Following last night’s announcement by the Government please see below our current update on our activity.
Operational Resilience
We have continued to work on our contingency plans and phased approach to split our teams and currently have 60% of our staff working from home. We will continue to work on enabling more home working and our aim is to have over 80% of staff home base by the end of this week.
We have one staff member self-isolating (since Monday 23rd March) following her son being sent home from school with a cough. We are pleased to report that no further symptoms have been reported.
Homeworking
All Staff have been sent a pack which contains advice on health and wellbeing while working from home. The pack also contains a “working from home health and safety self-assessment” which is returned to HR and any action required can be taken.
As advised in previous updates our call handlers that are home based are using our telephone system that has been configured for remote access. The call recording system and the reporting system will continue to be in operation.
Laptops are configured in line with OPAL’s Security and IT Policies and have remote access to our in-house systems.
Feedback from the teams so far has overall been positive. Systems are slower as expected.
Office Based team
A small number of our staff members have requested to be office based due to various reasons including difficulties of working at home, living alone and not wanting to spend prolonged time isolated.
Our office based staff continue to adhere to the current protocols and preventative activity including social distancing within the office space. Staff are segregated and not sitting together. Some staff have requested to work different shift patterns, coming in early or working later and we are also offering weekend working for those who would prefer this.
Call and business Volumes and SLAs updates
Throughout the coming weeks and months OPAL will take all actions necessary to maintain core operational activity and endeavour to meet all contracted SLAs.
Although currently we are not experiencing any issues, we do expect to move to “best endeavours” should we see increased volumes.
Call volumes have remained consistent and we have not had any increase in complaints.
We will monitor performance and volumes daily and will advise you if we see any spikes/trends.
Should we need to request extensions to any SLAs we will contact each client directly to agree to this.
We will contact you should we have any queries from your advisers or customers where we need guidance on how to respond.
While banks remain open we can bank customer cheques, however, we would encourage clients to send funds electronically to the relevant bank account for their products.
Royal Mail has not indicated any plans to change however we are monitoring this closely.
We will continue to provide you with further updates, however, if you have any further queries please contact the following:
Amanda Kay - amandakay@opal-uk.com
Sarah Lister and Leah Bishop - AccountManagement@opal-uk.com
Colin Buckhurst - colinbuckhurst@opal-uk.com