GWR closing their contact centre

[whole diary]

[grahame]

From https://www.gwr.com/safety

Getting in touch

In line with the government advice to only travel to work if essential, we’re closing our Contact Centre. If you need to get in touch, you can send us an email, or you can direct message via Facebook or Twitter.

Agree "only travel to work if essential" ... which to me means "and work from home if you can".  Is the technology not in place for contact centre staff to pick up calls remote from their office ... such as at home??

[TaplowGreen]

From https://www.gwr.com/safety

Getting in touch

In line with the government advice to only travel to work if essential, we’re closing our Contact Centre. If you need to get in touch, you can send us an email, or you can direct message via Facebook or Twitter.

Agree "only travel to work if essential" ... which to me means "and work from home if you can".  Is the technology not in place for contact centre staff to pick up calls remote from their office ... such as at home??

Probably not if it requires access to internal GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) systems - that's the problem we had with contingency planning when our Contact Centre closed on Thursday.

[Sixty3Closure]

Our land line stopped working but Plusnet seem to have closed most of their contact methods as well which surprised me. I would have thought remote working would have been a key part of any business continuity plan for a call centre.

Our work one is able to operate at about 50% capacity remotely after a bit of intensive planning although unfortunately in the current situation probably needs to be about 150%. It an internal one though so different commercial drivers.

[TaplowGreen]

Our land line stopped working but Plusnet seem to have closed most of their contact methods as well which surprised me. I would have thought remote working would have been a key part of any business continuity plan for a call centre.

Our work one is able to operate at about 50% capacity remotely after a bit of intensive planning although unfortunately in the current situation probably needs to be about 150%. It an internal one though so different commercial drivers.

To give you an example of the position of the (outsourced) callcentre we use, it has 600 seats (approx. 300 are "ours"), on Wednesday, 370 staff were absent either through illness, self isolation or childcare needs. Even with that reduction, it wasn't possible to create enough space between them all to maintain social distancing, and had it not closed, the staff Trade Union would have led its members out of the door on safety grounds.

Our offshore call centre in India was completely shut down

Hundreds of suitably secure laptops and/or connections may provide some remote capability assuming that all those people have broadband access and a suitable environment but any less than that would just result in a few people being overwhelmed, and mass remote working simply isn't how call centres operate.

We have managers on call remotely for any real emergencies, but in common with a lot of other organisations (And more all the time), that's pretty much it.

[Rhydgaled]

The small-medium business I work for uses a VOIP (Voice Over IP) system which can be accessed over the web, as a mobile (Andriod / iOS) app and as a softphone (PC software) allowing our pepole to make and receive calls from practically anywhere they can get internet access. We had been slowly rolling out VPN to our laptop users (about half our PCs being laptops) over the past few months anyway and had most done before the COVID-19 outbreak. This rollout was accelerated, and extended to desktop PCs, when the virus appeared on the scene (with two users granted machine-admin rights to install the VPN software) so that pepole could take the PCs home (which most now have, there now only being 2-5 pepole in the office most days I beleive). I think one person didn't have internet at home, the company offered him a 4G router/dongle I believe. So far working from home does incur a few issues but, although a call centre would have a lot more employees to manage than I do, if they had a VOIP system like ours already set up for everyone they probably have a larger IT support team so I doubt they would have many issues either.

[Sixty3Closure]

Ours is the IT Service desk so they've been quite creative in how they work. Lets not tell the information security people.

Much of my work over the last two weeks has been getting secure laptops out to key workers. Made much harder by their having to be Windows 7 machines. New laptops won't run Windows 7 so we've have been searching in cupboards, cabinets trying to get the numbers up.

We do have the ability to install VPNs on staff's personal machines but at the moment the trade off in effort has made it worth focusing on laptops.

The unions with the exception of one particular area (staffed by teams of more er..mature and change resistant staff) have been pretty co-operative so far.

The biggest challenge has been manager's championing their own teams to the extent of anyone else and making it difficult to work out who really is 'essential'.