Poly – People, Spaces and Technology: Enabling Success in the Virtual Contact Centre

At Poly, their remote working products have enabled many employees with the benefits of flexible working and working from home for many years – whether it’s been the occasional day working from a remote location, a regular schedule of working from home one or two days a week, or permanently working from a home office. With seven very busy contact centres across the globe our Poly customer service representatives have always had the opportunity to embrace a flexible working policy, so they can focus on delivering smarter customer interactions wherever they happen to be.

As discussed in other recent blogs, a lot can change in a short time as is evident with the impact of COVID-19 on the global contact centre industry. Similar to many customers, in the last few weeks Poly had to quickly move to a fully remote model for their contact centres to provide a safe environment for their employees and maintain their customer support promise.

Fortunately, their previously tried and tested flexible policy put them in a strong position to swiftly change to a full working at home policy for all employees, knowing that they all have the skills and tools to work efficiently and effectively from their home offices. Poly were able to do this with the full confidence and peace of mind that they had everything in place to make this transition smoothly, all the while ensuring a positive experience and maintain business continuity and the excellent levels of service that Poly proudly provide to their partners and customers.

The methodology they have used to turn on their global virtual contact centre follows the principle of: “People, Spaces and Technology”.

PEOPLE

Remote management skills with mutual trust being the core value for all associates. Training best practices for video and voice collaboration and how to work remotely. Virtual team building and motivational skills.

SPACES

Ensuring that home working locations were set up to enable staff to work remotely. Replicating a work environment at home – with a dedicated workspace and Poly professional grade headset and camera.

TECHNOLOGY

Video and voice enabled, global cloud CRM and systems in place to drive metrics to manage performance. Ensuring that Unified Collaboration and Communications (UC&C) tools are in place to enable easy collaboration amongst the team.

The transition to permanently working from home for a contact centre — and for any department, is a challenge that you can’t do alone. Buy-in and support from key business partners such as, IT to provide expert guidance around the right equipment and software to ensure productivity, as well as security protocols is crucial. HR policies may need to be adapted to support everyone—taking the lead on training staff on how to work from home. Additionally, management training to support team leads will ensure that newly remote teams will be managed effectively are also critical to success.

At Poly, they know that around-the-clock support is key to their customer’s experience and they are committed to continue offering their high-level of support and offer “business as usual” service.  Poly  contact centres remain fully operational, available 24/7, offering support in 14 languages and leveraging their full range of tools that customers can use to contact them – phone, e-Support, chat and social – to support your business through these challenging times.  Poly are here to help you as you move to a remote environment, and their primary goal is to ensure you are able to collaborate and stay connected to your colleagues, partners and customers.

Visit Poly.com for more on remote working strategies and solutions.