As the Philippines embarks on a nation wide vaccination campaign, the country inches closer to a post-pandemic workplace. Yet it is unlikely that businesses will return to usual, because employees now value increased flexibility, having proven that they can be as productive working from home as they are in the workplace. A recent global Kaspersky study has shown that almost three-quarters of employees want to rethink pre-Covid 19 ways of working, and with two in five workers wanting flexible work arrangements.
When it comes to the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, a key economic driver in the Philippines[1], diversification and long-term thinking are critical factors when considering an appropriate post-pandemic business model that mitigates risks.
Reliable BPO partners now offer geographically distributed workforces that are hybrid and can work from anywhere. They are innovative and agile enough to mitigate unpredictable risks and can optimise their services to perform well at an affordable cost.
Everise, a customer experience solutions and technology company, calls this approach flexshoring, as it offers flexibility to blend work-at-home and centralised teams on a global scale. To facilitate the service model, Everise has customer experience centres strategically located across seven markets including the Philippines, and has invested in developing the tools, infrastructure and security practices that enable a high performing digital workforce.
Everise, a leader in digital customer experiences
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, due to their foresight and investments, Everise was uniquely placed to absorb and capitalise on their remote work capabilities, as they had implemented a Work at Home solution in 2017 that had been catering to a small percentage (10%) of their global workforce.
“We were fortunate, because we had already engineered home-based operations like remote recruiting, virtual training and on-boarding, and business intelligence. Thus, all of our solutions, including omnichannel customer service, tech support, fraud detection, and community moderation, chatbots and natural language interactive voice response systems, could be delivered remotely, and moreover, safely, from home,” says Sudhir Agarwal, CEO and Founder of Everise.
Because they were well prepared, Everise outperformed much larger competitors by transitioning 95% of their global workforce in the second half of March 2020 to work from home. They were therefore able to retain business continuity in spite of the pandemic’s social distancing restrictions, and were able to make strides acquiring new business in both health and technology verticals.
Consequently, Everise experienced employee retention and found that employees worked significantly more efficiently in a work-at-home environment. This transition has also attracted more experienced, better-trained agents, who improve customer satisfaction metrics, enabling improved delivery and satisfaction for clients.In the past year, Everise has increased their headcount in the Philippines, Malaysia and Japan.
Recruiting exceptional agents with psychographic hiring
As a next generation BPO, Everise is deploying technology as much as possible to free up their employees to service emotively – with compassion and empathy. Technology helps with task automation, and replaces low level customer support positions and back-office services, so that agents can focus on managing increasingly complex problems. This means that Everise now recruits agents with more sophisticated skill sets, requiring educated, experienced, technology-literate workers.
A notable advantage of complimenting a centralized support team with home-based customer or product support agents is the possibility of finding exceptional talent. Free from the limits of geography, the company has been able to build a more diverse, dispersed and inclusive culture by rethinking traditional hiring tactics, shifting focus from hiring demographics to psychographics, which is characterised by an individual’s aspirations and preferences.
“We have always celebrated diversity and inclusion, but a focus on psychographic hiring has removed many barriers and enabled us to surpass our inclusion targets across the board.” says Sheena Ponnappan, Chief People Officer, Everise.
When hiring based on psychographics, companies require flexible policies to cater to the needs of different segments. It is also important to customise job descriptions to resonate with their goals and aspirations. Family-focused individuals, for example, are open to trading a traditional office environment for a more flexible remote job, and are drawn to messaging that celebrates work-life balance.
Technology and culture enable flexibility at scale
Flexshoring not only offers access to exceptional customer service agents, it also permits companies to rapidly scale up or down during cyclical hiring seasons, as well as to bring in specialised talent for specific tasks, such as customer service delivery in multiple languages.
Yet all this is only possible with the right tools in place to facilitate communication, enhance service delivery, and enable agent monitoring.
An agile cloud contact center architecture is required to easily manage and reroute volumes, as well as enable root cause analysis to find and solve any issues in specific locations. When gathering intelligence for a Flexshore operation, companies need powerful business and agent intelligence platforms with analytic capabilities to optimally route volume and enhance coaching strategies.
It is also vital for businesses to have a pervasive, borderless culture that connects disparate teams across multiple geographies and time zones.
As companies merge teams from multiple locations and environments, they not only reduce the risk of a single point of failure, but they also mitigate the risk of geopolitical changes, natural disasters, and other market uncertainties. Said in another way, Flexshoring is simply having the entrepreneurial spirit and technical ability to act quickly and smartly.
[1] Covid-19 and the Philippines outsourcing Industry; BPO industry seen performing better vs PH economy this year