“In a matter of weeks during the month of March, tens of thousands of call center operators and customer service professionals working on behalf of the government were uprooted from the familiar brick-and-mortar facilities that have long served citizens to even more familiar confines: their homes.”
“The displacement—driven by coronavirus’ rampant spread across the country, forcing most offices to close—may sound like a trivial event to the uninitiated, but those in the call center trenches understand what a massive undertaking it was, and what the major ramifications might be…”
“Overall, the company turned to cloud computing to further advance its remote employees’ capabilities, allowing 9,000 remote call center staff to address calls in Amazon Web Services’ secure cloud computing environment.”
“Staffing up during a pandemic presented its own challenges. Romeo said the company strategized to hire people with their own internet-enabled computers, but while many people own those, far fewer own viable USB-enabled headsets required for high-quality audio calls. Hardware, including laptops, were in short supply and high demand, and the company’s IT help desk was further challenged to ensure hundreds of new hires procured and installed the proper customer service software required to securely field calls. (The software is of the utmost importance, Romeo said, because it locks a machine’s other applications so that secure conversations can take place without privacy concerns) …” Read the full article here.
Source: COVID-19 Could Change Government Contact Centers Forever – By Frank Konkel, July 10, 2020. Nextgov.
