Below is a Q&A session with Matt Highsmith, CEO and Founder of TailoredMail, the parent company that launched Proze.io in April 2019. Matt has a wide-ranging history in marketing and brand management while working at Apple Computer, Procter & Gamble and Intermind.
Matt’s unique view and experience in F500 marketing and messaging gives him a unique insight into the ever-changing challenges of Global Internal Communications for Enterprise level organizations.
Matt Highsmith
Q: Please share with us a brief overview of your company? What are the origins of Proze?
Our very first client – 20 years ago – was Microsoft, and they had a difficult challenge communicating with various sales teams who each represented different collections of products and services. Revolutionary at the time, we built our technology to solve this problem; create a single email that contained all the content the salesforce needed, however – filter out (or in) content for each person based on their role, department, title and interest. This dramatically simplified the email production process, but more importantly delivered highly relevant content to the right individuals. It was a huge success and our solutions for internal communications needs were off and running. Our research over time has shown that most of the tools out there aren’t designed for Internal communicators unique needs, security considerations, and workflows. So earlier this year we decided to branch off the internal communications features and future strategy into its own product line; Proze. We wanted Proze to be a flexible but powerful alternative to other solutions on the market which were less open and more expensive to administer.
Q: Who are your current customers? How does Proze help them solve their challenges?
Proze can serve any company or organization that needs to communicate to their employees in a smarter and more engaging manner. We have a diverse set of customers in various verticals such as public services, education, healthcare, finance, retail and others. Clients include HULU, Allstate, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Teradata. Proze’s innovative Internal Communication Platform transforms Internal Communications to create more engaged, aligned and responsive employees while enabling tangible, high-value measurable feedback and reporting. Our platform was specifically built to enable a targeted, personalized, applicable and interactive email for each employee.
Q: Who are your ideal customers? How does Proze help them solve their challenges?
Our sweet spots are midsize to large companies who want to solve complex internal communication challenges with their widely dispersed workforce – domestic and international. Too many companies are overloading employees with too much information, which is causing them to tune out. Additionally, we often see companies with emails being created across the organization with little coordination, consistency, or proper tracking/measurement. It’s a Wild-Wild-West environment – and it bewilders employees.
Proze provides a single “portal”, if you will, where consistent templates can be created (and enforced), messaging can be more coordinated (calendars), and measurement reports can help individual departments, as well as the corporate communications team learn from what engages employees – with centralized feedback options (e.g. comments, ratings, likes, shares).
Some key vertical segments we have seen the strongest adoption in are:
- Financial and Insurance Services
- High Technology
- Global Manufacturing
- Large Retail Organizations
- Pharmaceutical and Medical Industry
Q: How is Proze different from other Internal Employee Communication applications? What are its key features and capabilities?
In short, our clients choose Proze for four key reasons:
- Dynamic Role-Based Content Targeting: A single email can dynamically send different content to each employee based on their role, title,
department, preferred language, desired-interests and much more (via smart integration with services like Active Directory). This allows IC to send the right information to the right employees when and how they want to receive it without complex list-management. - Content Engagement Tools: We are the only provider in the market to enable embedded video or podcasts – they literally play directly within the email. We also have drag-and-drop widgets to create image carousels, countdown clocks, and “Favorites” pages where employees can save/bookmark or search prior content for later viewing. In short – our emails engage employees like no other.
- Simplified Production: We offer numerous team-authoring tools that empower your authors, including drag-and-drop widgets, lockable templates, varying permission-levels, workflow approvals, centralized calendars, time-zone sending, and powerful A/B testing.
- Powerful Metrics: Our analytics are second-to-none and help companies learn what types of content resonates most, what’s the best times to send, which segments engage the most, and much more.
- Always Innovating: Proze has the most inventive features on the market, and we’re constantly innovating. Our clients love us because they can expect technical leadership and forward-thinking features that drive engagement and employee satisfaction. We often build custom features directly for clients, based on their feedback and needs.
- Customer Success Manager Expertise. We assign a dedicated CSM to each customer for support and expertise giving our customers the highest amount of value from Proze required to meet their objectives.
Q: Can you provide us with sample use-cases for Proze?
Example #1: A large healthcare company had a sales and marketing team inundated with product communications from various internal teams. The field was bewildered by it all and quite vocal with their frustration – which led to sales teams simply ignoring the communications altogether. Proze was used to centralize all of these communications into an innovative weekly newsletter that dynamically matched piece of content (articles) to each field employee based on the product, region or service they represented. Dozens of updates were now consolidated and filtered into a single email that each team member looked-forward-to, because they knew it would only contain content that was relevant to them. A complimentary Proze “microsite” was added so that prior content could be searched, commented on, shared with others, and more. If a field member missed one week, all they had to do was click through to the microsite from any email they received to view prior content, search for topics previously written about, or “favorite” the content they like most for quick retrieval.
Example #2: A major software firm has internal communications teams spread across multiple departments, as well as international teams. Each team had different content needs and target audiences – yet often those audiences overlapped. Also, each were designing their own templates and sending cadences. Proze simplified all of this by enabling centralized libraries of templates, images, and drag/drop content layouts so that branding and messaging were consistent, and individual teams were reinventing the wheel with each new project. A centralized calendar also helped ensure employees weren’t being sent competing emails on the same day. And finally, automated integration with multiple Active Directories ensured each team was sending to the right audiences based on the most-recent organizational structure.
Example #3: One of our customers has a very dynamic environment that requires them to segment and target their messaging to numerous audiences. The need was to dynamically send emails, for example, “to everyone who reports to John Smith, Western Area VP of Sales and Operations.” Active Directory is their source of truth for current employee data, and our dynamic integration solved this communication need without any IT involvement or queries.. Additionally, if they wanted to send a communication and have a specific person’s boss and bosses-boss included (or more)…our smart integration solves that list-creation as well. Prior to Proze, it was a painful internal process that required at least a day’s advance notice to the IT team.
Example #4: A multi-national manufacturing company that has numerous subsidiaries and has multi-language content needs used Proze to standardize the corporation on a single platform, where content, lists, images, and template designs could be centrally developed and shared with each subsidiary (and even content created in multiple languages). Proze allows teams to develop their own drag-and-drop designs for their authoring teams so that professional-looking layouts can be easily deployed across the enterprise. Proze’s innovative “roll-up reporting” also allows the central corporate team to monitor and measure how engagement results compare across the enterprise.
Q: What are some trends or technologies you see on the rise in the Internal Communication category and how is Proze meeting these?
Business Intelligence: Analytics should lead to decisions that drive better employee communications, and even deeper content-relevance. For example, we’re working on intelligent analytics and features to help IC teams send even-more-relevant content to employees based on what individuals previously read/liked, or by matching content that peers found of value that are similar to them.
Team communication, collaboration and sharing tools integration: Organizations are using Slack and Microsoft Teams for ever increasing team and instant communications. Customers are looking for creative and innovative ways to tie in Internal Communications with Slack and Microsoft Teams. We see tighter integration between email, mobile and sharing applications so that they leverage and complement each other.
Embedded Video in Email: We have been providing video-in-email for many years with our VIZU.AL platform for the Entertainment Industry. Video can triple the engagement and reading rates of your internal messaging. So, we have expanded it into our Proze platform with an industry-only Outlook embedded-video solution. From working with Microsoft Streams and other internal video sources to playing videos inside Outlook, we are leading the way with our customers as they move to more video within their IC strategy.
What is something every IC professional needs to know?
Email is universal, and is used constantly throughout the business day. It is a required communication tool for business because, by its very ubiquitous nature, it will always involve communicating with people outside of our own networks (customers, friends, vendors, etc.). Done the right way (personalized, relevant, consistent, visually engaging), email reading-rates can skyrocket and truly enhance the corporation’s goals and employee-satisfaction levels. Getting the right information to the right employees – on a timely basis and in a “channel” where they are already spending much of their work day – is still the most important means of corporate internal communications. Email also provides one of the more unique benefits that you simply can’t derive from other channels; detailed analytics (down to specific departments, roles, or even individuals). It also gives you the unparalleled benefit of “resending” or retargeting employees if they missed the original communication. Your IC email platform should be simple-to-use, as well as improve and engage your employees while providing you the analytics needed to show a high ROI.
About Proze (www.proze.io)
Proze’s open-architecture SaaS Platform has 20+ years of proven email communication success (www.tailoredmail.com) including exclusive workforce-oriented features amplified to provide Internal Communicators and HR professionals with a powerful toolset required in today’s challenging and complex world of corporate employee communications and engagement. Proze is designed to simplify internal email communications across the enterprise silo’s while measuring email results with deep analytics providing the insights needed to improve internal communications including amplifying employee engagement.
Proze’s enterprise architecture is a 100% cloud-based Internal Employee Communications platform that connects and engages employees across the organization with important employee information.