It’s been nearly a year since many businesses sent employees home to work. Though some staff have returned to the office, either all the time or on select days, many workers continue to work from their homes. Some have set up fully functional workspaces, while others persist with cobbled together solutions that mostly work, most of the time. These workers and or the company that employ them are hoping to return to their office working any day. However, until this happens their customers suffer.
When businesses first decided to, or were forced to, send workers home, it was sad to see that many sent out Covid-19 response emails to their customers and stakeholders advising them to basically lower our expectations because their employees were working from home.
Even today most websites have the Covid-19 warning stating lower levels of service. Let’s face it these companies were giving poor service before the pandemic and now it’s a great excuse to deliver inferior service.
It is sad that not all companies embraced the amazing technology that we have and that has developed to new and better levels since the pandemic. These services help us deliver the same high quality of service and responsiveness while we are working away from our office desks. As far as they were concerned it was business as usual.
This business-as-usual message should have come from every organisation, whether accomplished at having home-based employees or pursuing working from home as a new initiative. Yet I still hear companies apologise for their poor service and delayed responses because of their staff struggles with the limitations of their home-based offices.
With the onset of this development, we were already prepared for remote working in telephone answering but just had to allow a few days adjustment period so our teams could get used to the idea of working from home surrounded by family etc and getting their home offices equipped and ready to provide full-functional support to all our clients. However, this mindset that working from home means an inferior service is not something we have and even thought of. For Telephone Answering we have never though of using the pandemic as an excuse for providing an inferior service.
Agreed some jobs require face-to-face interaction, most work occurs at a distance using the telephone, email, and video. Office location shouldn’t matter. And it certainly shouldn’t be an issue after all this time. Even the excuse of reduced staff for providing an inferior service should not be the reason.
Though we hope that employees who once worked in an office will soon be able to return, the wise approach is to proceed as if this might never happen.
If you’re working from home, look at your office configuration. Is there anything you can or can’t do as well from home as you could in your office? What do you need to do to correct that? Don’t let the limitations of your home-based office affect your staff or clients any longer.
And if you have employees working from home, are they fully functional or partially provisioned? What do you need to do to close that gap? What must you do to ensure their location isn’t an issue?
It shouldn’t matter to your stakeholders where you work from. They deserve the same quality of service and responsiveness whether you’re at home or in the office.
Excellent service is normal and not an excuse. If you want to experience the high level of service Telephone Answering deliver then please contact us.
