Outstanding Performers: Top Xplorers Elevate Rural Internet Experiences

At Xplore, we value hard work and dedication to our mission of enhancing rural life through technology. That's why we are thrilled to highlight our "Top Xplorers" - three employees who have gone above and beyond the line of duty to make a difference for our customers.

These individuals have shown exceptional leadership, innovation, and commitment to our values. We are proud to have them on our team and can't wait to share their stories with you. Join us in celebrating these outstanding employees and their contributions to Xplore's mission.

Nicholas Sleptov

In his seven years at Xplore, Nicholas has moved from customer service rep to tech support to his current role in network operations.

Currently, he manages Xplore’s Access Network Operations Team, a small group of highly talented individuals who provide the highest tier of internal technical support involving resolving equipment malfunctions. They also help with new tower building projects, new service deployment and are on call 24/7 to respond to emergent network operations issues.

His favourite part of working at Xplore is his team, who he said feel like a family.

“We have a very good team. Every day I enjoy working alongside them,” he said.

Nicholas is very proud to have earned his role in network operations, largely self-taught. He has always been a natural when it comes to technology. In his words, “I am a bit of a geek.” He also finds the role very rewarding.

“At the end of the day we make a difference in people’s lives. It's a good feeling to keep people connected to each other,” he said.

Nicholas and his team are directly responsible for preventing outages and reducing outage time.

“We work toward the ideal, customers not having any outages, but if they do, we work toward minimizing the outage time and resolving it as fast as we possibly can to make sure people stay connected,” he explained.

Nicholas was born in a large city in Moldova and his family moved to Florenceville, New Brunswick, a town of 1500 people, when he was 16. His real experience living in rural Canada has given him insight into just how important reliable Internet is to rural Canadians.

“Growing up it was a big adjustment, especially the lack of public transport. If people live an hour apart and don’t have a car they still want to communicate with family and friends, so we literally help people stay connected in a place where people have less access physically,” he said.

Despite the adjustment, Nicholas and his family appreciated the generosity of rural people right away.

“Where I grew up, people keep to themselves. When we came to Canada, it was late November and we caught our first snowstorm soon after. We hadn’t even met our neighbours and they just plowed our driveway without even asking if we needed help,” he said.

The family relocated for Nicholas’ dad’s job as an IT professional. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

When asked what he likes to do outside of work Nicholas said “I like staying in, looking at code, reading tech news and playing video games. Anything to do with computers.”

Logan Baron

Over the years, Logan has worn many hats, and he is currently one of Xplore’s esteemed full stack developers, creating tools and automation in order to increase efficiency and improve workflows for Xplore's network team.

Logan joined the team 6 years ago when Xplore acquired the smaller Internet service provider where he worked called YourLink, which he joined in 2011.

At YourLink, Logan held a hybrid position involving both systems and development, but he always gravitated more toward the development part of his role. When he joined Xplore, he eventually got the opportunity to take on that task full-time.

Logan describes his job as, “creating things that make people’s lives easier.”

He loves seeing the impact that something he makes can have, including saving precious company time.

“I created a script that was able to automatically pull in connected devices from Salesforce and drop them into our monitoring solution. I used the same type of script for adding connected devices from Salesforce to our backup system,” he explained.

Monitoring and backing up devices are two ways Xplore ensures that if there are any service issues, we can resolve them immediately and get customers back online. These systems often allow us to catch and troubleshoot problems before the customer even notices they are there.

Put simply, Logan’s automated processes were previously done manually. Automation saves the company time that can then be used to make sure our customers are happy.

As you can tell, Logan loves efficiency, so one of the things he appreciates about his role at Xplore is that he can work remotely, saving time by skipping the commute. He also really enjoys working with his team.

“Our teams work well together. We get along, and we are constantly improving the way we communicate,” he said.

Logan was born and raised in rural Saskatchewan. His first ever high-speed Internet provider was YourLink.

"I was 13 years old when we got YourLink. Before we were acquired, Xplore was our top competitor. So, I’ve been involved with Xplore directly and indirectly since I was 13 years old,” he said.

Mankota, the small town where he and his family lived at that time, has a population of less than 200 people and his graduating class in high school consisted of 7 students.

“Small town life has its charms. Closer knit community, you can walk down the street and say hi to everybody and you recognize them, and they recognize you,” he said.

Like Nicholas, Logan lives and breathes technology.

His favourite hobby outside of work is programming.

“I enjoy games of all kinds: tabletop, board games, video games. In my spare time I’m making my own video game,” he said.

The game is a 2D retro-inspired puzzle game. The object of the game is to outsmart enemies, collect gems and progress to a new floor where it gets more difficult.

You can try the game on Logan’s website. https://ololgame.com/olol/

Tom Koutsoumbis

As one of our dedicated tech support team members, Tom’s biggest point of pride is that he takes the time to make sure that the customers that he’s helping understand, especially seniors.

“I had a customer last night who was 82. It was her birthday,” he said with a smile.

You can tell he forms genuine connections with each person because of how fondly he speaks about each interaction.

Tom goes above and beyond to provide excellent customer service. One example he gave was when a customer called in reporting an Internet issue and he determined their problem was actually with their connected device. For these situations, he takes the time to find phone numbers so that he can direct the customer to the place where they can get the help they need.

“Seniors tell me how happy they are that I take the time to help them. That I’m patient,” he said.

Certain pieces of advice like, how to change the password on a Smart TV, might not be an Xplore issue, but Tom makes it his, taking the time to walk through how to do it so that each customer feels that they got the help they needed when they end the call.

One of Tom’s goals is to make sure that customers get the most out of their package speeds.

“I’ll walk through multiple issues with people to make sure they’re satisfied,” he said. “I can’t solve every problem but if there is a solution, I will find it.”

Tom’s favourite part of working for Xplore is his team’s ability to collaborate to ensure customers are as satisfied as possible.

“We work together to help customers,” he said.

It’s no surprise that “teamwork” would come easily to him! He’s a huge sports fan outside of work.

“I love anything to do with sports; football, basketball, baseball, tiddlywinks. When I was young and stupid, I even played football at the University of Western, mostly on the bench,” he said laughing.

Now he travels far and wide to watch his favourite teams play. One of his latest trips took him and a friend to Temple Arizona to see the University of Arizona football team play.

He loves sports, but the thing that gets him out of bed every morning is his family and his two dogs, Misty and Penny.

Tom said that winning The Top Xplorer Award is his proudest career moment to date.

It’s hard to choose from Xplore’s talented team of superstars but it’s clear that these three are giving their all to create great experiences for our customers.

If you’d like to join the Xplore team, visit xplore.ca/careers to see what roles are currently available.