Jim Mitchell, Sr. Business System Solution Architect at VIZIO, wrote this post.

At VIZIO, our service mission is simple: help people. In fact, we have this promise painted on our conference room wall where all agents can see it as they walk by. We know our more than 70 million customers rely on us to make sure their VIZIO TVs and sound bars work — no matter what.

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, we continue to deliver quality and consistent service. The only difference is our 380 service agents now work from home. We were able to act quickly because we already have best practices and technology in place to help our agents work collaboratively and support our customers on whatever channel they prefer.

It would have been more difficult to respond to this situation if we were still struggling with the inefficiencies of our previous homegrown solution that consisted of several different applications pieced together. And though we were positioned for success, we still had concerns about our agents working from home and challenges to our support model. 

Here’s how VIZIO tapped into digital to tackle these matters to keep agent morale high, train new and experienced agents, and get insights into agent productivity — all while delivering service.

Gamification: Play well and reap rewards

VIZIO traditionally has an on-site workforce. We find working together in-person drives better collaboration for fresh ideas. We were concerned about the impact that moving our service organization to work from home would have on agent performance.

We’ve been using gamification to engage our agents for many years. We use Shift Bid, an internal dashboard that helps motivate agents by ranking their productivity. Everyone can see the dashboard. The agent at the top of the leaderboard gets to choose the shift they work. Even if they decide not to pick a prime shift, everyone wants recognition for doing a great job. 

Another way we continue to engage our agents is with our VIZIO Employee Excellence Program or V.E.E.P. With V.E.E.P., employees can earn points for doing exceptional work. Once someone earns 2500 points, they can redeem for a $25 gift card or use the points in our company store. An agent working from home recently earned points for helping to resolve a billing issue for a customer.

MyTrailhead: Learn, earn badges, and serve customers

Thanks to a pilot group of our top four phone support and four digital agents who helped us to define how remote work should work, transitioning our service team to work from home was smooth. However, we still faced two challenges.  

One obstacle was phone support. Our customers use digital channels, such as Chat, Messaging, and Coveo for Salesforce Community Cloud to self serve, but many still prefer phone support. Our outsourced call centers in the Philippines were forced to shut down, and the team wasn’t equipped to work from home, like our agents in the U.S. In response, we eliminated weekend phone support and outsourced new phone agents.

The second challenge was TV repair, which was not deemed a critical service. While our agents can troubleshoot some issues remotely and customers can self-serve, there are still services that need to be done by a field service technician. Our agents had to learn how to put these service requests into a backlog in the service console to be handled once restrictions are lifted on in-person service requests.

For both of these challenges, we tapped into myTrailhead, Salesforce’s online learning platform. VIZIO already uses myTrailhead for training and upskilling employees — I’m almost a double-star Ranger! Within a few days, we trained our new agents on Service Cloud and Lightning Service Console. Our experienced agents got upskilled to learn how to use the changes we made in the console to defer service requests until a state opens back up. Everyone earned Trailhead badges for their accomplishments, and we didn’t skip a beat for service.