With rapid adoption ITIL framework, the focus shifted to services and management (business outcomes). This resulted in a gradual change from IT Helpdesk to IT Service Desk, which is now equipped with multiple channels that end-users could use for requesting support services. It has also enabled and empowered the end-users to solve a certain level of issues themselves.

Technology has made quantum leaps over the past decade, but the majority of the organizations continue to operate with the dated model when fewer things went wrong with IT. The onset of the pandemic in early 2020, drove the CIOs to think digital and move towards an operation that encouraged “Shift-left” and “Remote”.

The modern Service Desk Operations or “SDOps” (as we like to call it), offers an intelligent “first line” of entry point into IT Organisation comprising of Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled automated solutions that users can access with Zero-human touch. To reduce the involvement of human agents, it is anchored around self-service and self-healing initiatives. Some of these enabling tools/ trends are listed below:

• AI and NLP powered Chatbot – Empowering the end-user to converse with a chatbot to get their issue resolved via self-service
• Digital Experience Management (DEM) – allows organizations to develop a deep, continuous understanding of each employee’s needs across the entire digital enterprise. The DEM platform is capable of Service Desk diagnosis & remediation, Root cause analysis, Proactive Endpoint Services, and Asset Optimization
• Automation and orchestration capabilities – From the use of simple scripts to the use of RPA for simulating human-like activities for resolution of issues
• Integrated IVR based telephony – AI-based telephony option to intelligently redirect the calls to appropriate resolver groups
• Remote support and Augmented Reality – enables users to leverage both smart technologies and a remote expert at a world-class service desk to resolve their issues

Adopting a “shift-left” approach enables issue resolution close to the end-user, thereby, bringing in an enhanced end-user experience and reducing the wait time. This directly impacts the cost of dealing with the incidents and enhances the services levels. The productivity of the business end-user improves significantly, and they are motivated to resolve the issues themselves, rather than reaching out to the service desk.

What the future holds?

Post pandemic, organizations have begun to realize the power of “shift-left”, which results in minimum human interaction and resolution closer to the users, at the IT service desk. This has propelled a rise in the adoption of AI-enabled capabilities, automation, and knowledge management capabilities. AI interfaces will eventually become an integral part of SDOps in the next few years, providing the end-users with a self-learning robotic bot as an alternative to a human agent. This will lead the way in Value Demonstration, enhancing and enriching End-User Experience.

As we move ahead, the operational cost for running an IT Service desk is expected to drop as AI interactions will mature and provide round-the-clock support to end-users without the need to have human agents covering a 24×7. Moreover, AI-based interactions at Level 0 going to cost less, thus, incentivizing the organizations to drive adoption of new technologies at the end-user level. The rate of technological development in the current day and age would result in IT Service Desk becoming more of a facilitator ensuring that all the end-user services ‘just work’.

91¶¶Òő’s E³ framework provides a strong foundation for the ‘Digital Workplace’ to be leveraged, a differentiated framework for transforming the end-user workplace. This framework comprises of

• Experience: Identify User experience journeys through Value Stream Mapping
• Efficiency: Drive Extreme Automation for an efficient self-service experience
• Effectiveness: Accelerate adoption for benefit realization

Author:

Abhimanyu Pandey
Lead Consultant – INFRA,
91¶¶Òő

The post Evolution of IT Service Desk Operations (SDOps) appeared first on 91¶¶Òő.

With enterprises adopting Work From Anywhere reality, and with the advent of the digital age, Digital Workplace has truly evolved to be digital and is here to stay. Digital Workplace solution needs to be envisioned with end-users forming the core of the solution. It is crucial for an organization to ensure that each end-user has a seamless workplace experience regardless of time and space.

To build an effective Digital Workplace solution with the end-user being at the center, it is imperative for an organization to focus on persona-based services. To achieve this, a well-planned discovery exercise needs to be initiated. Discovery has to be an iterative process that gets refined progressively and incrementally with continuous user feedback.

Accurate Persona mapping is the base for creating truly customized and efficient digital workplace solutions for different verticals.

• Personas are end-user prototypes that represent the requirements of groups of users, with users aligned with the enterprise’s business goals and therefore exhibiting a specific set of user characteristics. They act as ‘substitutes’ for real users and help guide decisions on strategy, functionality, design, and development
• Personas help in designing the solution by identifying the user motivations, expectations, and goals responsible for user behavior. They are based on knowledge of real users and imitate the end-user in the digital world
• Personas also provide a reliable and realistic understanding of how a business could expect a group of employees to embrace the new solution

The problem

The primary reason for discontentment within enterprises that deploy digital workplace solution is their one size fits all approach irrespective of the users’ requirements, their industry segment, technological maturity, and its user’s willingness to adapt to change. The ever-changing technological landscape combined with work from anywhere has made it challenging and complicated for workplace solutions to provide a consistent end-user experience.

Some of the top industry-specific persona examples include and not limited to:

Banking

Supporting on-demand customer requests and managing high customer expectations in remote work scenarios arising due to pandemic-induced lockdowns. A digital workplace solution curated for Banking Professionals enables them to connect with the banking systems remotely and securely for transactional activities in a seamless manner. The solution enables unified collaboration within the staffing ecosystem easing the processes such as inter-departmental approvals, financial transactions, and reporting.

Manufacturing

Managing and maintaining production capacity and other activities with a lower workforce and quick turnaround in case of breakdowns or IT issues. To facilitate remote resolution, the production engineer should have access to event logs, live execution system status, and augmented reality-based smart remote support. Digital Workplace solutions can enable the engineer to seamlessly resolve the breakdown through persona-driven access.

A well-researched and regularly updated set of end-user personas allows in preparing a solution that can manage the scale and complexity of the modern workplace while ensuring end-user delight and cost-saving. 91¶¶Òő’s E3 framework builds a strong foundation for the ‘Digital Workplace’ to be leveraged, a differentiated framework for transforming the end-user workplace. This framework comprises of

• Experience: Identify User experience journeys through Value Stream Mapping
• Efficiency: Drive Extreme Automation for an efficient self-service experience
• Effectiveness: Accelerate adoption for benefit realization

Author:

Shreet Das,
Pre-sales Lead, Digital workplace,
91¶¶Òő

The post Digital workplace aligned to industry-specific personas appeared first on 91¶¶Òő.

The trend will force organizations to bring heightened attention to delivering exceptional end-user experiences on one side and building new support services and processes on the other to enable smooth remote working (see Table 1 for ‘What has COVID-19 changed?’). This is because users can no longer visit ‘tech bars’ (areas dedicated to IT support teams) or expect support teams to come to their desks to resolve issues. The problem is compounded by organizations’ having relaxed their norms around personal devices while, simultaneously, they have become cautious about their IT spends.

From SLAs to eXLAs

Organizations must work around their traditional notions of what comprises end-user experience to meet rising expectations. The old-fashioned concept of SLAs will need to be replaced by Experience Level Agreements (eXLAs) because users want everything faster. Organizations too are waking up to SLAs being misleading, resulting in undocumented productivity loss. For example, a user may log a ticket for a technical problem for which the SLA could be 20 minutes. A 100 such tickets every day for a mid-sized organization would work out to over ~500-man days lost every year. Meanwhile, the support dashboard would show “all green” because SLAs are being met. Invisible to management, users would have experienced the frustration of long waits and loss of productivity (see Figure 2 for what users do when faced with slow support).

The way to change this is to connect user experience and productivity. This can be done by leveraging automation and self-help and self-healing processes. Consumers—and we all are consumers—have become accustomed to managing tasks like “change password” and “install application” independently. Over the last decade, we have been doing this on our mobile phones with routine ease. But organizations are not geared to provide the same experience. The first thing you hear in an organization at the slightest hint of trouble is, “Have you logged a ticket?” The ticket is the center of service and experience. Not the user.

But when experience and productivity are connected using automation and self-help, there is a dramatic improvement in user experience (see Figure 3 for the change in user satisfaction between hands and feet support and self-help/automation).

The trick is to move the user to the core of the support process. This is where structuring the “new normal” begins (see Figure 4 for the structure).

In the new normal, interactions with users must move a notch up. They must become multi-lingual and intelligent. This can be achieved by using AI-enabled chatbots that don’t just refer to an FAQ but execute solutions for the user. This can also be supported by intelligent IVR that goes beyond the “Press-1-for-password-reset-and-2-for-agent-support.” IVRs can be made intelligent to identify the user by name with voice bots using natural language processing (NLP). These interactive bots should ensure that users need not refer to several apps, say from Workday and PeopleSoft or the intranet and a website but they should be contained to deliver app outcomes from within these bots. The user must not struggle to navigate to sources of information. Instead, the system should become a single window for all information, binding all information as a single source of truth. Finally, the system needs a strong wrapper of governance to take care of how data is managed and shared.

Levers to create the new normal

Most mid-sized organizations would have automated up to 10% of their support processes. The target should be to have self-service systems, automation and bots to manage in excess of 70% of these processes, freeing up time for agents at the service desk to attend to complex troubleshooting. The path to achieving this is by using six levers of transformation spanning self-service, intelligent automation, etc. (see details in Table 2).

How does the organization know that its efforts and investments in delivering user experience and support for remote employees and distributed workforce are effective? Currently, the processes to measure the impact of interventions are long-winded and complex. These processes need to be simplified, without which organizations will continue to get responses from two polar ends of the experience spectrum: those who are extremely unhappy and those who are extremely happy. This creates misleading perceptions. Instead, eXLA should be measured besides SLA covering channels such as chatbots, live agents, email, and instant messenger. To ensure that effectiveness can be measured the use of “Digital Experience” platforms becomes a must and compiling data from end user devices on performance and intelligence becomes important. In addition to this user sentiments should be captured in form of the response from users which can be collected using simple methods like gestures – thumbs up/down, likes / dislikes and smileys. Regular SLA metrics are always an important element to complete the 360 degree view. These can be translated into scores, providing more accurate insights into user experience.Ìę

What does the new user experience look like?

An example of a typical session using an intelligent AI-driven bot helps understand how new support systems need to work. Assume that a user logs into the system to seek assistance with installing an application. Instead of dashing off an email to the service desk (or calling a service desk and waiting endlessly in a queue), the user interacts with a text-based chatbot that has identified the user by name. The bot presents a list of the top common queries to the user. In this instance, the user selects, “Install app” and the bot immediately lists the applications authorized for the role and which are not currently installed on the user’s system. The user selects the right application and the bot completes the installation. At the end of the processes, the user clicks on thumbs up/ down, like/dislike button to provide feedback.

A non-IT use case helps appreciate this further. Assume you are the user and you want a list of holidays. The chatbot lists holidays applicable to you using your role/ location/place of work. The bot understands that you may want to apply for leave and therefore presents you with a “My leave balance” prompt. You click on the prompt and the bot looks up your leave balance, displays it, and helps you complete a leave application. At the backend, the bot looks up a variety of systems from the intranet for the list of holidays to Workday to complete HR processes. You need not switch applications and hunt around for links.Ìę

When the bot encounters a query it cannot respond to, the session is handed off to a live agent. The agent gets a copy of the entire interaction history with the bot and can understand the context of the query. The query can then be resolved using several channels from SMS to social media.Ìę

At the back end, the interaction is captured on a dashboard as a new problem for which the knowledge base has to be created/improved so the bot can handle it independently the next time, without having to escalate it to a live agent.Ìę

Organizations must up their game with remote/distributed work becoming a reality. End-user experience will play a major role in determining if your remote working initiatives succeed or not. If they put the user at the center of the process, success will be assured.

References:

Author:

Sujoy Chatterjee
VP, Infra Managed Services,
91¶¶Òő

The post End-user experience and remote working during COVID-19 & beyond appeared first on 91¶¶Òő.

Over the last two decades, businesses have become more and more reliant on information technology and managing IT has become extremely complex. It has become absolutely necessary to monitor the applications and infrastructure that support the business. With the ever-increasing portfolio of software tools, organizations today, find themselves invested in multiple monitoring tools: custom in-house tools, open source tools, packaged tools, and many more, that add up over time. A survey conducted by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) in the year 2015, found that 65% of the enterprise organizations have 10+ monitoring tools. What is the potential consequence of this?

Indeed, data disparity and information silos begin to plague organizations. It is common for an administrator or a manager to hop from one tool to another, each with a separate login credential and different data source to get the complete story. The data is always there, but not in a consolidated manner/view, causing IT and business users/ executives to waste valuable time hunting for insights. In the enterprise world, siloed data has become a norm. This is a major enterprise level problem, and without a single source of truth that offers a holistic view of service performance, it is impossible to have visibility into what went wrong and where. This results in IT support teams scrambling to manually correlate events and solve problems, while the business and end users suffer leading to degraded end user experience and business productivity. For instance, if a business-critical application is down for even a few seconds, users may choose to click away, and this can directly impact the revenue of a company. For some of the leading companies such as Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, and others, their application presence and user experience are extremely vital, and any technical snag can jeopardize their positioning in the competitive market.

A proven solution for the aforementioned problem is the Single Pane of Glass – a unified dashboard or portal that provides one view of all the disparate sources of data to gain actionable insights. Organizations have begun to realize the cost and productivity implications of piling up tools meant for reporting and monitoring, they are now focusing on unified real time visibility. Every IT manager aspires to have a Single Pane of Glass reporting and governance layer across all IT systems – from laptops to servers, applications to infrastructure end points, virtualization to storage and network to cloud platforms, and even extending it to service performance measurement throughout the IT landscape.

When an end user raises an issue/ problem, instead of spending time in discussion/ war room, the IT manager should be able to:

• Look at a unified and central dashboard which provides real time visibility of all IT infrastructure
• Narrow down on the problematic area and isolate the root cause
• Involve the right IT personnel for further deep dive analysis within their domain Typically, a Single Pane of Glass monitoring solution should be:
• End-to-end – Provides centralized infrastructure wide visibility from a single console
• Intelligent – Provides insights to spot the root cause of issue
• Automated – Enable automation for discovery, monitoring and problem remediation
• Proactive – Provides trustworthy alerts before the end user is affected
• Simple to use – Allows IT support agent and helpdesk technician (non-experts) to use the tool for triaging

Characterized along these lines, single pane of glass is a reality today. Furthermore, it provides deep service level IT insights and performance diagnostics that ensures a great end user experience. Over a period of time, this translates into improved efficiency and business objectives.

While consolidating multiple IT tools and platforms for reporting purpose may seem simple at first, it requires an organization wide commitment in terms of time and effort for unifying them. Beyond helping decommission redundant reporting tools and bringing down operational expenditure for an organization, Single Pane of Glass provides a unified, real-time and simplistic view of reports/ dashboards which empowers the IT support teams to be aware of the most critical metrics and statuses on a daily basis. This really puts monitoring and diagnostic power in the hands of the IT teams.

91¶¶Òő’s Digital Workplace Solution is all about services revolving around the end-user, a framework that puts the users where they belong – right at the center. With this “user-first” approach, certain principles are framed that provide End-User Computing Services. The end-user outlook provides the ultimate vantage point for very high user experience and satisfaction. 91¶¶Òő understands what it takes for the IT teams to strategize end-user centric services and get the most out of them. This, despite modern-day service challenges, multi-vendor and multi-technology environment, complex infrastructure and applications. 91¶¶Òő monitors the entire user journey across interaction channels through the integrated platform ITSM on a single pane of glass. This offers user sentiment analysis and effective platform usage through interactive dashboards.

A structured governance mechanism helps to obtain insights for continuous improvement plans to enhance end user experience and increase self-service usage.

To learn more about the Digital Workplace solution, click here.

Reference Links:

Author:

Abhimanyu Pandey
Lead Consultant, INFRA, 91¶¶Òő

The post The Need of Unified Reporting through a Single Pane of Glass appeared first on 91¶¶Òő.

Not only are there massive challenges — such as understanding user content from the free-form text — but chatbots also present an interesting question for designers: what do you do when there is the very little interface? For designers working on chatbots, the text itself is the only canvas they have. But used wisely, it is the most powerful tool in the modern design kit. Chatbots are a hot topic and many are hoping to develop bots to have natural conversations indistinguishable from human ones, and many claims to be using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Deep Learning techniques to make this possible. But with all the hype around AI, it is sometimes difficult to tell fact from fiction. Chatbots don’t need to impersonate humans. First, to boost outcomes and deliver better end-user experiences, they must quickly deliver responses that speak directly to human needs. Second, they must keep learning, so that the learning can be applied towards creating more meaningful responses.

Effective chatbots will showcase the perfect end-user understanding of needs and complement them with quick access buttons and images that depict the options available. By incorporating these visual aids, chatbots can reduce the time and effort spent on interacting, resulting in a quality end-user experience.

A number of companies are already using chatbots for customer support because it is an effective way for brands to:

• Improve customer service
• Increase customer engagement
• Monitor customer data and gain insights
• Generate better leads
• Save costs

We have seen the following happening based on our implementations:

• 55% of users preferredÌęchatbots as a primary channel when contacting
• The most common use of chatbots is to get quick answers in an emergency (37% of chatbot users)
• Furthermore, 34% of chatbot users reported that they use chatbots as a means to get connected to a human agent

Organizations have good reasons not to have live support available in the volumes that customers may need: it is too expensive. And although they recognize the value-add of a good conversation in terms of customer relationship benefits like improved retention rates and an increase in the share of wallet, they face the challenge of staying competitively priced. In addition, they probably have a hard time finding qualified employees to take on-demand.

Chatbots are fast

Customers expect fast and efficient support. Customers that do end up getting some kind of response have to wait an average of ten hours, while they reckon that should be around four. Responding to customers in a timely fashion can be a major challenge for organizations that don’t have experienced teams working round the clock to solve customer issues as they arrive and is a major investment even for larger organizations. This is one of the reasons it makes sense to bring in chatbots. Unlike their human counterparts, customer support chatbots don’t need eight hours of sleep a night and can give consumers the answers they need with little to no wait time.

Chatbots are proactive

With traditional customer support, organizations sit back and wait for the customer, meaning that customer interactions are mostly passive and centered around issues and problems encountered. As you will have noticed, chatbots take a more proactive approach by being quick to leap in as soon as a customer arrives on a homepage, asking what they are looking for and if they can be of any help. Advances in NLP means that talking to a bot is no longer the slightly surreal and potentially frustrating experience it used to be. Conversing with chatbots nowadays is very much like talking to a human agent — only faster. Bots can kick-start the conversation, pointing customers in the right direction, guiding them through the payment process and following-up post-sales by letting them know about useful tutorials to help them out and asking questions about their experience, thus replacing the traditional satisfaction survey and helping build even better customer journeys in the future.

Your support team can focus on the important activities

As in many fields that are currently seeing rapid developments thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), the rise of chatbots in customer support is raising questions about human agents eventually seeing their jobs taken over by robots. This is however far from being the case. Chatbots aren’t set to replace customer service representatives, but rather take care of the grunt work and help agents do their jobs moreÌęefficiently, in better conditions, and with more satisfying results for themselves and the customer. Chatbots are just like human agents in that they learn on the job and improve as they go along. AI-powered chatbots can gather and analyze cross-channel data from a wide variety of sources, including previous conversations with the customer, social media profiles, web searches, and interactions with websites. This enables them to personalize their responses and improve them with every customer interaction while providing agents with essential analysis grounded in previous conversations and similar use cases. Unlike human agents, chatbots can’t handle situations that require in-depth analysis or diplomacy. What they are great at is taking the weight off customer support teams by welcoming customers and reassuring them that their issue is being addressed, before responding to simpler requests and filtering the more complex ones towards a customer service representative. The benefits are obvious: agents no longer have their time taken up by routine questions and can focus on bigger, more complex tasks that require their creativity and advanced problem-solving skills.

In conclusion, customer support chatbots are a great investment for any organization, big or small, seeking to give their customer service representatives the help they need to smooth the customer experience journey and boost brand loyalty.

91¶¶Òő’s Digital Workplace solution is all about services revolving around the end-user, a framework that puts the users where they belong – right at the center. With this ‘user first’ approach, certain principles are framed which provide End User Computing Services to enhance the complete customer journey. The end-user outlook provides the ultimate vantage point for very high user experience and satisfaction. We understand what it takes for the IT teams to strategize end-user centric services and get the most out of them despite modern-day service challenges, multi-vendor and multi-technology environment, and complex infrastructure and applications. Knowing just the ‘what’ without the ‘why’ is of no use, as almost all the toolsets and platforms that are part of the Digital Workplace are easy to implement and manage in large and complex IT environments.

Author:

Manoj Kumar P S
Solution Architect, Digital Workplace

The post Implementing effective chatbots for enhanced end-user experience appeared first on 91¶¶Òő.

Today’s technology can change that. Using Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Cognitive Intelligence, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP), etc., it can turn what used to be a frustrating experience into a stress-free – even delightful – interaction. The real reason why these wonderful experiences are difficult to come by is because IT systems designers are out of touch with end users. They don’t know how to go about using technology to redesign processes and meet user expectations.

Over the last decade, there has been dramatic change in technology. Today, organizations can use chatbots over mobiles, instant messengers and websites to deliver multi-lingual voice and text support. Next Gen technology can accurately handle customer queries and arrive at precise decisions using massive knowledge banks, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data Analytics and even the Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain! In fact, now is the time for organizations to place the power of self-healing and self-service in the hands of users. Using these technologies and methodologies, it is possible for users to reduce resolution and response wait times to minutes instead of days, sending the time when “raising a ticket” was the norm into history.

While re-casting processes and replacing technologies, it helps to bear in mind the three different categories of end users we have today:

The Digital Native:

A person who has grown up in the era of ubiquitous technology, popularly known as the millennial and the centennial generation, for whom the technical world poses no challenge. These are the people who want the best-in-class service.

The Digital Immigrant:

This is a person born before the digital era, popularly known as the Xennial generation, which has had an analogue upbringing but has learnt the digital ropes. They are making the effort to feel at home with technology but they want simple-to-use technology.

The Digital Handicap:

This is the “old school” and digital has not been their ally…yet. It requires patience and perseverance to make sure this user can work his/her way through technical problems. For these users, customer service needs to be 100% on point since they stand to lose the most if their issues do not get addressed properly.

The type of service used depends heavily on which of the above three categories the user falls in. This brings us to the key question: If users have evolved over the last decade, why are we still offering the same services to everybody, as though there is no distinction in the way these users approach their digital world?

The answer lies in the mind-set of service providers. It is the service provider that needs to refresh the technology that forms the backbone of these services and which intuitively adjusts to end user needs.

What are your thoughts on this? Why have IT teams been slow to change? Why have they been reluctant to keep up with the shifts in consumer behaviour as well as expectations? Stay tuned to this blog to know more!

Author:

Sujoy Chatterjee is the Vice President @ ITC INFOTECH. In his current role he is responsible to incubate new technology, alliances and build solutions in the IT Infrastructure space. He drives End User Computing services to global customers.

With his 25+ years of IT Industry experience, he helps organizations to re-look at the way the end user services are delivered and to transform these services to a user experience led delivery.

The post The Changing Dispositions of End Users appeared first on 91¶¶Òő.

The insurance customer requested 91¶¶Òő’s assistance to supplement support and manage colleague experience. The goal was to bring things under control—to where the solution to handle the spike in volumes could continue to be deployed after the threat from COVID-19 subsides.

Visible decisiveness from our leadership to take on this challenge ensured high degree of motivation amongst team members and also instilled requisite confidence in the customer

91¶¶Òő’s support professionals and domain experts quickly determined the right solution. The following aspects were examined and a course of action agreed upon:

• People and Infrastructure readiness to enable support from home
• On boarding the support team and provisioning access
• Knowledge Acquisition via WebEx training sessions & Microsoft Teams
• Mock calls and assessment carried out by the customer
• War room for immediate next steps and resolution
• Customer feedback and analysis
• Daily reporting and dashboards

In the pre-COVID-19 era, a major portion of the solution would be discussed and blueprinted onsite, working at the customer’s facility/ office/ worksite. Here, with its unprecedented emergency level, we did this remotely (besides, traveling to the customer’s location was not an option given the risks of infection to employees and the uncertainties of lockdowns being enforced by governments in the wake of COVID-19).

In the traditional approach, the entire transition process would have taken 3-4 weeks. . Here, time was of the essence. We went from idea to live production in under 7 days (for details, see figure below).

For the customer, it was relief and disbelief rolled into one. The service desk manager of the customer organisationÌę was quick to thank 91¶¶Òő for the “tremendous effort.”

Such quick rollouts of support enhancement and stable employee experience, even under demanding and testing conditions, can be achieved by following best practices for successful remote transition. 91¶¶Òő did this by conducting virtual huddles including check-ins at start of day and at regular intervals, by defining clear roles and responsibilities within in the team for transparency and by creating a dispatcher role to ensure work allocation and facilitate handovers.

A second set of best practices revolved around pairing associates for efficient coaching and resolution, creating dedicated champions for setting agenda and publishing minutes of meetings, weekly communication by the leadership team to address the team and increased engagement of team members via training sessions.

We can’t say that the engagement was an easy one, although the best practices make it sound simple. But that is the trick experienced remote process management teams can pull of: make even the toughest projects look simple. Even in the testing times of COVID-19.

The post COVID-19 and the challenge of scaling remote support appeared first on 91¶¶Òő.