Playing Outside the Roadmap: How a Culture of Creativity Drives Success

Picture this: you’re a sales exec, sitting at your desk on a typical Monday afternoon and wondering how to engage your latest prospect, when you hear a polite English gentleman’s voice ring out, “Blasts! Jonathan abandoned the sign up!” 10 minutes later, the Price is Right horn sounds, signaling a new sale for your team. Hopefully you don’t hear the gentle chirping of crickets, letting you know too much time has passed without sales activity on your site.

Welcome to CallTrackingMetrics, where our developers are hard at work evolving our conversation intelligence platform for marketing agencies and contact centers, while also plotting out creative ways to keep our sales team on track with their goals. Our sales team has come to love our English friend Chatsworth, a bot built by our development team as a fun, audio tool to drive sales activity. Built via CallTrackingMetrics’ open API, throughout the day, Chatsworth may briefly interject with phrases or sounds based on predetermined activities, such as when someone indicates interest in our product or abandons the purchase flow.

Chatsworth is just one of the many fun innovations our developers have created to help drive productivity for our entire team. And like many other leading tech companies, such as Google, Facebook, or Linkedin, we believe a little bit of play is integral to getting work done. That’s why we welcome our engineering team to work on creative projects that align with our overall mission, even if they don’t fall within our formal product roadmap.

One feature the team built out, for instance, directs a customer who tries to create their password as “12345” (universally accepted as one of the worst passwords, no?) to this classic moment from Spaceballs.

Sound like a waste of resources?

Hardly. The opportunity to build out “Easter eggs” and gamify our own product is part of what attracts new members to our team while also driving improvements for our company, like Chatsworth’s role in keeping our sales team tuned into their success or building a digital doorbell for our office. Plus, allowing employees to work on creative projects that fall outside of typical day-to-day responsibilities helps boost mental energy while increasing productivity and morale — and we all know happier employees drive success to their organization. In fact, the Workplace Research Foundation reported that highly engaged employees were much more likely to have above-average productivity, to the tune of 38%.

These developments, although they take time, don’t detract from our overall performance and instead provide tangible results that help our company achieve success outside typical parameters such as boosting morale, enhancing security, and more.

The bottom line: encouraging a little creativity and fun in the workplace inspires workers to pursue projects in line with their own passions, while also freeing up mind space for when professional work needs to get done. As a rapidly growing startup, our team prides ourselves on being nimble and creative, while also making room for fun in our workday.