Youa Yang

Analyst Director, Spacetel LLC

Founded in 2011, Spacetel is a premium Cricket Wireless retailer operating over 100 stores throughout the western United States including California, Oregon, Arizona, and Colorado. Its team of over 300 employees provides customers with affordable and reliable mobile phone plans, phones, and accessories.

Supernova Award Category: 
Future of Work: Employee Experience
The Problem: 

Our success as a company relies on a high level of team collaboration and daily reporting across a dispersed workforce; and before developing our system on Zoho, we didn't have tools that matched where we felt the operational efficiency of our 300+ person organization should be. Each team tracked and reported goals differently, and none of it was automated, which made it challenging to address team needs or generate consistent, accurate reports at the district and org-wide level. Onboarding, training, and evaluations were also manual, and each had areas where we could have been saving 50% more time for our staff, making communication clearer, and achieving better business outcomes as a result.

The Solution: 

Zoho Cliq started as our company's core messaging app, but it now plays an expanded role due to its flexibility and interoperability within Zoho's ecosystem. We've customized it to serve as a centralized information hub for employees, a tool to track daily goals for sales teams, and a way for upper management to create and share reports. By creating custom command keys, widgets, and forms, we get structured data that we can use to gain real insights about our business.

From there, we made evaluations, onboarding tasks, and training requests accessible within Cliq through widgets that map back to Zoho People, our core HR app, and Zoho Sites, our internal website for employee resources and training content. The HR team was given a specific command key that links to Zoho People for org-wide announcement blasts in Cliq, and all training was centralized on Zoho Sites through videos and self-led courses.

The Results: 

Efficiency has significantly improved since implementing Zoho. Building off Zoho Cliq and connecting out to Zoho People and Zoho Sites, we have developed industry-specific processes that address the real needs of our employees and managers. 

Sales reps are now able to start their days immediately with an automated task-list to follow. They use a team-specific command key to manage and track goals. Instead of copying, pasting, or manually typing numbers, employees now simply type in their command key at the start and end of the day, enter their goals and achievements, and send.

Management receives the information, and since the command key submissions are preformatted to make entries stand out in the chat, District Managers and upper management can quickly spot and review entries without extra effort. District Managers can also request to have their own customized command keys for their own team's reporting requirements.

Company-wide trainings and announcements are more consistent and faster to share. HR uses command keys integrated with Zoho People to manage bi-weekly time card reminders and send out announcements, either to the entire organization or specific to different team group chats. Before, HR relied on District Managers to forward messages manually, which led to miscommunications and multiple follow-ups that are almost all eliminated now. HR has experienced substantial time savings by utilizing these command keys, enabling them to send important information to all employees with a single click. This automation has not only improved efficiency but also ensured consistency and clarity in our communications.

Other custom forms and widgets in Cliq have decreased the amount of time our employees spend switching between apps. Employee evaluations are now directly filled out through a form in Zoho Cliq, and training requests that link to Zoho People can be made in that same form, so the process is all managed in one place and passed to the right person. Suggestions for upper management, tech support requests, or training files coming from Cricket can also be accessed directly in Cliq. For more expansive trainings that once required dedicated presenters, we now have Zoho Sites where employees can access any training video they need when they need it.

Metrics: 

We’ve cut employee entry time by 50% using market-specific command keys that let employees input daily metrics instantly in Cliq. This information speeds up both the employee workflow and the evaluation process for managers.

For example, managers previously spent an estimated 10–15 minutes submitting their goals, often missing key reporting details. With the use of the commands key and a pre-set form, the process is now anywhere from 33–50% faster depending on the report and ensures that all required data is captured—providing management with the exact numbers they need.

Performance evaluations are conducted quarterly, and this is now 50% faster—from 10 to 5 minutes per review—a significant change when managers conduct evaluations for each of their employees quarterly.

Using Zoho People email notifications in conjunction with Zoho Sign has allowed us to streamline and organize onboarding, reducing the entire process to just 20 minutes.

New Hire Orientation used to require 5 to 6 hours of manual training. Now, with customized training pages and tutorial videos available through Sites, the initial orientation takes just 1 hour, and team members can revisit the training materials anytime.

The Technology: 

Custom widgets, commands, and integrations in Cliq allow employees across teams to access all of their tools and information from one place.

  • Zoho Cliq is the employee hub, used for daily communication, task management, and reporting.
  • Zoho People is utilized by HR for various tasks such as onboarding, training, and evaluations.
  • Zoho Sites hosts our training information and other materials the whole company needs to be able to access easily.
Disruptive Factor: 

Looking at the technology gaps at Spacetel, we thought out-of-the-box and took a unique approach to integrating three Zoho apps to operationalize our EX stack, providing necessary tools to our employees in one central location and gaining real visibility into our organization.

Using the information we gather through Cliq, we're able to more effectively identify what changes need to be made internally, both on the individual and company level. Management can now easily track daily performance across employees and stores using Zoho Cliq. With real-time data on key metrics, managers can quickly identify top performers and areas needing attention, facilitating timely support and recognition.

Shining Moment: 

Retail is an industry that typically does not make use of the data available, especially when workers are spread across locations. Communication tools don't tend to be built as a core part of a business's operations, but employees are using them every day, so we opted to go beyond the basic functionalities of Zoho Cliq as a chat tool and build custom integration between Cliq, Sites, and People that transformed how our employees manage and report on their work. To increase adoption and employee involvement, we worked with the team and district managers during a testing phase to create a command key and offered the opportunity to help with the reporting. District Managers can request to have their own customized command keys for their own team's reporting requirements. This adaptability has streamlined their workflow, making their roles more efficient.

About Spacetel LLC

As a partner and authorized retailer of Cricket Wireless, we share the mission to provide our customers with affordable, reliable, and high quality nationwide wireless service.