“COVID-19 has changed the way we work.”
COVID-19 has changed the way we work. More than half the planet has experienced some level of social restrictions and many companies are working with an entirely remote work force for the first time.
Mobile Mentor is a service company that supports mobile and remote workers in New Zealand, Australia and the USA. Our customers include government, healthcare, and private enterprise.
We had a look at our support team’s numbers to see what has changed, and here is what we have seen in the first few weeks of mass-working from home.
Response times improved…
Like many companies, we worried how productivity would be affected with long-term remote work. As it turns out, productivity was positively impacted. Eliminating travel, less distractions from colleagues, more focus time, etc. We worked to improve our response time. This is also reflected in the rest of our organisation where we’ve seen an increase in productivity all round.
We were confident in our ability to continue to serve our customers when relocating our staff from operating across our support offices to working from home. We conducted BCP exercises regularly to prove this. But, enforced working from home had different dynamics – pets, children, remote customers, etc. A pleasant surprise was the increase in our ability to answer calls faster – even with increased volume!
…but customer expectations increased
What we observed is our customers’ expectations also increased during this period. Perhaps for similar reasons as our own bump in productivity, our customers were more productive and expected more of us. Though we were exceeding our SLAs, we saw a slight dip in customer satisfaction scores.
We believe the primary reason is that our improved response times fell slightly short of customer’s new expectations. There were some good learnings and, we are taking steps to continually improve on the service we provide to our customers.
Peak call volumes changed to match remote work
Historically across the traditional working week, we experience two peak periods of demand for employee support – the morning between 8 and 9 am and the early afternoon between 1 to 2 pm.
As employees adapted to working from home, we have seen this demand contract to the late morning hours of 10 am – 12 pm.
The curve has also been flattened a little perhaps reflecting the fact that we are all doing more meetings throughout the day.
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Mobile Mentor engineers are certified by Microsoft, Apple and Android. Since 2004, our customers have rated our service consistently above 95%. We are proud to be a certified provider of security services to the NZ government.
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