729 Solutions Raises The Bar With Work From Home

It has been more than a year since the global Covid-19 pandemic impacted businesses, and employees began to work from home. What started as a novelty “two-week quarantine” resulted in an extended work from home transition that still lingers today. For some companies, this transition was difficult and full of challenges. For our team here at 729 Solutions – work from home wasn’t anything new. With so much of our workforce already remote – it just meant that our business model was more prepared for the shift.

One of our team members, Brandon Tidd, was recently featured in a Zendesk article about how good customer service starts with supporting your agents. Tidd, one of our Zendesk architects and an all-around Zendesk Guru, provided feedback about his experiences. He points out how businesses within the industry stumbled through the transition and lacked the proper support for their internal teams.

No stranger to the WFH environment, Tidd always meets his Zendesk deadlines, juggles team dynamics, all while most likely pushing a cat off his at-home keyboard. Tidd believes that his team at 729 had an easier time with the WFH transition because they have worked this way for years. His Zendesk projects and expertise did not halt when the rest of the world transitioned to remote. If anything, it gave Tidd and the rest of us here at 729 a competitive advantage.

Even during the pandemic, we continued to provide customers with the same expertise, products, and high-quality results. We can attribute much of our success to our familiarity with the remote processes and having already worked out the kinks.

After our own trial and error, we settled on a few essential mandates. From an open Slack policy, checking in on team members (but not so much as to be annoying), listening, and making sure team members didn’t feel isolated – we took steps to make sure everyone was successful and a part of the remote-work team. Like Tidd said, “There were a lot of people that saw that maybe their company wasn’t as well prepared, and then there were other companies that just knocked it out of the park in terms of bending over backwards for employees.”

“Customers can pick up on whether employees are satisfied in their role,” Says Tidd, “From a customer experience perspective, this not only impacts your relationship with your employees, but it trickles down to impact your relationship with customers.”

We were fortunate that our WFH infrastructure already existed pre-pandemic. When the pandemic began to impact our industry, it was an easy solution to move the entire team remotely. Fully supported by the leadership, we found the perfect balance between productivity and flexibility and went with it. Our employees continued to build and launch awesome Zendesk projects, clients continued to call, and benchmarks were met.

No matter the complexities of the outside pressure we faced as an organization, we rose to the challenge and produced some great content. In fact – we continue to raise the bar with our Zendesk product and couldn’t be happier with the team we have grown and fostered at 729. And let’s not forget the occasional cat memes that Tidd sends out on our watercooler Slack channel.

Also, to learn more about Brandon check out his Employee Spotlight!