Thousands have businesses have had to adopt an agile strategy in response to the ongoing COVID-19 lockdown, so that they can continue as normally as possible.

Motor insurer, Markerstudy deployed its business continuity plans to move 3,000 of its staff to homeworking in just two days, including contact centre agents, many of whom had never worked from home before. Of 3,000 staff, 1,400 of them are in customer facing roles taking inbound calls from brokers, customers and partners.

"We have always put business continuity planning at the top of the agenda and invested in the latest technology," commented Adam Miller, group head of IT at the company. “As the technology and the business continuity strategy was already in place and we predicted that lockdown was going to happen before it was officially announced, we were already ahead of the game with our deployment strategy.”

As part of the plan, Britannic Technologies deployed a Mitel IP Solution and Mitel Contact Centre, which is managed as a hosted solution in a secure cloud.

"There was no impact on customer services during the transition and we are still able to track the agent’s performance as normal,"" Miller explained. "For example, we still see log on/log off times, call duration and all other KPIs giving us complete visibility so we can continue to deliver a seamless customer service."

Jonathan Sharp, director, Britannic Technologies said it is vital that conferencing and collaboration technology integrates with front and back office systems to maintain customer service.

"With lockdown looking set to continue it is also about how to optimise your remote workforce and customer engagement, and to streamline operations. Use this opportunity to discover new business opportunities and models in light of these new working conditions and reduce costs, with hard times yet to come, without impacting on the customer experience," he said.

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