How Discover Mobilized an Army of 8,000 U.S. Call Center Agents to Work from Home in a Matter of Days as the Coronavirus Spread
By Tom Eavenson, vice president of infrastructure services at Discover and Steve Mendelson, vice president of customer service and engagement strategy and operations at Discover
As the coronavirus started to spread across the globe in early 2020, its arrival in the U.S. and effect on the workforce was inevitable. In the interest of safety, and with all of its customer service operations in the U.S., Discover Financial Services quickly devised a plan to move nearly all of its call center employees from their close-quartered cubicles to the relative comfort and protection of their homes and other remote locations.
In less than 14 days, 95 percent of our call center agents were off-site and continuing to serve customers.
Cross functional teams labored 24/7 to create work-from-home kits with monitors, keyboards and cables. Some drove around town searching for power strips and bubble wrap when supplies ran low. Others organized a drive-thru process to allow agents to more easily transfer the equipment to their cars. One-by-one, as many as 1,900 agents per day were equipped and ready to work off-site in four different states.
What’s more, we accomplished this while coping with the impact of a 5.7 magnitude earthquake that hit our Utah call center, the largest of the four.
How did Discover move so quickly?
Having the right technology in place — and incredibly committed teams –made the difference. We have never seen anything like the work orchestrated to mobilize so many thousands of people. We’ve simply never done anything at this scale.
Evolving Technology Before COVID-19
Agents typically come into one of our call centers in Arizona, Delaware, Ohio and Utah to serve our customers around the clock.
Over the past few years, Discover has experimented with a way for agents to work off-site. We equip them with virtual desktops and thin clients, or lightweight computers, that establish a remote and secure connection to our servers.
Deploying this highly secure technology started as a way for military spouses to continue to work with us as they moved from place to place. Over time, we found this model to be effective. Eventually, we grew it to about 20 percent of our agent workforce. The technical model was working so well that we decided to deploy that same technical solution in our locations and were preparing for the roll out when COVID-19 illnesses started to mount.
This modern platform adds significant benefits:
- Virtual desktops and thin clients are easier to maintain and secure.
- They are simple to administer.
- We can seamlessly push out software updates and roll them back on the rare occasion when needed.
We had already built out the environment to support this new model and had been testing and tuning it for months when the coronavirus struck.
On March 13, we started the day with a plan that would ramp up our work-at-home capability gradually over the coming weeks. By mid-morning, Discover’s executive leadership authorized us to accelerate our plans dramatically as news of the coronavirus spread evolved.
Within hours of the decision, employees — from information technology to human resources — already were working on the task. They equipped 300 agents with virtual desktops and thin clients by the end of the first day.
To help more colleagues get out the door, our field teams imaged the thin clients. As makeshift assembly lines formed to move equipment out at each center, network teams behind the scenes added more capacity to Discover’s VPN (virtual private network) and back-end servers that power all of the virtual machines.
Across the call centers, business technology staff set up more than 1,900 thin clients each day. By March 20, one week later, more than 70 percent of all agents were working from home. We pulled everyone we could who had the right skills and stopped other work. In a tireless effort working 24/7, our teams collapsed what would have been a month’s worth of work into a week.
Even an Earthquake Did Not Stop Us
In the midst of relocating employees, a 5.7-magnitude earthquake rocked Utah, where Discover has its largest call center, as well as a mail processing center. Ceiling tiles crashed. Chairs and tables tumbled. Elevators stopped working.
Both facilities were evacuated and one building was shut down for the better part of a day. But we were lucky. Our employees and their families were safe.
When our building reopened more than 12 hours after the quake, the elevators were still out of service. So our field teams formed a human chain from the upper floors down the stairwell to the ground level to move equipment to the doors and into the arms of agents waiting to head home.
Customer Service Never Stopped
By March 25, more than 95 percent of call center agents were working from home. Throughout the move, the majority of customer calls have been getting to agents within two minutes except for March 18, when the earthquake struck and wait times averaged six minutes. Wait times toward the end of March and into April averaged about 74 seconds.
Employees at Discover are using the same tools as they did when they worked on site, such as Webex, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Yammer, and we continue to use the same security measures and actively monitor for threats.
We didn’t relax any of our controls in terms of getting folks home. We just changed where the work was being done.
The incredible accomplishment of those who came together to make this work across Discover, including numerous teams working in the background, can’t be overstated. It’s amazing to see how this all came together.
