Nothing is perfect. Everything has room for improvement. The trick is to work out a way to continually improve. This is not new. There are aphorisms like “pause to sharpen the saw” and “listen to your customers.”

Easy to say, but how do you do it? At Voalté, a significant part of the company is devoted to listening to the customer and most importantly...paying attention! The Services department feeds information from our customers and users to the rest of the company in several ways through product plans for future work, and more immediate problems too.

We see a lot of information come through Engineering...specifically about new feature requests. We make a big effort to make those new features happen too. Like everyone, we have limited resources but try to make the most users happy with our changes. As a software engineer I really like to see people using the software I write to do something good and useful. It’s why I do what I do in the first place.

But that’s first degree listening. We also want to listen at a higher level, at a second degree. Apple and Steve Jobs knew no one was asking for something like the iPhone when they came out with it, but they knew through listening at a higher level that this was what people really wanted. Now, after four models and an installed base pushing 100 million phones, it’s pretty clear they were right.

New ideas are interesting, but lets face it: ideas are cheap. It’s the execution of an idea to make that idea real that’s important. Smartphones existed before Apple created the iPhone. It was how Apple made the iPhone that’s important. Hospital communications already existed before Voalté. We think, and hope you agree, that it’s our approach that is important. We listened at this higher level and combined voice, alarms, and text and we will continue to listen to improve what we have now. But we’ll also pay attention to what you’re not yet saying and practice that higher degree of listening so that we can continue to give you what you really want and need.