WATCH NOW: How Spektrix continues to deliver client success while rapidly scaling in a remote world

While a number of big-name companies are attempting to drive remote workforces back to the office, the reality is that for the majority of businesses flexible working is here to stay—with remote working becoming more commonplace as technology continues to improve.

Increased employee satisfaction, productivity, and access to a global talent pool are all great reasons for businesses to consider flexible working, but if a company is in a period of growth it can throw up a few challenges.

In the latest episode of Zendesk’s Speaker Spotlight, box office and theatre ticketing software provider Spektrix shares how the company has increased productivity and client satisfaction while rapidly scaling across two continents.

The software-as-a-service Spektrix provides arts and cultural businesses in the UK and North America with ticketing, marketing, and fundraising tools, while also offering training and consultancy—with a key focus on supporting its clients to be successful.

Strategy and Operations Lead, Charlie Whitworth, joined the UK-headquartered Spektrix 14 years ago and has seen the company go through an incredible journey, including breaking into North America and surviving the pandemic, which has resulted in remote working becoming the norm for Spektrix.

“There’s been an awful lot of change,” says Whitworth, who has watched the CX department transition from a small, cohesive team to a larger, distributed workforce.

“Each of those changes has led to a different challenge in regards to how do you keep sharing good practice? And how do you keep sharing the Spektrix way of how we want to talk to our clients?”

One such change included a complete restructure of how its client success teams operate. Previously, the division was split into two, with the UK team managing around 400 clients with North American managing 200.

“[In the early days] when I was answering the phones you’d speak to the same people regularly. You knew the organisations you were working with like the back of your hand. And you know what their challenges and opportunities were.”

Whitworth says asking an employee today to have that same context across hundreds of different organisations is impossible.

“And because people are working more remotely than going into the office, there wasn’t that context being picked up from people sat next to each other,” he adds.

“So we really had to pivot and think how are we going to have something that’s still scalable, but is going to also going to allow us to have some of the benefits of having smaller teams?”

Last October, Spektrix pooled it’s clients and split its success team into smaller groups. Each team looks after a pool of similar businesses, for instance, commercial venues, museum attractions and touring theatre companies would be grouped separately.

“We now have teams of around 10 who are dealing with around 100 clients each, rather than having to have context for 400.”

The restructure has allowed teams to build personal relationships, and understand the challenges clients are facing and begin to standardise approaches.

Spektrix has seen that tickets now take more of an advisory approach as teams build their knowledge, and from CSAT surveys Whitworth is seeing further results: “We’re seeing far more of people resonating with the fact that they keep getting through to the same people.”

“It’s been a big challenge getting that to work from a tech level, and Zendesk has been a huge part of that and it’s been really positive for us.”

To watch the full conversation and learn more about keeping up CX standards while scaling a business, click here.