• Strengthen the brand through a unified Google Drive account

• Transforms ‘business as usual’ by enabling real time collaboration using Google Meet, Google Chat, Google Drive, etc

• Supports internal communication practices using corporate Gmail accounts to keep Comdata branding consistent globally

• Enables recruitment, training & coaching, and management of Work at Home teams and remote training of staff using Google Meet

• Enables our capacities to innovate to provide digital embedded solutions

Looking back at changes in consumer behaviour one year after the first COVID-19 lockdowns, a global survey reveals how people are changing the ways they engage with brands. While some findings suggest challenges for brands, such as a drop in brand loyalties among younger consumers, others present opportunities for future growth. And because changes are likely to last beyond COVID-19, businesses that can adapt to meet them are likely not only to survive today, but also thrive in the post-pandemic world. Enter Comdata, the customer management outsourcing experts helping brands to place customers at the heart of their businesses.

Comdata’s joined-up services enhance the relationship between brands and their consumers, providing the best blend of people, process, and technology to ensure outstanding customer interactions at every stage of their journey. That means providing top-class customer service, acquisition, retention, credit management and technical support, through to front and back-office solutions that reduce operating costs, streamline processes and boost performance. And there’s clearly a demand for Comdata’s offers, with the company generating $1 billion revenue in 2020/2021 alone.

As the result of a series of mergers and acquisitions in EMEA and Latam, Comdata has expanded to a team of 50,000 people, working in 30 languages across 130 sites in 21 countries. But Comdata also faced a challenge, largely as the result of its own success: "We’re now a huge team working in offices across the world, and it can be difficult to maintain communication internally, let alone a consistent experience and share best practices to improve our solutions and services delivered to our clients," says Patrice Mazoyer, Chief Transformation & Integration Officer at Comdata. "We’re working in different languages with specialist local knowledge, which is a real strength for Comdata, but we also inherited more than 10 different email addresses, website domains, and ways of working. This made it impossible to quickly connect with colleagues when we needed to solve a problem."

As a company that places the wellbeing of customers and employees at its heart, the situation was unacceptable for Comdata, which looked to Google Workspace in 2019 for a solution. "After benchmarking various options, Google Workspace was clearly the best for unifying our global team on just one platform with a comprehensive set of productivity and collaboration tools that we can rely on every day," Mazoyer explains of the decision.

Comdata initially planned to roll out Google Workspace to its staff over the course of six months, with support from Google Cloud Premier partner, Nubalia. But when COVID-19 hit in early 2020, Comdata, like many businesses, had to adapt. Mazoyer says: "It’s been a big challenge for our industry. We moved 45,000 people globally from our call centers and offices to their homes, so we had to reinvent the way we train and support a really large global team almost overnight."

As a result, Comdata decided to speed up its rollout process by creating Google Workspace accounts for its 41,000 staff in just three month. This, in turn, enabled the company to start leveraging its new tools to support its global staff remotely. "Previously, we conducted customer support training in meeting rooms in each country," Mazoyer explains. "When COVID-19 arrived, we switched to remote working, and thanks to Google Meet our global teams were able to continue receiving training and support while complying with lockdown restrictions and working safely from home and on site if requested.."

Google Meet has also changed the way Comdata interacts with its clients, who are no longer able to travel to their offices to meet with the team supervising their business due to safety measures implemented during the pandemic. As a business that specializes in managing customer interactions, being able to hear from clients directly is another key component in Comdata’s ability to deliver a world-class service. Mazoyer adds: "When it became impossible to have in-person meetings, which are so important to our business, Google Meet enabled us to maintain a close connection with our clients. It became central to our operations."

By early 2021, Google Workspace had been deployed as the central pillar for Comdata’s ongoing digital transformation, a process created to ensure that it continues to maintain the high quality of services its clients and their customers expect, while allowing the business to further expand. "Uniting our team on Google Workspace has fundamentally transformed the way we conduct business," shares Mazoyer. That’s because, he explains, Google Workspace is enabling seamless collaboration between Comdata colleagues by breaking down the geographical borders between them.

Before making the switch to Google Workspace, collaborating quickly and effectively among teams working in different locations presented a problem. "We work for clients across the world," says Mazoyer, "and we have international teams routinely working together on proposals. If I wanted to reach the HR department in a different country, to share a file for example, we have to send it as an email attachment, which was time consuming and often resulted in problems accessing files stored on different systems. Being able to access the same information instantly on Google Drive, and to work together on the same Google Docs, Google Sheet and Google Slides in real time, means our work has become much easier and more efficient."

The nature of Comdata as an organisation, as well as the work that it undertakes on behalf of its clients, means that good communication is vital for the business to function effectively. "If you don’t have a unified email system, communicating with 50,000 people at once becomes very difficult," says Mazoyer. "And if such day-to-day communications were challenging, planning and implementing strategic changes to improve the business was virtually impossible. One year ago, Comdata’s IT directors for various countries didn’t know one another, let alone talk," he adds. "Now, with collaborative tools like Gmail and Google Drive, these directors have been able to work together on the company’s IT roadmap."

And it’s not just internal communication that’s improved as a result. Comdata’s business is driven by customer interactions, and it's here that Gmail is making the most tangible difference. It allows Comdata’s staff to share information and answer customer enquiries in a consistent way around the world, no matter who customers speak to. "Instead of a group made up of multiple companies, Google Workspace enabled us to become a unified company that can work together seamlessly and effectively," Mazoyer explains.

Comdata is now building on what it’s learned from seamlessly communicating and collaborating across the world, using Google Workspace to better support the customers it serves on behalf of client brands. Next, Comdata plans to make use of more Google Cloud solutions so that it can help even more brands to provide exceptional customer interactions.

Comdata Digital, the practice across the world that aims to provide digital and cutting-edge solutions to brands, draws on AI and analytics services to develop new products and services for clients. "Everything we’re doing with our digital transformation is powered by our collaboration tools. Google Workspace lets us tap into advanced technologies to improve internal processes, present ourselves consistently externally, and further develop our services," says Mazoyer. "And this is just the beginning, which is very exciting."