You can move a help desk to remote work in a week, but only if you treat it as five separate problems: phones, access, security, knowledge and people. Fix them in that order. Most teams discover the hard way that “everyone has a laptop” solves none of the five.
On March 11 the World Health Organization called COVID-19 a pandemic, and the decisions that had been theoretical a month ago turned into Monday-morning logistics. A day earlier, CNN reported that Google was recommending its UK and Ireland staff work from home, and Alphabet was recommending the same for employees across North America, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Whatever size your company is, the message to support managers is the same: your people may not be in the building next week, and your customers will still be calling.
I’ve written before about setting up and launching a remote office and about whether remote working is a fad or here to stay. Those were planning pieces, written with time on your side. This one assumes you have days. I covered the staffing side of a health scare back in 2009, in my piece on help desk pandemic planning after the swine flu alert, and the same skills-first thinking applies here. It’s a checklist, in priority order, for a help desk of the kind I described in what a help desk actually is: Tier 1 applying fixes, Tier 2 finding causes, and a handoff between them that has to survive the move.
What breaks first when a help desk goes remote?
The phones. A voice team lives on telephony, and telephony is the part most likely to be tied to a building. Desk phones on a PBX, a headset plugged into a physical port, a queue that rings on extensions that only exist in one office. Before anything else, find out whether your phone system can put an agent’s calls on a laptop or a mobile app, and how many of those seats you’re licensed for.
Ask three questions of your telephony vendor today, not tomorrow. How many remote agent seats can we turn on this week? What does it cost? And what’s the lead time? The honest answer is sometimes “we can add twenty by Thursday and the rest in a month,” and that tells you how to split your team: voice agents first, email and chat agents wherever the capacity is thinner.
Then deal with the headsets. People will say they can use their own earbuds. Some can. Call quality is part of the customer’s experience, and a noisy kitchen with a laptop microphone sounds like a bad line. Budget for decent USB headsets and ship them if you must.
Can everyone actually log in at the same time?
Not unless you’ve tested it. The next thing to fail is access. A VPN built for fifty occasional remote users does not behave well with three hundred people connecting at 8am. Licence limits, gateway capacity and authentication servers all have ceilings, and you find them in public, with the queue growing.
Run a test day before the real move. Pick a day, send a slice of the team home, and watch what fails: logins that time out, the softphone that only registers on the corporate network, the incident tool that needs a certificate installed on a desktop. Each of those is an hour to fix on a test day and a crisis to fix on a live one. Test with the whole queue behaving normally, not at a quiet hour.
Check the equipment, too. Plenty of agents work from a desktop at the office and own nothing portable. You’ll need a way to get machines to people, a list of who has what, and a plan for the person whose home broadband can’t carry a call and a screen share together. Don’t assume. Ask.
How do you keep customer accounts secure from a kitchen table?
With the same identity checks you use on the floor, and a few new rules. When an agent logs into a customer account from home, you’re extending the trust you built in the office. Keep the security questions exactly as they were. Don’t relax them because the line is long.
Expect social engineering to increase, not decrease. A caller with a sympathetic story about being locked out, working from home, in a hurry, is a familiar approach, and an agent without a supervisor at the next desk is easier to pressure. Tell your team plainly that the rules apply harder in a crisis, and give them a way to escalate a doubtful request without feeling they’re accusing the customer.
Add the practical rules for the home setting. Screens locked when the agent steps away. No customer data written on paper or photographed. No sharing a work laptop with the household. Customer calls taken somewhere a family member can’t hear account details. These sound obvious written down, and nobody has ever followed them without being asked.
What happens to your knowledge base and your escalations?
They become your whole support system. In an office, a Tier 1 agent who doesn’t know an answer leans over and asks. At home there’s nobody to lean over to. The knowledge base is the replacement for that conversation, and any gap in it now costs a call to Tier 2.
This week, ask your agents what they’ve been asking each other. Write the top twenty questions into the knowledge base before the move, even badly. A rough answer in the tool beats a perfect one in somebody’s head. Then give agents an obvious, easy way to flag a missing or wrong article so it’s fixed the same day.
Escalation needs the same attention. Tier 2 owes Tier 1 an update time even when there’s no answer, and this matters more at a distance, because a silent escalation can’t be nudged by walking past it. Agree a channel, a response expectation and a named person for each escalation path, and write them down where everyone can see them. The tiered service levels you already have tell you which escalations get the fastest answers when time is short.
How should you run the team on day one?
With a short, fixed rhythm. A ten-minute video call at the start of each shift, the same time every day, covering three things: what’s the queue like, what’s broken, and who needs help. A second short call at mid-shift for the leads. Beyond those, resist the urge to schedule more meetings. Agents on the phones can’t also sit in a conference call.
Pick one chat channel for the whole team and one for escalations, and keep them separate. If the escalation channel fills up with banter, people will stop watching it. Decide in advance what goes where and say it in the first call.
Set expectations on measurement early, too. Don’t introduce a new set of metrics in the same week you move everyone home. Keep your existing response-time and resolution-time targets, watch them daily, and be ready to adjust the targets, not the definitions, if volume or staffing changes. Changing both at once leaves you unable to tell what happened.
Which work should you pause?
Anything that isn’t customer contact or the systems that support it. Reporting that nobody reads, training programs that can wait, process projects that were due next month. A move like this takes capacity from the same managers who run the queue, and something has to give. Decide what, and say it out loud, so nobody feels they’re failing at a project nobody asked about.
Be honest with customers too. If response times are going to stretch while you reorganize, tell them on the phone greeting, in your email auto-response and on your website, with a realistic estimate. People forgive a team that said it would be slower. They don’t forgive one that kept promising what it couldn’t deliver.
For benchmarks and practical guidance on running a support centre at a distance, the HDI community is a useful place to compare notes with other support managers who are in the same position this week.
Finally, decide who is allowed to say no. During a move like this, somebody will propose a shortcut: skip the test day, relax a security check, let people use personal phones for a few weeks. Each one saves a day and creates a risk that outlasts the crisis. Name one person, ideally a Tier 2 lead or the security owner, whose job is to say no to the shortcuts that matter, and tell the team they have your backing.
And write down what you did. Which systems you changed, which exceptions you granted, which people took on extra work. In three months you’ll want to undo the exceptions on purpose, and you can’t undo what nobody recorded.
You won’t get it all right in a week. The goal is a help desk that’s working, a team that knows who to ask, and a list of what to fix next. Get the phones working first, and the rest becomes a to-do list instead of an emergency.
Hutch Morzaria is a Director-level CX and Support Leadership professional with 19 years of experience building global support organizations across SaaS, Fintech, and enterprise technology. He has hired dozens of support and CX leaders across his career and holds ITIL Expert certification across V3 and V4.
