Heroes in Business - Eric Mulvin, Work at Home The Future of Working Remo, Contact Center Cactus Chat

Episode Date: September 12, 2022

Eric and Jake sit down to talk about how having their agents work from home has benefitted their company, and what this setup could look like in the future in this episode of the Contact Center Cactus Chat.

Welcome to the Contact Center Cactus Chat Podcast. I'm your host, Eric Malvin, coming to you from sunny Phoenix, Arizona. And I'm your co-host, Jay Kayang, from Dumagiri City, Philippines. I'm a serial entrepreneur, started my first business 10 years ago, and six LLCs later, I started PacBiz Contact Center Outsourcing in 2015. Today, we have over 200 employees growing. And I'm the operations manager here in PackBiz, and I've been working with Eric since 2014, and I grew as a company grew. So whether you're looking to outsource for the first time, whether you manage a contact center, or you're just looking to improve your customer experience, we'll be covering topics for you. So business managers,

operations managers, business owners, this is for you. So make sure to subscribe. operations managers, business owners, this is for you. So make sure to subscribe. All right, welcome back. And today is episode five. And we're talking about work from home and what that's like in the contact center space these days. Yes. And this episode is different because Eric is here in the Philippines recording. I am. With the podcast podcast with us in this episode so yeah it's awesome it's awesome to be here live and in person with Jake and because I haven't been here in two and a half years the last

time I was here the lockdowns were just starting I was here with my wife and two young kids and we had to escape back to the US before we would have been stuck here for several months so that would have been been interesting but that was also the change what started probably one of the biggest changes in the contact center space in some very long time maybe since the invention of the Internet yeah nobody was for was nobody tried to test if work from home would work on BPOs, but we were forced to do it. Yeah, we were. We had no choice. So, you know, it's now 2022. Fast forward, it's two and a half years later.

And, you know, work from home is here. But what are you seeing in the Philippines as far as the contact centers and how are they handling work from home is here. But what are you seeing in the Philippines as far as the contact centers? And how are they handling work from home today? I think it's different on different industries. Like the healthcare, they're very careful with the data and all. They cannot just be sending people and work from home without anything that protects it. But for other accounts like taxi accounts, we just take calls for a minute and just get the information and put it on so that dispatchers

would see where to pick up and the drop off and all this stuff. And that's, I mean, the restrictions are not really that high with healthcare. So that works for those BPO companies. So it really depends on the type of accounts. Are you seeing more calls? Are most of the contact centers here in the Philippines, are they still work from home or are they having their employees starting to come back? Some are doing it, but I don't really... Here in the city, I would say that only a few are doing it, not too many, because of the kind of industry that they're supporting. So they're having to come into the office, you're saying? Yes. So, you know, how does PacBiz handle the work from home?

So, you know, how does PacBiz handle the work from home today? Well, PacBiz, you know, we made the decision early on. Like when I was back here, when the start of COVID, we decided we're going to try to make work from home a permanent thing. Especially once we saw the success of it and we saw that people were successfully taking calls. Like I believe back in like early 2021, we even had 100% of our call center agents working from home. And I believe today it's a bit closer to 80%, but still a significant amount of the staff working from home. And it's been really fascinating because I haven't been back here in two and a half years. So it's my first time back in a long time. So I'm seeing some new faces, but I'm seeing a lot of familiar faces.

And they haven't been to the office either. They're like excited to be here. They're seeing their friends. They're like, oh, I haven't seen this. There's some things that they haven't seen in the office yet. So it's really interesting that even though I haven't been here, they haven't really been here either.'s pretty funny yeah you can yeah I can imagine like the last time you were here was also the last time I saw some

of the people that I saw yesterday Wow yeah that's that's that's how long it was and so imagine for two and a half years we you haven't seen some of our own staff and we've been they've been some of our own staff and we've been, they've been an employee at the company and we've been able to make that work, which is incredible. So, and even today we still have a significant amount. And part of that decision to invest into work from home was investing in equipment for the staff. You know, we've made sure that they had backup internet, if there's internet issues, otherwise they have to come work at the office or backup power, which is a huge thing. And there was actually some really innovative stuff I'm excited that we've

been working on, solar-powered backup generators, which can run up to 12 hours and I could actually power other devices in their house. Yeah. And also with the selecting of the hiring process, I mean, selecting the right people because not all people can work and not be, you know, distracted by other stuff while working from home. So it takes, you know, something to do that. And yeah, we need to be selective with those people as well. well you're right because there's certain personalities and kinds of people they need a lot of they need a lot of hand-holding that's just who they are and there's nothing wrong with that we're happy to provide that support

because they're still great agents and there's some that they don't they don't need anything they're like tell me give me my instructions and I'm good I'll run with that yeah so well so for the clients you know you get to you get an opportunity to talk to the clients all the time what is their perspective been on work from home yeah well there's there's this one client that I talked before that he really likes like in his office onshore he's embracing the work from home scheme because of the you know you can just call them to cover shift like less than

five minutes they can just be already there logging in and you know ready to cover for absences and yeah I think they also also feel the less missed shifts on the call center companies. Their employees are just there at home, probably doing something, but they're at home. And if they've been called to help cover shifts, they're just there available because you know they're after for you know overtimes and those things and yeah while you're here you recently were able to talk to the agents and how are they what feedback did you get from them about working from home yeah the feedback was incredible and way, you know, they were way more passionate about this topic than I thought they would be because I know everyone loves working from home, of course, but this is the specific things that I got to hear. So, for

example, being able to not have to get ready in the morning and, you know, like I know you have to spend so much time getting your hair ready and and um getting dressed you know i don't know i can't tell you how many zoom calls i've done in uh pajamas and i put on a nice polo and people don't realize imagine eliminating the travel time the time that you prepare and going to the office you know selecting the dress that you wanted to wear to look good you know just eliminate the time you spent with that well when you're working from home and it shortens everything and you get to to you know to lengthen the time that you spent with your family while working we're doing your job yeah and at our call center here at PACBiz family is our number one core value.

And so allowing the staff to be able to spend more time with family and to be able to make sure that they're able to not have to be away from home and their kids so long, it's really incredible. And even the little things like being able to eat whenever they want. Because if they're working in the office and on the production floor, they can't. Yeah, but of course, they have to be very careful with the equipment. Yes. Taking care of the equipment. Yeah. All right.

So that gives you guys an idea of what work from home has been like in PACBiz and in the Philippines. And in our next episode, episode six, we're going to be talking about the future of work from home. And what does that look like? What trends are we seeing on there? So thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. All right.