Falcony's development team has been busy, and thanks to their hard work, we have a bunch of great new product updates. In this blog post, we'll go through the revamped open links with a possibility to sign up after the report is sent.
This is the second blog post from our recent launch event held on September 5, 2024. Even more blog posts about other updates will follow soon.
Revamped Open Links: A Quick Reminder
We've had open links for a long time, and our customers have come to love them as a great way to involve people in reporting observations, even if they don’t have user credentials. For all open links, it’s been possible to limit which categories and places the open link allows reporting.
There are three reasons why open links work so well:
- Some people simply do not have credentials to Falcony.
- Even though many people could have their own credentials, they report observations so infrequently that it doesn’t make sense to have credentials for everybody.
- With open links, it’s easy to limit the reporting to just one or two templates, places, or combinations of the two. You can then print the link as a QR-code and place the printout where those observations are expected to be reported.
The common thread with all of these is that more often than not, they all relate to external users.
Open Links with the Feedback Loop
In the past, open links have been only one-directional. There hasn’t been an option for the reporter to stay in the loop about what happens to their reported observation. However, this is now about to change.
From now on, when the reporter decides to leave their email at the end of the observation form, they will be able to stay in the loop about what was done and even provide further information in the comment field.
When the reporter leaves their email address at the end of the form and presses send, a pop-up modal will appear, asking them to fill in a four-numbered code. This code will be sent to the email address the reporter provided. Copying the code allows the reporter to complete the process.
After that, if the user doesn’t have Falcony credentials, they will be asked to complete the creation of those credentials by setting a password and logging in. What they can see in Falcony is simply the observation they just sent. If they send multiple observations, they will also be able to see all of those when logging in.
This update significantly increases involvement. When reporters see what happens to their observations, they will be encouraged to share even more. Thus, the feedback loop increases overall involvement.
Implication for User Management
All people who report observations through open links and decide to leave their email address will be listed as external members in the users list view. It is possible, however, that if an external member reports often enough, an admin can change that user’s role from external member to one of the internal roles.
Rethinking Open Link Use Cases
On a high level, this update can impact pretty much all reporting use cases. We've identified four examples where it truly makes a difference:
Service Requests
For service requests, Falcony could now be a full-on solution to cover the entire process, as anyone can truly report them and know what happens to their request or work order. However, we have thought about this further by providing off-the-shelf integrations to major maintenance management systems such as Granlund Manager, Tampuuri, or Nuvolo, as some companies need to store their entire maintenance history and logs in one place.
In practice, it means that Falcony works as a one-stop solution to involve everyone for reporting, but maintenance workers can keep using the solution they are familiar with.
Feedback
The next use case is feedback, meaning customers, suppliers, or whoever providing the feedback, can now see and follow up on all their feedback in one place, regardless of which organization they’ve shared it with. When it comes to true involvement, this will actually make Falcony more and more a platform with network effects.
Permits to Work
In safety management, many different types of work require a permission process before the work can be done, either by law, by insurance, or by best practice. These could be hot work permits, confined space work permits, ATEX work permits, and permits to work at heights, just to name a few.
We have ready-made templates for all of these and more. Now that we have the open link feedback loop, contractors requesting the permit will get notified whether they got the permit or if some changes are required.
Surveys
With surveys, we haven’t actually had a proper roadmap before, as they are also a hyper-competitive market. But still, many of our customers have nonetheless used Falcony for surveys for quite some time. This will now allow all those, and everyone else, to benefit from involving the respondents even further.
Conclusion
Open links will be rolled out to all customers. As an existing customer, you'll get to decide whether you want to enable it for your open links or not. For those of you who want it ASAP, simply reach out to us, and we will enable it for your open links.
If you are new to Falcony, simply reach out to us and let's book a meeting to discuss more! Or start a free trial to see Falcony in action:
We are building the world's first operational involvement platform. Our mission is to make the process of finding, sharing, fixing and learning from issues and observations as easy as thinking about them and as rewarding as being remembered for them.
By doing this, we are making work more meaningful for all parties involved.
More information at falcony.io.
