Managing the COVID-19 situation in 2020
The epidemic crisis related to the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus forced a change in our hierarchy of objectives and lines of action. The most important issue has become to ensure the safety of employees and customers while maintaining business continuity and seamless service.
From the beginning of the pandemic, we placed emphasis on implementing solutions to support customers in the new reality. These activities required the reorganisation of many aspects of our operations and posed a major IT challenge. Due to the increasing use of remote channels by customers, the priority was to increase throughput, expand the scope of support for sales and after-sales processes and maximise security measures for key IT systems.
We launched more remote processes with solutions to improve customer liquidity and mitigate the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. We continued to digitise, automate and simplify service processes.
We changed the organisation of work and introduced a home office model, which covered around 6,000 employees of the bank (almost 60% of active employment). This involved the need to replenish hardware resources and provide everyone with secure access to the infrastructure enabling mutual cooperation. We increased the capacity of telephone lines, extended the capacity of connections to teleconference bridges and increased the capacity of external connections to the bank, thus increasing the comfort of work and customer service. We also configured remote work stations for advisors from the Multichannel Communication Centre.
Despite the changes in our ways of work, we have maintained solid standards of customer service and IT performance with high availability of IT systems.
