Under the hood of SeaQ: Next-gen technology transforming crew feedback

by Alexis Houssemand, CTO at PsyFyi

Our CEO Claire founded PsyFyi in 2021 with the idea of revolutionizing data collection in the maritime industry after appreciating the difference in treatment between the millions of seafarers worldwide and shore staff - read her story here. Getting to this realisation, she then approached me with this project: creating an anonymous system to send questions to seafarers.

This would not only help the companies retain the best staff but also have an impact and improve life and security onboard for the people on ships. As a tech person, it’s rare to see the genesis of an idea and then get a blank sheet of paper to start construction. As normal, we usually start with the hard bits! 

The ‘things we had to bear in mind to make SeaQ attractive for the users (seafarers), the non-negotiables, and the different techy bits’

Phone storage: If you’re working on a ship 6 months a year, it's reason that your friends and families will send you lots (and lots) of videos and photos of your family. We knew straight away that the first thing you probably delete is that cumbersome app that doesn’t do much for you. This led to us discarding creating a mobile app from day one. 

Anonymity: If you want people to open about potential issues, you must give them a platform where they can express themselves without retaliation. Being a third party, this already helps the seafarers to respond more freely in our pools and open-ended questions, however, we needed to create a platform that they could trust. 

Availability: Ships travel all over the world, and their staff are international: no one wants to be charged a fee to respond to a text message (SMS) to a phone number that is based in the UK! Text messages were disregarded quickly. Nonetheless, the questions remained: 

How can you provide your services to anyone with minimal intervention? How can you deliver thousands of questions every day to seafarers all over the world? 

Anonymous questions globally 

After mind-mapping our ideas, the solution became clear: we had to use a platform that everyone already used in their day-to-day life to communicate with people externally: social media. 

Meta accounts for 3.3B users in Q4 2020 (Statistica), with WhatsApp alone gathering 2.95B users in June 2024 (Statistica), it seemed that the best platforms to primarily integrate were WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. 

Receiving messages with those third parties was a piece of cake. However, to avoid having companies spam their users, Meta uses extensive vetting of its clients to ensure that we are not abusing our position of power and ‘spamming’ people. This can, at times, make META a difficult and thankless platform to use but it is part of the game as we wanted to build a lasting platform for our users and clients. 

Now, we were able to send messages to users. Great! So, what should we ask them and how should we do it? That was the next issue for us… well, for me. 

Claire needed to find the questions to ask and decipher the data received to create reports. I had to create the platform to help her do that. The best way of proceeding was to have a web app. We were already online to receive the messages (for the webhooks for the tech enthusiasts) and we could just connect to our cloud-hosted database. We went for Django, a Python framework, well suited for such project, and after using their views for quite a while, we moved to ReactJS as frontend and relied on Django solely for the backend. 

Having that functional web app, we could now implement the questions on a user interface, read results from it and also download the raw data for deep analysis.  

Evolution of SeaQ 

We have come a long way from V1 (or maybe it should be called Alpha).  

We started off by sending one question a day which worked fine but turned out to be too binary and we quickly evolved into the creation of a ‘tree of questions’ with each answer leading to different branches gathering different unique data sets.  

Since 2021, the team has grown, and Satu - our COO - has rightfully earned the title of our data queen -handling responses from all branches. Together, we continuously refine our approach to extracting insights from our ever-expanding database, ensuring our platform remains scalable and capable of managing millions of rows of information effortlessly. SeaQ is also undergoing yet another refurbishment in that matter to deliver even more insights about your data. Stay tuned for more. 

We’ve also moved on from the two messaging platforms we settled on using in the beginning (WhatsApp and Messenger) as we made it a goal to keep growing our availability across platforms. Last year we integrated Telegram, and we have just released our services on Viber (available on request).  

Give your crew a voice 

There are plenty of topics we have not even touched on - like distribution and database management - but I suspect most readers would find those a bit dull. So, I will spare you the details and stop here. 

With determination, the extensive features of SeaQ, and the wealth of data we've gathered (and continue to collect), we're only missing one key to truly understanding what goes right, and wrong onboard your ships. 

That key is your crew. Give them a voice. Give them SeaQ. We’ll take care of the rest!