This is how we’re helping our Staff work from home with Cloudcall Hosted PABX:
Our Problem During Covid-19
A lot of companies in South Africa are sending their Staff home in response to Covid-19 (Coronavirus), including us here at Centracom. One of our biggest concerns was how do we carry on carry on delivering good service to our Customers. In order to do this we identified some critical areas:
- Calling and speaking to Customers
- Emailing our Customers
- Accessing our systems to provision services
All of the above had to be done remotely from each staff members home. Staff have 2 pieces of hardware – their laptop and their smartphone. The laptop takes care of the emailing, as well as the access to our systems. We opted for LTE connectivity thanks to Pindrop, and were able to roll out that connectivity quickly. The big question was the VoIP systems and how we enable Staff to work from Home with Cloudcall Hosted PABX?
Our Solution: Cloudcall
At Centracom we have our existing Hosted PABX, one that we offer our Clients, called Cloudcall. We use this because the calls we make are cheap, the quality is very high (4.2 on the MOS Rating score), and our Cloudcall Hosted PABX platform is very stable. The question was how do we extend that environment to 60 plus Staff members houses overnight, and cost effectively i.e. without buying new Yealink desktop IP phones? We have 2 options to do this:
- Cloudcall Desktop – we installed a Desktop Softphone on each staff members laptop, and supply them with a Yealink or Jabra headset. Easy enough and a great solution for advanced users that need their hands whilst talking like our Call Centre Agents.
- Cloudcall Mobile – we installed an Application on staff members Apple iOS or Google Android devices, sync them and they were up and ruining on their own devices in minutes. Great for more mobile staff members like our technicians (who are cautiously visiting Clients with lots of hand sanitiser, gloves and masks), as well as our general desk-bound staff members.
On top of the obvious benefits above, we noticed a few other logistical benefits. Our Staff, despite our best efforts, didn’t know each others extension numbers. This was compounded by the fact that they were sitting at home alone. Our Cloudcall platform took care of this with not only a staff directory, but even offered extension presence (who was online, who was available), and even an instant messaging platform for them.
We learnt that expediency in times like this are underrated, and it’s always the small things that catch you. Cloudcall hosted PABX helped us resolve this, and we’re very excited to be able to offer other companies in South Africa.
