2021, a year full of connections: with our clients, our people, and our vision.

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2021, a year full of connections

2021, the second year of a worldwide pandemic. A period like this brings uncertainties, disconnection ad a lot of doubt. However, it doesn't have to be just that. For Dropsolid, the past year also brought a lot of benefits. You instinctively fall back on what really counts. We’ve translated this into the connection with our clients, the connection with our colleagues, and the connection with our mission and vision.

More than ever we checked in with our clients, through account management, with steerco’s, and by presenting proactive ideas. But also with a spontaneous phone call for example. More than 70% of our turnover comes from existing clients. Something we’re extremely proud of because it shows confidence in Dropsolid as a partner and in our people. 

“Help organizations to become the best digital version of themselves.” It’s an expertise, but above all, a people business. Our people work with people and for people. Each and every one with tons of passion and lots of expertise. We like to let our colleagues determine their own balance and give them freedom but also responsibility. Through daily news updates, our Whatsapp group, extra check-ins, remote quarterly reviews... we ensured that our colleagues kept communication and that connecting was stimulated. The vibe and fire are still there, our company event in early November more than proved that! 

With Dropsolid, we’ve been building on the same mission for years: “We make complex marketing technology accessible for ambitious companies, organizations, and governments to enable them to create the best digital version of their organization”. We’re very loyal to our vision to do this in an open way: with open source technologies. “We want to make, not take”, and in this way contribute our part to a wider world. When our mission, our vision, and our own developed open DXP (Dropsolid Experience Cloud) are being embraced by big organizations like Toerisme Vlaanderen and Boerenbond, we celebrate and are only motivated to continue our open journey. 

Connecting with our customers, our people, and our vision. Throughout the past year, we’ve only gotten better at it. Last year we’ve prepared ourselves for further growth in all areas, and already laid our solid foundations in 2021. Want to connect with Dropsolid? Read on to find out what steps we took last year.

Stay connected

Anneleen.

 

Our HR team looks back on a year with 25 new hires

2021 was another challenging year for our HR department. Mandatory working from home, a harsher than ever raging 'war on talent', the onboarding of new employees in quarantine times... Yet that didn't stop us from continuing to grow. We hired no less than 25 new employees.

In 2021, we also introduced hybrid working for our employees. This way, we encourage everyone to decide independently how a workday is completed as efficiently as possible. And from which location.

We continue to work on our employee happiness. We’re currently also running an ESF project on Organizing Differently. With this project, we want to increase the learning and adaptability of our organization and our clients and increase the workability for employees. We are redesigning the organizational structure and adapting and safeguarding the culture within our organization.

What 2022 has in store for us? Another 10 additional hires, giving the teams more room to further engage in innovation. In addition, this year we want to focus even more on the well-being of our employees, including burnout prevention and measuring psychological safety within our teams. 

 

To encourage our employees to stay connected and to keep communicating in times of disconnection, we’ve introduced a new, 6th core value: Connect.

Eline Van Coillie

Eline

HR manager

Our operations team implemented Teamleader Orbit in no time

Teamleader Orbit provided more efficient communication throughout our company, better project follow-up, and transparency with respect to cost control.  A great step forward!

Laurence De Medts

Laurence

Operations manager 

Growth in a company also entails the optimization of processes, better tools, and more structure. Last year we placed a strong emphasis on this, and we will continue in the same direction for 2022. 

Last year, our biggest focus was the implementation of our new tool: Teamleader Orbit. This allowed us to create a better understanding of time, capacity, and project planning, as well as timekeeping, billing, and reporting. 

This year we are focusing even more intensively on internal reporting. It should further optimize the communication and transparency for our customers. We are also introducing Confluence, a documentation system that contains all project information and its status. This will give our customers immediate access to the latest developments in an ongoing project. 

Our marketing team reflects on a successful rebranding

In 2021, Dropsolid didn’t only grow in numbers, but also in identity. In doing so, we are responding to the changing needs of our customers. This resulted in more extensive services, more distinct areas of expertise, and an entirely new branding that highlights our new identity even better. 

What 2022 has in store for us on the marketing front? With Dropsolid Digital Agency we want to make an impact in the digitalization of Flemish organizations. We do this through open collaborations and with open platforms in order to break through silos. 

In 2022, we see this trend evolving towards meaningful marketing. In which marketing is carried higher in the organization and transcends traditional tactics. We are deploying marketing tools to optimize the entire customer experience. We certainly want to experiment with that!

When we connect the best of marketing and IT, Flemish companies can be even more committed to creating superior, digital customer experiences.

Leen Penders

Leen

CMO

Our sales team reminisces on a year focused on customer intimacy

In the past year, we’ve put extra effort into our customer intimacy. We want to stand next to our clients as a loyal partner

Peter Snauwaert

Peter

Sales Director

2021, a year in which we also welcomed major customers such as Tourism Flanders, Inagro, and ITZU. A year in which we are once again very grateful that companies such as UZA, Acerta, ERA, Boerenbond, Liberale Mutualiteit, Gezinsbond, Lotus, Soudal, Recavit, Ivago, Pidpa, Graydon... are putting their digital challenges in the hands of our teams again. 

2021 is also the year that Milou fell off her horse and was absent for 4 months. How we’ve missed her! Luckily she came back healthy. We even welcomed 3 more forces in our team: Inez, Joel, and Joy. In 2022 we can focus even more on account management and on larger projects that are technically challenging. These are the projects in which the Dropsolid teams really shine. 

Our Experience Cloud team made great jumps with our product

What a year. In one year time, our platform and Managed Cloud services grew by more than 44%. All of this because of automation and a very early look at the benefits of DevOps as a philosophy. Let's look back a little further to 2015. That's when Dropsolid first received recognition as an innovator through an award from VLAIO for developing a PaaS platform to develop and deliver digital experiences with Drupal through automation. Not much later, a second recognition as innovator followed to add CDP and personalization to the DXP platform as well. Today, our team is happy to announce that in 2022 we will knit a third part to this: making it easier to put our entire DXP solution on any public or private cloud! Want to learn more about building a DXP with Drupal?

Today, we serve an average of more than 360 million requests per month for more than 450 projects in production, with about 18,000 automation and self-service tasks per month. All of which are executed through our Dropsolid DevOps Platform. Over 6 million events per month are processed in our CDP/Personalization product. Most of these projects are on our Managed Cloud services, but we still welcome "bring-your-own" stacks! And we're ready for more, much more! Stay tuned.

Step by step we are getting closer to completing the core capabilities of a DXP.

Nick Veenhof

Nick

CTO

2021 was all about finding the right balance between human and digital

Connecting with the end-user is more than ever a mix of digital and human. Finding the right balance between the two is key to being successful as an organization today.

Steven Pepermans

Steven

COO

2021 was the breakthrough year for Dropsolid on the topic of ‘from CMS to DXP’. Our customers recognize the importance of a strong, digital experience for their end-users. Not to say that everyone was already adopting this, but this new standard became very noticalble last year.

In the past year, our turnover grew by 20%. We also transformed ourselves with a total rebranding. In addition to our technological expertise, we expanded our strategic services and our new branding focuses more on strengthening client relations, and customer intimacy.

In 2022 we want to get our positioning even sharper as a digital agency, further expand our European collaborations, and make our open source solutions even stronger. Just think of Dropsolid Experience Cloud with which you build, launch and manage your personalized, digital customer experiences faster, smarter, and more securely. 

Ready for the next step in your digital customer experience?