely work with top communication platforms including Meta (We're a Meta vertified Technology Partner) to make sure all new communication channels and features are readily available for you. All you have to do is connect our universal API endpoints to your product and voila! You're good to go. And, since everything you configure doesn't affect the API endpoints, you can freely experiment with new workflows and channels without having to worry about altering your code base.
Conclusion
Building and maintaining a notification infrastructure is a continuous journey, with unique challenges at each stage of product maturity.
Whether you're just starting out or managing a mature system, Fyno offers a comprehensive solution that simplifies communication efforts, reduces costs, and enhances customer engagement.
By leveraging Fyno's powerful features, businesses can overcome the hurdles of developing and maintaining a notification system, ensuring that the right message reaches the right customer at the right time.
Embrace the future of customer engagement with Fyno and unlock the full potential of your communication strategies.
Schedule a demo today and experience the transformation firsthand.
