Technology enabling work from home – The New Normal

The coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak and the subsequent lockdown, has brought the world to a near standstill with significant economic disruptions across all industries and sectors. While the pandemic is first and foremost a human tragedy, its impact on the global economy is also expected to be significant.

As the Government take measures to try and flatten the curve, a major challenge for business leaders is to ensure business continuity as employees work from home. It seems likely that “remote working” may be the new normal as the future of work is being re-defined by every passing day.

Research indicates that the biggest concern for most business leaders in the adoption of work from home as a modus operandi is the fall in productivity. With internet connectivity as the key enabler for collaboration, communication and resource allocation to drive businesses, the enterprises ensure that the employee productivity remains high.

Most of the companies are using video/voice calls to ensure the seamless function of teams, workflows and operations. In the past month, internet usage has seen a colossal jump, leading to a surge in demand for high-quality and secure home broadband and virtual private network (VPN) services. Telecom companies are effectively enabling Collaboration Platforms thereby ensuring business continuity is in place.

As one of the essential services during the pandemic, Telecom companies are focused mostly on increasing network resiliency that helps businesses in timely communication. Being the enablers of connectivity and communication solutions for businesses, the Telcos play a pivotal role in providing solutions for remote work scenarios.

Their robust infrastructure of services can assist organizations in facilitating the right mix of solutions across connectivity, secure access, collaboration and extending back-office operations remotely. The rise in the use of digital tools, including Web-conferencing, cloud computing, and electronic payments has put the telecommunications sector in the spotlight in facilitating this new ‘normal’.

Customer-oriented interaction with Hosted IVR & Web Chat solutions

The COVID-19 outbreak has resulted in a massive uptick in the call volumes as both large and small enterprises are directing their consumers to contact them via phone, email or chat. The increased phone calls throw a challenge to enterprises to deliver frictionless customer experiences. Cloud-based interactive voice response (IVR) is one such solution that can help businesses achieve an interaction between the company and its customers.

The Hosted IVR solution helps enterprises route inbound calls to the mobile or home phones of their employees thereby ensuring a seamless interaction over the phone. The Hosted IVR Platform routes the call to the Agent, enables the customer interaction, generates performance reports like before thereby ensuring Business Continuity of the entire customer interaction process.

Another product which enables interaction with Customers is Web Chat which is a plug-in that enables the chat functionality on the customer’s website. This tool enables any website to become interactive with Agents sitting at Home handling the Chat responses.

Effective audio and web conferencing solutions for remote collaboration

Amidst the current global scenario, business travel has completely come to a standstill making home the new workplace and remote working the new norm. As a result, not only have the large conferences suffered during this global pandemic, but smaller meetings are also affected. Hence, enterprises have increased the usage use of multi-channels such as audio and web conferencing for most of their communications.

Sai Pratyush, Group Product Head – IoT, Cloud and SaaS, Tata Teleservices Ltd.

The conferencing solutions follow high standards of internet security to ensure the privacy of all the parties involved in communication. These solutions help enterprises to engage with employees working remotely, collaborate across various departments and locations, interview candidates and manage suppliers as the technology is efficient, cost-effective and scalable. In these unprecedented times, these solutions have helped enterprises adapt to the modern and flexible working environment and continue business as usual.

In addition to Web conferencing, Web Casting services are also being utilized as a substitute for large face-to-face events. A Web Casting Platform ensures events like Town Halls, Product Launches, Trade Events, Lectures, etc can now be conducted in the virtual world.

Secured file sharing solutions for businesses

Cloud computing is one of the key enablers during the current remote working scenario. As small enterprises may lack the resources to provide employees with company hardware, they are mostly relying on employees to use their own devices while working remotely. The various cloud computing services across Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), enable the employees to get the same files, information and data they had access to in the office.

These document management solutions support a wide range of devices and systems and help deliver integrated security that is required in this digital world. These solutions allow employees to work in a virtual workspace and help enterprises in reducing administrative costs, managing various projects, allowing seamless collaboration and enabling hassle-free auditing. Cloud-based CRM tools enable businesses to address their customers’ issues on a real-time basis thus upscaling their customer delivery model. This also helps the enterprises in data analytics to enhance business intelligence for informed decisions making it more imperative for them to leverage this technology.

Triggered by the pandemic the industry and the ecosystem at large are now moving towards a hyper-interconnected reality. The rapid digitization has brought a change from the normal, and every change carries the need for positive development. The enterprises are using various technology solutions to strengthen business resilience, improve processes, reach customers more effectively and manage their workforce more efficiently. With the focus on customer-centricity and innovation, telecommunication companies are striving to provide the best technology and services to businesses to improve processes, manage employee, customer and partner well-being and be prepared for the future – The New Normal.

By Sai Pratyush, Group Product Head – IoT, Cloud and SaaS, Tata Teleservices Ltd.