With the ongoing COVID-19 (coronavirus) crisis, almost all non-essential workers (i.e., those who aren’t supplying food, medical supplies, utilities, transportation, etc.) have been strongly encouraged or mandated to work from home, if possible. Unfortunately, not all businesses have found themselves well prepared to handle an abrupt shift to a full-time, all-remote workforce. What we’re all learning from this continuing crisis is the importance of preparing your workforce for a work-from-home scenario in order to ensure business continuity.
Most obviously, being prepared with a work-from-home model has proven crucial for keeping employees safe and for continuing business operations in times of crisis—as unfortunately exemplified by the coronavirus. But as more companies have been forced to at least temporarily adopt this style of work, many are realizing that it is a valid strategy for business continuity even in ordinary circumstances.
By giving employees the flexibility to work from home, businesses are helping to alleviate work-related stress by easing common burdens like commuting time and expenses. In the short term, most employers are relaxing their policies around childcare while working, but this is not a practice during ordinary circumstances. Recent studies also confirm that working from home improves performance and worker satisfaction, while decreasing attrition. When employees feel supported, they are empowered to perform their best, which in turn, enables businesses to successfully support and service their customers. For example, David Shetter, a member of the Support.com team for the last ten years, says working from home with Support.com helps him do his job better: “At home, I’m in a more comfortable place. And when you can be cool and calm and relaxed, you can help your customers relax more easily, too.”
Remote work can only enable business continuity, however, when businesses are prepared to transition to this style of work. Businesses must consider what employees need to successfully carry out their work in a remote location, which includes having the proper technology equipment and understanding how to access corporate resources and tools from home. Proper communication is also an imperative, as businesses need to clarify telecommuting policies and clearly inform employees of the rules of responsibility and engagement when working from home.
Unfortunately, many businesses are finding that they were not prepared for the drastic transition to remote work that is presently being thrown at them, and they are now struggling to support both their employees and their customers in this turbulent time. From adjusting to new technology and tools to adopting new policies for engagement, communication, and security, there are many aspects to the transition from a brick-and-mortar model to a full-time remote workforce that present challenges. With over 20 years of experience managing a remote U.S.-based call center and corporate team, Support.com has developed best practices on how to set up and scale virtual teams for success. Support.com’s B2B services are built to help address the challenges that companies face supporting a remote workforce or transitioning to a work-from-home model.
Remote IT Help Desk Support
Support.com can help businesses of all sizes with their employee IT needs. We are seeing many companies report that their help desk resources are overwhelmed now that they have to support employees in so many different home environments—and often without standard issued equipment.
Support.com agents can function as the remote IT help desk to augment companies’ internal IT team capacity, creating bandwidth across multiple business and employee locations, with unlimited, on-demand remote IT support for any issue or device, via phone, online chat, or secure “virtual house calls.” Having a team of experts focused on the challenges of working in a home environment allows in-house help desk staff to focus on broader infrastructure needs.
U.S.-based Virtual Call Center Support
Support.com is ready to support enterprises of any size by extending existing call center support with a U.S.-based remote workforce who can ramp up quickly to answer questions about the company’s products and services and provide expert, friendly support to customers. Our nationwide recruiting reach and completely virtual environment allows us to rapidly recruit, hire, train, and deploy agents in a wide variety of customer support functions—all with industry-leading customer satisfaction scores. Support.com also creates DIY self-service guides for companies to enable customers to solve issues themselves.
Facilitating a Transition to a Virtual Call Center:
Support.com has the technology infrastructure, expertise, and processes in place to help a company’s existing call center transition to a work-from-home environment. Our proprietary software platform for our own virtual call centers can be licensed to businesses, enabling them to quickly setup existing call center teams and agents with remote, secure, virtual call center capabilities. We are also setup to “re-badge” and incorporate existing U.S.-based call center employees and make them remote immediately by hiring them directly and onboarding them on our software platform. Finally, we offer professional services to assess a business’ practices and policies, identify the gaps, and develop an action plan to support the transition to a virtual call center.
To learn more about Support.com’s remote help desk and virtual call center services, visit https://corporate.support.com/call-center-services/.