From its Dunedin headquarters Crest Clean provides commercial cleaning services to almost 4,000 customers across New Zealand. General Manager of Administrative Services Jacqui Hannagan explains how fibre has allowed the company to improve internal services and enabled easy collaboration with their team who are spread  throughout the country.

What does Crest Clean do?

We are a franchised commercial cleaning business running a team of more than 1790 personnel throughout the country. We set ourselves apart with centralised training, information systems, marketing and quality assurance programmes.

How has improved connectivity with fibre broadband changed your business?

The biggest opportunity for us has been the upgrade of our Customer Relationship Management software, which was made super easy when we moved to the cloud. Every part of our business operates through our CRM system and once we knew the software could sit in the cloud and not on a server we took the opportunity to update it. That means that eventually when we expand further we can replicate our customised CRM everywhere we operate.

We take jobs through our 0800 number, enter them in the CRM and then share them with 32 staff spread around the country who receive all the details on their tablets. Having access to gigabit internet speed means there’s no delay in getting the job information into the field so it can be allocated and actioned quickly.

We’ve noticed how easy it is to use our business collaboration tools too. In the past Skype used to drop out. Now we use Skype for Business with a number of people online at our office and at sites around the country and share documents with ease.

In the office we’ve lost the ‘lunchtime go slow’, when we used to find connectivity frustrating when lots of the team jumped on the net to check out the news.

What opportunities is firbre opening up for your business in the future?

Voice over IP is the next technology we plan to take advantage of. We’ll look at this a bit further down the track once we have implemented the full upgrade on our CRM system. One change at a time!

What would you say to businesses considering connecting to fibre or gigabit fibre?

Why wouldn’t you? I don’t see why any business wouldn’t take advantage of the opportunity, particularly if they have staff spread across multiple sites.