FEATURE
COMMUNICATION DURING CRISIS
Jess Pritchard, Head of Corporate at Moneypenny, looks at how communication in a world of hybrid working is changing.
When lockdowns were first introduced in March 2020, an estimated 300 million office workers across the globe made the shift to remote working. With little warning and no time to prepare for seismic operational change, business leaders made quick decisions in their endeavour to keep running.
Almost a year later, many businesses have really embraced the shift to homeworking. Leaders have recognised that they’re able to operate effectively even with a dispersed workforce and that productivity hasn’t dropped like so many anticipated. According to Gartner, 74% of organisations plan to permanently shift to more remote work post-COVID-19, but with another lockdown underway – there has been little time to plan – which has been one of the trademarks of the pandemic so far. FMs are working hard to facilitate effective hybrid working in the here and now.
“According to Gartner, 74% of organisations plan to permanently shift to more remote work post-COVID-19.”
One of the very first questions asked by businesses when shifting to remote working was ‘how will clients and prospects contact us?’ and the solutions rolled out were far-ranging. Some companies invested straight away in technology or extra resource to keep communications flowing but for the majority, who like most of us didn’t expect the impact of COVID-19 to be quite so long-lasting, quick fixes were put in place to keep things ticking over until normality resumes. Unfortunately, many of these temporary measures simply don’t constitute a sustainable long-term solution and failure to step up the game now could lead to poor external communications and bad sentiment.
We’ve heard of one business fielding all office calls to one mobile and working on a rota system with the office manager delivering the phone to staff members by car. This approach creates a dangerous single point of failure that, if it did fail, would completely breakdown the inbound phone connection to a business.
The public was very forgiving in the first lockdown and understanding of teething pains but we’re almost a year
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down the line now and people expect business as usual. FMs are under pressure to keep the wheels of business turning and ensure customer experience isn’t compromised.
The most common solution for handling calls remotely, if a phone system allows it, is to reroute calls to mobile phones. However, relying on mobiles depends on good signal in employees’ homes and their availability to answer. Inevitably, callers will get through to the wrong people and have to wait for a call-back or even worse, reach a voicemail. It makes for a clunky client experience and opens firms up to missing valuable leads. The inability to screen calls or manage status via mobile is problematic too and can hamper productivity. A more professional solution ensures only genuine and relevant calls are transferred to boost efficiency and remove the frustration of nuisance introductory cold calls.
Outsourcing has been a popular pandemic solution for FMs and telephone answering is no exception. Making it a specialist supplier’s responsibility to ensure every call is answered and handled professionally frees up FMs for bigger challenges. This approach allows calls to be transferred to staff in any location at any time, so firms can be contacted outside of the traditional nine to five – an ever-growing requirement during lockdown.
The Coronavirus pandemic has brought about a complete shift in worker habits and team dynamics. With little time to prepare, businesses naturally went into survival mode and adopted short term fixes. However, in the long run, these create bottlenecks and hinder productivity, which in turn puts reputation at risk. By acting on the lessons of the last 10 months and trying to think long-term when choosing remote working solutions, FMs will not only help organisations survive the current lockdown, but future- proof their operations.
www.moneypenny.com/uk/
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