Collaboration is at the heart of today's workplace transformation. That is the view of Sam Dickert, founder and principal consultant at Australian technology company Peak Insight, who says the rapid evolution of working practices has forced organisations to rethink how they connect, communicate, and support their teams.
Dickert, whose firm specialises in Cisco-based collaboration, contact centre solutions and connectivity, has watched as the world of work has shifted beyond all recognition in the past year. "We really enable teams to work together effectively whether they're at home, mobile or returning to the office," he said. "From a contact centre perspective, we're about enabling organisations to provide great customer experiences, and from a connectivity side, we provide secure, easy to manage, cost-effective network and Wi-Fi solutions."
What differentiates Peak Insight, Dickert explained, is its consultative, outcome-driven approach. "We take a consulting-led and adoption-driven approach to working with our clients," he said. "We love to have a business conversation, let that drive the technology, and then have adoption services at the end of it to make sure the business is really adopting the tech as it was intended when it was purchased."
This strategy has helped Peak Insight build a strong reputation, not only through direct client engagements but through partnerships with larger telecommunications providers and professional services firms. "We work a lot with partners, so we work with large carriers such as Telstra and other professional services businesses," Dickert said.
The reshaping of the workplace has led to a flurry of innovation at the company, with the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and the push for hybrid working acting as a catalyst. "The hybrid workplace is really top of mind," Dickert said. "Especially now, businesses are considering how they safely return employees to the office. There's a lot of focus on things like touchless join for meeting rooms, or letting people know when there are too many people in a meeting room that should be socially distanced."
Utilising investments made during the pandemic, organisations are now seeking more seamless interoperability between different meeting technologies, Dickert explained. "They want to leverage that to be able to join the meeting technology that their partners, customers, or in some cases employees, use in different locations. It's all about providing a great experience in office."
Key, he said, is providing equality of experience for employees regardless of location. "You have your workforce in the office, you have the mobile, and you have them working from home. But you want those participants in meetings to be able to fully participate, to consume high-quality video, audio, and easily share content, annotate that content and whiteboard," Dickert noted. "An equality of experience across those different scenarios can really help from a collaboration side."
The changing nature of customer service has also influenced Peak Insight's focus. "Really, businesses are looking to enable their customers to use a channel of choice, so whether they engage via web chat, email, SMS or even the old phone call to the business… enabling those businesses to cater for that," Dickert said. A flexible approach for agents is also now essential. "Enabling them to easily have their agents work from wherever they may be - not necessarily in the office anymore - is fundamental."
For many organisations, simplifying complexity and moving to cloud systems is the key takeaway from recent upheavals. "A lot of businesses are looking to simplify the complexity of their existing on-premise investments and really take the benefit of the cloud to do things like enable mobility, flexibility and support the hybrid workplace," Dickert said. "Operational complexity and support challenges can really be simplified by the move to cloud as well."
Developing tools to support these shifts, Peak Insight's product teams have launched a global cloud platform offering real-time and historical reporting for Cisco Webex Calling and enabling contact centre capabilities. "Our teams actually established a global cloud platform that we've developed to be an add-on to Cisco Webex Calling," Dickert said. "It enables real-time and historical reporting, and enables customers to run a basic contact centre in Webex Calling, and really get some of that visibility that they're used to."
The new platform, known as Peak Wallboard for Webex Calling, is gaining traction internationally. "We've got a number of customers in Australia and in the US now, and it's being rolled out globally, which is quite exciting," Dickert said.
Despite this global reach, Peak Insight remains solidly rooted in its Melbourne home. "We founded Peak Insight here in Melbourne and our head office is based on Trove Street," he said. "We've actually got an experience centre there as well, which has been really good for demonstrating collaboration and the hybrid workplace, and having customers actually come in and experience some of those scenarios."
The company's core team is distributed across Australia, Dickert added, and all support resources are kept onshore. "We have team members in almost every state now and they're all onshore resources from a support perspective," he said. "But we do work in conjunction closely with partners who provide installation services and specialised AV services here in Australia as well."
The industry has taken note of Peak Insight's achievements. The company was named the top performer in the CRN Fast 50 for 2020 and also took out the Cisco Bridging Collaboration Challenge in the Asia-Pacific region. "It's been fantastic recognition for the team last year to have been awarded a number of wins," Dickert said. "We're also a finalist in the Telstra Enterprise Partner of the Year and the Telstra Cisco Partner of the Year for 2020, so very excited with those awards - and we'll try and keep that up in 2021, let's see."
For those looking to engage with Peak Insight, Dickert had clear advice: "We'd love to have a chat."
