While the competition in this domain, the team at Flock has strong reasons to believe this and the new strategy would help make a mark as a solution provider, instead of being just another tool to facilitate internal communications. Flock recently announced a vast suite of applications that businesses can integrate into this business communication tool in order to offer more functionality to users. Going forward, this portfolio will be expanded to offer more connected services to businesses.
Why a One Stop Solution?
Optimising business processes and operations is the key to success and with the current set of tools available to users its difficult to achieve that. Bhavin Turakhia CEO at Flock firmly believes “There aren’t enough tools available that actually ensure that individuals across the organization are on the same page”. With Flock, there could be a possibility of answering these problems in a more efficient manner. Most organizations rely on email or some other form of communications tools for faster information flow within the organization. However, efficiency in operations drops when the tools for communications are not inter-linked or are not interoperable. Whatsapp today is one of the most widely used tools for internal communications and the reason for its popularity is the ease of use associated with it. Users are already on it and by adding a group even business communication can be done through it. But the problem arises when there is a need for other services to work in tandem with it and that’s where everything starts to fall apart. To counter this problem, Flock has devised the application strategy and allows users to integrate applications that people usually resort to while working. With this, if there is a need to integrate a service to resolve an issue, the turnaround time is much quicker.
How Does Flock Want to be Different?
Right now Flock has close to 60 applications that can be integrated with its services for a seamless operation. The benefit of the app is not only enjoyed by the person integrating the app but with the team members on the same group as well. One good example is the Uber app integration with Flock. With this app integration, users can simply book and even track their rides from within the conversation. This is just one example and there are more such apps that organizations use on a day to day basis that has been included in Flock.
Going forward, Flock aims to be a one-stop solution for all businesses. To make this possible the company is planning to include tools that would allow managers and team leaders to monitor teams and micromanage employee activities from within the application itself. “We want to take every step of your workday and try and make sure that we remove these processes that are required where people have to follow up”, Bhavin Added. In order to do so Flock aims at integrating all critical modules of business processes right in the communication tool itself, through apps. “Some of the products that we will be launching shortly in the next couple of months will actually enable automation of various workflows in an organization that currently out competitors don’t support”, Bhavin added. These could be related to HR, Medical, Leave management, Employee welfare, all through the app ecosystem.
What’s Flock OS?
Inherently, Flock is a communication and collaboration tool, however, with the help of integrated apps, additional functionality is being offered. The application integration is not something radically new as softwares like Slack also offer similar features. One thing that Flock really takes pride in is the way things have been simplified down for the most basic of the users and that is of critical importance.
The whole concept of OS originated from the idea of allowing third-party app makers to make apps for Flock. This way popular application makers can create smaller modules that bring the same functionality to Flock. But this goes a step further and as Bhavin told to Guiding tech, ” Any user with required know-how is free to create applications for Flock, Once done they can choose to either make it public or use it for their own team and Flock supports that”. So basically if you need a particular tool that is useful for your business you can make an app and use it without waiting for the developer to make it or flock them to make that for other users.
How to Bring About the Change?
Humans generally do not really embrace change positively and that is why most employees resort to the easiest means of communication available to them. Whatsapp is one such application which serves as the mean to communicate between employees. And to break this habit it’s a big uphill task. Flock has a unique way of reaching out to its customers and Bhavin believes that “The advantage of Flock is that we have both top-down and bottom-up approach. We ensure that we go and meet CIO’s to convince them as to how software and tools will help their entire organization and increase productivity. and from bottom’s up standpoint we have people who themselves can create a team and start using it and then they become internal advocates”. Once even a small group is exposed to the benefits of Flock they can then go ahead and teach others about its benefits and this is exactly how the business looks at growing in the future.
Flock Vs Slack Vs WhatsApp
Flock is not the only tool for internal communications out there and there are services that businesses have relied on for a long time. But are there any benefits, what are those? Well below is a comparison that will help you understand better. The above article may contain affiliate links which help support Guiding Tech. However, it does not affect our editorial integrity. The content remains unbiased and authentic.
