„When employees are happy, they are your very best ambassadors.“
Markus and Orlando knew that happy employees are a company’s most valuable resource and tracking employees’ satisfaction is a must-have. They came up with the idea to develop a SaaS tool for tracking employees’ moods, reasons for their mood and collecting feedback. CompanyMood was born! Founded in 2014, CompanyMood counts 314 happy customers and is on the rise.
In today’s customer success story Markus and Orlando talk about the idea behind CompanyMood, their product, vision and how they manage translations with Lingohub.
“We love the 'Lingohub way' to export right into the localization files, which keeps the source segments.”
Markus and you started with CompanyMood as a private side-project in 2012. Your tool rapidly gained publicity and increasing demand, so you officially founded the company in 2014. Please tell us about the beginning and the success story behind CompanyMood.
The idea behind CompanyMood was born when Markus’ team, at one of his former working places, used to draw their daily mood on flip charts. They began to track their mood, after one team member left the company unexpected. After the company has moved to a new office and all the rooms had walls of glass, it wasn’t possible to use flip charts for the mood tracking anymore. So Markus decided to code a simple tool to continue the good practice of tracking the team’s mood. The tool was accepted very well and the CEO and even their customers liked it. As result Markus continued the tool as his personal side project. In early 2014 he asked for my opinion and if we shall start a business. At this moment we already knew each other for more than 10 years as friends. Driven by our own experiences about the importance of employee morale, we decided to found a startup in October 2014 and worked on the MVP until the end of 2015.
CompanyMood takes employee management to a new level and makes employee mood tracking easy. What are the core features of your product and how do HR departments benefit?
The core feature is our simple employee satisfaction monitoring. We ask weekly for the employees’ moods providing smileys and „reason-tags“ (topics) to select. Companies benefit from a high participation rate and get weekly feedback which is reliable and detailed enough to improve issues and recognize successful areas. With the results of CompanyMood HR departments and responsibles can:
- increase agility
- increase efficiency in decision-making
- save costs decreasing attrition rates
- increase retention by participation
- increase ROI for HR measures
Of course employee satisfaction always pays out for both, companies and employees. It’s a classical win:win situation.
Lots of developers read our blog that’s why we’d like to stress a technical viewpoint too. How does CompanyMood integrate in the intranet and other HR software?
We provide an API which can be used to submit the weekly employee mood review. Developers can use this API to integrate the mood submission into their intranet or an already existing HR software. At the moment we are working on an Office365 integration/app that allows to use CompanyMood in Office365 groups without the need to invite every single employee separately.
More than 300 companies use CompanyMood to measure employee satisfaction and for employer branding. How many countries are you currently shipping your product to? Where is your main customer base located?
The main customer base is located in the D-A-CH area and Europe, but at the moment we help customers from all over the world and companies in more then 15 countries, including the United States, Great Britain, Australia and South America, to benefit from CompanyMood.
We’re happy to have you on board and would love to learn more about your localization workflow. How do you use Lingohub to localize CompanyMood? How many languages do you support?
Since now we support two languages, German and English, in all our products. We plan to add another two languages this year. Before Lingohub we had a service which accumulated all translations into one locale file after export. We didn’t like that very much. That’s why we love the „Lingohub way“ to export right into the localization files, which keeps the source segments.
When we’re working on a feature, we just push the feature and new translations to GitHub, who triggers Lingohub to pull the updated translation files. Then we write a notification in Slack, that some segments need attention. After this is done, we push the new translations via the Lingohub integration right to the master branch and deploy.
Last but not least we’d love to hear what you like best about Lingohub. Which internationalization goals did you achieve so far? What are your internationalization plans for the future?
We plan to extend the number of languages as CompanyMood grows. Most probably we will add Spanish and French next, depending were our customer base grows faster. We need to make sure to have a simple process to add languages. Translators should be able to handle the translations in Lingohub and deliver them ready-to-use for us. Lingohub offers this solutions and we are very happy with the UI and workflow. We use it for our web client, the iOS/Android apps and our tablet apps. As a marketer I love the fact, that I can push the new language files directly to the productive environment, once I’ve decided to change wording or find a spelling mistake. No developer is needed for this steps anymore. It enables me to work faster and save important resources.
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