Posted by Ashley Sprague, Director of IT, Netflix
Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Ashley Sprague, Director of IT at Netflix, where over 65 million members go to stream their favorite movies, shows and more. Netflix was recently featured at Chrome Live to share how they’ve brought their call center into the cloud powered solely by Chrome devices and Chrome management. To learn more about Netflix’s approach to work, check out this recording of Chrome Live.
If you’re binge-watching the newest season of “Orange Is the New Black” on Netflix and the streaming video falters just as the ladies of Litchfield launch into a new scheme, we want to troubleshoot for you. If you have questions about your monthly plan, we’d like to answer those too. Whatever your question or challenge, the Netflix Salt Lake City call center reps can provide fast answers. Now that Chromeboxes, Chromebooks and Chrome management are the backbone of our call center, we can focus on helping customers instead of managing software and hardware from multiple vendors. By bringing our contact center to the cloud with the help of Chrome, adding reps and managing hardware and software is easier than ever — and we’ve broken free of the traditional call center model.
Netflix’s call center is growing steadily, and we’re expecting to increase the number of reps. Legacy hardware didn’t give us much flexibility to add new reps or bring in new equipment when we had breakdowns. Swapping in new workstations demanded that we reconfigured the devices, so we had to keep an extra row of workstations just for reps to use when their desktops didn’t work. We maintained more hardware on the call center floor than we needed — taking up space, costing money, and requiring more time and IT resources to manage. The call center is hundreds of miles away from our IT home base, so a cloud-based management solution made sense.
We’re already using
Google Apps for Work at Netflix, so it made sense to think about how Google could help reduce the call center’s dependence on outdated technology while allowing us to grow as needed. At the heart of our new call center is
Chrome management, which gives us a one-stop shop for maintaining Chrome devices used by reps and call center managers.
Our reps are using Chromeboxes at their workstations, while supervisors use Chromebooks to manage Chrome and the call center. We can add reps in Chrome management in just a few seconds, and they instantly have access to their email, calendars, and
Hangouts — everything they need to start working. We can apply policies to groups of reps with just a few clicks, which is a big time-saver.
Switching out a device requires nothing more than handing a rep a new Chrome device and telling them to plug it in. You hear a lot of overly optimistic claims about “plug and play” in the technology world, but with Chrome devices, it’s all true. One of our call center managers says it takes longer to get a Chromebook out of the box than it does to set it up — and I believe it.
Our call center reps love having every application right at their fingertips as soon as they sign in to Chrome. We can tell they’re happy because the number of trouble tickets has dropped noticeably, another way we’re saving time on the IT side. When reps can get straight to work without worrying about the technology they’re using, they can spend more time on giving customers great service — so when people call with questions about streaming the new season of “Orange Is the New Black,” we’re ready.
