Setting up work from home isn’t easy – This is how we did it.

I received a call from one of my enterprise customers before the lockdown was announced in India. They wanted to be prepared to have their agents work from home, and they wanted the entire solution to be rolled out in a week.

They had a workforce of 3000 people, and moving all of them to work from home takes a lot of effort. We set out to help them in their transition, and as a first step, we identified all the points of failure.

1.     Spotty Internet connections and non-availability of Internet at the agents’ home

2.     Softphone installation and integration to make phone calls and the security of it

3.     VPN connectivity to access the on-premise applications

4.     VPN connectivity to access the on-premise contact center suite

Spotty Internet and non-availability of Internet

We made a list of locations that do not have Internet and provisioned them with an Internet connection. Those locations that had spotty Internet, we provisioned the Internet by aggregating multiple mobile network SIMs using our SMOAD device.

Softphone installation and integration to enable voice conversations

Installing a softphone and integrating it is not a straightforward solution to allow voice conversations. There would be multiple operating systems, and the codec used requires a fair bit of bandwidth to enable voice conversations. This most likely results in broken conversations and the quality take a beating.

We deployed WebRTC endpoints for the voice conversations that require very minimal bandwidth. We also provided a backup option for every agent to do their outbound and inbound voice calling using a mobile application. Our mobile app works well with the minimal bandwidth provided by 3G/4G Internet connectivity.

All our voice communication is encrypted, ensuring the security of the conversations and does not allow anyone to eavesdrop.

VPN connectivity to access on-premise applications

They wanted to access a bunch of on-premise applications from home. VPN connections are relatively expensive and more so when you want to maintain multiple connections to your contact center.

Some of the direct costs include:

Cost of licensing – each VPN client connection requires a license fee when you are using a vendor-based solution. When you use an open-source VPN solution, the price gets translated to management costs

Cost of hardware – with 3000 agents connecting, and assuming that 1000 of them need to access on-premise applications, that represents an additional monthly expense of roughly anywhere between $1000 to $3000

Cost of deployment – configuring our VPN connectivity and ensuring the right access is provided to every user will take up a lot of time of the IT infrastructure team.

We helped our customers avoid all these accumulated costs. Instead, we deployed our open VPN client with our SMOAD VPN server installed on-premise. We were able to connect all of the agents to access on-premise applications for a flat subscription fee.

VPN connectivity to access on-premise contact center suite

Their contact center suite was an on-premise deployment like most other contact centers. They wanted to access their contact center suite using VPN. VPN access was a challenge as the bandwidth requirement was reasonably high, and they couldn’t provide such connectivity at the agents’ homes. Provisioning dedicated VPN connectivity between the office and the remote locations would have been prohibitively expensive.

What we did was we migrated their call center to our cloud contact center solution, and we managed the integration with their on-premise applications using APIs. They used our open VPN solution to access on-premise applications and updations. They managed the rest of the call center functions using our cloud contact center.

The complete WFH solution was implemented for the customer in a week. We enabled Internet connectivity, cloud telephony, SIP trunking, VPN connectivity to access on-premise applications, and enabling cloud contact center was done in 3 days. The integration of the contact center with on-premise applications’ took a week.

Two-thirds of the entire ITBPO industry has started to work from home. While the IT industry manages WFH with its existing infrastructure and collaboration tools, that is not the case with the BPO industry. International calling and the ability to address customer queries quickly is the need of the BPO industry, and it faces several challenges in implementing them.

While many of them have moved their staff to WFH, there remain several challenges, as described in this article. We continue to address these challenges and offer solutions to our customers.

Our WFH solutions follow a pay-as-you-go model, where we charge for all the infrastructure put together on a per-minute basis.

We have helped migrate more than 10000 agents to work from home in the last three weeks, and we are addressing several challenging needs.