Beekeeper is a mobile software-as-a-service platform that helps organizations in more than 160 countries to reach, connect and engage their non-desktop workers. Beekeeper was founded in 2012 by Cristian Grossmann, Flavio Pfaffhauser, Daniel Sztutwojner, and Andreas Slotosch. The company has raised USD 71 million so far. Investors from the Verve Ventures community have supported Beekeeper since its Seed financing round.

How does the coronavirus crisis affect Beekeeper as a company?
Our number one priority is to keep our staff of about 180 people healthy. We were early at introducing a home office policy in our offices in the US, the UK, Germany, Poland, and Switzerland. Beekeeper has worked with remote teams since its inception, which is why we had more than enough time to establish rules and habits. But it is still a big change to work all by yourself now.

Beekeeper has grown its team very rapidly in the past few years. How does the crisis affect your hiring plans?
It is true that our HR team has done a great job of onboarding many new employees in the past. We’re slowing down the pace of expansion a bit at the moment, as it is important to preserve cash, and it is also more difficult to hire people that really fit your company without meeting them first.

How have your corporate customers reacted to the crisis?
We get mixed signals from the market. On one hand, it is a very challenging time for all companies, on the other hand, it has become painfully evident how important communication with your frontline workers is, and that is where we can help. As a consequence, we have seen much more inbound demand and even emergency requests for expedited rollouts of our communication tool. We’re pushing the boundaries of what is possible in terms of speed. Recently, a big client was able to use Beekeeper across his company in less than a day after their decision.

What about companies that are heavily affected by the crisis, hotel chains, for example. Did you lose clients?
Hospitality is one of our main verticals and is hit very hard. But we haven’t lost clients. We’re in close contact with them, support them and continue our long-term relationship. These companies need to stay in contact with their employees even if they’re on leave, in order to be rapidly operational again when the crisis ends.

You’ve just recently partnered with PwC to better address the healthcare sector. Why?
For hospitals, circumstances are changing very rapidly these days, which means that they need to decide faster and communicate faster. Rooms need to be changed to emergency rooms, new personnel needs to be coordinated, new information and protocols need to be disseminated quickly. These needs are urgent, and this is the reason why they turn to us to help them share information for non-desk workers in real-time. And it’s not just one-way communication, it’s also about giving employees a voice, letting them ask questions, sharing information amongst themselves and letting them reassure each other. It’s humbling to see that Beekeeper has almost become a lifeline for the employees at the frontline. Hospitals are only one example, the same is true for pharmacy chains, home care, and nursing providers. The whole healthcare industry is in high alert. We have so much demand that we have partnered with PwC to speed up client onboarding. We’ve worked with them on big projects before, for example, when we rolled out Beekeeper for all the factory workers of ABB. They’re trained and certified with our technology, which guarantees that customer onboarding and support is up to our standards.

How do you assure that this lifeline of communication is always running?
We see this responsibility and are technically on top of things. We have more than doubled the capacity of our servers and we have a special team that is monitoring the systems 24/7. We have also increased the number of data points we monitor. We are handling a big increase in usage. It is not just the number of active users that has gone up significantly, people are also using the Beekeeper app much more intensely than they did before, the usage has gone up by a factor of 2.5x.

What are your priorities as a manager of a startup in times of crisis?
My main concern is that the members of our team stay healthy. In a difficult time, the priority is to stay very close to the customer and support them in any way you can. We are in a position to do this because we raised USD 45 million only six months ago but we’re also very conscious of cash. For all of us, it is a very demanding time but it is also very rewarding to realize that our simple, yet sophisticated communication tool has become more useful than ever and a true must-have for our customers.

For more information about effective operational communication in times of crisis, check out PwC’s website.