“We needed a seamless IT system that would enable our employees to work well and uninterrupted; and we needed a high resilience, supportive partner who understood our needs and empowered us to achieve our goals”. 

N21 is a global performance marketing group whose mission is to activate better e-commerce results for brands around the globe. The group works with some of the most forward-thinking, dynamic brands and employs some of the most talented affiliate marketers to help these brands prosper. 

Since its people are its power, N21 needs to provide its employees with flexible, innovative and bespoke technology. 

Unfortunately, before partnering with Cobry, this was not the case for N21. It’s reliance on legacy IT infrastructure meant that huge costs and inefficiencies were incurred. Meanwhile, employees were growing increasingly fatigued by endless IT issues and downtime. To add fuel to the fire, remote work (which is essential for the employees of a globally dispersed organisation) was complicated by VPN requirements and trying to book a meeting room was made near impossible due to inadequate software. 

All in all, N21’s IT setup was not adding value for its employees. Something had to be done. 

How Cobry helped

As always at Cobry, we started by getting to know Silverbean, their unique needs and what they wanted to achieve. 

A cost-effective, efficient and reliable IT infrastructure

Previously, N21 was operating with on-premise servers which were extremely expensive, unsustainable and unreliable - often leaving employees unable to work due to non exhaustive IT issues and downtime. To solve these problems, Cobry migrated N21 to Google Workspace - a cloud-first IT solution. Thanks to this move, N21’s team could enjoy the luxury of Google’s 99.9% uptime guarantee and get work done, assured that they wouldn’t be running into any unwanted IT issues. 

In addition, N21 works hard to be more sustainable by working closely with Ecologi, and carries out many amazing activities such as carbon offsetting. Their move to Google Workspace - the greenest cloud in the industry - nicely compliments this work. Not only was N21 now working better, but also more sustainably. 

Seamless collaboration for a remote team 

As a team which spans across many regions and countries, effective collaboration is essential for success at N21. Unfortunately, on N21’s previous IT setup, this was infeasible. The team weren’t able to share docs or important files with one another, and attempting to collaborate was an altogether tedious task.

Google Workspace boasts a suite of tools which are innovative, intuitive and purpose-built for collaboration. So, this was an easy one to solve. 

In order to ensure that N21’s employees would get the most out of the Google Workspace platform, Cobry provided remote training sessions on all of the tools. This included sharing best practises across the likes of Gmail, Calendar and Google Meet; as well as supporting the structural development of the organisation’s Shared Drive. Now, the N21 team were equipped with everything they needed to work together in seamless collaboration and make amazing things happen!

Insights: 

100% of respondents found Google Workspace made them more productive. 

100% have found that Google Workspace has made collaboration with colleagues easier. 

One of the biggest and most frustrating challenges faced by N21 employees was the difficulty of booking meeting rooms to collaborate with colleagues as the system being used was extremely unreliable. Often bookings would disappear, be automatically declined and wouldn’t allow recurring meetings to be scheduled. In short, it was a meeting nightmare. 

Cobry helped N21 solve this problem by inputting Meeting Rooms as Google Calendar resources. This way, employees could quickly and easily see the room's availability in its calendar and book to their heart's content. 

Simple and effortless remote work set up

N21 has been growing rapidly and continues to do so, therefore, they needed a way to be able to effectively welcome new employees into the team and get them set up for success.

Cobry helped N21 develop a slick onboarding process which, when new employees joined the team, would create an action for Cobry to provision and deliver a company device to the employee, meaning they would be ready to go right from day one. 

During the first weeks of the employees time at N21, they would also be enrolled into our onboarding sessions where we would train them on the Google Workspace tools that they would be using day-in day-out. 

Security

Security was also a huge concern for the team at N21 as they wanted to ensure that their company devices were secure and company data safe. To help them achieve this, Cobry conducted a Security Review of N21’s Google Workspace environment. This included identifying the needs and requirements of the business and configuring settings in such a way that would protect the organisation whilst also ensuring that the tools were still easy to use for employees. 

Control over their own IT, with access to expert support if required

Having previously felt like it lacked charge of its own IT, it was imperative to N21 that it had complete control over its technical environment whilst having a great partner whose expertise it could rely on when needed. This was great news for us at Cobry as this is exactly how we like to work. 

Firstly, we provided training and configured admin privileges so that, ultimately, N21 had control over anything that happens in its Workspace environment. We also work closely with N21 on a monthly support retainer which means we can be there to help with any challenges the team may face, and ensure that the business is continually evolving through its use of Google Workspace.