Heroes in Business - Eric Mulvin, Working From Home Part 2, Contact Center Cactus Chat

Episode Date: September 26, 2022

Eric and Jake talk more about working from home and what its future looks like. How both the Contact Center outsourcers and the agents are able to adapt and innovate in this kind of work system in this episode of 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 PackFist, and I've been working with Eric since 2014, and I grew as the 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. Welcome back. It's episode six. And today we are continuing the topic of work from home. Last week, last episode, we talked about what are the current status in the Philippines for contact centers for work from home and what is happening there. And now we're today, we're talking about the future of work from home. What are we seeing? Let's look into the crystal ball and see into the future and see

what does work from home look like? Yeah, and I think there's so many things that we can go to in terms to innovating, doing stuff to adapt what's happening for the working from home and other things. So yeah, I would like to ask you what does the future look like for working from home for the contact center outsourcers? Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of different things that are, you know, it's interesting because we all had to, two and a half years ago, all had to go work from home, at least in the Philippines. There was all these restrictions here.

And a lot of them were similar in the UK, the US, Canada, and workplaces. And a lot of people didn't start coming back until last year, maybe even this year. In the Philippines, it was more this year. And so now that people are starting to come back, some of the things that I'm seeing that we're going to have is, well, people like work from home. And so instead of bringing them back full time, having them work 20 days a month in the office,

I think it's going to be more of like you come in with your team one, two, three days a month in the office, I think it's going to be more of like you come in with your team one, two, three days a month and you hang out with your team. You get to so that you could meet, talk about what's going on with the account, catch up with each other, keep that connection, that human connection, but the rest of the time that you're still work from home. So you could still keep taking calls in your pajamas. You know, and some of the other things that i'm seeing is uh you know with workstations before you had your own workstation set up before covet you could decorate it you might have another person you share with to share some decorations but that was your station and now we have all these empty stations because everyone's working from home so these hot desk workstations or where you could just plug in for the day

anywhere in the office. And not only just in the office, but I really feel like the break room is going to be changing. It's going to be bigger because it's going to, we want to make it more inviting. So ping pong tables and I don't know, different games.

I don't know. What do you see? Yeah, I can imagine that from the beginning we were 100% working from home with the agents and you know others are really hyped and you know they're really excited about it and you know there's this small percent of people that you know don't really want to work from home and you know we we also consider these people and right now we're on 80 20 percent 80 percent working in the office 20 percent I mean

80 percent working at home and 20 percent working in the office so we give away to those people who would want to work in in the office and in addition some people who really loves working from home and they be in the office. And in addition, some people who really loves working from home in the beginning, who started to feel like they want to work in the office for a little bit. So that's why we are adopting the hybrid office. Like people who wants to work in the office, there will be office available,

and if they want to work from home, you still have their workstations at home so that that makes it more you know like we always think about the employees so this this is for them and at the same time it's been giving benefit to the company and other like do you have when you have happy employees everything will be okay. Exactly. You're able to provide an amazing experience because they're happy. They know that they're taken care of and they don't want to give that up because maybe the options out there are having to work out of the office because some of the other employers are not doing work from home anymore and they're having their people

come back. now with hybrid becoming more common you know like how does that work with training because you know if we're having people come into the office and you know a couple days a week how are you seeing any impacts on training yeah for the training I as of now, we're pretty limited. We would want them to be trained here in the office to give full support. And after a certain time, we would allow them to work at home if they want to. But if they don't, they can also work here in the office. And I think it's better that way.

The availability of working from home is still there and you know normally we work in the office but yeah there are you know the there there are still people who would prefer to have them in they have their own preference to work in the office or at home so yeah to ask you how does the contact center continue to maintain its culture when staff are not in the office at all time? Yeah, well, you know, you just covered a little bit about training and that's a big part of it is when they're new here at the company, we want to set the standard, at least here, that we have an amazing culture.

And that only works if those employees are engaged, if they're active. And so the opportunities are a lot less, you know, if they used to be there coming to the office 20 times a month or more, uh, there's a lot of opportunities to build that culture. Now we're those opportunities are a lot more limited just a couple of times. And so we're also looking at more activities to get them to hang out, maybe not come to the office, but, uh, some of the stuff that I've seen happen recently,

beach cleanups, you know, and people are interested in helping protect the environment. They all get together and do a beach cleanup. Bike rides, people are interested in, who like biking or maybe for staying fit, or jogging, different, all kinds of activities. Not just active stuff, just getting people together that have common interests.

Because if you get plugged in with different groups of people like that at the company, you're able to support each other and you're able to... You create a bond. Yeah, exactly. With other people. And that's something really important with you know with every company like you know you don't you can't work alone like you need somebody to help or you know there's always a partner that you should you should be with in the office like

everybody has that like someone that you want to see sometimes or someone that you want to talk to and not not just spending all your you know time just working from home being alone of course there your family is there but you know there there you know certain you know times that you would look for this to be normal like working in the office yeah Yeah. And so what about, you know, software? Because we're seeing a lot of changes happen, you know, with how people are coming to work, with how we're structuring things. What about the software?

What are you seeing as far as like what's coming up to help support work from home for contact centers? Others, in the beginning, when we were 100% you know they already started doing this using I mean maximizing the software and available so softwares like you know doing the conference call and while they they're working in the at home they get to talk to the people who used to be sitting beside them through conference call. And, yeah, I think there is so much more that these developers can do, you know, to support working from home and, you know, monitoring the people who are working from home

to make it more effective. And, you know, all of these things. And also with the payroll, I know they're also adopting. They have this thing that where we can log in from home, we can also log in in the office. And one other thing that I see which is very good is that some people are maximizing their work in the office. Like if they are out of time going home, i mean going home they're using the office as second option yeah yeah that's great well uh thank you for sharing all that you know it's uh it's really interesting to see where things are headed with work from home and i know we're trying to be here at pacbiz on the cutting

edge of the the ideas and the investments back into the office to make it a great place to work and where they can still work from home and still be connected. So thank you guys for listening and so that's episode 6. Catch us next week for episode 7 and thank you guys make sure to subscribe.