Antwerp-based digital innovation agency November Five launches Spencer, a spinoff that has created a digital workplace assistant for employees. The tool, which carries the same name as the startup, alleviates a pain that all employees have felt at one point or the other: having to switch between different programs to take holiday, schedule a meeting, or file an expense note. The young startup is already serving major Belgian corporations such as Telenet, Proximus, and DEME.
Tool-overload causes frustrations at work
The market for enterprise tools is oversaturated, Spencer claims. “Companies are responding to the digital transformation revolution in the business world by implementing a dedicated technology fix for every small task: Book a holiday? Use this tool. Find a phone number on the go? Use that solution. Approve a PO? Pull up that program. The result is a complex and fragmented web of tools, websites, and applications that employees must navigate to complete daily tasks”, the company writes.
Bad user experiences
“This fragmented network is made worse by bad user experiences. Digital native users have high expectations for the navigability of applications, which are not being met. Companies implement enterprise applications with little consideration to the user experience, which creates low adoption amongst employees and causes frustration. Moreover it is a real productivity killer – a 2016 report by Forrester found that 62% of employees delay completing tasks that require logging into multiple systems.”
Spencer was born
From this pain point, Spencer was born. Spencer strives to make employees’ lives easier, by centralizing and synchronizing information from different enterprise tools into a single digital interface; thus, saving times and increasing productivity by eliminating the need to switch between applications.
Modern workforce
“Millennials are a core part of the modern workforce and they have high expectations when it comes to digital interactions. Employees expect the same user experience from their workplace applications as they do from the most cutting edge tech in their private life. Many enterprise tools are frustratingly complicated today, a problem we set out to solve with Spencer,” Spencer’s founder, Tom Vroemans, states. “We think of Spencer like Google Now for large companies – it connects you with the tools and data you need whenever you need it.”
Partnering with large enterprises
Spencer has partnered with Telenet to begin implementing the solution across the company’s 3,200 employees. Teams at BASE Company participated in a pilot project prior to the company’s acquisition by Telenet. “Spencer helps us combine our critical applications into a single, easy-to-use, mobile interface. The result: a more intuitive way-of-working, increased productivity and happier employees,” shares Claudia Poels, Senior VP Human Resources at Telenet
Team
With the support of November Five, Spencer has gone from concept to a fully-fledged startup, with a current team of 8. Management consists of Vroemans, also November Five’s CEO and founder, and Maarten Raemdonck (former exec at Aptus Health) as co-CEO’s.
Spencer – The mobile workplace assistant from November Five on Vimeo.