Alexandra and César co-founded a UK based e-commerce company in 2008. They were struggling with high office rent cost and local high wages. That was killing their profits. They decided to base the majority of their staff in South America so that their competitive advantage lied in offering a lower price, supported by the possibility of paying wages in a lower value currency while its competitors paid wages in pounds sterling.
The company noted that the first few months were very positive and that they saw great value in having a remote workforce at a considerably lower cost than it would be to have their operations in England. However, after a while they began to notice that the productivity of their remote team was not as they had expected and they had no idea how to overcome this obstacle. Many companies have similar difficulty in managing the performance and productivity of their work teams.
They searched for solutions and could not find a fully automatic one so for that reason, developed ClowdWork. Through the implementation of the automatic productivity analytics agent, she realized that given the long hours of work that she demanded, people perceived that their productivity was measured by their hours connected to the computer rather than the value they were adding to the business. They started an awareness program in which everyone understood that the solution was to rethink that concept and help team members focus on what added value to their work.
With this, not only were they able to have shorter working hours, but also the company achieved significant growth, sustainability, better and timelier customer service and, above all, it achieved its goal of being one step ahead of its competitors. In 2014, Alexandra and César sold their e-commerce business and decided to help other companies facing productivity challenges and since then, they have been working full time on ClowdWork.