Navixus (Formerly Eventus Solutions Group)

Physical location is not as important as we once thought. Employees have the same performance expectations whether they are sitting in a cubicle in the office or at home. Employers must empower their employees to be productive by establishing and communicating expectations.

Communication is and will always be the most critical component of an employer-employee relationship. Adding the variable of being virtual forces employers to get back to basics with setting general office protocol — accepting or declining meeting invitations, having a representative attend meetings, establishing core working hours for client availability and more.

After communicating the basic office guidelines, employers can give employees the freedom and autonomy to do their job. As long as clients are happy, deadlines are being met and coworkers are working as a team, how, when and where the work is getting done isn't a concern.

Keep it simple. Employers and managers can feel pressure to do a big, fun team-building event. These are well received but can be costly, and therefore occur infrequently.

Because employees want to interact and get to know their coworkers, Eventus coordinates virtual events where we spotlight employees' lives and activities. Two examples are our "Proud Papa" event, for which we virtually spotlighted new dads and their little ones, and a pet event with small breakout rooms for employees to socialize with other employees and their pets.

We use Microsoft Teams and Slack and have utilized breakout rooms, polls and quizzes. Teams is an easy and fast way to encourage interaction and collaboration among employees. We have also used Kahoot!

and online games to keep the interactions fun and entertaining.

Eventus' mantra for all of our projects is "Day 2 First." This became our mantra for several reasons. The first is that our company focuses on operations in addition to development.

That operational mindset drives our team in this direction. The second is that we saw many situations where we were brought in to "clean up" other providers' work, and it became clear that "Day 2 First" is very effective.

There are three primary ways we put this mantra into practice. The first way is by understanding both current and future goals for our clients. The first step is to focus our engagements on not just what clients need immediately, but their future goals, be it acquisitions, customer relationship management system enhancements or product line expansions.

The second way is by staying current on client and industry trends. We bring industry expertise and trends analysis into all of our engagements — conversational interactive voice response, multichannel, "Bring Your Own Telephony" and AI-driven automation.

The third way is by creating an overall architecture that leverages the appropriate design patterns. We keep a large library of design and service templates that are modified with industry trends and based on client needs, and we're able to adapt these to our clients' needs and provide them, in most cases, with scalability and supportability built in.

At a recent project at a large financial services company, we were able to create reusable modules and services that replaced over 100K lines of code with a solution with under 20K lines of code. This approach was quicker to develop but also consolidated operations and maintenance support from a team of six to eight people to a team of four.

Our "Day 2 First" approach requires constant reimagining. We structure our organization to include both upward and downward communication from our team members, as well as being self-reflective in our internal project reviews. Being our own biggest critic and involving the entire team in those discussions creates an environment that rewards "breaking glass.

" Trends change, and while some basic principles remain constant, many of our current mantra design principles have changed over the past five years, like the need to accommodate AI support and multi-channel integration with CRM, to name a couple. Nothing is future-proof, but staying ahead of trends and embodying a culture of 360-degree project evaluation has created a unique design ethic — one where we measure ourselves against not just the client requirements but also whether we delivered a solution that was ready for Day 2, Year 2 and beyond.

The title of my blog would be "AI: Keeping Up Isn't Good Enough." Humans expect instant access to information — whether it's our PCs running numerous applications at once to produce and leverage documentation, voice-activated home devices or the technology we carry in the palm of our hands.

We consume information at an incredible rate, especially in customer service, where answering the right questions at the right time in the right way is crucial. At Navixus we specialize in customer service — many of our leaders are former customer service operators, so we understand the challenges these executives face in staying ahead and the pressure to constantly innovate and improve.

All of it! This is such a great time in human history to be alive, with AI offering us the chance to discover, learn and improve — at speed and scale. AI has the potential to revolutionize industries by positively impacting life expectancy in healthcare, effecting the preservation of natural resources or altering the generation of wealth, for instance.

While AI has existed for decades, its true potential is now being seen, leading to innovations that will transform our world, from self-driving cars to smart cities, bringing sci-fi dreams into reality. It's exciting!

My biggest piece of advice for anyone exploring AI is to be curious. This applies to us individually as well as our teams. My job as a team leader is to provide opportunities and learning platforms for the team to collaborate, learn and grow together.

In consulting, we often work with clients in a variety of industries whose AI initiatives are not performing as expected. There's no better way to learn than to dive in, solve challenges together and build valuable experience.

At Navixus, we build solutions that improve customer and agent experiences across multiple lines of business. Whether inbound or outbound, our tools streamline workflows, boost response times and enhance performance across channels. We help clients modernize by moving from legacy on-prem systems to cloud platforms like NICE CXone and by adopting AI to improve efficiency.

We recently used AI to extract key values from client requirements and convert them into a format we could use directly in code. This saved time, reduced manual errors and helped us move faster from planning to implementation.

Without AI, we would have manually reviewed and extracted values from requirements, which is time-consuming and prone to errors. It could have taken days instead of hours. AI has changed how we work by speeding up repetitive tasks and letting us focus more on design and implementation.