We are faced with unprecedented times. The world is in flux, as social norms, cultures and the global economy are under threat.The only constant is rapid change. It is a time where the resilience, patience, empathy and will power of humanity is being tested.
Businesses, health organisations and governments are faced with tough decisions, ones that require swift action under immense pressures as they are confronted with many unknowns.
It is a time where the robustness and readiness of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans are truly put to the test and their validity verified
For many,the Work From Home (WFH) concept is no longer an experiment. Simply put, work is being done differently.
With the World Health Organisation(WHO) announcing the Coronavirus a global pandemic, CapabilityBPO immediately initiated plans to redeploy our workforce across additional sites to minimise the impact of a potential mass infection across our workforce in addition to a Work From Home plan.
Our plan included providing measures and actions to be deployed on each of our sites globally to minimize the potential impact on our service levels in addition to contributing to continually educating our employees and preventing their health from being affected.
Our plans include:
The first phase of each BCP illustrates the scenario in which there are no confirmed Coronavirus cases in the area the site operates. In this phase the focus is on raising awareness and educating employees on measures to take to prevent the spread of the Coronavirus.These go hand in hand with the directives of the World Health Organization as well as those of the National Health Organizations.
All our employees are informed about the most important measures they can take to prevent the spread, stressing the importance of basic hygiene measures. These include:
The following rules have been put in place:
As of Thursday, 12th March 2020 Capability BPO successfully rolled out our Corona BCP Work from Home (WFH) solution. No small feat for a global Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) operation.
According to the BPO industry benchmarks, Capability BPO did a massive job in a very short time, with much success.
Rolling out a WFH solution in one location is challenge enough. Rolling out an effective WFH solution across multiple sites across the world without any service disruption and no impact to operational metrics is a huge achievement. In fact the only change was a dramatic reduction in Shrinkage!
We successfully deployed 750 heads around the world to work from home in a phased country by country approach, starting with the Netherlands, followed by Albania, Philippines, Morocco, Colombia, South Africa and finally Suriname.
During this time of change with process and policy changing rapidly, ensuring that our employees are providing the most relevant and up to date information is critical. To ensure we continued to deliver the high standards that our clients demand, it was vital that we applied our client communicated policy’s effectively and ensured that these were adhered to. as such it was therefore critical that our quality process continued to operate effectively whilst meeting volume commitments.
Capability BPO’s quality programme allows our leadership to breakdown the process into three major compliance categories ensuring that we understand the issues we are facing and can take immediate root cause and action with additional training and coaching where required. This ensures that not only at this difficult time but at all times we enhance the customer experience minimizing effort in the end to end process.
Remote management of quality was underpinned by our effective existing processes and lifting these directly into a remote platform. Through utilizing existing systems which allow for QA’s and Team Leaders to provide written reports of agent quality performance broken down into the component parts, along with our culture of proactive agent management allowed employee’s to remotely access, review and acknowledge feedback promoting immediate action on their performance. This was further supported by 15 minute power coaching sessions led by Team Leaders and Quality Analysts.
Additionally through our existing governance and reporting process of weekly quality business reviews completed on remote tools, senior leadership can adapt and manage remotely without any change in approach, continuing in line with previous expectations via conferencing with root cause and actions identified and addressed. In the occurrence of any training requirements or specialized coaching sessions these are scheduled via WFM however delivered via remote virtual classroom training or remote group coaching sessions ensuring the business continues to exceed expectations with regards to performance.
As a result of the above, there was no impact to our baseline quality performance, additionally updates to process and policy could effectively be tracked, and performance understood. This result was possible due to the governance and controls being devised to meet a remote working environment due to the global nature of our business.
*Speed of readiness is influenced by specific in country developments & Government directions
Our continued commitment to Customer Services hasn’t stopped since the implementation of our Work From Home plan. We continue to train using collaborative tools like Zoom.
We have established clear Work From Home Guidelines and Procedures to assist maintaining a good quality of delivery and business continuity across all tasks.
Snapshot: Implementation of the Philippines
Overall, there’s an overwhelming positive vibe which inspires the teams. Whilst working hard, that can be with their loved ones during this very difficult time.
‘Capability BPO is proud of what we collectively as a global business have delivered. Through early identification of the changing environment and proactive testing of our COVID19 BCP’s prior to deployment we managed to achieve no service disruption during the transition. In light of the fact that we serve 12 to 20 hours opening window 7 days a week this is no easy feat. This could only be achieved with the hard work and dedication of our global teams and the support of our partners and clients. Well done to all our people. You have all made it possible and we are incredibly proud of each and every one of you.’ Global Delivery Director