Our Founder and CEO, Aakash Kumar, is featured in this INC. magazine story about how Shiftsmart created a remote call center in 72 hours to assist the SBA during the height of the pandemic. After screening thousands of workers registered on our platform, we trained them and deployed them to remotely answer questions from thousands of small business owners about the SBA’s Paycheck Protection Program.
As our mission is to create scalable on-demand workforces, we were poised with the technology and operations team to match and train workers to manage remote shifts answering thousands of calls from distraught business owners to SBA. Callers were waiting more than an hour to speak with someone to help them navigate the guidelines and qualifications for the PPP loans that many desperately needed for financial survival.
Our challenges included screening for our highest-quality workers who also had strong customer-service skills, empathy and understood the psychology of assisting the business owners who, understandably, had a high level of emotion at the time. We also had an internal team that was tasked with reading the rapidly changing PPP guidelines, summarizing them into easy-to-follow bullet points, and passing them along to our trainers to update the remote agents.
As Aakash explains, “it was an electric moment for our company”, that simultaneously tested and accelerated the company’s vision of a changing modern workforce. Our team was fully invested, working around the clock, because we knew it was one of the most important things we could do to help during that unprecedented time.
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