10 July, 2018

How to become a better flespi client

A brief outline of how flespi team does its job and tips on how to do the job with them.

flespi is a young and dynamic product that has been changing quite a bit since it’s release in March 2017. We do not try to please everyone, yet we deeply empathize with all the projects we embark on. Below are the principles we work by and the tips on how to communicate with us more productively.

We are picky

Yes, we consciously decided to filter out the audience of our prospective customers. When you are doing a presentation, you prefer the audience to be homogeneous — then you won’t have to grade the language to be understood. Same stuff here — we create the tools for the people who are prepared to use them. We do not erect barriers to entry artificially — on the contrary, we do everything to explain ourselves; however, you still have to be technically savvy to feel comfortable with the platform.

We are no Yes-men

Our support team, which is our entire team, is very responsive and professional. However, we can easily discourage you from using flespi… for your benefit :) Here is the deal, sometimes our experience tells us that there is a better solution to your task that does not involve flespi. And we’ll be happy to guide you in the right direction. Our goal is not to attract clients but to find the best solutions, and then the clients will follow.

Another reason to say No is when supporting becomes teaching. It’s no coincidence that we position the flespi platform as the product for developers. If you are trying to figure out all this REST-API-coding-debugging stuff from scratch, we may refuse to help. And it’s not that we want to conceal the sacred knowledge from the masses, it’s that we do not have the resources to enlighten the eager.

We go an extra mile

Once we take on a project, we foster it with love and care. We take your business needs and goals personally and willingly do extra work to drive it to success. Why? Because this is a chance for us (being a B2B company) to see the market with customer-facing eyes, and thus better understand what the end-users want and how to cater to their wants most efficiently.

Tips to become a better client

  1. Do your homework. We give you a wealth of resources to get the idea of how flespi works. Even if you are a non-techy person, we have a lot of high-level materials to put you in the picture. And of course, we have plenty of docs and in-depth manuals for developers.

  2. Take a developer with you (if you are not one). It would be helpful to have a technical person nearly whenever you want to talk about flespi — be it a conference, an exhibition, a meeting or a Skype call. We define a tech person as one understanding the terms like REST API, MQTT, Python script, POST request, etc.

  3. Have a project in mind. A specific task would greatly facilitate communication — we will be able to be more detailed in our answers, and you will be able to project the benefits on your real business, not a hypothetical case.

  4. Consider other options. We know for sure that flespi can fit most of the telematics projects. However, it’s not always the best fit. Many fleet management platforms, like Wialon, offer SDK and/or API for customization and development of complementary solutions. Take a look at those as well.

  5. Give it a try. It won’t harm you to test flespi a little bit. It’s easy since you just need to login in with any social network account to start. And even if it won’t work for your current project, you’ll get the understanding of what you can apply it to.

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As you can see, immersing in the subject matter just ankle-deep will greatly level the playing field and promote constructive talk. Whenever you have specific questions or suggestions, let us know.