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‘Remote First’ can be a superpower for your customer experience

January 31, 2022

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Blogs

Isabella Calderon & Katya Tabachnik, Sales Development

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March of 2019 most of the world shut down, forcing employees to work from home. I’m sure you remember when it was supposed to be just a two-week quarantine, but two weeks turned into months and now it's turned into years. Now, working remotely or in a hybrid model has become the standard and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.

This reality has forced many companies to pursue a “remote-first” strategy: an organizational strategy that makes working remotely the primary option for most or all employees. However, this remote-first strategy presents its own challenges. A recent study on Microsoft employees shows that workers' ability to spread new information across their respective teams has significantly decreased, which negatively affects both productivity and innovation. Effectively, this shift to less ‘rich’ communication styles is making it more difficult for workers to share, absorb, and retain information. 

Many business leaders are concerned about remote work impacting the customer experience. With employees spread across multiple locations (often global) and time zones, communication and collaboration can become fragmented and lead to breakdowns in delivering delightful customer experiences. To that concern, a study by Gartner shows that over 70% of companies are taking measures to track remote productivity. However, these measures mostly rely on self-reporting, which are not only burdensome to employees, but less than 50% inaccurate and therefore not reliable.  

All of this information begs the question: how do we align our teams better in this new remote-first world with accurate data while not burdening employees? More specifically, leaders are trying to drive the natural coordination and collaboration that existed when full-time office work was the norm. 

We actually believe that instead of seeing this as a challenge, leaders should seize it as an opportunity. You must have true visibility into habits and coordination through accurate data, companies should be able to change habits and processes to capitalize remote coordination. For example, you can use your distributed remote resources to provide a better 24/7 support model or opportunistic localized customer engagement. When it comes to driving better information sharing and collaboration, we are seeing companies be successful who are willing to change behaviors with new systems, expectations, and processes.

However, this is not simple - changing behaviors is never easy. Organizations need to accept and commit to change instead of clinging on to what worked in the past. And in these situations, it is valuable to rely on new systems and tooling to help. And we can help here. 

Retain helps teams understand what your workflows and habits are right now, which ones work best in this new remote world, and then drive behavior change. Our platform helps provide a more cohesive work experience that your customers will be able to feel. If you want to learn more about how to better coordinate your workforce so you can better delight your customers during the remote first world visit us at retain.ai or reach out at hello@retain.ai.