玩偶姐姐

Welcome to DEMO, the show in which we have companies talk about their new products and they show us how they work. Joining me today is Sean Nolan.

He is the CEO of Blink, an employee application that delivers a modern intranet to everyone in an organization, especially frontline workers who might not have access to desktop or mobile laptop equipment. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Keith.

Yeah, so I think I described it the best way that I could. But again, this is designed for frontline workers.

And when we think about this, you know, I think some of the examples you gave were paramedics, EMT, grocery store workers, you know, frontline retail, talk a little bit more about, you know why this, this app got designed, like, what problem are you solving?

Yeah, so in most organizations, where there's kind of a mixed workforce, or some people behind the desk, and some people out in the field or frontline workers, retail, like you said, hospitality, typically, the frontline workers have a very different experience to desk-space workers.

And the end result is that they don't have convenient access to all the tools technology, for convenience that everyone else has, who sits behind the desk, maybe you worked in retail for a bit.

Yeah, so you know what it's like, you have to go to find a shared computer in some dark dingy room, that probably doesn't work, you try and log on some portal to swap a shift or to fill out survey or to get access to your pay stub or to do something you've been told to do some elearning, or some training, it's really clunky and hard, right?

So typically, in most organizations like that, that technology doesn't get used. And actually, it's still paper based, toolbox talks or like, you know, word of mouth rumors spreading faster than facts, all that kind of stuff. So, technology really hasn't taken off those desk-less workers.

So that's what that's what brings. I think in order to find out of any company initiatives or things like that you would be on a bulletin board somewhere and that and or a bulletin board that never gets updated? Yes.

That the you know, the net impact of that is a lot of those workers feel very disconnected from the organization, they feel like they're not part of the of the mission, the vision, the values of the company, they don't feel connected to them anyway.

But the opposite is true. Like, you know, there's normally a lot of good content has been created as a lot of good intention from from head office and from people sit behind desks, but there's just that disconnect between these people in these two different worlds, right?

One's online and highly connected new on very analog and offline still. Okay, so yeah, sure. Show us what you've designed here with Blink. And let's go ahead and go through the demo of showing you some different scenarios. Yeah, of course.

So here, we've got both experiences up on the screen. So you got your kind of desk based experience for people. On the left. Yeah. And on the right is the mobile. So yeah, so most companies we work with about 20% of workers are desk based.

So transit, healthcare, manufacturing, retail logistics, and then about 80% of the workers are mobile. So typically, often they don't even have a workplace email address, right? So one of our sort of tag lines is no email, no problem.

So what we're trying to do is create a really compelling, I'm just gonna, I'll just get rid of the desktop experience for a minute, really compelling experience for those deskless workers. So how do we make it easy for them to onboard?

So we have a one touch onboarding process? How do we make it secure for them? But then how do we give them access to everything they need and care about smooth one application, and a lot of that is about is about our hub?

So let me just pull up my phone here. Yep. So really, what we're trying to do is bring together all of the other applications that the your organization's already invested in and make them accessible through this one app.

So they don't need to download an app for benefits, not for elearning. And for paystubs, not for scheduling rostering, they can just access all of that. Oh that's helpful, too. So then now you're not filling up their phone with multiple apps. Right, exactly.

So you take the workday example here, if I just click on workday, we're going to we're going to authenticate the user and load workday inside of Blink in a really, really slick way. Okay.

And people love this, you know, our adoption rates are super high, because it's kind of a one stop shop, which is the kind of thing that everyone dreams about. Okay. But if I if I just kick off the demo. The example here is the paramedics. Right, right.

We have about 20 EMS EMT agencies across the US so that we're here in Boston, nearly all of the paramedics around here will have blink on their personal smartphone, okay.

And in this example, here, which is kind of based around that persona, you know, they might open up the app.

And when we're about to start a shift, or when they have started shipping, just have a quick look what's going on, and immediately they're gonna see, you know, there's a travel disruption, so they can immediately see that they can knowledge it, so then the supervisor can check who's seen it and who hasn't, and maybe radio out to people who haven't acknowledged us to check they've seen, there's something going on in the fields that critical real time communication, whether it's a snowstorm coming in, or whether there's been a major incident or, or other things as well, can happen in the same sort of format that people are familiar with.

It's very friendly, it doesn't, we don't need to do any training. There's no like onboarding, it's just very intuitive how this all works.

And in that same feed, we've got some some softer culture building stuff, that's, you know, a lot of reward and recognition and a lot of feeling connected to the shirt to the company's values.

But then, as we scroll down, we can really see oh, look, there's a new shift available. So we've got practical things. All of this is tailored and personalized to me in my role in my location, so there's no noise here and stuff. It's not relevant to me, okay.

But what's what's key for something like this new shift is, I can see here but then I can really interact with it.

Alright, so let's say you're a paramedic and you see this, this notice you're like, oh, I want that shift, or I want to swap with another worker. Yeah. So typically, these are being fed from another system, your existing scheduling or rostering system. Okay?

And I'll just press view and apply. And then we'll load that other system up and allow you to do something from here like accept the shift or swap or shift or advertise a shift. So it's really frictionless.

It saves people a lot of time and a lot of hassle. And what companies do is shift film rates go up. So there's less unfilled shift less agency workers, those kinds of things.

And so in terms of using the app and updating content on the app that typically be done by an HR group or other people within the company that wanted to either get announcements out or or updated?

Or is there a lot of it work that needs to be done? Behind the scenes? Yeah, very little IT work. And most of the integrations are out of the box. Okay.

And yeah, a company will typically assign a group of users to who can who can administer the platform. But oftentimes, it's the sister supervisors, the frontline managers, who are the ones creating content sharing shifts, availability, sharing operational updates, just doing more convenient.

And are there benefits for companies that don't have a lot of frontline workers? Or they might not like it? Or, you know, can this be applied to other other companies?

Or is this really geared for people that have a large majority or a large workforce that typically doesn't have the desktop. Yes, most of our customers have a mixed use case. The goal is to bring everybody together. So it definitely serves the desk base workers as well.

I'm gonna show you the desktop experience. In just one sec. Okay, sure. Yeah, for sure. Keep going.

Just one last thing before I, before I switch gears, you know, the good example here is of Workday, triggering a notification, which would have come through on their phone as notification, just say, Hey, your new paystubs available.

So again, rather than getting that through the mail, which cost the company lots of money, and it's slow and cumbersome, and get it on your phone, you can open it, there's an extra layer of security, so I just don't try to authenticate myself if my password anyway.

So it's a PDF, they can view it, you can download it. Yep.

Now, what's key here is let's say that this is not quite right, or you're not sure the hours are correct, you can really come out of here, go back to your hub, click on Ask payroll on the left hand side.

And we're going to load up a form which is probably integrated with ServiceNow, or something like that to say, Hey, I've got an inquiry about my pay. I don't think it's quite right, right.

So someone can just quickly log that in, and then get a notification back to the app when it's completed thing. So all right, it's really putting everything in one place, making it super easy and super easy.

Yeah, cuz a lot of these workers don't have a lot of time to cut it and deal with that kind of work. Right? Yeah, correct. Yeah. So you know, this, this is shaping minutes after day, so they can get back and see their families or Yeah, okay.

So you want to show the desktop part of it too, right? Yeah, of course. So if I just slide this over to the side? There we go. Yep. This is the desktop part of it. So I think, very similar experience overall, but obviously designed and optimized for desktop.

But what I was just going to quickly show a feature we added recently, is probably be fairly familiar to a lot of people here is, is blink assist.

So the concept being you know, using all the latest language language models, we can help people get over writer's block and create an initial post more quickly.

You can improve sleeve written or write a new post, if we just click Write a new post, It wouldn't be a show of DEMO without talking about generative AI these days. Right?

yeah, we're just we're just experimenting with seeing where the value is here and save some people some time. So if I just say, let you know, thank thank everyone for the hard or last weekend.

And for taking extra shifts during the major event, other names and mouse and last name.

And then you can turn this into a different a bunch of different, right, yes, It's a thank you message gives us an idea of the tone, you know, and gives you an initial thing to work from, I can make it slightly more professional, maybe it's gonna go away and just kind of do that could make it a bit more friendly.

I can maybe maybe simplify the language a bit to make it just a bit more readable. And there's no sarcasm button. No British sarcasm. We need that. Cool. That was that's really fast, too.

This just helps you get over writer's block, you can you know, you can I tend to do that. And then you'll edit it until your heart's content. And what's the pricing model behind the application? Is it subscription based? Is the cloud is it? Are they hosting on site?

Yeah, so it's hosted in the cloud. And yes, per user per year subscription, typically, so most of our agreements end up being, you know, enterprise wide license agreements. Okay, and where can people go for more information of they're interested in this? Go to https://www.joinblink.com All right, Sean Nolan.

Thanks again, thanks for the demo. Thanks, Keith. Transcribed by https://otter.ai