A vast chunk of the global workforce now works from home, possibly for the long term, with many businesses saying they’re unlikely to point employees back to their office desks – at least not on a fulltime basis.
Giants such as Facebook are leading the way, with company chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, earlier this year saying the world’s largest social network would start “aggressively opening up remote hiring”, expecting around half its workforce to work remotely over the next five to 10 years.
Technology is the enabler, with apps and cloud services, such as Spaces, Webex, Zoom, Slack, Google, and many others providing workers with remote access and connectivity to people, tools, and networks to do their jobs.
The shift has been widely hailed as a success, obliterating lingering scepticism held by corporates regarding the likely hit to productivity when employees are left to their own ends. What’s more, many businesses switched to remote working without missing a beat, carrying on while their offices were closed.
Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, summed up the feeling when he said: “The past few months have proven we can make that work. So, if our employees are in a role and the situation enables them to work from home, and they want to continue to do so forever, we will make that happen.”
However, the realities of remote work may not be as glitch-free as reports suggest, with deep analysis of call quality revealing new vulnerabilities in unified communications (UC) systems when users work beyond the confines of private networks.
Analysing data gathered from more than two billion calls conducted by our global community of clients, we zeroed in on call quality from March to May – the critical three months from the mainstream emergence of COVID-19 to escalated alert levels and lockdown.
During this remarkable period in history, our platform processed 32% more calls. Video calls in our user community grew from less than 1% to 8.2% of sessions as workers isolated themselves and clambered to retain the benefits of face-to-face communication.
As people and workplaces adjusted to working from home, call quality took a major hit. At its worst, quality disturbances impacting both customer and user experience were evident in 68% of voice sessions.
World worst call quality day was March 23. However, by mid-April the situation had turned around, with quality issues arising in just 3.4% of calls. The improvement corresponded with a growing appetite among our clients for data driven decision-making. Specifically, the number of reports used to guide configuration adjustments to compensate for remote working and the vagaries of public internet increased by over 2,500%.
