Every October our customer service centre takes on about a hundred and eighty temporary agents for the run up to Christmas, when calls roughly double. They use laptops we keep for the purpose. In January the laptops are wiped of personal settings, packed onto trolleys and locked in a cage in the basement, and in October they come back out.
Last year they came out on a Thursday, with the first intake of agents starting on the Monday. By Friday afternoon fewer than forty were usable.
Three things had happened while the cage was locked. Each laptop joins our office Wi-Fi with a device certificate, valid for a year and renewed automatically whenever the laptop checks in with our device management. A laptop in a cage checks in with nothing, so most certificates had expired in the summer. Without a certificate the laptop could not join the network, and without the network it could not reach the service that would issue a new one. Second, the machines were ten months behind on operating system and application updates, and when the first sixty were plugged in on a wired connection they spent the afternoon downloading several gigabytes each. Third, our contact centre platform had stopped supporting the version of its desktop client those laptops still carried, so even the ones that connected could not take calls.
My team spent the weekend re-enrolling laptops one at a time on a bench of network cables. Forty agents spent their first morning on paper training instead of shadowing calls.
Nothing in our routines had failed. They simply assumed every device would be switched on regularly, and these were the only machines in the company that were not.
The peak fleet is now part of the ordinary estate. On the first Tuesday of each month the trolleys are wheeled to a room with wired ports and power, the laptops are switched on for a day, and they check in, take their updates and renew their certificates like everything else. Device management flags any laptop not seen for forty days. Six weeks before the first intake, an engineer runs a full rehearsal on ten laptops: sign in, take a test call, log out.
This October all hundred and eighty were ready on the Wednesday before the first intake.
Equipment in storage has not stopped needing maintenance. It has only stopped telling you that it does.
– Serguey Shinder
