Let's Talk About Our New Reality
About this episode
September 04, 2020
While most of us want to return to ‘normal’ or how life was before COVID-19, that’s just not realistic for the world of business. We must move forward and adapt to our new reality. In this episode of the Geek Freaks Podcast, Ron opens up the floor to you all; Agency Owners, Principals, Producers, CSRs, and so on. Let’s talk about what worked and what didn’t with the transition from office to remote work. How will you improve and make changes for 2021, and all of those little stumbling blocks along the way.
THIS WEEK ON THE HOT SEAT
RON HARRIS
VICE PRESIDENT AT OMEGA COMPUTER SERVICES
- 15 years in the industry.
- Enjoys spending time with his family, riding his Harley, and finding time to sleep.
- Fun fact: Ron broke both of his arms.
- He's a simple person, enjoys work, but also enjoys being alone reading a book or learning something new. Loves candy DOTs!
VIEW TRANSCRIPT >
Let's Talk About Our New Reality
Ron
Hello and welcome to the Insurance Hot Seat podcast. I’m Ron Harris. And today is more of a challenge or there is no special guest, so I wanted us to start having a conversation wrapped around budgeting and 2021 and everything that has bene happening in the current environment. So, I guess talking about COVID-19. What I want to know, what I want to understand is and I’ve had a lot of great conversations wrapped around this – leave a comment, let us know, there are a lot of though provoking questions, and we love the feedback, a little interaction here – so I guess as you are in the office or maybe you’re not all the way back in the office, maybe it’s a 50-50 split or you’re doing days here and there. Whatever that means for you, how did coming out of the office to work from home, how did that go? Did you have a lot of issues with your hardware? Was your technology adequate to work from home? If not, how are we planning on changing that as we get ready for the budget of 2021. How are we going to make the new reality that we are currently existing in work for our agency? And what didn’t work, right? So, a couple things right off the bat. If you’re remoting into your office, how was that experience? Are we having a slow-go at it because maybe the office internet is adequate for 35 people to remote in at a time? Do e need to have the added expense next year to push up our internet speed. Is there other providers to be looking at? All kinds of things can go once you hit the internal network. Do we need to update our switching? Do we need to upgrade our servers are they not ready for this type of load because again I don’t see us changing what is going on currently in this environment? And we’ve been fortunate enough to have a mixed experience where we have not fully managed customers that we work with and fully managed customers that we work with and I can tell you that when we build out a project, or process I should say, we come from the angel of worst-case scenario. For a lot of us this was the worst-case scenario when it comes to your I.T. infrastructure. So, when we sit down with the project team, we start discussing ya know best-case, worst-case scenarios. How does this all function? What’s up with the internet speed? That kind of stuff. You want to take it to the extreme because that means you’re going to live in the middle. So, a lot of our current customers, we were fortunate enough to be able to get them out of their office pretty seamlessly because they are all on laptops instead of desktops. Now, there’s challenges with that. Driving multiple monitors, doing stuff like that. But, from an aspect of a pandemic and working from home, they are having a pretty seamless experience. I’m not saying everything was perfect, we had to do some upgrading of internet lines to make sure we had enough bandwidth because know we have instead of just normal every day traffic going to any of the agency management systems, maybe Office365, that kind of stuff. Now it’s maybe 13-14-35 people remoting in to these locations, so that’s really hard on ya know your AT&T, Charter lines, anything like that, so that experience is bad. Think about how that went. Think about those little stumbling blocks. These little issues that could always and consistently be there that we want to remove in 2021 because again I don’t think we are moving away from this. Again, have that conversation with your ISPs, your Charters, your AT&T’s, your Comcast, whatever it is and say Hey we need to get a faster speed, what does that look like? By just simply making a phone call with a lot of these people, you’re able to lower your rate or increase your speed. Now the other thing to think about is collaboration. How did we keep our team engaged? How did we keep them together? Now again, how is working for you? Are you using Slack or are you using Microsoft Teams? Are you using SharePoint? How are you keeping everybody on the same page? Maybe it’s a daily huddle on Teams or maybe it’s a quick conference call even if you have a phone system like that. Now, the other side of collaboration is how do we collaborate or service our customers? Did you have your handset with you? Were you all using cellphones? Does all your agency’s clients now have access to your cellphone? How did it go? Again, we provide VoIP services, so a lot of our customers were able to just take their cellphone home and their computer or actually grab their desktop phones. Now, speaking with other agency owners as we are going through the sales cycle and jumping in and helping here and there with them, that’s not the case for a lot of people. So I’m always curious to know what most people are doing, especially in the middle of this auto reform that happened in the state of Michigan. So how did your agency handle that influx of calls? I imagine that a lot of people sent a handful of people back in the office to field those calls, since I imagine the call volume was up a couple hundred percent during this time as the switch came. I guess as this sweeping regulation changed, so I’m curious to know, comment below on how you guys are staying connected. What’s working for you. What’s not working for you. And we’ll go from here. Again, we’ve had a lot of people that weren’t using anything to collaborate, chat or share files. Now they are using Microsoft teams. They are loving the collaboration, the video chatting, the audio chatting. So, there’s tools available that are free that you can use to help your organization. I guess let’s talk about the technology itself, so laptops, tablets, desktops. If you stand up in your office right now do you see a sea full of desktops or docks and monitors. It’s time to start thinking about that as we look to the future. Again, I don’t think this is going to be changing anytime soon. I don’t think work from home is going to end anytime soon. So, we have to figure out what this new reality is going to be for us. We are, probably our split is 80/20. 80 mobility. 20 anchors. Now that’s a business decision. You’ll never hear me say this is what we have to do. I mean the conversation is certainly going to curve that way in the future because of the current environment, but I’ll never tell you guys how to spend your money. I’ll certainly guide you in what I think is best for the business, but we do have some people that love them a good ole desktop and that’s fine. But, we never, I don’t think anybody in this situation thought we would be in a global pandemic working from home. Now, going forward. If you are working at your agency how does this function? Do you have a desktop at home that you can then remote into the desktop on? How does that work? How is that experience going? Are you guys having a good time? Are you using a remote desktop session? Are you VPN-ing in? Now a lot of agencies don’t have to do anything like that because they use cloud services from their agency management system or their provider, so ya know EZLynx, PartnerXE, that kind of stuff. You just need the internet to get running same with Applied, pretty much anyone with a higher-end platform. You just need the internet to get running, so there’s one hurdle down, you don’t really have to remote in, but you have to be there. We have a lot of customers that are still on-prem with their agency management software. So, something to think about as you move forward. As we all move through this time, is how do we future proof what we are doing today. And I know it’s a big expense, big turn, a change of thought and I know we were in the same boat. A lot of didn’t work from home because it’s hard for us. We’re very similar to our techs and our service team to that of a CSR. You’re taking phone calls, you’re helping, assisting the end-users, you’re making sure they have what they need to be successful. In this case to let them feel safe in your industry, know that they have coverage and we just kept everybody in our office. And when the time came, we worked from home because everybody was on laptops. Now laptops to a lot of agencies that love their desktops, it’s kind of a scary thing, right? Now you’re arming somebody with…it could be up to a couple thousand dollars in assets to say go ahead and take home and use at your leisure. But, it’s also safe now. I mean we’ve had a conversation just recently with an agency owner that was like we didn’t do it because of the security issue. We didn’t want Sally’s son jumping on the computer doing whatever he wanted to do. That is no longer an issue. You can get these devices warrantied through the teeth. So, if Sally trips and drops her laptop, you send it back in and get a new one. You can protect it with a login, a two-form factor login, so they need a pin to login to the machine. So now no un-attended access is being granted to anyone within the home unless Sally says yeah Ron go ahead and jump on, you can look at Facebook for ten minutes. Whatever the case is. But even if that’s allowed, you even have other tools you can use that the entire agency can use that keep the constraints and the policies in place. So now you can say hey we don’t use Facebook inside our office, we don’t use t outside our office on our device. If you have your own laptop, go ahead and feel free to do whatever you want there, but since we do have sensitive information, we do have client information, we do have access back to our company, these are the rules on this device. Now, we do have a lot, not a lot, but we do have some agencies that do the BYOD (bring your won device). Still those constraints can play on that device in that world because there’s software. You don’t physically need anything. You can say well okay you have to use these firewall features when you’re connected to the VPN, all that other fun stuff. There’s certain things you can do now that kind of put the security minded people at ease because again it’s not 100% foolproof but it helps with a lot on constraints; BitLocker, 2two-form factor authentication, DNS filtering, and active EDR, uh antivirus, sorry. Any of that stuff can help alleviate some of these thoughts or fears when it comes to this work from home, BYOD situation. So, if you’re having a positive experience, if you’re having a negative experience, if you want to know more comment below. We would love to get some interaction going. I know that the world has been changing and morphing and I don’t think it’s going to slow up. I mean obviously the business world is going to keep spinning so we need to keep servicing and we need to keep living and taking care of our customers, but how are you guys’ doing? I want to hear what is working, what is not working, what the experience has been like because it’s important to get a full picture of it to a handful of agency owners, CSRs on a pretty regular basis and you know they are pretty successful, but the you hear some real bad horror stories and you know it’s time to start having that conversation out loud. Maybe with the Principals or maybe with the champions of I.T., or maybe your internal or external I.T. person because right now is the time to have that. As we get ready to write these budgets, as we get ready to look to the future of 2021 – the most fantastic future of 2021. It’s now time to have those conversations so let’s get that conversation going. I would love to hear from you guys. Again, sorry for the shorter podcast this month, we…it’s hard to get guests in pandemic and we also don’t want to bring anybody in because of the pandemic, so we’re kind of doing solo shows for a while. But again, let’s get together, let’s interact, let’s collaborate, comment below. Alright guys stay safe. Thank you for your time. Talk to ya.
LISTEN ON:
SPOTIFY
APPLE PODCASTS
GOOGLE PODCASTS
STITCHER
CASTBOX
RADIO PUBLIC
POCKET CASTS
OVERCAST
BREAKER
TUNE IN
IHEARTRADIO
PANDORA