Working from home has become the ‘new normal’ for most people during the global COVID-19 pandemic, and based on recent surveys, nearly half of employees working from home want to continue with this. Businesses are now turning to their trusted network partners to show them a quick, simple and affordable way to transform unreliable and ‘flaky’ home broadband into a secure, resilient and performant extension to the corporate WAN and Cloud services.
Real-time applications such as voice and video are particularly susceptible to the problems of distortion, jitter, packet loss and dropped calls that are common on low grade, home broadband links. These technical problems, combined with the uncertainty around when it will be safe for staff to return to the office, are forcing businesses to look at longer term solutions to overcome the challenges of working from home.
It is something that has been recognised, particularly for those companies running customer service desks – big or small. Whilst a lot of these employees are having to adapt their home environment to suit taking customer calls, there also appears to be a demand in customers wanting to speak to customer service teams, regarding their services – whether this be pausing gym memberships or looking for their lost Amazon parcel, for example. In fact, 66% of consumers stated that they would be unlikely to continue to do business with a company after just one bad experience! It is therefore paramount that these companies ensure they give their customers the same level of service they expect, without the excuse of COVID-19.
It is at this point whereby a lot of companies running contact centres, are missing the right “full package” IT service. Each of their employees requires a service which ensures no mishaps or connection issues, potentially resulting in disgruntled customers and social media/PR disasters. The problem for many businesses is that most of their employees have only one internet line into their homes. Whilst the cost of installing a second, business grade link into a house is no doubt, much lower than the rental cost of the equivalent office space in a city centre or business park, the time lag between ordering these lines and installation can be several weeks. Businesses cannot wait, they need a plan for improving home communications for their staff now, not in one to three months’ time.
Intergence Systems, in partnership with Five9 and Adaptiv Networks, offers a fully managed service called HomePOINT which resolves all these challenges. And the best part is that this service can be set up with virtually no effort required from the home worker, making HomePOINT simple and easy to deploy.
The HomePOINT managed service includes the following:
- Advanced SD-WAN technology from Adaptiv Networks – this load balances traffic between two or more internet links, enables seamless fail over when one of the links fails or deteriorates in quality and prioritises the most critical application traffic, such as voice and video ahead of domestic video streaming or online games.
- Intelligent Cloud Contact Centre from Five9 – helping to transform the contact centre to be the front door of a business to ensure that every customer interaction provides an extraordinary experience for customers. It supports teams with the best cloud tools and technology to deliver exceptional customer service.
- Full managed IT service support from Intergence – taking the pressure away in-house for those IT leadership teams that may not have the capacity to manage small IT problems at scale.
Making homeworking work is about more than just technology. It’s also about giving your teams the right tools, processes and support to ensure they are happy, engaged and working productively.
This means offering your home workers access to health and well-being resources, making sure they can work efficiently in their home environments and encouraging behaviours and working practices which increase teamwork, communication and the collaboration of your virtual teams.
The fully managed service can combine existing home broadband links into one virtual network which will never fail, as well as incorporate a 4G/5G backup link to provide enough resilience to satisfy most home office requirements. Combine that with Quality of Service (QoS) to prioritise the most critical applications, as well as the ability for Intergence to manage, provision and configure everything remotely, and businesses have the ideal ‘Work from Home’ solution, at a financial cost saving. Tying all of this together ensures all parties are kept happy and companies can provide a great customer experience.
Intergence
Intergence is a Digital and IT change consultancy, who solve complex Digital and IT infrastructure challenges end-to-end through consultancy, technology and managed services.
Five9
Five9 is a leading provider of cloud contact centre software for the intelligent contact centre space, bringing the power of cloud innovation to customers and facilitating more than six billion call minutes annually. Five9 provides end-to-end solutions with omnichannel routing, analytics, WFO and AI to increase agent productivity and deliver tangible business results.
The Five9 Genius platform is reliable, secure, compliant and scalable; designed to create exceptional personalised customer experiences.
Adaptiv Networks
Adaptiv Networks removes the barriers to digital transformation with amazingly simple and effective cloud connectivity. Our market leading Software Defined Network-as-a-Service brings the power of SD-WAN within reach for any-sized business. We specialize in cloud-managed connectivity that eliminates downtime, optimizes business-critical cloud applications, and protects the quality of real-time voice and video communications with no dropped calls on failover. Working with our global network of certified service providers, we manage network connectivity for more than 500 businesses, with more than 8,000 sites deployed worldwide through an ecosystem of more than 100 Partners globally.