• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 1, 2020

Verizon Wireless wants to fill about 950 permanent work-from-home customer service positions. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company reportedly transitioned more than 90% of its employees to work from home.

Catchpoint, which focuses on digital customer experiences, on Tuesday released findings from its 2020 CIO New Normal survey, which includes feedback from 200 enterprise CIOs and 200 enterprise work-from-home (WFH) managers.

The survey, conducted by ReRez Research, examines the differences between the enterprises that fared the best and the worst during the first half of 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, and analyzes the lessons learned.

Before COVID-19 hit, 3% of U.S. employees at enterprises worked from home at least some of the time, rising to 7% during the pandemic.

Prior to the pandemic, 43% of customer engagements were face-to-face. This number dropped to 13% during the pandemic.

The survey shows the three biggest impacts on businesses were in profitability, revenue growth and productivity. Within IT departments, the biggest impacts were on security, app reliability and network availability — all required for brands to run advertising campaigns smoothly as well as ecommerce sites.

Mehdi Daoudi, CEO at Catchpoint, said some companies did “extremely well” during the first half of the year during the pandemic because they were prepared to have their employees work from home.

Some 91% of the top-tier companies have implemented a formal site reliability engineering methodology (SRE), compared to just 69% of bottom-tier organizations.

Top-tier companies also are committed to making work-from-home (WFH) employees as productive as possible.

For example, the top tier, such as Verizon, is 33% more likely to train its employees on work-from-home technologies.

The top tier also does a better job of equipping their WFH employees — and is nearly three times as likely to say their employees’ collaboration tools are extremely effective.

"Working from home is not just about giving a laptop to someone and saying 'off you go'," Daoudi said. “Companies that have better productivity also spend time enabling them to use remote technologies like Zoom or Webex.”

Top-tier organizations are more engaged with initiatives that optimize remote work. For example, top-tier organizations are 1.8 times as likely to be involved with robotic process automation.

Top-tier organizations also have increased security initiatives, with participants in the top tier saying that they are 1.4 times as likely to be involved with better security management and working with software-defined parameters.