How Equifax achieved “ruthless collaboration” with Google Workspace

“We see the benefits from Google Workspace every day. We can work together on everything from documents to decks, in real time, all through Google Meet and Chat.” — JK Krug, Vice President of Digital Employee Experience

Snapshot: As one of three credit reporting agencies in the US, Equifax serves millions of consumers and businesses each year to reach their financial goals. Here’s what they’ve accomplished with Google Workspace: 

• Fueling real-time connection and collaboration in 20+ countries 

• Migrated global teams from an on-premises solution to Workspace in 48 hours

• Standardized communication across the company by reaching a 100% adoption rate for Gmail and Google Calendar and sending over 100k Chat messages per day

• Improved access to new applications through a growing catalog of 600+ apps designed with AppSheet

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Mission and challenge

Rethinking 125+ years of business with global, real-time collaboration

Equifax has been in the credit business for more than 125 years. Today, we’re one of three consumer credit reporting agencies in the US, and with the support of our global teams, we strive to help people live their financial best. We do this through credit monitoring and scoring solutions as well as risk management, identity and fraud protection, and financial workforce management tools. 

To make all of this possible, we have to ensure our teams have all of the tools they need to be their best. That’s why in 2019, we began our search for new ways to collaborate. Our goal  was to achieve “ruthless collaboration,” which meant finding a solution that would allow any of us  to connect and work together — from anywhere. We also needed a platform to securely store our data, since  it’s crucial for us to find a balance between securing our teams and providing a delightful user experience. After an extensive bake-off, we found that Google Workspace was the best solution.

Deploying Workspace across more than 20 countries in one weekend

As we started our migration to Workspace, we implemented a comprehensive change management campaign called #betterwork to help our employees adjust to new ways of working. The campaign involved workshops and resources to spread the message about the impact this cultural shift would have on our organization. This also meant we could take our time to clearly understand individual workflows, see how people were working, and show them exactly how they could transition those processes to Workspace.

At launch, we worked with more than 60 members of the Google Cloud team to deploy Workspace in our offices across more than 20 countries in a single weekend. After going live, we continued to support employees with road shows and Q&A sessions, and started an internal best-practices email campaign. It all came together to ensure everyone’s concerns about the transition were addressed and we could fully integrate Workspace into our day-to-day work.

Enabling real-time collaboration from anywhere, on any device

Our #betterwork campaign was all about getting our organization to think “the Google way”; we wanted our collaboration solution to be deeply interconnected, so people could work together from anywhere, on any device, at any time. Today, we’re seeing that philosophy in action across the business. Google Chat is now core to our infrastructure; we send more than 100k Chat messages per day. We’ve also reached a 100% adoption rate for both Gmail and Google Calendar, and our daily active users across the rest of the suite continues to climb.

Google Meet is a core part of how our teams work together. The product has evolved so much in such a short period of time, and those changes and new features have helped us define what “ruthless collaboration” can look like at Equifax. Because Meet is tightly integrated with the rest of Workspace, we can jump into a Meet call without skipping a beat, right from the places we’re already working together in Google Sheets, Slides or Docs.

Security was also a major factor in our decision to switch to Workspace. We wanted to make sure that we had a home for our data to be absolutely secure and a solution that would secure it for us. We’ve completely eliminated concerns over version control and document sharing because we’re more certain about who has access to share what and when, all while still being productive.

We’ve also recently adopted AppSheet and have already built more than 600 apps to fill small use cases throughout the organization. One of the best parts of having a no-code solution built into our existing tech stack is that it’s simple for our IT team to manage because they don’t have to constantly adjust to monitor new endpoints. 

A well-structured, user-friendly ecosystem encourages employees to follow established protocols, further strengthening the organization's overall security posture. By embracing simplification by consolidating solutions in Workspace, we can create a secure and efficient environment that empowers employees to do their best work. And from an IT perspective, we simply have to monitor Workspace through the Admin console.

Providing a world-class customer experience by growing a global team

As Equifax manages new mergers and acquisitions, we’ve been able to repeat our implementation process at a smaller scale to easily integrate those teams into our existing workflows. Being able to scale and adapt our initial adoption and implementation plans has been vital for unifying our business across countries and languages as well. With all of our global teams so well connected, we can more easily deliver on our promises to both employees and customers, and ensure that all of our data is secure and protected as we work together.