At IO Integration our sole focus is bringing the best possible service and solutions to our customers. This past week we gathered all of our employees from around the globe to meet for our annual company meeting in St. Simons Island, Georgia. This is the one time of the year when we are all together in one location, to discuss ways to improve all aspects of how we deliver to our customers the best possible experience when partnering with IOI. This meeting offers us a unique opportunity to analyze our process and procedures, discuss best practices and talk about solutions that will assist us and our customers to enable us all to continue to grow.
Here are a few items we tackled at the meeting:
Review and Improve Processes
With team members ranging from sales, marketing, project management, business analysis, development and technical support we discussed in depth, ways to streamline existing processes based on customers interactions and feedback. By having the entire team in one place, we were able to address the intricacies that each department deals with and through a series of highly interactive sessions we were able to take that information and make detailed plans to expand upon our departmental communication and interaction to ensure all customers have a clear path for success and delivery of IOI services.
Product and Service offering improvements
We also take this time to discuss and evaluate our current product and service offerings. We discuss what we see in the marketplace to ensure that we are well placed competitively and make sure that we are delivering to our customer’s needs and requirements.
Products: We use this opportunity to take a deep look at our current product offerings, assess any feature or functionality needs, and work with our internal engineering team as well as directly with product developers to make sure the products we offer cover the full range of business requirements to ensure customer success. We also look into the larger technology ecosystems that marketing and creative operations operate within and discuss opportunities to create more efficient ways to connect within a larger corporate technology stack. And finally, we use this time to work with our technology research team to identify new technologies on the market that could further expand our ability to offer a wider range of solutions as customer needs and the industry as a whole continues to evolve.
Services: Our services offerings are always a major topic of discussion as we pride ourselves on delivering the most comprehensive set of professional services to our customers. With that said, we have identified several areas to expand and improve upon. Our focus is always on how we can work better with our customers through Project Management, Business Analysis, Technical Support to Custom Development. Stay tuned as we roll out new ways to better serve our customers throughout the year.
Employee Achievement & Appreciation
This is also the time when we can look back upon the last year and recognize the individual contributions for team members that went above and beyond the call of service, both internally and customer facing and show our appreciation and gratitude for their efforts. Those honored for 10 Years of Service included Jen Gantous, Tom Alonzo, Terez Gross, Chip Norton, John Kingsbury, and Damian Diaz. We also presented a very special recognition award to Aprile Lynn as our IO Integration Employee Appreciation Award for Outstanding Service, as voted for by her peers at IOI.
Team Building and Social Bonding
As one would expect, this meeting provides an opportunity to bolster our company unity and connect with people we may only see face-to-face once a year. After a busy day of meetings that address’ all of the topics above, it is equally important to make sure we are able to get out and have some fun and bond on a personal level with our team. Our extracurricular activities include our annual ultimate frisbee challenge, where our U.K. (and commonwealth) and U.S. teams duke it out for bragging rights for the next 12 months. The U.K. team regained glory this year as they soundly beat the Unites States. Those who aren’t as competitive could opt to take a historic tour of St. Simons Island or simply take a walk on the beach. Throughout the event we continued to connect and carry on our discussions while “breaking bread” and enjoying the local fresh seafood and a glass of wine.
We can all say that our annual meeting was a success and we look forward to improving our business as well as our customers for a productive 2018!!!