COVID-19 BUSINESS CONTINUITY

Offshore service providers count on the idea that distance is of no consequence in order to get the job done. We at OSI realized just how true this is when we chose to relocate our workforce from our office space to their homes due to the COVID-19 health and safety measures imposed nation-wide on March 18th.

Although OSI provides a generous work area for each employee, the close proximities of team members in call centers pose a health risk as Coronavirus is highly contagious. For these reasons, the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, ordered all call centers and similar high density work spaces to home quarantine for a minimum of fifteen days.

However, customer assistance and technical support are some of the most important services to maintain, especially during times of uncertainty when customers will be looking for information and their ability to operate from home.

One of the biggest concerns of the current crisis is the impact that movement restrictions will have on the economy on a national and global scale. To minimize the impact, businesses need to embrace flexibility in order to remain operational.

Understanding the urgency of the situation, OSI was able to relocate two hundred workers to a home office set-up, all within the span of forty-eight hours. The priorities of this operation, which you can see in full here (Is your business ready for quarantine)

  • Ensuring team member’s safety and health.
  • Ensuring access to necessary programs and authorized cloud services.
  • Ensuring data protection and security, including encrypted hard drives that can be reformatted remotely to add another security layer in case of loss or theft.

 

Four hours after the president called for the halt of high density office operations along with other industries, our two hundred workers had all the necessary equipment and tools to work from home. In this way, we became the only call center in El Salvador that remains fully operational throughout the national COVID-19 health and safety measures. These measures expanded to a nation-wide thirty-day quarantine on March 22nd.