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Enterprise IT on COVID-19: ‘I Came, I Saw, I Conquered’
Three IT leaders dish on how their communications and collaboration platforms have served them during this crisis, and prepared them to move full steam ahead.
Wrapping up this morning’s Enterprise Connect Digital Conference & Expo roundtable discussion with enterprise IT leaders, I couldn’t help but think of the expression, “I came, I saw, I conquered.” It seems to be with that sort of aplomb that the enterprise IT executives who participated in this session have dealt with the COVID-19 crisis and are approaching their strategies overall.
Priceline: “In a Great Place”
From Jennifer Featherling, director of global contact center technology at Priceline, we heard how the company’s reliance on cloud services put the company “in a great place” to move 1,600 agents from contact centers to their homes in one week. Priceline only just recently consolidate from five disparate contact center systems to the Amazon Connect platform, “a game-changer” for the company, she said. “You know, we wouldn’t have survived, absolutely … if we had not made that shift from a contact center standpoint. I never once worried about trunking. I never worried about the underlying tech supporting it. It was just let the people keep calling … whatever they’re going to do, let it happen,” she added.
Not having to worry about the contact center platform, during this time Priceline has been able to accelerate deployment of a lot of self-service capabilities as well as its ability to offer customers to reach out via the channel of their choice, Featherling said. “We have some more work to do, but we opened up several channels that we were kind of playing with before, so they’re fully out there and available for everyone to use.”
TD Ameritrade: “Normalized the Idea of Working Differently”
When the pandemic hit, TD Ameritrade found itself “incredibly well positioned to transition to be working from home based on a number of decisions that had been made years ago,” Neal Obermeyer, senior manager of channel effectiveness at the company, said. That includes the decision to move the entire company to virtual desktops, allowing employees to log into their desktops remotely — even when in the office. Moving to home was just more of the same. Prior to the pandemic, approximately 15% of the company’s 10,000-strong workforce worked from home on any given day, compared to nearly 100% within one week of the company issuing its work-from-home (WFH) decision, he added. This includes all call center and retail branch employees, in addition to corporate office workers.
While virtual desktop isn’t in Obermeyer’s purview, the digital workplace is. As part of that initiative, TD Ameritrade selected Slack “as the best platform to help us reach our goals for communications and information flow,” and since its implementation it’s “sitting at a 95% activity rate in Slack,” Obermeyer said. So well before the pandemic hit, TD Ameritrade had “basically already normalized the idea of working differently, and access information differently — shrinking that space between people, and they need,” he added.
With the COVID-19 experience validating the digital workplace partnership’s decisions on communications and collaboration, the mandate on “understanding the employee experience and understanding the goals and then designing solutions to shrink the space between people and what they need” remains the focus going forward, Obermeyer said.
Walden University: “Leveraging the Platform”
Walden, an online university, is 100% in the cloud, with 4,000 UCaaS/voice users and about 1,200 contact center agents on the 8x8 platform, Gary Kohlheim, director of services management for Walden, said. Because it’s a couple of years into its cloud-first strategy, Walden was able to move staff from office to home in a fairly seamless way, he said. Helpful, too, is that everybody worked from a laptop, so his team didn’t need to worry about sending desktops home, he added. Overall, between the 8x8 communications platform and the use of Microsoft Office 365, including Teams, the cloud “put us in a really good position to be ready for an event like this,” he said.
Despite the changes wrought by the pandemic, Walden really hasn’t had to miss a beat on its strategic IT plans, Kohlheim said. “We were positioned really well to be able to work regardless of where people are located,” he said. Toward that end, he is expanding contact center services into different channels, carrying forward on its AI strategy, and moving more into self-service, Kohlheim said. With the platform well established, Kohlheim said, the next year or two is really about leveraging it for more services and features and building integrations.”
Other highlights from the digital conference today include these sessions:
Beth Schultz
Program Co-Chair, Enterprise Connect
Editor, No Jitter & WorkSpace Connect
