2020 has certainly been a year to remember. There’s no doubt that the 100 year storm that has been COVID-19, has had, and continues to have, a significant impact on many aspects of our lives. With relatives overseas our thoughts are with them. I feel incredibly lucky to be in Australia and am hopeful of positive outcomes on the horizon for all of us.
The Switch to Remote
Like many other businesses, the Cloud Assess team started working from home in March. Working from home was always something we had resisted in the past. We always felt that the team needed to be physically together to better collaborate and innovate on a day-to-day basis. How would we continue to foster our culture? How would this impact us? How long was it for? So many unknowns. To our surprise we had virtually no tech challenges through this transition. Our business has always stretched to adopt great systems from day one. Business systems such as Slack, Zoom, Google Drive, and Xero, among others, have always been a part of our business. Until a totally unexpected scenario like COVID arrived, it was easy to take for granted some of the benefits that we get from our tech stack.
After the dust settled from our initial transition to working from home, we had a chance to reflect. We were pleasantly surprised how effectively and efficiently our business continued to run. Collaboration and communication evolved to video calls through Slack and were more frequent than ever. Processes flowed, projects rolled through, and clients continued to create great outcomes for their businesses. In the full throws of COVID lockdown, our business simply would not have been able to cope had we not been on the cloud. This too was observed across the globe as tech stocks soared in recognition of their value and importance to get/keep businesses running through this period.
The COVID Roadmap Pivot
In recognition of some of the challenges associated with the recent pandemic, 2020 saw us make a step change in our Product Roadmap and shift focus onto the differing short-term needs of our client base. An initial period of anxiety and uncertainty transformed into a powerful period of innovation and excitement around new and sharp functionality, supporting our clients work more effectively with their remote Learners. These changes included:
- upgrades to the Content Library,
- a fantastic update to the Learner User Interface, and,
- our recent introduction of Messaging.
This just names a few.
Keeping Connected
We’ve increased our focus on providing value through extended content and webinars, and brought in more capacity across the business in terms of support, development and relationship management.
The Value Add
We continue to be humbled by the value that our client base extracts from Cloud Assess. As we continue to grow and on-board great new customers, we are seeing some truly breathtaking statistics as a measure of their output. We achieved the milestone of 1 million kilograms of paper saved some time ago. Here are some great stats for Cloud Assess 2020:
- Our clients create a Cloud Assess assessment record every 2 seconds, saving millions of sheets of paper and thousands of trees.
- We do this through the most robust infrastructure in the industry, providing 99.9964% uptime for this year to date. That’s less than 19 minutes for the whole year, and that includes out of hours maintenance to perform updates and upgrades. Reliable and available as and when you need it, whether remote or face-to-face.
- Our support team responded to issues raised with a median 1st response of 36 seconds (2 seconds quicker than last year) and median time to close was 64 minutes (nearly 3 minutes less than last year). This was done with more than 29,000 responses to a satisfaction rating of 99%.
The Future is Tech
Although the situation this year proved to be a catalyst for for the adoption of technology. Once businesses grasp the value that a transition to the cloud offers, it’s not something that one would move backwards from.
For me, this year has highlighted the importance of modern systems and tech in progressive businesses. Technology is giving companies a competitive edge like no other before, opening up a world of possibilities (including having fully functioning workforces in the height of a lock down!).
In Closing
As a team we continue to be energised and excited about the future of tech and its changing shape in the business of tomorrow. Whilst we cannot wait to get out of 2020, we’re grateful for the lessons it has taught us and we’re looking forward to getting into next year and kicking goals. We’ve got lots of amazing new features that will be hitting your accounts in the first quarter. Our passionate and dedicated team is ready to go, here’s to 2021.
Yours in tech,
Rob Bright
Founder & Managing Director
Cloud Assess
