Case Study: Moving 800 Call Centre Staff to Remote Working

This case study investigates how Reassured, a leading life insurance broker, switched to remote working as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since the first lockdown was enforced, Reassured has welcomed over 300 new employees and opened five new contact centres, in Chester, Bournemouth, Brighton, Bristol and most recently in Cardiff.

All new staff have had to be onboarded into the business remotely, which has meant changing their HR, compliance and sales training processes.

But What Have the Main Challenges Been and How Have Reassured Overcome Them?

“We have tried to embrace and enjoy the challenges of switching from office-based to homeworking, concentrating our efforts on engagement through such mediums as Zoom competitions and quizzes, even getting the whole family involved as they have been huge supports to our staff at this time,” said Dean Harris, Sales Director at Reassured.

Management teams have had to adapt to a new way of communicating with their frontline agents, learning the positive and negative impact their words can have.

What Reassured have established is that messages that work face to face in buzzy contact centres don’t necessarily have the same desired effect through online communication.

Through research and feedback from our teams, they’ve tried to identify the best possible team experience without that face-to-face contact.

Often, they have had to adapt their approach depending on the individual to ensure everyone feels fully supported whilst working from home.

Reassured have also had to become much more flexible as a business with regard to working hours, appreciating just how hard it can be to juggle work and homeschooling, whilst being parents/brothers/sisters/carers/spouses.

“At the end of the day, as a people business, the aim is to make sure our staff enjoy the best possible working environment and, in turn, they can ensure the best possible outcomes for our customers,” adds Dean.

When the world was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and the first lockdown was enforced, Reassured purchased hundreds of laptops and transitioned their entire workforce to remote working within 14 days.

They developed a home-based telephone system and rolled out 100s of softphones so that frontline sales teams could continue protecting families from their homes. They also had strong of support from their VoIP supplier.

Group Systems Manager at Reassured, Trevor Tsang: “All of our business is currently done over the phone, so it is absolutely essential to have a system we can depend on to provide high-quality and reliable calls.”

Instead of furloughing any staff, Reassured set up homeworking models for every employee, which involved retraining an entire department and giving them temporary jobs during the lockdown period.

A new flexible working policy was introduced for frontline agents to help them overcome the challenges of homeworking.

22% of Reassured’s workforce didn’t even have dedicated homeworking spaces, making do with ironing boards and window ledges.

The IT department worked round the clock ensuring that technical issues were dealt with efficiently and there was minimal disruption to Reassured’s market-leading service.

Life insurance is one of the few industries who have actually experienced a spike in sales as more people look to secure financial protection for their loved ones, whatever the future holds. However, this period has bought many challenges for our sector.

What Reassured’s recent story does suggest is that our call centre sector is very resilient and adaptable – where there is a will, there is a way.

Thanks to Ben Bendall, Marketing Manager at Reassured, for sharing this case study with us. 

Author: Robyn Coppell