How Pobuca uses Pobuca

A policy set of rules that make us more productive and secure

Pobuca officially launched in June 2016 and since then we count 200 people using our service every day, while having 5000 users in total. Roughly 80% of them have come aboard in the past 2 months which is indeed very promising for our future.

There is, however, a customer that has been using Pobuca since August 2015, from its first prototype/alpha version. That would be the company itself and I am going to share some tips of how we use it internally for Pobuca and SiEBEN group (120 people in total).

We do use Pobuca every day on desktop or mobile to find and communicate with our business contacts. In order to be more productive and secure we have set a bunch of rules to follow:

Start by importing all business contacts

We ask from newbies in Pobuca to import all their business contacts from excel files, Outlook, personal address book on mobile etc. Then we tell them to read next…

Personal contacts vs. business contacts

According to market research, business workers would like to have separated personal and business contacts storage. Pobuca solves this problem and we have set a simple rule to our team:

• Always use Pobuca,and Pobuca only, to store any new business contact you come across. By this, all contacts are shared, securely saved on business cloud and there is company control.
• You can use your smartphone default address book (or any other app) to store your personal contacts.

No need to export from Pobuca

In fact, there is sometimes the need to sync with external systems, but only for specific tasks and in a controlled way. For the majority of users they have to import once from their previous app (Outlook or Gmail contacts in most of the times) and then solely use Pobuca to manage their business contacts on any device and platform (web app, mobile app, Windows app, Outlook app…). Shared information, like Pobuca contacts, should be managed by one system, otherwise comes a mess!

“But I don’t want to share my contacts”

We encourage our people to store their contacts in Pobuca and make them available to their teams. Unless in very special and rare privacy situations, in all other cases you should share contact information with coworkers. We are more productive by finding instantly any or our organization contacts without having to ask around, or by having caller ID for our entire business network.

Rules of how to fill up contact fields

We have rules for filling up specific custom fields to segment our contacts, how to store addresses and phone numbers (we always use the country code, e.g. +1 434355532 to be able to make phone calls while abroad).

Keep your profile healthy

We try to put as much information about ourselves in Pobuca profiles. You never know what may be useful to a colleague in the future. If any change happens to our contact details (new title, department, mobile phone) we always update our profiles. Our HR uses information stored in Pobuca to verify and print business cards for our employees!

New hires and leavers

Imagine being a new hire. How can you get access to your new organization contacts and be productive? We always invite new co-workers to Pobuca and revoke access to leavers. In fact, we have connected Pobuca with our company’s Active Directory for single sign on and automated user management. Can you think of any new hires in your organization to send them Pobuca invites and be their hero?

Invite external partners

We have some external partners (freelancers most of the times) that we work with for years. We invite them to Pobuca and share our contacts – they mostly need access to our internal address book.

If you have a different alphabet than latin…

… decide which one to use to store your contacts. Since Pobuca started in Athens, we have many Greek names in our shared contact list; we decided to use the Greek alphabet to store them instead of Latin. Therefore, whenever we are searching for a Greek contact, we know that this is going to be stored with Greek characters in Pobuca.

Bottom line: set your own rules in your organization or follow ours to be more productive. To follow a company policy for your business contacts is critical for success and trust me, your users need it!