Private sector lender Axis Bank , which initiated work from home facilities for its call centre employees during the lockdown, could continue with some of these changes even post the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Some of these changes are permanent, and (we) may continue with work from home even post Covid. On the operations side, our endeavour would be to allow about 60 per cent of the total workforce to continue working from home,” said Ratan Kesh, EVP and Head, Retail Operations and Service, Axis Bank.

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Realising that customers would continue to require call centre assistance for banking services and frauds, disputes or failed transactions, Axis Bank had initiated work from home for its executives at the start of the lockdown.

“About 3,500 people are working from home in Operations, of which 1,700 take customer calls. Even during the lockdown, critical activities have been kept running by working from home,” Kesh told BusinessLine , adding that it now gets 80 per cent of the earlier peak, and employees have been able to handle the calls from home.

The bank identified and classified the services in three segments – emergency, premium and non-critical services, to structure the teams and their respective roles, and gave handsets, laptops and desktops to employees to work from home.

Kesh said that this has also improved the productivity of employees. “We are convinced about this that some of these changes are very good changes. Productivity of employees has gone up,” he said, adding that travel time in cities like Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad where the bank’s operating and call centres are located, can be anywhere between two to three hours.

“Now, people are willing to devote a part of the time to office activity,” he said.

The bank had, last month, also unveiled Automated Voice Assistant ‘AXAA’, which is an Artificial Intelligence-powered conversational voice BOT. It can converse in English, Hindi and Hinglish and is capable of handling one lakh customer queries and requests per day.

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