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A year ago , employees were asking for permission to work from home . Now , after an initial return and depending where in Asia- Pacific you are , many are back to asking permission to enter the office as business recovery strategies support on-going operational uncertainty .
COVID-19 forced most to think fast and rapidly adapt , with 88 % of organizations adopting work-from-home strategies in response to operating restrictions . Previous hurdles to transformation journeys were pushed out of the way as businesses across the economic spectrum sought to keep operations running , maintain productivity and deliver the best possible customer experience .
But in the past months , the very idea of work-life balance has evolved from an equilibrium between work and life commitments , to an entwining of the two . We ’ ve moved towards work-life integration .
Work-life integration has been driven by the hybridisation of three key aspects of the workforce : the convergence of customer experience and employee experience ; the blurring of lines between the home and the office ; and the melding together of humans and the technology .
Convergence of customer and employee experiences
Traditionally , organizations have spent millions of dollars improving customer experience each year with comparatively little invested in employee experience .
With so much focus on one side of the equation , many organizations unwittingly created a growing digital divide between their customers and the frontline staff who are there to support them .
But mandated work-from-home initiatives tipped the hands of many businesses . As organizations sought to enable their agents to work remotely , employees gained access to many of the services available previously only to customers – such as digital chat and self-service , video and IVR .
As the availability of digital self-service grows and new channels become available , voice interactions will become more sophisticated and more complex – both in the nature of the customer query and their expectations around their resolution .
So as organizations evolve from traditional communications , they need to think about how to bring more complex channels into that experience and how to integrate with the back office when that support is needed .
To do this requires an open architecture . This might be a widget framework that can align customer applications with contact center applications – then integrating both of these with back office collaboration tools .
It also demands a flexible and adaptable infrastructure to ensure those tools are always available to mitigate downtime without limiting how employees prefer to work . Although many have looked for a silver bullet with an ‘ all-in ’ strategy , enabling true work-life
integration means leveraging the affordances of the many types of clouds to tailor technology to serve your business , not vice versa .
The critical piece of this puzzle is being able to bring in all those resources together and use them in a holistic approach , rather than having each channel act in a siloed manner .
Blurring the lines between home and office
As a result of the pandemic , almost every traditional office role was trialled in a remote working
Jeremy Paton , Team Engagement Solutions Director APAC , Avaya
As AI continues to proliferate , it ’ s increasingly becoming a tool to assist humans in their work – not replace them .
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