Key Takeaways From the 2021 Strategic Session

This past year was challenging in many respects. We successfully went through ISO 27001:2013 certification, increased the number of projects all while dealing with the fallout from the global pandemic. All of this, and more, was discussed at Mindy Support’s annual strategic session, which was held earlier this year. We analyzed the results of the past year and made plans for 2021. The meeting consisted of two parts: a management of the board meeting and another session with the heads and specialists of all departments. In total, 55 people attended the strategic session and today we would like to share with you what was discussed and the goals that were set for the next year.

Recapping the Results of the Past Year

As we mentioned in the very beginning, 2020 was difficult for many reasons. As part of the impact of the COVID-19 crisis we needed to transition everybody to remote work. All of this needed to be done without any service disruptions to our customers. Thanks to the emergency procedures we had in place, this transition went smoothly. This is also one of the reasons why Mindy Support was able to grow in 2020 while many other businesses were downsizing. In addition to honoring commitments to our clients, we also reinforced our support to our team members. If somebody did not have a working laptop at home, we would give them a company one, we offered to pay their internet bills so they can have faster speeds and gave them peace of mind that everything will be alright by issuing salaries on time.

As a result of our hard work and dedication, the number of new projects quadrupled. This meant that we needed to expand the data annotation services we offered to include things like data collection, audio annotation, and QA services. Since so many new projects were coming in we needed to hire new project managers, quality assurance specialists, and additional people to strengthen our middle management. Overall, despite all of the unexpected challenges we all had to overcome in 2020, Mindy Support was able to rise beyond the turmoil to grow in terms of the number of projects, new employees, and revenue as well. Most importantly, we increased the service quality levels we offer our clients which is reinforced by our customer satisfaction survey. In fact, 95% of our clients responded that they will recommend us to their partners.

Strengthening Our Data Security Processes

Since outsourcing data annotation and other BPO services require a lot of trust between the client and the service provider, we wanted to give our clients additional peace of mind by obtaining ISO 27001 certification. As you may know, ISO 27001 is an internationally recognized standard that provides specific requirements for information security management systems and is awarded only after an independent auditor has verified compliance. Last year we successfully passed the audit and were awarded ISO 27001 certification.

Our Plans and Goals for Next Year

Even though we had many great accomplishments in 2020 we need to set our sights on the year ahead and make plans to reach even greater heights. Since we would like to even further increase the number of clients and projects, we plan on increasing the number of languages in which we can provide customer support. We will also expand the level of automation to ensure better quality assurance for data annotation projects and further strengthen our data security practices by obtaining SOC 2 certification.

Achieving new and ambitious goals is only possible through the collective efforts of our team members, which is why we plan on hiring even more people, in addition to the 2,000 employees we already have on staff and opening new offices as well. This is necessary to accommodate the growing number of projects and reinforce internal processes as well.

We are happy to say that we overcame all of the adversity we faced in 2020 and came out stronger than before. We definitely got it done in 2020 and we will continue to do so in 2021 and the years ahead.