Impressions from Xurrent CAB 2021
A year after the socially distant but highly interactive and fruitful online CAB meeting of 2020, we were happy to finally be able to meet with representatives from our valued customers and partners in person again. To minimize any problems with travel restrictions, we chose a location that was as close as possible to the geographic center of the invitees: Frankfurt, Germany. The Schlosshotel Kronberg provided us with impressive lodgings and meeting rooms in a beautiful autumn-hued environment.
After the traditional welcome reception, Xurrent CEO Cor Winkler Prins kicked off the event with a presentation about Xurrent’s Service Cost & Service Quality initiative, giving organizations complete visibility of costs per service and tie that to service quality.
Then it was up to our customers, supported by their Xurrent partners and members of the Xurrent development and support teams, to introduce and discuss enhancement ideas to be implemented in the coming year. These discussions were held over three intensive sessions, spread over three days.
Enhancements based on last year’s CAB meeting that have been introduced this year were agile boards, dashboard sharing, the ability to perform mass-updates and a workflow progress indicator, amongst many others.
The second day was kicked off by Xurrent software engineer Valery Jaspers, with a presentation about a long-awaited update of the Xurrent user interfaces. The challenge in such undertakings is always to keep a balance between keeping existing users happy and making work for future users even more usable and easy to learn. Discussions about the look and feel of software always spark a lot of interest and discussions, and it was decided to keep the suggested improvements out of the voting as everybody seemed equally excited about these changes.
In addition to good conversations about service management, exquisite meals and interesting presentations, there was of course also room to visit the beautiful surroundings of the castle and Frankfurt, for example during a mountain bike tour and a cheese and wine tasting in the wine district of the famous Riesling grapes.
Day three started with discussions about the wishlist for standard integrations and after that the list of discussed improvements was once more presented. Then it was time for the traditional voting. Each customer representative could cast a vote on the enhancements that their organizations thought should be given the highest priority.
This year the clear winner was the development of a web shop, that would allow people from an organization to order items like office supplies and marketing materials from the company warehouse directly through Xurrent. An integration with the chat functionality of Microsoft Teams ended up high in this prioritized list as well. The Xurrent development team is already deciding which enhancements to pick up first. As these improvements are delivered, they will be announced right here at the Xurrent Blog.
We would like to thank all participants again for their time, commitment and contributions, which are invaluable in improving our services.