The story behind how BlueJeans swiftly enabled remote customer support amidst a pandemic
Among Everise’s many marque partners is BlueJeans Networks, the world leader in video cloud conferencing. Amidst uncertainty and chaos, the strength of our partnership enabled us to transition the enterprise support team into a home-based environment over 2 days.
To get an account of this amazing story, our CMO, Chris Greenough, and VP of Marketing, Judd Bagley, have a conversation with Nir Galpaz, VP Technical Service & Support for BlueJeans, Gagan Mehta, EVP Asia Operations for Everise, and Rechelle Valenzuela, the Everise’s Sr Operations Manager for BlueJeans.
Here’s an excerpt of the conversation:
Chris Greenough: Good evening and good morning! Let’s start by introducing yourselves, your business and your roles within them.
Nir Galpaz: Hi, my name is Nir Galpaz and I’m the Vice President of Technical Service and Support at BlueJeans. So BlueJeans is a video conferencing solution. It’s extremely reliable. And I would say one of the things that set us apart from our competitors, it’s really our enterprise-grade solution. We build the product, the services, the support and everything around it to support enterprise-grade video conferencing and collaboration. And we’re very proud to serve a few of the largest companies in the world — Fortune 100 — and being a partner with them during these difficult times.
Gagan Mehta: I’m Gagan Mehta and I’m the EVP of Operations for Asia. So I manage all the Asia business for Everise, which includes the Philippines, Malaysia and most recently Japan.
Rechelle Valenzuela: I’m the senior operations manager for BlueJeans. I pretty much manage the overall operations for BlueJeans for all three lines of businesses that we support. So we have customer care. We have a provisioning team and we have the customer success team. So all three are part of my scope and I manage everything from metrics to operations to people management.
Chris Greenough: Nir, what was the main business driver for BlueJeans choosing to work with Everise?
Nir Galpaz: So about a year and a half ago when we started to kind of scale and look about the future of the company and how we want to scale, one of my tasks was to kind of figure out what’s the right way to scale both from an economical but also from a quality perspective. We were looking into different markets and we identified the Philippines, and Manila in particular, as one of the markets where we want to expand. So when we weren’t searching, we were looking at various different companies and enterprises from very large to very small.
What I liked about Everise at that time was really that the level of connection that we were able to build with the leadership, the transparency, the quality of the resources, the forward-looking aspects of the partnership, and being able to cater to our unique criteria and the things that we were looking for. We really liked the ability to combine human resources and technology, the thought process around automation and other things that Everise was able to demonstrate was really appealing. That’s kind of how we ended up in this partnership.
Chris Greenough: What was the moment you knew this was going to be outside the bounds of a normal business continuity plan?
Gagan Mehta: So I think March 13 is when we had our first infection in the BGC area across the site, it was literally a block away. That’s when we realized that we could potentially be looking at a complete shutdown of the BGC because that’s private property.
Nir Galpaz: Four weeks ago or five weeks ago when the entire world kind of started to spin around in a pace that was really unknown before. It’s kind of connecting the different dots from different types of information, it’s reading in the news about what’s going on in China, how things were really kind of unfortunately progressing into Italy and Spain, starting to see the first signs of the fear of this pandemic in the United States with some early reports of, you know, the first person getting diagnosed in the Philippines — just really connecting all of those different points together.
This is you know, I would say was a pure combination of both an emotional and rational decision making. It’s not, I can say, it was neither a very impulsive one nor was it was a very rational one. It’s trying to really combine all of those information points together to try to take a really different approach and get a very close look of what’s really the right thing for us.
So one of the things that we’ve done, you know, I created just a WhatsApp group for all the leaders. And I was so happy to you know, first I had their phone numbers, their cell phone number, and I was able to get in touch with them. It’s not something I take for granted. People sometimes keep their personal stuff, you know, outside of work and I was really able in two seconds to get in touch with the leaders in Manila, really get some real stories from the ground level, not from a political point of view or the government, but from people that are still living and breathing out there and being able to connect that with my team, having a couple of conversations, trying to kind of brainstorm. So what’s going to happen next? Understanding ok, so there’s a BCP — what is the BCP? And thinking through it and saying, you know what, the BCP plan of locking down everyone in the building, making sure that they’re not flooded with water or, you know, the ground is not shaking — not going to help us this time. If one guy or girl gets the COVID-19, the entire department is gone. They will get sick in two minutes and then how does it really help anybody if they’re all locked down in the same building? We need to do something quite the opposite. We need to spread everybody out and get them as far as they can from each other. So we do have some kind of a contingency and if one guy is sick, then the rest at least is healthy.
That’s kind of how it all came down to decide to take something which is again, a really different and actually take trucks and then move people with their computers, screens and everything that goes with it and send them back home to their provinces or wherever they live. Make sure that it can connect to a reliable connection. We provided, you know, cell phones and cellular cards and a lot of things that just are not in the playbook of any kind of BCP.
Chris Greenough: Take us through the journey of transitioning to home-based support and why other players maybe missed the boat a bit.
Gagan Mehta: From our perspective, work at home was a standard practice which had a playbook in the U.S. geography. So we were extremely lucky, but you know, we planned as such over the last two years to have that playbook and just instantly to deploy. So I think the doubt or rather the inability of other players in the market was just not having a work-at-home practise in their ecosystem. So for us, it was as good as, you know, pick up the US work-at-home infrastructure, scale it pretty quickly and start deploying people.
Nir Galpaz: It was exciting and being able to do that over the course of one weekend. That’s remarkable.
Rechelle Valenzuela: So that the week and before the actual lockdown, people who were in the office on a Friday shift on their way home, we decided to give them their desktops, set them up for Grab transportation so that it would be comfortable to carry home. For those who were off shift, we packed their laptops, got their address, got their phone numbers and coordinated with our Facilities team so that when they delivered the desktops, they would be there to sign off for it.
So we did that Friday after the shift and Saturday morning until Sunday evening. So the premise was by Monday, when we are fully staffed, everybody would be ready to work from home. So Saturday, Sunday, we were doing testing to make sure that, you know, they can support BlueJeans and everything. And sure enough, Monday we were up and running. Everybody was, you know, had their desktops on. Then we have our wireless headsets, which kind of helps in terms of noise cancellation and audio quality and all that. So Monday we were all ready to work. That’s how we did it. That’s how it all started.
Gagan Mehta: You know, this was something that was unprecedented and just fell in our lap. Although I would say that as the outbreak happened, you know, us as an organization with our core value being people-first, we were already in the process of getting prepared to move our complete workforce to the safety of their homes.
Chris Greenough: How has the team adapted and maintained performance in this new normal?
Rechelle Valenzuela: It’s been taken in really wild because almost 90 per cent of the workforce across the globe or probably 100 per cent are working from home. One good thing that came out of this work from home is that last month our CSAT scores for last month actually was one of the highest ever recorded. I guess it’s because, you know, despite all the issues coming in, BlueJeans was there to support the customer. So they’ve been very happy about how responsive the team is and how, you know, because of the volume coming in and kind of missed some calls, you kind of answered more calls and all that. But the feedback was, you know, the team was very responsive. The level of support was still there, which is what we’ve always emphasized to our agents, regardless of how many calls are there, make sure whatever you’re handling gets quality interaction. So it shows in our numbers.
Gagan Mehta: I think there are three elements to customer satisfaction, whatever the metric may be, whether it’s CSAT or NPS or CES. The first one is resolution, you know, complete and long term resolution. The second one is a customer connect, and I think that’s the element where we are seeing a higher index, so to speak because both parties are facing the same situation. To the connection to around one, this whole pandemic, and two, we both are in the same boat, I appreciate you’re trying to help me and, you know, I think that’s playing in a lot.
There’s a lot of, you know, emotional intelligence that’s happening. So the amount of time we used to see where a customer and a frontliner are doing, you know, chit-chat is slightly increasing where they’re talking about their general state, wherever they are from a pandemic standpoint. So, of course, the empathy element is playing a huge part in that whole customer service index.
Nir Galpaz: Whether it was the quality or the bandwidth, everybody told me about fifteen different reasons why this was never going to work. It is working. It’s not as perfect as everybody is sitting in the same office, but it is working and it’s much better than the alternative.
So, I think it’s a good wakeup call for a lot of corporates and big organizations to rethink and specifically, I think in our business or, you know, in Everise’s business where it’s a lot of really large centers with hundreds and thousands of people, this thing is teaching us something that can you know a lot of people were opposed. With the right tools, supervisions and the right hiring of candidates, you can actually run a pretty successful organization remotely.
Chris Greenough: What is different about managing a remote workforce? Of these changes, what elements have the largest impact on operating a high performing remote team?
Gagan Mehta Yeah, I think are a couple of things here right. From our champions standpoint or the agent on the ground, the frontliners. Their whole world is different, right? So they would usually come into the office, have a specific set of tools and log on to that. But the majority of our toolsets that we scaled over the last 18 to 24 months, all of them are available on the cloud. So essentially the toolset that an agent or a supervisor or an office manager would access is the same. What really changes is the whole technical aspects or the technical realities of working as a remote worker compared to being in a brick-and-mortar site.
Nir Galpaz: So far, it’s been working well. Again, it requires different aspects and a different type of management and tools and a lot of other things. But it’s doable and it brings a lot of benefits too. Specifically, when you think about people that are living in very crowded areas, like Metro Manila or different cities in India, the amount of time people waste on just commuting it’s unbearable. If you take that time away and you give it back to the employees, that’s a huge benefit.
Gagan Mehta: We saw that the first 24 to 48 hours were critical for us to support all the employees at home. But beyond that, from a performance standpoint, I think there are a couple of things. Number one, the way we used to interact from a coaching and mentoring and improving performance standpoint is going to change a little bit. It’s all going to be a remote. We have a fantastic suite of tools which we’re using, tools like Microsoft Teams, which we use to interact with a workforce at home. But the connect points, just to make sure the emotional element of all our workforces are managed well, that has to be amplified.
So what we are seeing is that we have to engage more, hold more town halls, do more coaching and connect sessions. So that’s the biggest change that we’ve seen, but ultimately, from a performance standpoint, we are seeing better performance from our work-at-home agents around efficiency and productivity and even customer satisfaction. Our NPS has gone up by 10, 15, 20 per cent in some cases. Our productivity is increased by 5 to 10 per cent. Our shrinkage is at the lowest right now. And then our attrition is next to zero. Again, it’s too early to kind of spell success, but we truly believe that a work-at-home environment is way better from a performance standpoint.
Chris Greenough: How has this changed BlueJeans outlook on work-at-home? Is there a fundamental shift occurring here within the outsourcing industry?
Nir Galpaz: On one hand, I’m saying, you know what, I think that that can actually work for the long term. On the other side, there are other implications of not being together as a team and being able to really brainstorm ideas live that are missing.
What I think we’re going to evolve to a much more fluid environment with fewer restrictions. So instead of having 100 per cent availability in the office, we’re going to figure out something that works both ways. I think it’s like almost anything in life, it’s the balance. None of this is right or wrong.
I think only working from home for a technical support group or customer care, which is very interactive, is probably not good for the long run because as much as you know, BlueJeans enables you to feel together, there are human interactions that are just missing by the digital form. At the same time, you know, we can avoid the commute, the time, the pollution, a lot of other things that just coming and going from one place to the other brings to the world. So figuring out the right balance, I think will be key for us in the next few months to figure out what our new baseline is for the future.
I don’t think I’m going to go back to where I was before because I’ve just learned new things. But I also don’t think I’m going to keep everything remote and just gonna say from now on, I’m going to hire people everywhere in the globe and I don’t care where they are and it doesn’t matter. I am a big believer that people need human interaction. I see it with my kids and how they missed it. BlueJeans is a great tool. Technology is great. But we humans need, you know, side chat conversation, corridor conversation, talking at the kitchen — people need that. So I don’t want to take that away.
Gagan Mehta: You know, within Everise as we speak, within leadership, what we realize is that this whole pandemic has changed the way we will work and operate in the future. Most companies will look at blended models of work going forward. We probably think more and more of the workforce will start working from home and more clients will start demanding that blended approach. But just as learning, I think we were very lucky in terms of preparedness.
What I would say to other peers in the industry and where I see a lot of struggle is that we got we cannot take anything for granted, number one. Number two, we got to get systems, infrastructure, as well as people emotionally ready for any such scenarios going forward. I think every company needs to have the playbook for disasters and events like this and, you know, like we do, everybody should practice and do drills around that so that when the actual event, God forbid, happens, they are much more prepared, as Everise was.
Chris Greenough: What was the one thing critical element that enabled Everise and BlueJeans to transition so swiftly and efficiently?
Nir Galpaz: I know decision making is one thing, but the execution was flawless. It really all goes to the partnership and the understanding that we have between the companies. It just I feel like I operate with one team, there were no two sides here, and at no point of time did the question of cost and margins and all of those things, it never even came up. We just say, hey, this is the right thing to do. Let’s just do it and we’ll figure it out later.
Gagan Mehta: One of the things I feel very lucky about is that we are already empowered in the company, on all levels, to do what’s right for the customers as well as our employees.
Chris Greenough: A strong partnership seems to be incredibly important to enabling agility. Take us through the last year with Everise and how our partnership got to this point.
Nir Galpaz: From the point, we signed the contract we started really small with only five or six agents. Through the partnership we learned to trust each other based on our mutual skills and strengths, we bring a lot of enterprise-grade technology knowledge into the mix, you guys bring a lot of strong knowledge of the culture, of the economics in Metro Manila and how to manage and hire the right people. And we slowly scaled the team from five to twelve to twenty-four and so on to the point where we started to kind of look at this pandemic evolving globally and making a very early call. Actually, I think much earlier before the government in the Philippines, mandated the shutdown, we were able to take a call and really send everybody home, equip them with the right equipment, test everything. So when the bell rang and everything was closed, we were already over there, tested, working and there was just zero impact to the operation. It’s really about building trust over time and trusting the gut feeling and the knowledge of the people that you work with that they want your best interest. That’s how it’s played out.
Chris Greenough: Thank you Nir, Gagan and Rechelle for your time and stories. #Staysafe!
Find the BlueJeans Case Study here and contact us to begin an equally strong partnership.
