Change is never easy. Sudden change can be even rougher. The sudden shift to remote work has been a challenge for many organizations as they seek out ways to keep their operations running smoothly and their customers feeling supported.
For customer service departments, this means being able to keep picking up calls and providing support with the same consistency and quality remotely as they do in the office.
In hopes of getting a sense of how this transition is going, we caught up with Utah-based enterprise project management tools provider Workfront and asked them how they are shifting their team’s culture and utilizing technology in the face of the changes.
Why Workfront Chose Talkdesk
Serving over 3,000 customers worldwide, Workfront’s software helps enterprises manage resources and track tasks throughout large organizations. Their global support team is spread out between Utah, London, Armenia, and more locations, providing 24/7 service to their customers.
Underpinning Workfront’s support operations is Talkdesk, the California-based Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) technology provider. Workfront has been using Talkdesk for nearly three years now says Nic Bryson, Workfront’s VP of Customer Enablement and Support, who leads their global support team.
Having worked with Talkdesk at his previous company, Bryson brought the CCaaS on to replace what he described as a more costly and less effective system.
“When I came to Workfront they had already bought another tool that I found came with too many strings attached,” he says. “They required us to buy extra equipment and pay more for basic integrations like we needed for Salesforce, all of which they failed to mention in the sales process. We got through it all, turned it on, and then found ourselves dealing with terrible latency issues. Moreover, in many instances, customers had real difficulty hearing us on the line. It just failed at every turn.”
“So I found myself in the same exact situation as before when I had chosen to work with Talkdesk at my last company,” says Bryson, explaining that, “I told them that we could be up and running in a week so we got a trial spun up.”
“I was actually over at our office in Armenia at the time. I was able to get a crystal clear call up and running from my less-than-stellar hotel WiFi back to our office in Utah”
Favorite Features
Bryson and his Director of Customer Support, Greg Ballard, cite a number of features that have helped them to gain better visibility over their operations and assist in planning.
Ballard points to analytics like the heatmap that helps them track when they receive the most contacts from customers. “It helps us plan staffing for heavier or lighter, as well as more basic things like when to schedule lunch or meetings,” he says. “It’s not just the real-time reporting but the trends as well. We’ve been able to make much smarter decisions, seeing data on things like which days of the week we get the most contacts.”
While he says that it varies by team, they found that as a B2B company, they got the most tickets at the beginning and end of the day, with Thursday taking the cake.
Integrations with Salesforce and other popular business software is a significant plus they explain, but a key feature is the ease with which their team members can jump into the system and make changes on the fly if necessary. All without needing help from their systems operations team.
“One of the things that we did was that we developed a switch over so that if we have an outage or system issue and we see the mass of inbound calls,” says Bryson. “The controls on Talkdesk are easy enough that anyone from our team can jump in and make adjustments to the IVR to let customers know that we have an outage. It also puts everyone across the team on deck, doubling or tripling our capacity to handle calls. We’ve seen the queue not reaching even 50% of the highest numbers that we’d had in the past during an outage since we’re able to get everyone together to triage calls all at once.”
The ability to be agile in the face of adversity has been crucial for Workfront as the COVID-19 crisis forced them to go remote.
Transitioning to Remote
“It was really seamless,” says Bryson, speaking about the transition to remote that occurred in mid-March. He says that his team was already running Talkdesk’s Agent Desktop on their Macbook Pros, which reduced the need to set up any additional equipment or networks for his team members at their homes.
“Some folks came back into the office to get their monitors or other peripherals, but as far as their experience working with the system, there was no difference,” he says, adding that “From the human point of view, of course there were some adjustments like having family at home with them which could make for a more challenging work environment.”
Bryson cites the speed to answer the phone as a top indicator for how his team is performing. “When you call a company and someone picks up after one or two rings, that’s the kind of experience that you’ll talk to your friends about,” he says, adding that, “We are proud to say that our average wasn’t impacted by the move to remote, which speaks volumes. It says something about our company culture when our customers don’t feel a difference.”
Ballard notes that the real-time reporting was critical for them as they moved remote.
“We’ve got to know what’s going on in real-time, not the next day,” he says, “That’s been critical for us in working from home”
My Take on Talkdesk
Talkdesk is part of the growing trend of contact center services that are moving away from the on-prem hardware and into the cloud. And to their credit, they are getting noticed.
The company was cited in last year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant report for CCaaS, which listed them in their “leader” category for the North America edition and a “visionary” for Western Europe. This was due to their innovative API offerings and high level of customer service. While the mention on the MQ report is always a positive, it reminds us that they are up against some stiff competition in companies like NICE inContact, Content Guru, and plenty of others.
As for my take, I’m a fan of how Talkdesk has made it simple to work from anywhere.
With easy integrations and customizations, Talkdesk seems to be focusing on making their product geared for more agile-style companies that want to be able to quickly jump in and make changes on the fly or have their team members set up shop wherever needed if working at the office is not a viable option.
In months and maybe years ahead, organizations are going to need to take business continuity planning more seriously. Getting this right will include instilling a company culture where every team member takes responsibility to step up when needed, working together to triage when the calls start pouring in. It will also mean adopting the right tools to make transferring work between the office and remote as smooth as possible, minimizing the impact for team members as well as customers.
With their remote-friendly offering, Talkdesk seems well suited for this future, providing some much needed reliability in the face of uncertainty.
