In light of this recent pandemic, remote working has become the new norm. What does that mean to Spearline today, and how do we go about helping in that environment?
At Spearline, we’re all about making sure that the connectivity into the work environment is good, particularly within contact centers. But the world is changing as we know well, and working from home has become a bigger part of the day-to-day routine. We’ve been doing tests such as quality testing, connection testing, and latency testing, right down to the contact center to date. But now that people are starting to work from home, we have to start building towards those new challenges.
Spearline is no different than any other company. All of our employees, across the world, are working from home. How do we make sure that the flexibility and the connectivity are getting right down to the home? And how do we ensure that when you’re working from home, you have the same experience as you would in the workplace?
In regards to contact centers, how big of a challenge has this been for them?
This has been a significant challenge for every contact center around the world. They are very much team led; driven by call stats, with big screens up on the wall collecting data. They have a hierarchy, with a team leader looking over agents and a manager above the leader, these structures are gonna have to change. The biggest aspects of all those structures are firstly trust, and secondly making sure that your environment at home is the same environment or similar to the one you have inside the contact center.
For that, you need excellent connectivity, making sure your audio quality and your data connectivity with chat are absolutely perfect. To date, we’ve been very successful in helping our customers to communicate with their customers, but, we at Spearline are now venturing into a place where 100% of our staff are going to be working remotely. So the quality of communication as we collaborate together is key. As businesses adapt to work from home type environments, the quality of those team collaborations and communications is going to impact both their productivity and the quality of their outputs.
Conversation between one another is important, and the home office can be a very lonely experience for some people due to the lack of social interaction. Do you believe that Spearline has an obligation to our customers to ensure that we help provide that conversation and connectivity necessary to overcome these challenges?
Absolutely! I think some people do find it very lonely, and they struggle with it. For me personally, I think that we should advise our own teams that we do keep up interaction with one another. Every employee should be doing at least two video calls a day with another colleague to keep communication flowing and to look out for one another. And you know, if they’re talking remotely to our customers, they should be having these video calls face-to-face. Strong connectivity is necessary for that requirement to happen. It’s well and good to do an audio call, but you can’t beat connectivity and that human interaction. Everyone tells us that when you are working from home, your routine should remain similar to your office routine. If you get up in the morning, you have your breakfast, you go for your shower, you go for a jog; whatever it is you do, stick to that routine, and then begin your working day. Sticking to your usual routine will help with your mindset. Employees should dress the same and do everything as if they were in the office. It is important to make sure that your productivity stays at a high or even higher standard than you had before. Therefore, social interaction is critical.
I’m a person who loves social interaction, I love talking to people, I love collaborating with people. So, I think it’s vital we keep progressing that collaboration with one another. So making sure that you have high connectivity into your home and into a remote working office needs to be achieved. And connectivity which allows you to just work on documents isn’t good enough anymore. It has to be audio, it has to be video, it has to be data. We have to go right across the spectrum, and work is needed to achieve that.
With video and audio as real-time applications on the network reaching down into people’s home office environment, it does present challenges. So do you think we have a future helping businesses optimize their employee productivity in that space?
Definitely! I don’t think any business really stands out from another business unless it has a true purpose. I think at Spearline, we have that true purpose. We’re trying to help businesses to communicate better, whether that’s right into your data center, right down to the contact center, or right down to the home, we’re going to achieve that for customers when they work with us. Our stats show that when you work with Spearline, in the first year, we increase your connectivity by over 2%. Now 2% might not sound that high, but if you’re running at a 97.5 connectivity rate into a contact center, that’s not a pretty place to be. We can guarantee within the first 12 to 18 months that we’ll lift you up to a 99.55% stat. I think that’s a really exciting metric because we can show companies that they’re achieving what they want to achieve. We’re making sure that our customers are able to keep the lines of communication flowing with their customers. And talking to customers through just voice or video no longer suffices, it may be through data, it can through chat. We can’t have latency and we must make sure to have ping times down as well.
It is a really interesting time for Spearline, and I think that’s reflected in our growth over the last three to four years. There has been a complete adoption of our software and our products around the world by our customers. We value what our customer has to say and what we are helping them to achieve. At Spearline we try to be proactive rather than reactive and that’s what we’re training our customers to be all times. They see Spearline as the company that’s proactive, not reactive. If they have a number down, Spearline can flag it before the customer is even aware.
We are helping to make it easier for telecommunication teams to work on their day-to-day jobs, to spend their time implementing new services rather than handling tickets. Let Spearline handle this side of the business, allowing you to work on what’s important, looking after your people and customers.
*To hear the rest of this interview, be sure to listen to the full Spearline Podcast episode here.
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About Us
Spearline is a technology company that proactively tests toll and toll-free numbers for connectivity and audio quality globally. It enables organizations to provide uninterrupted services to customers around the world. For further information, or if you have any further questions 
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