Tag Archives: customer love

Creative entertainment provider Paint Nite uses Google Apps to create a flexible workplace

Posted by Jeffrey Rennie, Development Programs Engineer

Editor's note: oday we hear from Courtney Osgood of Paint Nite, a Boston-based events company that offers consumers a creative social experience at local bars. Learn how Google Apps helps Paint Nite maintain its close-knit company culture and keep teams connected no matter where they work.

Paint Nite offers a different kind of nightlife experience. Guided by a local artist, our customers spend a few hours sipping cocktails and painting at a local bar.
Working together to create something great is in our DNA, which is why we’ve used Google Apps since the company was founded in 2012.

As we’ve grown, Google Apps has helped us maintain our tight-knit culture while successfully scaling our business. In the past year, we’ve added more than 950 cities and towns that are now hosting Paint Nite events, and more than doubled our employees at headquarters from 40 to 100+.

Work-life balance is a big priority at Paint Nite. Our founders recognize that everyone has commitments outside of work, whether it’s spending time with family, pursuing a hobby or volunteering. Paint Nite offers unlimited vacation time and allows employees to work from home any time. Tools like Google Apps help our employees take advantage of this policy. Teams use Google Hangouts to chat about projects throughout the day, whether they’re at the office, at home or working from a coffee shop. We use Hangouts for our weekly all-staff meeting so all employees can join from anywhere and feel like they’re in the same room.

Google Apps helps teams stay organized, which is important given how quickly the company is growing. Our employees love using Google Calendar, which makes it easy to schedule meetings with colleagues who are working remotely. Calendar also lets us book conference rooms in advance, which is a small but critical feature for a rapidly growing company with limited meeting space.

Google Apps also saves us time. Our data analytics team, for example, uses Google Forms to manage dozens of data requests each day. At Paint Nite, we rely on our data to make decisions or share information — a digital marketing manager needs to know how many cities we operate in for a new advertisement, or our communications team wants to share year-over-year growth figures with the local newspaper. Before they started using Forms, our analysts spent hours each week sorting through requests manually. It was an inefficient and frustrating process. Now, if anyone at Paint Nite needs company data, he or she can submit a request using Google Forms.

As we continue to scale from a local startup to a international brand, it’s crucial that our teams stay connected, whether people are working from our main office, at home or on the road. Google Apps helps us do this while maintaining the close-knit, flexible work environment we've grown to love.



How Infoxchange and Google Maps are empowering Australia’s homeless

Posted by Diana Brown, Product Manager at Infoxchange

Editor's note: This is the fifth in a series of “Mapping a Better World” posts, highlighting organizations using location data to affect positive local and global change. Today’s guest post comes from Diana Brown, Product Manager at Infoxchange, creators of Ask Izzy, a mobile app for Australia’s homeless that connects them with shelter, food and other essential services. The company was founded in a Melbourne garage in 1989.

No one expects to become homeless. For those that do, knowing where to find resources like water, shelter and medical supplies — resources we can’t live without but can take for granted when we have a roof over our head — can be a daily struggle.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his wife Lucy Turnbull speak with a former homeless man who helped consult on Ask Izzy. 

In Australia, 1 in 200 people are homeless, but 80 percent of them have a smartphone. We realized that these smartphones could act as lifeline to basic resources, providing real-time information about nearby services, including services that offer food and shelter. That’s how we came up with the idea for the Ask Izzy app.
With the help of Google Maps APIs, Ask Izzy gives homeless people information about over 350,000 vital nearby services such as shelter, food, needle exchanges, employment resources, technology facilities like Wi-Fi and charging stations, legal and financial advice. The Places API allows us to suggest specific destinations and services based on a user's current location. We can tell a user how far away various services are with the Distance Matrix API and provide transit options with the Directions API.
We work closely with those who have overcome homelessness to understand the specific needs of the homeless population and provide the best access to resources. We also collaborate with the service providers who help meet these specific needs.

None of the benefits provided by Ask Izzy would be possible without our partners, whose cutting-edge technology we depend on every day. We’re thrilled to call Google a partner and we look forward to growing our working relationship and doing more to address the needs of our users.

St Kilda Mums helps mums, powered by Google Apps for Work

Posted by Mary Gourley, Google for Work, Public Sector (and proud mum of three)

For all the amazing things mums do, they deserve much more than just one day to recognize their greatness. As Sunday approaches, Google Australia is celebrating an organization that makes Mother’s Day an everyday affair.
St Kilda Mums provides new and pre-loved baby goods to mothers in need. What began as a living room operation seven years ago has grown to four warehouses and more than 1,000 volunteers accepting and distributing nursery gear to thousands of families.



So what’s their secret superpower for supporting thousands of mums across Melbourne? Technology. Products like Google Forms and Drive on mobile devices and desktops allows St Kilda Mums to organise incoming donations and better coordinate logistics across the network of staff, social workers and volunteers. The requests are received instantly in the warehouse, matched with the donated stock and dispatched to the family in need.
We're proud to play a small role in enabling St Kilda Mums through Google Apps for Work. We applaud the staff at St Kilda Mums, volunteers and all the mothers out there who keep the world turning with their love and power. And to all my fellow working mums, you’re my heroes!

Happy Mother’s Day from all of us at Google Australia.

Shoes of Prey embraces a “design your own” experience for bespoke shoes and workplace technology

Posted Mike Knapp, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Shoes of Prey

Editor's note: Today’s guest post is by Mike Knapp, Co-founder and Co-CEO of Shoes of Prey. Shoes of Prey creates handmade, bespoke women’s shoes designed by the customer.
Like a lot of tech companies these days, Shoes of Prey started as an exchange of ideas between a few friends — in my case, casual discussion with longtime friends from college, Michael and Jodie Fox. That day, a little magic happened for us when we landed on an idea that would spark interest for customers around the world — an online platform built to inspire creativity and truly honor individual expression. Shoes of Prey allows customers to design their own made-to-order shoes from anywhere via our online store, as long as they have Wi-Fi access.

The flexibility and freedom to be as creative with our personal expression as we choose is at the core of what we offer to customers, and we want the same from our workplace technology. We use cloud-based tools like Google Apps that allow employees to work how they want, from wherever they please.

Sharing information is particularly crucial now that we’re a global team with offices in the U.S., the Philippines, Australia, Japan and China. We save thousands of dollars we’d otherwise spend on travel by meeting face-to-face over Google Hangouts and working simultaneously in shared Google Docs.

Being able to write a document with people in three different offices at the same time is incredibly powerful. We compile our weekly global newsletter in a single shared Doc. Each team contributes its updates when ready, and there’s no need for multiple meetings and back-and-forth email attachments. Most teams share their weekly meeting notes in Docs as well.

We also use Google Sheets to manage financial budgeting across teams and have a singled shared master Sheet to track monthly expenses and cash flow. Each team updates its expenses in a designated Sheet and then the team lead or manager updates the master, which is access-controlled.

With Google Apps, we can maintain a highly collaborative culture and keep our data secure. Thanks to sophisticated sharing settings in Docs, we’re able to share customer and employee information only with intended recipients, grant specific permissions and adjust who has access even after sharing a link. We know that we have Google’s security experts watching out for us, which gives us peace of mind.

We’ve grown our company using Google Apps from day one, and I can’t imagine working any other way. Once you've worked this way, there’s no other way to work. And we’ve saved thousands of dollars by not having to hire people to manage servers or perform software updates, as these are automated with Google. Google Apps keeps our talented workforce from getting bogged down with outdated or mundane processes so that it can continue to create the best experience — and shoes — for our customers.

BigChange Apps improves mobile workforce productivity using Google Maps APIs

Posted Martin Port, BigChange Apps CEO

Editor's note: Today we hear from Martin Port, BigChange Apps CEO. Read how BigChange Apps helps its customers improve mobile workforce productivity, efficiency and their bottom line with Google Maps APIs.

Many companies that require fleet and workforce tracking waste too much time, money and fuel managing their mobile workforces because they’re using old technology, manual reporting or paper-based systems. At BigChange Apps, we set out to change that by building a mobile workforce management platform called JobWatch that combines a back-office application, vehicle-tracking and mobile apps for drivers. The platform connects a company’s back-office processes to their mobile workforce while also allowing their end-customer to place new bookings, check the ETA and status of existing jobs and even view historical information and documents such as invoices. Companies can manage jobs and create reports in real time directly from JobWatch, improving workforce productivity and eliminating manual processes like providing paper project quotes.

Maps are at the heart of what we do — they power the mobile apps for drivers and our back-office web app for dispatchers and other staff. When we started, we used a different mapping solution. But it wasn’t keeping up by adding new features. Pricing was too complex, and we couldn’t get the help we needed. So we switched to Google, which gave us great tools in Google Maps APIs and advice on how to use them to improve JobWatch. And since Google Maps sets the standard for the way people interface with maps, we spent less time training our customers how to use JobWatch.

The back-office web app uses the Google Maps Javascript API for its Maps tab, which lets our customers track vehicles in real-time. Dispatchers can see where all their resources are. So if there’s a problem out in the field, they can immediately send help by dispatching someone nearby.

On the drivers’ side, the iOS mobile app for drivers is powered by the Google Maps SDK for iOS, and the Android app uses the Google Maps Android API.
We’re big fans of the Google Maps Distance Matrix API, the Google Maps Directions API and the predictive travel time feature because they help our dispatchers more efficiently schedule drivers. When customers call asking when a driver will be arriving, dispatchers can give them an exact time.

What’s also great about Google Maps APIs is they integrate so well with other systems, like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. We’ve built a widget that imports contacts, then passes them through the Google Maps Geocoding API, which translates addresses into geographic coordinates so they can be more accurately mapped.

JobWatch means big savings for our customers — in two recent customer case studies, our customers have reported a 10 percent reduction in fuel use, 10 hours less of travel time per mobile worker per month, an extra four jobs finished per driver per month and eight hours of office administration time saved per mobile employee. Happy customers translate into growth for us — our revenue grew from £337,000 in 2013 to £2 million in 2015. By 2020, we forecast having £4 million in recurring annual revenue. For that, we have Google Maps to thank, by providing the tools to help us build a single platform uniting drivers and the back office.



UK County Council ranked first for flexible working with Google Apps for Work

Posted by Tonino Ciuffini, Head of Information Assets, Warwickshire County Council, Warwick, UK

Editor's note: Today we hear from Tonino Ciuffini, Head of Information Assets at Warwickshire County Council, the local authority for Warwickshire, UK. The council handles social care, highways, public health, the fire service, economic development, education and more for the region’s 540,000 citizens. Read how £260,000 a year is just the start of their savings with Google Apps for Work.


The best thing about the work we do is the sheer range of ways we help people. While one group works to bring broadband to small businesses, another will tackle a fire or care for children in need. So when the government cut our council budget by 20%, we knew we faced tough decisions. For IT in particular, a £2,000,000 cut to our budget meant we had to look at all options for new ways of operating, and helped drive the decision to replace our 20-year-old email system. But it wasn’t just about saving money in the short-term. We wanted to share our facilities more effectively, improve the flexibility of our IT for staff and make it easier to work with external partners. Google was a perfect fit.
 
Tomino Ciuffini, Head of Information, Assets, Warwickshire County Council
Deploying 5,500 Google Apps accounts was much easier than I had imagined. With the help of Cloud Technology Solutions, who provided migration tools, advice and support, we migrated 3,000 users in just 8 weeks. Now Google Apps saves us £260,000 a year that we would have spent on our old system: £100,000 on licenses, £100,000 on infrastructure and £60,000 on support staff. But the really significant savings go deeper than that, and come from efficiencies made right across the organisation.

Saving time by working together on Drive. Instead of multiple versions of a document flying around on email, or saving documents to unrestricted servers, staff can work together on a single document on Drive, comment, make changes, choose their own access settings and even share documents with external agencies. This has also led to increased collaboration between staff and teams.

 The mobility of web-based apps frees office space. We now have the flexibility to not only work from home or elsewhere, but to also work more closely with customers and partners. When working on-site with the police or health workers, council staff can essentially take the office with them.

 Saving on transport costs with Hangouts. Face-to-face meetings with the citizens we serve are still important, but cutting out the financial and time costs of travelling to internal meetings generates further savings.

Cutting bureaucracy with Docs and Sheets. Taking notes during meetings on Docs eliminates the need to type notes afterwards. Everyone can leave comments, which improves accuracy and transparency, and voting with Forms gives us immediate, presentable results in Sheets.

Google logins make working simple. We no longer waste time dealing with forgotten passwords or typing separate logins into different applications. And being able to use multiple logins on a single device saves money on hardware, too: teams going to trade shows can share a single Nexus 9 tablet and log in simultaneously instead of using one device each.

Automatic upgrades saves on IT maintenance and keep us ahead of developments. In the four years that we’ve used Google Apps, every upgrade has felt like a natural evolution, and we’ve never had to implement new training to accommodate changes.

Google Apps has improved our effectiveness, too. Our team of four roadworks inspectors use Apps on tablets to be on the road for 80% instead of 50% of their day, significantly improving compliance with timetables for roadworks. And our family social workers use Calendar to advance safety by ensuring teams know where they are.

We also use notes on Drive to improve security and save paper with digital notes. At the top of our organisation, most of our elected county councillors have other jobs and don't work in our offices. Now they use Google Apps on a device of their choice, instead of clunky remote access systems, and check in more often to keep track of progress.

Budget cuts made life complicated for everyone at the council, but satisfaction with our IT system has actually increased during this difficult period. In the year we introduced Google Apps, our staff satisfaction scores increased in all 55 categories of an independent benchmarking run by a UK society of public service IT organisations called SOCITM. And last year, we ranked number one out of 60 UK councils in the SOCITM benchmarking survey for flexible working practices. That flexibility generates real savings without compromising on quality, and it was all made possible by Google Apps for Work.

Environmental Defense Fund finds methane leaks and helps slow climate change using Google Maps APIs

Posted by Cassie Ely, Manager in the Office of Chief Scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund

Editor's note: This is the third post in our “Mapping a Better World” series, highlighting organizations using location data to affect positive local and global change. Today’s guest blogger is Cassie Ely, Manager in the Office of Chief Scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund. Read how the organization uses Google Maps APIs to help combat climate change by locating methane leaks underneath city streets.


The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) works to solve the world’s biggest environmental problems through innovative public policies, robust science and cross-cutting partnerships with leading voices in the business community. Our partnership with Google reflects all three approaches.

Most people don’t realize that a major contributor to global warming is methane, the primary component of natural gas. It’s an extremely powerful greenhouse gas: 84 times as impactful as carbon dioxide over a 20-year timeframe. We still need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but cutting the amount of methane emitted into the atmosphere has the power to reduce the rate of global warming when time is of the essence.

EDF staff analyze the methane leak maps for Boston

About 25 percent of the warming we face right now is due to methane. It can be released from biological sources like landfills and cow pastures, but can also come from leaky pipes underneath city streets, delivering the natural gas that heats our homes and provides cooking fuel. We thought that if we could reduce those gas leaks, we could help slow climate change.

To address this issue, we joined forces with Google Earth Outreach to put methane analyzers on Google Street View cars. While the cars drive to capture 360-degree Street View imagery, the analyzers measure the concentration of the methane gas in the air.

The team is also working with a scientist and professor at Colorado State University, Joe von Fischer, to analyze the spikes in methane levels and detect leaks in the underground pipes. We do multiple drive-passes and combine the readings with methane plume lengths and environmental factors to identify the severity of the leaks. We’ve conducted this research in 10 cities, where we’ve mapped over 4,000 methane leaks.
Anyone can visit edf.org/methanemaps to view leak maps of several U.S. cities, such as Boston, MA.



We chose to use Google Maps APIs because they have the design features and flexibility we needed to visualize the data in a way that can be easily understood. Google Maps APIs allow us to map the invisible. We use the Javascript API to build the base layer for our maps and then on top of that, layer the roads where Street View cars drive and the locations where our analyzers detected methane leaks.

With layered mapping, we've shown that there's an average of one leak per mile (in Boston) to one leak every 200 miles (in Indianapolis), demonstrating the effectiveness of techniques like using plastic piping instead of steel for pipeline construction. We hope utilities can use this data to prioritize the replacement of gas mains and service lines (like New Jersey’s PSE&G announced last fall).

Global warming is a huge global threat to all of our ecosystems, our livelihood and our health. It affects everything we do. By making information about methane leaks transparent, we’re providing a unique way for utilities, regulators and the public to work together and invest in infrastructure improvement and repairs — helping us reach our ultimate goal of combatting climate change.

If you are a nonprofit and interested in staying up to date on grants offerings for Google products like Google Maps APIs, apply to join Google for Nonprofits today.

Spanish gamechanger BQ builds a new way of working with Google Apps

Posted by Adan Muñoz, co-founder and Director of Operations, BQ, Madrid, Spain

Editor's note: Today we hear from Adan Muñoz, co-founder and Director of Operations at BQ, a producer of smartphones, tablets, e-readers, 3D printers and educational robots based in Madrid, Spain. Founded in 2010, BQ now has a global team of more than 1,300 people at offices in Germany, France, Sweden, Russia, Italy and the UK. See how Google Apps for Work has played a central role in BQ’s rapid growth and unique work culture right from the start.

We don’t just want our customers to use our devices, we want them to understand what they’re using. That’s the core idea behind all of our products, whether it’s our “flatpack” 3D printer, our customisable smartphone or Zowi, our educational robot. Our goal is to get people thinking about technology, because the next great idea could come from anyone, anywhere.

With the same emphasis on engagement, we try to run BQ as a team of equals, where everyone has a voice. We know we do our best work when colleagues in design, engineering, technical, marketing and sales are free to bounce ideas off each other. But with 1,300 people at 10 offices, open communication can bring challenges. That’s why we built our business around Google Apps for Work from day one. Its forward-looking, simple and powerful tools have allowed us to shape our ideal working environment and work team.

Transparent and connected, not bureaucratic
  • Drive gives us an open central platform that everyone can access. If we receive product information from a third-party, for example, we save it in Docs for anyone in the organisation who’s interested to read and leave comments or queries. That gives us oversight and transparency so that we can avoid problems before they occur.
  • Instead of an email hierarchy of labels and folders, Gmail’s powerful search lets us find what we need in seconds on any device, and links directly to Docs on Drive and meetings on Hangouts. We don’t need to subdivide and separate projects and personnel, so teams develop more naturally.
Supercharged project management
  • Every prototype we make is run through a series of tests by different groups before teams go back to the drawing board. With Drive, all of the information from every test is immediately available, and because we only have one version of the results on Sheets and Docs, we always know we’re working from the correct files.
  • Google Apps makes it easy to coordinate teamwork. At the beginning of every project, we create a plan of action on Sheets for colleagues to keep track of progress. Rather than trade emails, now when someone wants to organise a meeting they go directly to Calendar, check someone’s availability and create a meeting, adding a link for a video call on Hangouts when they can’t meet in-person but still want that person-to-person time.
One tight team
  • Hangouts allows employees hundred of miles apart to feel that they work in one office. We use Hangouts daily to ensure maximum staff contact while saving on travel costs, video conferencing hardware, telecom bills and even time spent looking up phone numbers.
  • We keep minutes of meetings in Docs so that staff can add to the same document simultaneously and leave comments on the public document after the event.
  • Intuitive interfaces and simple administrative setup mean that when we bring on someone new, we can swiftly integrate them with our team. We even give them a Form asking where they will sit and what materials they need, so that we’re ready for their arrival ahead of time.


Our work at BQ is part of a long-term project. When we teach children how to program and design their own Zowi the robot, we’re not just teaching them basic robotics, we also want to prepare them for a future in which technology will play an ever greater role. Google is the perfect partner for that mission, with its understanding of the fast-evolving tech landscape and the constant updates to its Apps. Ultimately, our goals are aligned: we both want to give people the tools to empower themselves.

Famous Fish by Steve Costi provides a first-ever digital experience for diners

Posted by Jon Sully, Director, Famous Fish

Editor's note: Today we hear from Jon Sully, Director of Famous Fish by Steve Costi, founded by one of Australia’s most renowned seafood families and the first business in the world to adopt end-to-end Google Commercial Chrome technology. Learn how the digital technologies helped boost brand awareness and transaction values by nearly 29% while blending seamlessly with a historic seaside aesthetic.

The Costi family joined the seafood business in 1958, and since then has built a strong reputation for offering up the highest quality seafood. One of the reasons for the family’s continued success has been a focus on innovating and responding to what customers really want. With our latest venture, Famous Fish, we aimed to balance our legacy of seafood expertise with a modern, customer-friendly environment. So we decided to cast our net into the digital world and transform our stores with interactive menu boards and express ordering technologies, a decision that has boosted transaction values by nearly 29%.



Our Famous Fish shops are high-traffic environments, so we needed technology that was robust, responsive and durable, as well as user-friendly. We turned to Nuon, a strategic partner of digital signage leader AOPEN. Nuon recommended Google Commercial Chrome due to its reliability and security. 

 The Google Commercial Chrome Technology hardware and software platform, developed by both Google and AOPEN, had recently been released. It’s designed for high performance and manageability as well as high-use and quick service retail and restaurant environments like ours. And Nuon believed the solution could be deployed rapidly and cost effectively. It was exactly the solution we were looking for.


Combining self-service touch screens with dynamic menu boards, the Commercial Chrome technology is already providing a huge return on investment. We’re seeing a noticeable increase in brand awareness and a large boost in customer spend.

At our newly opened Fountain Gate franchise, our average transaction value is 28.7% higher when customers have the autonomy and time to consider their purchase, ordering on their own in-store kiosk using the express ordering option. We’re confident that as customers become even more familiar with the self-ordering technology, the response will be even greater.
And the benefits of this new solution go beyond awareness and sales. Since we’re expanding rapidly, being able to centrally manage the Commercial Chrome Devices is key to our growth. Google’s Chrome Device Management has made central management easy and effective.

We also love that Google/AOPEN Commercial Chromebase products blend in a stylish and attractive way with our seaside design aesthetic. We wouldn’t have bet before actually seeing it that this digital technology would sit so comfortably alongside our weathered white timber panelling, beach murals and miscellaneous fishing paraphernalia. The digital technologies that have modernized our restaurant leave the personality and history of our brand completely in tact.

Famous Fish, Fountain Gate, in Melbourne is the first store to use the Google/AOPEN Commercial Chrome platform. Since that deployment has been such a success, we’ll deploy the technology in other stores very soon following the Fountain Gate blueprint.

Phase2 brings its “everywhere” teams closer together, saving time and money with Chromebox for meetings

Posted by Frank Febbraro, CTO, Phase2 Technology

Editor's note: Today’s guest post is by Frank Febbraro, CTO of Phase2 Technology, which helps clients such as Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer and Harvard Business School manage the way content is created, shared and experienced online. See how Phase2 Technology saves $3,000 a day and more than 100 hours a week by using Chromebox for meetings.


From the day we launched, we designed Phase2 Technology as a company that welcomed people who didn’t work on-site. In fact, we like to say we have five locations: New York, Washington, D.C., Portland, San Francisco and “everywhere” — a solid 25 percent of our employees work remotely. Because of this, we build our teams without worrying about where people are. A project lead in Portland might team up with people in Austin or Oklahoma City.

The most talented people don’t necessarily live near our offices, but that shouldn’t stand in the way of giving clients our best work. We rely on technology like Chromebox for meetings to bring down the barriers that get in the way of distributed teams working together.
Before we discovered Chromeboxes, the audiovisual situation for our meetings seemed like an insurmountable barrier.

Every video conference began as a comedy of errors: if we scheduled a half-hour meeting, we had to build in 10 minutes to struggle with the AV setup. We tried cobbling together configurations of cameras and mics, but nothing created the one-click system we needed. There were too many settings for employees to manage and too much tinkering around to get the meetings going. Plus, every room had a different system and settings. With five or so people in every meeting losing ten minutes on AV setup struggles, and those people meeting with others several times a day, we wasted dozens of hours every week. Over the course of a year, this translated into tens of thousands of dollars of lost time spent not delivering value to our clients.

All this changed when we brought Chromebox for meetings to eight conference rooms among our four offices. There’s no learning curve: people walk into a room and click one button on the Chromebox remote to start the meeting. We already use Google Hangouts and Google Calendar, so Chromebox fits in with the tools we know. We now work more fluidly, since we can start ad hoc meetings without worrying about cameras, mics and settings.

Chromebox for meetings saves time for our teams as they meet and also benefits our IT team. The management console lets us choose how the Chromeboxes operate, and those settings apply to every room and every meeting. Compared to conferencing systems that cost several thousand dollars per room, Chromebox for meetings costs much less and is much easier to set up and use. Achieving this ease at scale is critical for us — each employee might do as many as 10 Hangouts a day; multiply that by 140 people, and we’re spending about 450 hours on Hangouts daily.

Efficiency and time management are especially critical for a business like ours, which makes money by billing hourly and delivering excellent, efficient client service. We’ve reduced our IT costs for maintaining meeting rooms to just about zero. We used to spend about four hours a month per room on maintaining our old AV setups. We now spend about one hour per month total on all rooms — from 32 hours a month on maintenance down to just one hour.

We can do more with so much less now. Better meetings help us get rid of distractions so we can get right down to business, no matter where in the world our teams are.