With the Government urging people to continue working from home where possible, remote, and home working is now becoming a permanent reality for most companies.
With this in mind, have you considered how effective your existing systems, and short-term measures were during the first lock down, and how they need to evolve to become permanent features of how you work?
To help determine this, consider asking yourself the following questions.
Do our systems make it easy for customers to contact us?
Most companies still rely on telephones to provide the majority of their positive customer experience. Does your current telephone service deliver your customers calls seamlessly to your team wherever they are?
When one of your team receives a call, can they easily transfer or conference with another member of the team, through messaging and upgrading the call to video where required?
This integration really improves your customer experience and provides you the options to liaise with your customers in the way they wish to contact you.
It is vital you have a robust business telephone service in place that facilitates being integrated for quick and simple communication at all times.
Does our system maintain a cohesive and consistent experience for customers?
As you deploy more remote working, it can present many challenges, key of which are achieving the same service levels without your staff’s working location impacting their experience.
In order to achieve this, you need to ensure that all your staff have access to and are utilising the same apps, tools and methods to engage and communicate.
If your current system does not offer this, it is time to upgrade and integrate a solution that can.
Or perhaps your staff require more in-depth training to ensure they are all working in unison, so you have peace of mind that every customer who is contacting your business is being provided with the same quality service and experience.
How effective is our telephone system in handling calls?
Your existing telephone service should be helping your business to better handle your call traffic and allow customers, prospects and fellow colleagues to contact the desired individual or department within your business with ease.
However, with your staff now working from a variety of different work locations and no longer all in the same office or building, is your system still managing your calls as smoothly and efficiently as possible?
Particularly with employees often utilising business mobiles and other handsets whilst working remotely, is your service flexible enough to change your call handling across a variety of devices, for a variety of people are their work locations become frequently change?
Could we be getting more out of our business mobiles?
We know that for many clients, having their business mobile packages in place with us has proven invaluable over recent months allowing their staff to stay connected and continue to maintain the best customer experience and service.
With mobility and the ability to work from anywhere at any time being key in the current climate, you need to consider whether you are making the most out of pooling your mobile data usage across your workforce.
Could you be getting better value and utilising data more efficiently?
You need to consider whether you have the right mobile plans in place for your staff, that not only support them to work from anywhere, but achieve this in the most economical way possible.
Is connectivity impacting productivity and customer service?
With your staff working from home, they will be using their home internet access and Wi-Fi whilst working. This can create drastic differences across your business, with some staff having access to a strong, quality connection and others having a poor connection that could even be dropping off at times due to the network usage within their household.
You may need to look at integrating internet packages within your employee’s homes to ensure they can always stay connected and to allow you to maintain consistency and cohesion across your entire business.
Is our existing system agile and flexible enough?
A final consideration should be around the durability and flexibility of the systems you have in place.
Of course, having systems that support effective remote working are a must right now, but you also need to be looking ahead to when you do begin to welcome more staff back to the workplace.
Will your existing system be able to ensure a smooth transition from the home back into the office? Or if your staff will be regularly splitting their time between the two, will it be able to support this whilst maintaining a quality experience for the customer at all times?
You need to ensure you are investing in a system that will be able to adapt with you and your changing needs as you move forward.