The sudden move to remote working for many people last year was stressful: families having to navigate working and learning remotely together, and managers having to do their job from a distance.
Now, as office life resumes, many employees want to retain that flexibility as to how and where they work, and managers must figure out how to ensure that productivity is maintained with a distributed workforce, while also looking out for their employee’s welfare.
“What we’re seeing now with the WFH situation is that companies are foregoing the cost of having the expense of a desk inside a building and instead investing in the employee’s home environment,” said Ross Williams, Chief Product Officer at Virsae.
“For example, headset companies are seeing a big swing away from entry level headsets to those that provide the user with a better experience. Some of our customers are paying for the home internet connection, and even moving the collective group of employees to a single ISP that offers business-grade service. The idea is to enable the hybrid worker to perform at their very best.”
To help customers navigate this, Virsae has developed VSM Everywhere, a component of the Virsae Service Management (VSM) platform that offers customers and their MSPs the visibility to better manage the employee’s home working environments. VSM Everywhere is a unique, small, and easily deployed solution applied to the user’s workstation, that allows extraction and analysis of critical performance and inventory data in the “often unmanaged” WFH environment.
Williams said it is a particularly good solution for contact center agents to ensure that both the agent and the customer they are speaking with have a good experience. Virsae has partnered with Jabra for this offering, who provide a video capability, as well as audio.
VSM Everywhere provides new analytics such as workstation and home network performance, and even extends to telemetry data such as headset boom position and background noise. Room analytics that help managers track the engagement and comfort of their employees working from home.
“VSM Everywhere picks up home network and headset analytics and proactively notifies management, enabling them to take steps to invest in, and improve the working environment”
Research from Walker’s Customers 2020: A Progress Report revealed that 70 percent of agents found that noise negatively affects them, and that 78 percent of service professionals believe their company sees agents as “customer advocates”. Calls are now also 40 percent longer and more complex.
In addition, Microsoft research has shown that over 30 percent of hybrid workers have an increased sense of burnout, and Williams sees VSM Everywhere as a natural fit with the likes of Microsoft Viva, an employee experience platform that brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights.
Experienced through Microsoft Teams, Insights for individuals protects employee time for regular breaks, focused work and learning. For managers, it can help to see if team members are at risk of burnout, and this is particularly effective when complemented with VSM derived data.
Virsae further closes the experience loop by leveraging the Microsoft Teams post call survey. Once triggered, the survey response is integrated with VSM’s AI and machine learning to deliver data-led insight to IT managers, ensuring user experience issues are both acknowledged and fixed.
