Infoland is a Business Reporter client.
Marieke Kessels, CEO of software company Infoland, explains to Jeremy Swinfen Green why trust is at the core of the company's approach to business.
Jeremy Swinfen Green: Tell me about Infoland. What is it about you that makes you special?
Marieke Kessels: At Infoland we develop software that helps professionals and organizations excel by guaranteeing quality and security, and we have been doing so since 1998.
I think there are several things that make us stand out. First of all, we keep our promises: our clients often thank us for our sincerity and reliability. Secondly, we enjoy our work. Our culture is informal and our reporting lines are short: this helps us stand out. Thirdly, although technology is our backbone, we look beyond and focus exclusively on people, on end users. Fourth, we constantly innovate. Innovation means taking risks, but we are not afraid to leave our comfort zone if that allows us to continue surprising our clients. And fifth, we believe that there is always room for improvement. We do not settle for what is already here: we fight for what could be.
JSG: There are many enterprise software companies. What does Infoland do that is different?
mk: We provide quality and risk management software designed to help organizations with continuous improvement. Our main software product is the Zenya SaaS solution.
Zenya consists of a set of five modules. There is a tool for document management, another for incident and workflow management, another for audit management, another for strategic and operational risk management and, finally, a tool with which organizations can engage actively engage employees in risk and quality management. Together, these five modules can turn uncertainty into opportunities that organizations can rely on.
The Zenya suite is not designed just for use in compliance or risk management. It can be used throughout the organization, from senior levels of management to junior front-line and back-office employees. Anyone can work with Zenya, any way they want: on mobile and desktop devices, online or offline. And with Zenya, organizations not only have tools for risk and quality management, but they also have tools to raise awareness, encourage proactivity, and create a trustworthy work environment. This means that quality and risk management can truly become an integral part of any business.
JSG: Developing a deep understanding of your customers must be very important to you. How do you do this?
mk: We don't just provide a software license and let our customers get on with it. We are intensely involved with our clients, sharing our expertise and providing support. As part of this, we have developed an online community where our customers discuss problems and share solutions.
People in this community are constantly coming up with new ideas for ways to make our software more valuable and easier to use. We continually improve and optimize our solutions with the active participation of our customers.
JSG: In addition to optimization, innovation must be essential for the growth of an organization like yours. Tell me how you drive innovation.
mk: Innovation is an essential part of our company and occurs in many ways. As an organization we generate a lot of new ideas, both from our employees and our customers. For example, we organize innovation events for our coworkers and, especially, for our clients. These events are popular. During them we promote knowledge sharing, showcase new innovations, get immediate feedback, and talk about how people are implementing Zenya.
Innovations must provide real benefits to users. And this is something we can focus on. Because we are family owned, we are independent. So when we innovate, we can focus on our customers' success, rather than our own.
We are currently looking at how AI can be incorporated into some of our Zenya modules. For example, AI could help people find information quickly by identifying relevant parts of long documents, saving them a lot of time. But people should be able to trust its results. If someone is reading an excerpt from a document, they should be sure that the AI has used the latest approved version of the document. Innovation should not come at the expense of reliability. People must be able to trust the services we provide.
We actively involve our customers in our innovation, demonstrating new products in webinars where they can make suggestions and involving them in testing. Ultimately, we will release a minimum viable product that customers will be able to try if they wish.
Although not everyone will. And that's because many of our clients operate in critical risk areas, such as healthcare and utilities. For these customers, quality and reliability are more important than innovation. This is always a balance we must keep in mind, and our goal is to always deliver innovation while maintaining reliability and continuity.
The trust that people place in our services helps us to innovate. We work closely and they trust us to deliver effective innovations that improve their performance. Because we provide reliable solutions that help them achieve their goals, many of our customers have been with us for a long time. They have grown with us and we have grown with them because they trust us to support their growth. It's a great synergy.
JSG: It sounds like trust is something very important to you.
mk: It is. We talk about “trust over compliance”. This may seem strange, because compliance is a big factor for many organizations, a requirement to meet legal requirements or follow formal standards. So yes, compliance is important, of course. But compliance doesn't drive success. If compliance is compromised, most of the time people can still do their jobs.
Because “trust over compliance” is so important to us, we make decisions based on this principle when developing our solutions. This means that we not only develop software, but we develop solutions. When our clients use our software, they can benefit from the other services we provide. We offer support that goes far beyond implementation: not only before and during implementation, but also during operation and evaluation. We can help them optimize processes and workflows, and discover and implement new applications. And we act as a knowledge partner and thought leader helping our clients achieve more. Our end-to-end services make risk and quality management accessible to virtually any company.
It also means we focus on people. We want to make working life safer, healthier and more enjoyable for as many people as possible. That's why we prefer to help create benefits and better results for an entire organization, rather than simply working with a small group. And when we do this, our goal is always to make quality and risk management more efficient. We are very critical of operations that do not add much value, that make you feel like you are just checking boxes. If we can automate or even eliminate steps in the processes, we will do so. After all, if things are easy and intuitive to use, more people can and will use them.
JSG: How do you ensure that everyone (your clients, partners and colleagues) trusts Infoland?
mk: Our employees trust us because we trust them. There is no need for micromanagement because we are all working towards the same goal.
And our clients trust us because we practice what we preach. They know we deliver on our promises and see that we have quality and reliability built into the heart of our processes, along with agility and innovation.
Of course, there will always be at least some room for improvement. The good is never enough for us. That's why we always strive to do things better, hand in hand with our clients. We enjoy what we do and we enjoy helping our clients. That is the key to our success.
What we do involves technology. But it is our focus on people and their challenges that makes us unique. We are constantly innovating to achieve better results for our clients. And because we always put the end user first, our customers know they will find it easy to implement our solutions. They trust us to make things better for them. As you can see, ultimately and at its core, it's all about trust.
To learn more about how Infoland helps organizations and professionals excel, visit infoland.eu.
To learn more about the Zenya SaaS solution, visit Zenya-software.com .
