We wanted to share with you our experiences of working from home today, managing our call volume in the current climate we thought would be difficult, it wasn’t. We had our busiest day of calls in over a year, spread over our team at home. You may ask, how did you cope when your businesses never operated on these terms before. Hopefully, we can shed some light.
Call volumes up 25% on last week. This is our first time really depending on
the software. It impressed us in three ways.
1. We can see clearly who was answering calls and who wasn’t. We were also able to ensure that 95% of calls were answered by a person in under 25 seconds.
2. Everybody could see who else was on the phone with the presence app. So, we knew who was free to take calls at home.
3. The soft phone apps on the mobiles and computers allowed everybody to record their calls and give the rest of us visibility.
Learning New Ways of Remote Working
For our management team, being able to visually see the productivity of their team and ensuring high standards of customer experience are still delivered was essential. With 2 clicks of a mouse, we were able to see, how many calls we’ve answered, how long it’s taking to answer them and any that’s going unanswered.
There is much more data; however, for us personally, these three things ensured our customers still received the same high standards. Managers where then able to delegate workloads accordingly, which can sometimes be difficult, if you’re not in the office physically seeing what members of the team are flooded.
For everyone in the business, our main concern was knowing the availability of all other users. Once we set the right permissions in place, and users logged into their portal, they could quickly and easily view who’s available, who’s on the phone and who’s currently on Do not Disturb. We feel this was a huge contribution for the broader team to still feel like a team, rather than being a lone soldier. The click to dial has also gone down considerably.
We’ve come to the conclusion that sometimes our team are not as open to learning new ways of working until they have to. We’re now hopeful that these new tools will help our staff be more open-minded for future change.
One of the many challenges when working from home is still having a device that’s connected to a phone system, rather than a simple divert. Giving users the same functionality as if they were in the office, such as transferring calls and presenting their office numbers on outbound etc. This was the one thing we thought would be challenging with a workforce of all ages used to using a physical desk phone. Thankfully, the team have proved us wrong again. We are so impressed with how they were able to quickly set up their mobile apps, desktop phones and get on with the job in hand.
Well Done Team!