How To Overcome Hiccups While Working From Home?

The Teleperformance India group is actively minimising the cascading impacts of COVID-19 on employees, having reinvented their business continuity model overnight, with security and resiliency at the forefront.

Having launched their Cloud Campus Hubs this year, the company is revolutionising how remote employees stay engaged from afar. Offering full operational flexibility, these central command centers allow employees to work from anywhere in the world whilst maintaining optimum data security. With all PII data stored on the cloud as opposed to locally, the same levels of consistency, quality and security of office-based teams is being seamlessly passed onto remote teams.

Aditya Arora, CEO – Teleperformance India, tells us more

How is Teleperformance India navigating the hyper-connected space? 

During the outbreak and beyond, working environments will have been totally redefined, relying more heavily on virtual teams and remote resources. With an evolved generation of employees and customers to keep pace with, we are rethinking business continuity models and actively embracing change. 

The accelerated evolution of connectivity has provided Teleperformance with a great foundation to lead through innovation and showcase our working-at-home-agents (WAHA) capabilities. In recalibrating our business model overnight, we have been able to successfully deploy a blended approach of office-based and WAH (work-at-home) employees for seamless operations and to deal with future contingencies. As the most effective means of protecting our interaction experts, and ensuring business continuity for our clients, the WAHA model is now facilitated by the Teleperformance Cloud Campus Hubs – an efficient infrastructure to support a hyper-connected workforce.

Seizing the trend towards digital transformation, we have strengthened our digital solutions to ensure our business continuity models are robust and sustainable. Our expertise in automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI), combined with technological advancements in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and chatbots, provide the right balance of High-Tech and High-Touch. In an increasingly High-Tech world, we maintain an agile balance with empathy and the human touch, to enhance the customer experience in a way that best suits each individual customer. 

How is Teleperformance India acting as a global leader in providing WFH solutions and outsourced customer experience management?

Teleperformance has long since recognised the benefits of working-at-home (WAH) with 80% of global workforce already working on this model, and is well-established in addressing the urgent need for managing fluctuating volumes or in terms of showing more flexibility to our at-home colleagues. Helping companies to navigate through real-life business challenges, we are a trusted partner in making the transition to work-from-home as seamless as possible, through cost-effective solutions.

In India, just a few weeks after the implementation of the first lockdown measures, we began implementing widespread WAHA solutions, and we remain dedicated to providing better working conditions for all employees. We want to recreate a consistent workforce experience, which means less worry for our clients. 

As the appetite for digital offerings increases, we are keen to be the agile business services partner of choice. We design digital product and service inquiries, complaint resolution, customer surveys and integrate channels seamlessly, to reimagine how businesses can meet today’s unique, acute needs – while forging even stronger ties in a post-pandemic world. 

Could you acquaint us a little about your Cloud Campus Hubs?

As our new reality unfolds, having an efficient and effective WAH business model will become critical to longevity. Prior to the pandemic, Teleperformance was already working on an enhanced model for improving the customer experience and client results, through virtual teams. Today, this takes the form of Teleperformance’s innovative Cloud Campus – blending the company’s proprietary tools, analytics and processes, whilst addressing the newfound business challenges being faced post-pandemic. 

Designed from the ground up to specifically support dispersed teams, the model allows interaction experts to live anywhere, interact with colleagues and clients, and deliver consistent customer experiences. By combining hiring, training, and managing capabilities into a digital command centre, the model overcomes geographic constraints, to source the best global candidates and support the onboarding experience with round-the-clock tools.

With business continuity at the top of the corporate agenda, this real-time collaboration sustains the same levels of productivity, quality, and security as office-based teams. The model is highly flexible, can suit changing business needs and weather future business disruption, with the ability to easily scale resources – up or down. It further leverages multi-factor authentication measures and device lockdown, minimising the possibility of intelligence being leaked, and building cyber resilience in an ever increasing virtual era.

WFH involves a lot of hiccups too. How to overcome those?

Every industry has been affected by the shift to virtual working. But while some companies are tapping into the huge growth opportunities this presents, others are grappling with the challenges of new remote working structures and recovery uncertainties. 

When adopting a new way of working, outside of the trusted workplace, cybersecurity will be a natural concern for organisations. To safeguard data and instil confidence in the hyper-connected work environment, it is now vital that companies explore the applications of AI and automation, to avoid data being stored locally. The Teleperformance Cloud Campus actually prevents data being leaked, by blocking agents from interacting with other device functions until they log out of the virtual desktop. 

With limited face-to-face contact, companies may face challenges in controlling operational processes, and guaranteeing the performance of dispersed teams. For many organisations, this scenario will be uncharted and they should aim to anticipate and fix any communication issues –before they turn into larger operational problems. By mandating dedicated support channels, through instant messaging, chat, and cloud technologies, organisations can communicate changing strategies and coordinate virtual team members in real-time. Building an inclusive remote working environment, where physical distance does not mean social distance, will prove invaluable in motivating staff and reducing staff attrition. 

Now and long after the crisis has passed, deploying a hybrid model of office-based and remote working will provide businesses with an anchor. Beyond changing market needs, this blend will mitigate risk in a post-pandemic environment, and allow companies to continue operations as normally as possible.