I use Billy, and honestly, I love it. The messages are usually simple one-liners, but they’re paired with a great GIF, which makes a huge difference. Even though the messages aren’t deeply personalised, they feel personal. They land at the right moment, they’re warm, and they make people feel seen and appreciated. That’s exactly what I was aiming for before—except I used to spend ages writing individual messages myself.

The Alfy app is a great little bot we have connected to our company Slack, super easy to use and up and running in less than a few minutes. We have seldom needed customer support but when we have it has been excellent and highly responsive. Our fully remote global team now are randomly paired for 30 minute coffee connections every two weeks (you can choose your own scheduling cadence and suggested meeting length) , with helpful time suggestions offered by the bot and ability to seamlessly schedule the chosen time to their diaries. If the team members share their google calendars with the app, then the meeting times suggested also correspond with both parties availability - making scheduling super quick and easy. It is also easy to exclude personnel in the slack channel from the pairing e.g. if someone goes on a leave of absence. Our team really love it and the random nature of the pairings helps ensure true diverse connections are forged across the org. In the three months we have been using Alfy, it has really strengthened cross functional team bonds, and helped substantially improve our engagement scores for social connection. We love this little app at Travalyst - it makes enhancing our remote-first team culture so easy, and helps bring some joy and levity to their working weeks.

My team members really enjoy Buddies HR. There are multiple different functions (Billy/Celebrations, Clappy/Kudos, Pulsy/Surveys, etc.) in one. It is the first of it's kind. They are also quick to make updates if you give suggestions! I was pleasently surprised when I received an email that one of my suggestions had been incorporated into the platform.