In light of the current COVID-19 pandemic, countless companies are being forced to adjust their practices so as to protect employee health without disrupting normal business operations. While face-to-face agencies are closing, contact centers are vulnerable at this time, and companies must find swift solutions for ensuring business continuity without jeopardizing their staff. In this context, SABESP, Brazilian Water and Sanitation Service Company, Migrates Agents to a Work-from-Home Model with Vocalcom Omnichannel Contact Center Solution.
Brazilian water and sanitation service company SABESP serves more than 9.5 million customers in the São Paulo region. Their contact centers are comprised of 600 agents providing omnichannel support for their core services as well as commercial services. Altogether, SABESP agents manage more than 800,000 interactions via phone and 7,000 interactions via other channels. SABESP uses Vocalcom Contact Center solutions for both voice and digital channels in their contact centers, but also for their multiple face-to-face agencies managing in-person customer care service for 400 cities throughout the São Paulo state. Vocalcom further consolidated all legacy systems such as CRM into a single front-end application using Vocalcom script building capabilities. In addition, Vocalcom has been supporting SABESP with an on-site capsule team dedicated to help both in operations and DevOps.
When Brazilian authorities declared new business restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, SABESP faced the challenge of closing all their agencies that normally welcome the public. All face-to-face operations needed to be moved to the contact center, just as contact center operations also needed to start migrating to a remote work model. As a 1st step, in partnership with Vocalcom, SABESP moved some of their contact center agents successfully to a remote work model, and this number is increasing weekly. Together, we set up the necessary infrastructure, including laptop preparation and the organization of the entire remote system that uses both the Vocalcom solution and the SABESP network. In order to keep up with the increased demand coming to their contact center after closing the face-to-face agencies, SABESP decided to increase the agent capacity with 100 additional people working remotely while moving part of the face-to-face agents’ interactions to the chat channel.
To support this new volume of chat interactions, the company decided to accelerate their planned project of adopting the Vocalcom chat solution to boost their omnichannel capacity. With Vocalcom cooperation, SABESP Customer Relationship and IT teams were able to deploy Vocalcom’s chat solution in just a few days. All omnichannel traffic—including voice and chat—are now managed through the contact center on a single interface using Vocalcom solutions. In spite of the current outbreak, SABESP is running business operations continuously, serving customers efficiently, and protecting employee safety.
During this pandemic, Vocalcom is committed as always to providing continuous support to its customers. SABESP management has acknowledged this dedication, highlighting the role Vocalcom has played in their successful migration.According to Marcello Oliveira da Silva, Head of Regional Operations, “Thanks to the capabilities of the Vocalcom platform, we could implement the WAHA (work-at-home agents) model, preserving the health of our customer service agents. Vocalcom has also been supporting SABESP to enable online chat for our face-to-face agents, giving our customers more options to keep in touch with SABESP. Vocalcom support has definitely been very important to maintaining SABESP customer service even while facing the COVID-19 pandemic.”Tatiane Martins of the Customer Management Department further adds, “The agility of the Vocalcom team has been essential to coping with the WAHA Contingency Plan — an extraordinary situation overcome by the timely planning and execution of the SABESP and Vocalcom partnership. We certainly have a lot of work to be done, however, it is good to know we are on the right path.”
