Brendan Kiely, CEO, ThinScale Technology:
I had the pleasure to be interviewed on the CX Files podcast back in April. It was the height of the initial lockdown period and everyone was focused on Work at Home (WaH) security. The host, Mark Hillary, was asking me about how the contact centres that had all sent their teams home could keep on serving customers in a secure way from home.
I’m not going to repeat that interview, you can click on the link above to play it again and in any case the situation with the pandemic has changed a lot since April. What has not changed is the reliance on WaH as an ongoing business strategy for the contact centres and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies.
In the most recent CX Files episode, the industry analyst Michael DeSalles of Frost & Sullivan explored the importance of WaH and how it will continue to be used into 2021. We have a lot of time for the advice of Frost & Sullivan here at ThinScale and I was really proud when we won a major award from them in September. The 2020 Global Enabling Technology Leadership Award was awarded to ThinScale because Frost & Sullivan felt that our technology is essential for modern distributed workers – very timely right now.
So, as I was listening to Michael speak about WaH on the interview I was shocked and pleasantly surprised to hear him start talking about ThinScale and our products. Mark Hillary had just asked a question about remote workers using their own devices (BYOD) and how they can be used within a contact centre environment – Mark’s point was that it’s surely unviable to keep shipping thousands of laptops to contact centre agents at home.
Michael responded: “Check this out, I have a great story. In my research on this major shift, I found this small software company called ThinScale, and they’re based in Ireland. And what I discovered is that ThinScale, for a long time has been a leader in architecting, and delivering software solutions that help organizations to effectively implement and manage their remote working right and BYOD and business continuity strategies.”
This was a great shout out and I’m grateful to Michael, although I’m sure that our solution was front of mind for him because of the Frost & Sullivan award. He went on to talk about our Secure Remote Worker solution and how it’s a critical tool for contact centres that want to manage agent fraud when agents are working remotely because it allows the agent to only switch between their home mode or work mode on their device – nothing can be mixed.
It is clear to me that WaH is not just an emergency response to Covid-19 – it is quickly becoming an important and standard component of the BPO delivery model. The BPOs will continue using contact centres, but the previous scale will never return. The future is a blended model that offers their clients much greater resilience against disruption like this pandemic.
If you want to ensure that you can operate a blended WaH model and guarantee the safety of your customer data then you don’t need to listen to me telling you how great the Secure Remote Worker solution is… listen to the Frost & Sullivan opinion on the CX Files podcast!
– Brendan Kiely
Click below to access the CX Files episode featuring Michael DeSalles.
