Evolving with speed in times of Pandemic Disruption

At Pine Labs, we have been monitoring the ongoing COVID-19 situation for the previous four weeks now. We started our planning ahead of most organisations not by design, but by chance. Our wake-up call was in the form of fake news that a neighbor organisation had a positive case and hence a fear of immediate facility lock-down. Starting four weeks early gave us a definitive advantage to understand and fix the gaps. Here is a summary of some of the steps Pine Labs took towards reducing the spread of COVID 19 and support our people and ensure business continuity.

Emergency Response Team

- We activated a cross-functional Emergency Response team and an in-house task force to monitor and react to the fast developments around Coronavirus. We meet every day to plan actions to make sure as an organization we are always proactive mode and not reactionary mode.

Keeping our employees safe

- As the first COVID case became known in India, we started work from home for all roles that could be effective from home. Starting on this weekend all employees including call-center employees are working from home. All our employees are now leveraging virtual collaboration tools and staying connected as they work from home. Even in-person meeting with merchants moved to virtual meetings and we are using email and phone calls to stay connected with them.

Proactive not reactive

- As a precautionary measure to safeguard the health and well-being of our employees, we restricted all business travel. We are now using org-wide emails and team networks to keep reiterating the importance of practicing Social Distancing. In fact, all company events and gatherings have been postponed to avoid the spread. Our voluntary employee group for health has been sending updates regularly on hygiene practices and social distancing.

Emergency numbers have been communicated to all our teams to report any cases or share concerns.

Customer service excellence

- Trust is central to the relationships we have with our merchant partners...to continually deliver value to over 150,000 merchants and ensure we honour our service commitments. Our Customer experience team has been extremely agile as we moved to work from home for various teams such as contact centre by equipping them with laptops and connectivity. To enable work from home for all our contact centre staff we moved to a faster call-back service. Our email support team has also risen to the occasion and is promptly replying to customer issues. Roles like field engineers who need to service merchants in essential services such as hospitals have been advised to use personal transport and avoid public transport. They now use personal safety equipment such as masks and gloves.

In addition to serving our merchants we ensured that we updated our merchants through regular SMS and emails.

Keeping up the positivity

- We start everyday by sharing tips and best practices to make it a productive day working from home. In these uncertain times, it is important to stay positive, be available to support your teams and create that much needed awareness to help stop the spread of misinformation around this pandemic and as a responsible organisation we are doing that and a lot more.

Work from home is a lot more fun as we participate in quick daily meetings, virtual contests every week and online training sessions that are tailor-made for each role.