In MyGate’s contact centers, Chrome OS devices help boost security and productivity

Editor's note: Today’s post is by Ravi Mohan, General Manager, and Diwesh Sahai, Head of Engineering, for MyGate. The India-based company provides software for managing 20,000 residential housing communities throughout the country. MyGate’s contact center, which includes its sales and customer support teams, have adopted Chrome OS devices to improve security and productivity while reducing IT workloads.

MyGate’s community management app simplifies accepting package deliveries, paying maintenance bills, and welcoming guests for those living in gated communities. We are growing across India about 5 percent every month: Our vision is, “Wherever there is a gate, we want MyGate to be there.” Our contact center team of 350 sales and support people help users understand the MyGate technology and troubleshoot issues. MyGate wouldn’t be where it is without this contact center team. 

That’s why we adopted Chrome OS devices—we wanted our team to stay productive, even when working remotely. And stay productive they did: We estimate our contact center employees save about 1,500 hours a month combined by using Chrome OS devices, while our IT team saved 1,000 hours of device configuration time.

Creating a collaborative contact center environment with Chrome OS

We operate out of 15 cities in India, so remote collaboration has always been very important, even before the pandemic. As many as a dozen MyGate employees can take part in creating a presentation, for example. And with Acer Chromebooks and Google Workspace, we can work on Google Slides and Google Sheets at the same time, from anywhere.

This kind of collaboration wasn’t really possible before the pandemic. The contact center employees had Windows laptops and Microsoft Office applications. Security became our focus: Employees worked from many different locations, and frequently traveled with laptops that could contain personal information about MyGate users. Security is at the core of the MyGate experience for gated communities, so it would damage our brand if we suffered a data breach.

In 2019, we took the first step toward improved security and productivity by adopting Chrome OS devices, which includes Chromebooks, and Google Workspace as our productivity solution. With Chrome Enterprise Upgrade, our IT team would have the power to create a secure environment for supporting our customers—like locking down lost laptops remotely, or preventing the use of USB drives.

One of our core business values is preserving the confidentiality and privacy of our customers. We have to ensure their data is secure with our employees, wherever they are working from, from whatever network. We have this assurance thanks to the built-in security within Chrome OS. We implemented more than 60 security features using the Google Admin console, including requiring logins only within Chrome browser, and enabling data loss prevention rules to ensure no personal or sensitive information is transferred to personal email addresses that are outside of the organization.

We extend our focus on security to mobile devices through Android Enterprise. We enroll our 2,000 managed devices with the work profile, which creates strict separation of company and personal apps and data on each device. Our employees can securely access our internal and Google Workspace apps in a dedicated space, while keeping their personal data separate.

The very best customer service, even in a pandemic

We started rolling out Chromebooks to the customer support team in late 2019. When the pandemic required all of us to shift to remote work in early 2020, we realized how valuable Chrome Enterprise had become for employees in various regions working remotely. However, security became an even bigger concern for these workers.

We had every intention of maintaining our high levels of service, support, and security, pandemic or not—and Chrome Enterprise was at the heart of our plans. At first, we couldn’t get all the Chromebooks we needed to send home with our sales and support team. So we bought laptops without operating systems installed and added CloudReady, which provides a Chrome OS experience on PCs and Macs. This was an easy way to ensure that sales and support employees all worked with the same tools, and that we could set policies across the board to help them stay safely connected to coworkers.

The jobs of our IT team became much easier with Chrome Enterprise. The beauty of Chrome OS devices is that we can enroll them, ship them anywhere, and when employees open them and log in, they’re ready to start work immediately. The local IT support staff doesn’t have to do any special configuration. By eliminating the five hours of door-to-door shipping and configuration time per laptop, we’ve saved about 1,000 hours of IT time.

The sales and support teams save time too. Chrome OS devices have long battery life, and rarely need troubleshooting by the IT team. We estimate the teams save a total of 1,500 hours every month, which they can put back into answering customer questions. With Chrome tools helping us achieve this level of great service, there’s no doubt we’ll keep growing MyGate.