Improving internal communications across employees and ecosystem partners
The first challenge that FFN needed to overcome was on the internal communications front. Tonnesen knew that in today’s world of connected devices, digital displays, and great graphics, relying on email communications alone was outdated – especially when expectations for variety, choice, and high-quality communication experiences had become table-stakes in most organizations. Furthermore, the lack of quality, timely communications across the company’s employees, customers, vendors, maintenance personnel, and other stakeholders was a key reason employee engagement had declined.
Tonnesen sought a solution to control and deliver prompt, customized messaging that brought together data from disparate sources and combined it with rich, engaging graphics. The content would need to be easily or automatically staged and scheduled, and targeted to segmented, wide-ranging audiences throughout their enterprise. Delivery also needed to be considered as the resulting messaging needed to work across multiple personal devices and be able to be displayed in various environments, including lobbies, open areas, conference rooms, and customer and executive areas. Email, of course, would also need to be included.
Implementation began by deploying 70 displays across the company, using a combination of new Kloudspot displays and existing repurposed ones. Using information captured from their CRM system, the team was able to run important messaging and real-time sales leaderboards in customized graphical format throughout the company’s widespread geographic locations. “It’s really inspiring to see what full transparency and visibility does to employees…. watching sales numbers grow, watching big deals come in. It really gets employees pumped,” said Tonnesen.
Kloudspot is now enhancing FFN‘s business intelligence as a whole, empowering a wide range of data-driven decisions and countless communications on a daily basis. By improving the content and tying all their communications activities together, they are proactively meeting the needs of their employee ecosystem to be more centrally connected to the company as a whole.
Creating a better physical workspace for employees
Next on the list was using technology to create a better physical workspace for the 2,400 employees spread across FFN’s six buildings. Each building had spaces for customer service agents, engineers, operations and management, and included numerous configurations of conference rooms, open air spaces, and work environments. But whether or not these spaces were being used effectively was unclear.
When it came to decision-making and space planning for future facilities, Tonnesen wanted to understand the how’s of various areas in the building – how they were being used, how often, for how long, and for how many people. He said, “Our company had not long before invested $40M in two new buildings in the Tempe area. But now we were already approaching 90% capacity in these buildings, and even more filled company-wide. As we began to consider a major investment in yet another new building, we came to realize we were doing so without the necessary data and space allocation insights to make the best, informed decisions.”
Thus, company leaders sought a way to gather and analyze building/campus occupancy and traffic information, with the resulting analytics and insights being easily accessible and actionable.
To achieve this, FFN utilized and built on the analytics and extensions that Kloudspot provides with its AI and machine learning. Within weeks they saw that the system and the company could learn many details about its environment: they could see location information, GPS information, conference room density, and more – all for ongoing reference. They learned many building usage insights and started realizing that much more could be obtained.
With better understanding of the actual and optimal uses of all their environments, FFN is now adapting areas for best usage of all the floors and spaces in each building. For example, they’ve been able to discern and accommodate different activities and usage patterns by their engineers, alongside how management and customer service agents operate.
Providing employees with a better sense of physical security on premise
With other insights and results coming in quickly, FFN’s interest shifted to looking at Kloudspot as a potential security solution, too. What was going on in the parking garages? Were people there safe at night? What weekend activities were they seeing take place?
They had an existing video camera system controlling the outer parking perimeter that they were quickly able to tie into Kloudspot. From here, they were able to use the security data they were now seeing to determine the triggers and resulting notifications they would want sending out.
The first six months taught FNN a lot, giving them the confidence to expand their use of Kloudspot’s Situational Awareness and Intelligence Platform to implement additional capabilities. Maintaining and using the Kloudspot system only requires staffing by two FFN people as a portion of their regular job roles. One person handles audio-visual aspects such as analytics, determining rules, and communication outputs, while the other takes care of infrastructure, including controlling where the data goes and making sure it’s secure, so trying new things is easy and requires minimal investment upfront.
Benefits and impacts
With Kloudspot integration, FFN has seen results in-line with, or exceeding, their original objectives. Communications to stakeholders have clearly expanded and improved. And with a better understanding and use of their space, they have also improved their facility and safety-related decision making.
Recently, they’ve discovered new ways to gain and communicate insights that hadn’t even been considered previously. With Kloudspot’s solutions, they’ve been able to enhance FNN’s business intelligence as a whole, empowering a wide range of data-driven decisions.
