Since I've started at Silverchair, I've been really struck by how frequently everyone here talks to our clients. This is true for everyone from the Client Services team, who are always on top of any bugs resolution, the Delivery Team looking after ongoing projects, or the Executive Team. I've been really impressed by how many different ways we have of keeping in touch with our clients. This could be at events we host, like Platform Strategies, at other industry events, or just in our all regular calls. For some clients, we're in contact with them almost every day for various reasons. Each one of these touchpoints is important, and the team is always thinking about how to meet the client's needs. It's been an incredible experience to hop on that train and to get oriented.
We've just finished our 2023 client satisfaction survey, and a few big themes came out of it. One clear message was that Silverchair has built a community of clients and has given customers a clear path to stay in touch with us and with each other – through things like publisher Working Groups, workshops, and client events. So the message was, “Please keep this going; we need this community, we need to talk to you, Silverchair, but also to other clients, because we need to share ideas together.” Customers getting together like this is also a great way to move the platform forward.
We also got some specific feedback on areas where we can make some improvements, and we're really grateful for that kind of feedback. It's giving us a chance to take another look at some of our processes and see how we could do them better. We don’t see feedback or suggestions for improvements as negative, but rather as a collaborative process to continually make steps smoother both for us internally as well as for the client.
We also heard a lot of appreciation for the level of communication and the transparency that we give to our clients. It's really important when we are hosting their main content and we're so involved in their core activities that clients feel they can trust the partners that they've chosen for many years. This is a long-term relationship and we feel a great deal of responsibility in maintaining that trust and in ensuring that our clients feel like they know what we're doing, that they're aware of our plans, and that they feel like they're coming along with us on that journey.
Like any year, 2024 is promising to have a lot of new plans. We’re of course planning new initiatives around AI as well as in the analytics space. There's a whole lot more that we want to do with our clients and a lot of that we will be able to do because they trust us to do it. And we want to continue to earn that trust.
Finally – and I think I've said this to everyone I've met since joining Silverchair – I’ve known my now colleagues at Silverchair for a while because we've met at various industry events, and the main reason I joined Silverchair is because of the people working here. It's because I wanted to collaborate with them, and now that I'm working with them every day, that feeling is still very much there. It is a great team. The culture is a perfect mix of serious and relaxed - you can be yourself, but you’re also encouraged to speak your mind. That feeling of working together to fix anything that needs fixing, or to find a solution, is very real. It's a tight-night community and everyone has been really welcoming to me and others who also joined recently from the start.
And we couldn’t let her go without asking her to settle the ongoing Silverchair debate: “Is a hot dog a sandwich?”
Oh, sandwich - no hesitation.
Say hello to Emilie at Academic Publishing in Europe, London Book Fair, STM, or via email.