Reimagining Work In The IT Sector Focus On How Not

Summary: When deployed with a combination of appropriate digital tools and leadership style, a remote or hybrid work model allows your enterprise to capitalise upon talent wherever it resides. It also helps you to trim down office maintenance and hardware-related costs. If you are willing to reshape your organisational structure and operations, there are opportunities to invest in resources that fuel growth and resilience for a stronger competitive advantage.

Up until 2020, work for employees in the IT sector (and most other industries) meant a place. Real estate was a significant portion of organisations’ corporate assets and was a fixed expense.

Today, as the world recuperates from the pandemic, business leaders are zero-basing their approach towards the workplace. They are reimagining how their teams can work and analysing the strategies they must deploy to build operational resilience.

Although the forced shift to remote work brought many challenges for businesses, it also gave them a never-before opportunity to unlock their real estate investments and divert their funds for digital transformation, business agility and growth.

“Out of Office” notification – a new meaning

The unprecedented work-from-home experiment worked better than most companies could have imagined. It allowed many employees to move back to their hometowns and freed them from the stress of daily commuting. Many do not wish to give up this flexibility. According to a study commissioned by Atlassian and conducted by the Australian research agency Paper Giant, 66% of Indian employees prefer working from home.¹

Even though many did return to the workplace as economies reopened, studies have indicated that remote work models are here to stay.

Consequently, IT companies are ready to reconceive office cubicles and combine the conventional brick & mortar workspaces with digital investments to create a hybrid work environment.

This shift in work culture is not merely a cost-cutting initiative. By eliminating the barrier of geographical locations, it also helps attract specialised talent for the organisation.

Besides, forward-looking CEOs have recognised the significance of implementing a proactive tech strategy that keeps their organisation’s future growth in mind.

The accelerated digital transformation that the pandemic triggered was an opportunity that the corporate world had not seen in previous downturns. It shattered norms and paved the way for lasting change in how people participate in daily business operations.

The routine activities that have a high potential for remote work in the IT sector include:

• Interacting with software and applications
• Updating knowledge by attending online workshops/training
• Communicating with clients via telephonic contact centres and live chat services
• Managing customer relationships
• Collaborating with colleagues to discuss business strategies
• Processing, analysing and interpreting industry and market trends
• Executing organisational and administrative tasks

By allowing some of your employees (who prefer remote work models) to perform such job duties from home, you can help them become more productive and motivate them to stay longer with the company

Tools to implement a digital workplace

To set up a consistent remote work environment in IT companies, Tata Tele Business Services (TTBS) has an array of digital products that not only enable new ways of working but also drive better visibility into operational expenditure. These include:

Smartflo

The pandemic increased the volume of remote communication between customers and businesses for both B2C and B2B organisations. At the same time, organisations had to reduce the number of people working at their premises for employee safety.

If your IT company handles internal or outsourced contact centre services, Smartflo will help you maintain business continuity and consistent customer experience. It will also facilitate the work-fromhome model and keep hardware costs controlled.

Its cloud-based framework is easy to deploy and scale, and it lets you add “more seats” to your contact centre with higher influxes of inbound calls. You can also integrate it with your CRM apps to give agents a comprehensive picture of customers’ accounts and the details they might need to provide an effective first-time resolution.

Smartflo’s multilingual IVR system helps you offer automated responses to queries with objective answers and do not require help from a human. In addition, it has features for automated call distribution, performance monitoring, call recording, sticky agent and call analytics to improve productivity and generate high returns on digital investments.

Live Chat

Another application to complement customer service platforms in an IT company is Live Chat. Powered by TCS iON technology, it helps in real-time communication with customers who prefer to use the keyboard instead of the phone while connecting with contact centre agents.

With Live Chat on your website, you can also capture more leads and optimise conversions. It lets you collect valuable data on customers’ expectations to make more informed product, service and marketingrelated decisions.

Using the application, you can also channelise angry social media users - who demand instant replies to their questions - into a private, discreet space. You can then address their concerns out of the public eye, with less damage to your brand’s repute

Your employees can use the TCS iON Live Chat securely from any desktop or mobile device.

Document Management System

A study indicates that more than 21% of productivity in offices is lost due to document-related challenges.² Another survey has found that 77% of business owners prefer to access their work files remotely.³

The TCS iON Document Management System (DMS) allows you to manage your work files in the cloud and access them from anywhere. It is an IT-as-a-Service model that keeps your growing data organised without extra hardware and software investments.

Using DMS, your remote employees can store, share, edit and manage their files while eliminating the inconsistencies of keeping files in unsafe removable drives. Records such as client data, business proposals, presentations, training manuals, HR guidelines, vendor bills, checklists, and blog posts can be accessed from anywhere. Centralised file management also enables better version control.

Cloud CRM

The Cloud CRM offered by TTBS enables remote collaboration for marketing teams for effective and simplified management of pre-sales, sales and post-sales activities.

The application captures every interaction with a customer to leverage it for your organisation’s business interests. It minimises manual work in data processing and makes customer segmentation more lucid.

As an add-on, Cloud CRM incorporates custom features and widgets for the visual presentation of data and brings comprehensive analytical capabilities for sales and marketing processes.

Since it is remotely operable, you can assign critical tasks to any of your available employees to ensure that customers’ requests, concerns and queries are addressed promptly.

Enabling business growth and resilience with digital investments

Cloud and SaaS solutions do not involve significant capital expenditure that characterises on-premises configurations. They make it easier to recover from disasters and scale business growth cost-effectively. As future-ready solutions, they help you avoid costs on product upgrades and integration. At TTBS, we’ve also introduced high levels of security into our cloud systems to keep your business processes immune to cyber threats.

Besides deploying such sets of digital tools, a focus on appropriate leadership and management styles is critical for the success of any virtual workspace environment.

Regular and personalised interactions between supervisors and their teams help create social cohesion and avoid the downsides of remote work. All employees must have a sense of belonging, a common goal and a shared identity to build business success, growth and resilience in the next normal.

To know more about location-agnostic and cost-saving TTBS products for your IT company, please call us at 1800-266-1800.

Sources

1 - https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/company/corporate-trends/66-of-the-indianemployees-want-to-work-completely-from-home-survey/articleshow/79444498.cms?from=mdr
2 - https://www.business.com/articles/7-statistics-that-will-make-you-rethink-your-document-management-strategy/
3 - https://recordstorage.com/3-document-management-statistics-for-your-organization/