Opus Technology provide a wide range of market leading remote working solutions

The remote working landscape has shifted again and now, according to a recent Gartner CFO survey, 74% of companies plan to permanently shift to more remote work post pandemic. As well as this, 80% of Customer Service and Support leaders predict that the transition to work from home will have a lasting impact on the way contact centres operate.

How can you best support your customers whilst working remotely?

To help leaders on the remote working journey, we recommend they think long-term and answer these key questions:

How can I ensure a consistent, frictionless and more personalised customer experience—all while call volume is increasing and budgets are shrinking?
How effectively can I support the organisation as processes previously performed face-to-face are now handled remotely?
What tools will best help boost productivity and bring open collaboration to the entire dispersed workforce— without adding complexity and confusion?
How do I help provide oversight, control and visibility into every area of the business?

Create a culture of productivity with a tech-first approach.

The shift to hybrid working has presented both challenge and opportunity, and business leaders are looking for more permanent remote working solutions to boost employee productivity.

But what if, rather than a declaration made by leadership, productivity is actually a by-product of culture? Simply put, steadfast productivity cannot be demanded. And research is proving that productive workforces have something in common: employees are engaged and connected. According to The McKinsey Global Institute, productivity improves by 20%-25% in organisations where employees are connected.

If productivity is a proven by-product of connectedness and collaboration within the culture, how can organisations work to cultivate this kind of environment? And what does this look like for businesses supporting highly distributed, remote employees? How do we create a culture that drives productivity and transforms the concept of work from home to a successful operate-from-anywhere business model?

20-25%

Improvements in productivity when organisations ensure employees are connected.

Source: McKinsey Global Institute

Start with the right remote working solutions

To help illustrate, let’s use a sports analogy. Basketball players, for instance, are typically required to do a variety of drills and performance enhancing activities that will never be seen on the court. The speed ladder agility drill, for example, would most likely look absurd if all of a sudden you watched your favourite ball player move up and down the court in such a way. But this drill helps players become more agile, quick to respond, and build endurance. It builds a solid foundation for the player, and therefore the team, to excel. And without these key building blocks, it will be difficult for the team to thrive.

Streamlined technology is the catalyst for productivity.

54%

Respondents said their primary challenge in working from home was feeling disconnected or alone.

Source: ServiceNow’s “Work From Home Productivity Study” June 2020

Communication and collaboration

Instant 1:1 and group messaging are powerful tools to bring people together. We’ve clearly seen the limit of email, with 96% of workers saying unnecessary emails waste their time.

Live video meetings go a long way to recover some value lost when face-to-face meetings aren’t possible, providing connection through body language, eye contact, and other non-verbal cues. A unified communications suite should make video meetings an integral part of its interface and functionality.

Quality management and coaching

Quality management (QM) can have a profound impact on agent empowerment and engagement. Agents are typically highly monitored, which can create a feeling of micromanagement and negatively impact productivity. QM programs can help the agent to feel a greater sense of connection to the end goal.

As you share feedback, coaching, and offer new transparency to your agents, this builds trust and connectedness in ways that contribute to productivity. You can also check out these additional six tips to help boost agent productivity with QM.

Get better ROI for your communications investments by leveraging a single cloud platform.

There is more urgency than ever to make your move to cloud communications.

This section examines ROI factors and business benefits of moving to cloud communications on a single platform. It is the summer of 2020. Leaders must act boldly to invest in these services that can keep their businesses open in normal times and in crises like we are in today. Jobs and businesses are at stake. The time is now to make that transformation.

Calculating ROI

Because ROI is such an important part of discussions about whether and how to migrate to a cloud communications solution, we have created the 8×8 ROI Calculator to give you confidence about what you can save and from where.

This tool is a companion to our VoIP Speed Test service that tells you how fast your Internet connection is to the nearest 8×8 server. Having employees use this service can help you plan your networking requirements.

Using the Web-based tool, you enter profile information like the number of main and branch offices plus any contact centres. After you plug in information about your current phone and online collaboration costs, the tool generates a report that estimates your potential monthly and annual cost savings.

Why does single-platform cloud communications beat individual cloud apps?

This is a common early question when beginning to evaluate vendors. Naturally, we believe a unified platform offers customers more flexibility, cost savings, innovation and other benefits over the a-la-carte approach.

While people often say a unified cloud platform offers the benefits of a single vendor, what does that really mean? In reality, those benefits go far beyond volume discounts, licensing consolidation, and streamlined tech support.

Things like:

Capturing analytics across multiple apps like video conferencing, contact centre and voice to gain better insights that can improve operations and performance
Transitioning seamlessly between multiple channels — for instance, when users are in a voice call and want to switch to a video meeting, to perhaps share a screen, they can do so in a click.
Making a new world of data available across apps, facilitating AI/machine learning
Giving users a unified mobile communications app covering voice, video conferencing, chat, SMS, and fax