Reliance Jio Infocomm (RJio), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Reliance Industries Ltd, has permitted its entire customer care staff to work from home (WFH), and plans to make it a norm after the lockdown ends.

The operator redirected all the queries coming to its helpline desk to the call centre agents’ phones, which were then answered from the comfort of the agents’ homes.

“With technology innovation, we were able to move our entire technology stack of call centres onto simple mobile phones. And all our agents started handling the interactions in a remote way. Again, it remains an industry-first innovation,” Pankaj Pawar, Senior Vice President at RJio, said at the company’s fourth quarter results last week.

“I think, it was important for us that all our call centres, whether they are for calls ― that means voice, social, text, chat ― (or) anything, we moved to a virtualised way,” he said.

This helped the company provide activation, recharging and other services during the lockdown period, apart from keeping the network running.

“When the Covid-19 issue is over, this could be the new norm. Further, this would enable BPO activities being pushed into rural parts of the country and provide part-time employment to people like homemakers. This would further reduce costs,” Anshuman Thakur, Head of Strategy at RJio, said.

This initiative will also help recruit talent available across the country, who otherwise might not want to move to a city.

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