Celebrating Five Years: The Evolution of Kenect

Aug 4
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4
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Behind The Scenes

By Graham Anderson, CSO & Co-Founder, Kenect

The evolution of the Kenect platform from day one until today has been dramatic and exciting to watch.  

At first, Kenect was made to help manage and generate online reviews, while also monitoring and fixing online listings across 80+ review and listing sites. The intention was always to turn that into a text messaging platform, and when we saw how many people were responding to the review generation text messages, we absolutely knew we were on the right track.  

Once we developed the full text messaging capabilities, we immediately saw the impact that it had. The first version of the one-to-one texting and Kenect inbox were simple and basic but accomplished a task that very few of these businesses had access to before. With each passing month and year, we’ve been able to add additional features to the Kenect platform that has enhanced that core feature we love focusing on the most, text messaging.  

We first ensured that a business could use (in most cases) their existing business phone number as their text-enabled number in Kenect. After that, we added the Kenect inbound text messaging widget that allows someone to start a text conversation directly through the business website. Scheduled messages, templated messages, auto responses to inbound messages, smart routing of messages in the inbox, emojis, organized contact database, and more were now critical pieces to the full experience at Kenect.

With thousands of great customers giving us feedback about what more they needed to improve Kenect, we then launched our easy-to-use video chat feature as well as contactless payment options. Not long after, we were also able to deliver the ability to send messages to multiple recipients simultaneously. Broadcast Messaging has been a hit with all Kenect’s customers. These added even more value to the existing platform that was already delivering great results for businesses.

Early on, Kenect also knew that to have an even greater impact, we’d need to have the ability to integrate Kenect into other systems being used by our valuable customers. We launched a variety of integrations in the early years but have since started launching dozens of integrations with Kenect each quarter. Now, with countless integrations, including Lightspeed EVO, Clio, Salesforce, HubSpot, Practice Panther, Dockmaster, WINBoats, Lawmatics, MyCase, Tripleseat, Everlogic, FileVine, BBL Systems, and so many more. Every day a new customer shows up requesting a new system for us to integrate, and we add it to the list!  

If this much can be developed and improved to the Kenect platform in just five short years, what will the next five years bring us?  We hope to continue to evolve with the times, and develop even more solutions based off the needs of our customers.  Here’s to much more in the future!

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