From Kiwi start-up to global success: How Virsae is improving employee experience worldwide

 |   Microsoft New Zealand News Centre

Virsae began in 2013 with the goal of improving employee experience. Almost 10 years on and the company has helped hundreds of employers provide better work environments for their staff. Now, with its innovative service management system, Virsae is helping employees across the globe seamlessly transition to hybrid working. 

We’ve all experienced the frustration of a frozen screen, a disjointed call or the dreaded loading circle. For a CEO, that means embarrassing and disrupted board meetings. For employees, the disruption of troubleshooting means less time talking to customers or tackling that endless to-do list. For a doctor and their patient, the breaking up of a call is the difference between proper care and a misdiagnosis.

Although these issues have always existed, the transition to hybrid working has amplified them tenfold, as an increasing number of employees are attempting enterprise level work with consumer-grade set-ups. In fact, by 2024 over 600 million employees will be working remotely. In the office, employers can make sure their staff have strong connectivity, internet speeds and ISPs, but from home this visibility is lost – and you can’t fix a problem you can’t see.

Introducing Virsae

Originally founded in 2013, Virsae’s service management was ahead of its time. Founders Tony Jayne and Ross Williams, having spent 20 years working in engineering and communications platforms support across the Asia Pacific region, realised the need for a next-generation service management solution. They set out to create a system that would offer more visibility into people’s work-set ups, combine data and insights to improve employee experience and improve service agility all with reduced service costs.  That system is now known as Virsae Service Management (VSM).

After two decades of using UC management programs with complex software installations, Tony and Ross knew there had to be a more efficient way to empower their customers and partners. They took the old adage of “the sky’s the limit” and aimed for the cloud, investing in the new platform on the block at the time, Microsoft Azure.

When working on a device, there are many factors that contribute to the employee and customer experience. VSM gathers billions of data points from background noise to computer speed and network connectivity, utilising Microsoft Azure, machine learning and artificial intelligence to provide insights into what’s working and what’s not in an employee’s workspace. The system highlights to employers where’s best to invest in their people and technology to help fix issues before they become a bigger problem, increasing employee wellness and assisting with productivity.

This local Kiwi start-up caught the attention of New Zealand’s biggest players from the very start, signing up with government agencies, large manufacturers and retailers, and insurance provider IAG.

Going global

In less than a year, the news of Virsae’s innovative service management made it overseas and the company had signed-up industry leading distributors in Europe and America, including Westcon and Arrow S3. As demand for VSM grew, so did the need for a bigger team, creating roles for more than 30 employees.

By 2015 Virsae was already processing at least two billion transactions a month – 85 per cent of which were from international markets. With their sights set on furthering relationships within the global market, the Virsae team knew they were ready to take their business to the next level.

Virsae’s hard work hadn’t gone unnoticed, in June 2016 the company won its first award at the 2016 Air New Zealand Cargo Export NZ Awards “TNT Express Emerging Exporter of the Year”. Not long after they won Homegrown ISV of the Year at the Reseller News ICT Industry Awards.  They kicked off 2017 with a bang, being listed as one of the fastest growing technology companies on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500™ Asia Pacific for the previous year. With increasing customer demand, a solid reseller network and scalable Azure based technology, Virsae was just getting started. In as little as two years, Virsae had more than tripled the number of transactions it was processing, now up to seven billion every month from thousands of end-users across the globe.

With customers at the heart of all Virsae’s work, in 2018 the company took it upon itself to combat the $38 billion-dollar illegal toll fraud industry, inventing Virsae’s Security Manager. This is essentially a CCTV and alarm system like you would have for your house, but for your devices; it monitors activity and instantly alerts computer owners of suspicious activity so they can avoid a break-in before it happens.

By the end of November 2019 VSM was processing a staggering 12 billion monthly transactions from contact centres and unified communication systems worldwide – 500 million of which were call quality. The data showed that over the course of the past three years, call quality had worsened, down by 23%. This correlated with the slow shift to more people working from cafes or home offices with less reliable internet connections. Then all of a sudden, remote working became a reality for everyone when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and lockdowns rolled out.

VSM Everywhere

In response to this, Virsae launched ‘VSM Everywhere’ a solution specifically designed to support the new way of hybrid working. Wherever staff are based, be it in their home office or on a beach in Thailand, Virsae ensures Unified Communications and Contact Centre environments are operating as they would in the office. This solution builds on VSM to include new analytics on home network performance and headset boom position. Using headset analytics, the service management system can tell when an employee’s audio levels are above the World Health Organisation’s standards and could be damaging their hearing and lets HR know.

This new solution has helped thousands of employees across the globe transition to remote working and was crowned the ‘Standout performer’ in the ‘Most Innovative use of AI’ category at Enterprise Connect, the annual industry summit for enterprise communications and collaboration hosted in Florida, earlier this year.

Better together

When Virsae entered the UK market, there was another visionary cloud communications solution provider on the scene – Formation Tech. Formation Tech strives to help companies create the best modern workplaces for their employees. Or, as Mark Tyers, Co-founder of Formation Tech put it, they ‘make their lives easier’. Similar to Virsae, Formation Tech delivers exceptional customer experiences using the most innovative technology.

With a shared a vision of a consolidated future where all platforms would support each other, it didn’t take long for the two companies to realise they could achieve so much more working together. During the pandemic, when demand for quality remote working environments was at an all-time high, Formation Tech saw an opportunity to improve their services with Virsae’s technology. With VSM as part of their offering, Formation Tech could make sense of real-time data from platforms such as Microsoft Teams to give businesses the ability to address problems they were blind to.  Microsoft’s platforms were already providing Formation with surplus amounts of data, but adding VSM to the mix allowed them to bring all those data points together to understand how employees’ devices were performing and how their work environment could be improved.

“We were thrilled to find a partner that aligned so closely with Virsae’s vision and values and can’t wait to keep on innovating with the Formation Tech team in years to come,” says Ian McCarthy, Director of UK & EMEA Virsae.

“The feedback we’ve gotten is that employee complaints are down and that’s because we are able to prevent problems before they are affected by them,” says Mark Tyers, Co-founder of Formation Tech.

As the world changed overnight, Virsae and Formation Tech embarked on a new mission together to help customers make sense of their new reality and ensure remote working environments are up to the same standard as company offices.

“The gap between making the ‘new normal’ simply ‘normal’ is technology. When we get to the point where we just call it working, not ‘hybrid working’ that’s when we’ve done it,” says Tyers.

Next on the Virsae and Formation Tech team’s agenda is enabling customers with online meetings that feel just as seamless as those in the office. The challenge here is that every attendee joins with a different internet connection, but if anyone can overcome this it’s Virsae and Formation Tech. They are also working on bringing more devices in on an API level, including keyboards, mice and video cameras to capture even more data insight and bring us one click closer to normality.

“It’s great to see two of our partners working together to take full advantage of the analytics provided by Microsoft platforms and improve the day-to-day reality of so many employees globally,” says Hayley Horan, SaaS Partner Lead at Microsoft.