But, We Don’t Do At Home WAHA Tech Support!

WAHA: Work At Home Agent

I broke a company rule today. But, it’s okay. . .mostly.

Six months ago my client had zero WAHA agents. Everyone worked in one of our call centers across the United States. And then COVID-19 turned our lives upside down.

And it sent a lot of our agents home. Not just home. Home loaded down with a company computer, a couple of monitors, keyboard, mouse, and headset.

When we designed our agent infrastructure we intentionally designed it to be as secure as possible. We were locking it down from both a physical and a network standpoint.

When we were asked to figure out how to send people to work from home, we weren’t even sure if it would work at first. There are multiple layers of security protections. We had to try to keep the security in place, while also allowing our agents the ability to do their jobs from home using their own local internet service provider.

When we first started testing our WAHA strategy, we did testing in the center. After we got it working in the center, we handed the computers to the agents and sent them home.

And it worked. . .mostly. But, there were a couple that didn’t. Over the phone, we worked through as much as we could. We tried all of our typical troublshooting steps. Not just me, I had our senior desktop engineers on the call too. We couldn’t get it working.

I requested permission to allow our engineer to go to the agent’s house. I mean, it worked in the center, there had to be something about the home setup that was making it not work. I got a very clear response from our Senior Vice President over desktops.

We do not send engineers to agents houses under any circumstances.

Imagine my surprise today as I found myself at an agent’s house helping set up her WAHA computer. We managed to get it setup correctly but she had a problem logging in. She called into her helpdesk and they reset her account. At that point, she could successfully log in and take calls.

I knew how to resolve her network issues because I built her network. And she didn’t call my service desk. She called her service desk. She works for a different company than I do. But, I know her really well. I’m happy to help her out.

You see, my daughter started working from home today. And lucky for her she has live in tech support.

Stay safe

Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.

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