Managing a global customer support organization with a geographically dispersed team is always a challenge. Customer success hinges on dedicated support. And there can, under no circumstances, be any degradation in service. Things become even more complex when natural disasters and public health emergencies strike.
When COVID-19 hit in China, we knew we would need to rethink our work policies and the way we deliver our services. We all know that businesses run on people. So as a manager, my first concern is always the safety of my team and ensuring that they have the tools they need to be and perform at their best in any situation.
As Director of Worldwide Technical Support at Citrix, I oversee more than 100 employees in Nanjing, China, and Tokyo, Japan. We had been closely monitoring the situation when COVID-19 first made news in China. The moment we received information from our Citrix Global Security Risk Services, our HR team, and local health authorities that the virus was starting to become rampant, my team and I began expanding our work-from-anywhere policy.
In the face of government-imposed quarantines and travel bans, we immediately moved to enable remote work for all employees in China. Leveraging our digital workspace solutions, we were able to connect 80-plus people across the country to our corporate systems and information in a secure and reliable manner and empower them to do what they do best: serve our customers with excellence, from the safety of their homes.
And we did it in less than 24 hours.
Based on subsequent information received from our Global Security team, the World Health Organization, and local government authorities, we moved to expand this policy to cover Japan where our other primary support center is located.
In parallel, we took steps to ensure their physical and mental well-being of our team. We worked with HR to make sure that all employees had access to healthcare for their families and extended families. We distributed health masks to Citrix employees across both China and Japan.
We also took steps to maintain regular communication among the team, ensuring managers and HR have access to tools they can use to actively speak to employees and address their concerns and provide real-time updates as the situation continues to evolve.
We set up a Slack channel, for instance, and encourage managers to reach out to people on a daily basis via phone, video conferencing, or whatever collaboration platform they prefer to make sure they and their families are safe.
Ensuring the safety of our employees was paramount. Equally important was ensuring business continuity to ensure there was no impact to our level of service delivery. At Citrix, we have a proven track record of deliver superior service to our customers.
Our current Net Promoter Score is 78, and we could not let it slip below this level. So we mapped out a two-prong approach to enabling remote work covering tools and applications and people and resource management.
We performed thorough tests to ensure we would have reliable network connectivity and access to phone/voice and remote applications, including Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and Citrix Workspace, was in order. Working closely with our IT team, we configured a second VPN route dedicated to services to remove any bandwidth issues.
We also partnered with HR to providing training and guidance to employees on how to effectively work from anywhere to minimize disturbances that might hamper their engagement and productivity.
We then moved to execute and rolled our policy out. Since doing so, we have seen no decline in employee productivity and maintained our NPS scores along with our internal SLTs. The average speed of answer prior to enabling remote work, for instance, was on average 2.5 minutes. Today, it is less than a minute.
Customer support must always be on — even under the most challenging conditions. To deliver at world-class levels, organizations cannot react to specific incidents. They must have a thorough and well-tested plan to ensure that their work environment is ready for any situation.
This means having policies and contingency plans in place to drive business continuity. It also means enabling flexible and dynamic workspaces that allow resources to be scaled up or down to accommodate volatile conditions on a moment’s notice.
In preparing for the worst and thinking outside the box in doing so, companies can empower their employees and continue to deliver the best for their customers.
Learn more about how Citrix is helping its customers maintain business continuity. You can also download our white paper paper to learn best practices for a complete business continuity strategy and how Citrix technologies provide secure access to apps and data on any device, over any network or cloud.
