GCP – Wayfair Transforms Contact Center Operations with ChromeOS and ChromeOS Flex

Editor’s note: Today’s post is by Asad Rahman, Director of IT for Wayfair, a leading e-commerce company specializing in furniture and home goods. Wayfair chose ChromeOS and ChromeOS Flex devices to support contact center staff, improve productivity, and streamline security tasks.

“ChromeOS is a natural fit for how Wayfair operates today. We’ve embraced Google Workspace and Gemini to power collaboration and insights, and our teams are fast-moving and globally distributed. ChromeOS keeps pace with us, providing a modern infrastructure that’s simple, scalable, and streamlined.”

Snapshot:

• Easy deployment across multiple setups: Successfully transitioned 127 employees across 150+ devices with ChromeOS Flex.
• Cost savings: Potential savings of over $1.2 million over the next 6 months.
• Improved security: ChromeOS layered security model, automatic updates, and sandboxing have dramatically reduced the attack surface.

As the destination for all things home, Wayfair’s goal is to make it easy for customers to create a home that is just right for them. Delivering on that promise for millions of customers and an online catalog of over 30 million items requires scalable and secure technology that empowers our global teams. ChromeOS has been a reliable partner in our operations for years, powering digital displays in our offices and serving our retail and grab-and-go spots. We are now building on that success by expanding our ChromeOS deployment to our call centers, further enhancing the productivity and collaboration that are crucial to providing a seamless customer experience.

Recognizing the need for change

For years, we wrestled with a frustrating paradox. We had fully embraced Google Workspace leveraging tools like Gemini and NotebookLM. Yet, our endpoints were still stuck on a different platform. We had a vision to provide a cost-efficient, cloud-based, remote, secure environment that would eliminate expensive VDI licenses and complex engineering overhead, improve user experience, and align to a zero-trust architecture for future workforce expansion. Our users needed to collaborate seamlessly and do their jobs efficiently, but the solution we had just wasn’t cutting it. Sales and service agents, along with our BPO partners, faced daily performance and reliability challenges. Log-in times were a nightmare, often upwards of 10 minutes in our virtualized environments, and live updates would bog down productivity in the middle of the workday. Our end-users were constantly asking for something simpler, something that just worked.

On the IT side, we were stretched thin. Most of our resources and time were spent maintaining our stack instead of innovating. A reduction in personnel coupled with the departure of our lead IT architect further underscored the need for a solution that was inherently easier to manage and less resource-intensive. We knew we needed a change, and we needed it fast.

Easy, secure, and built for our future

The decision to lean into ChromeOS for our call centers felt like a natural evolution. Given our existing familiarity in other areas, and our grounding in Google Workspace, it just made sense. We needed a user experience that was intuitive and easy while being simple to manage for our IT team. The security and ease of deployment, while not our initial driving force, quickly became a critical factor once we saw the potential for a broader rollout.

We decided to launch ChromeOS in our Georgia based call center. The good news? We could leverage our existing devices by simply deploying ChromeOS Flex. This meant a smoother transition with less capital expenditure. We successfully transitioned 127 employees across over 150 devices.

Easy deployment across multiple setups

The deployment process was remarkably easy. Our call center agents were already somewhat familiar with the ChromeOS interface, which certainly helped. ChromeOS worked seamlessly with tools that our users depend on, like voice over the internet communication and workplace management tools. Additionally, we can rest assured that our business processing outsource partners have secure remote access to company resources since ChromeOS can work with various hardware solutions, like BYOD. The feedback we received has been stellar. We are now expanding beyond our in-office agents and deploying ChromeOS to our remote workers—working both stateside and globally.

$1.2 million in savings

The great news is that our initial estimates for moving to ChromeOS are looking even better than we projected! We’re now looking at a potential savings of more than $1.2 million over the next 6 months. With ChromeOS, we’ve also successfully reduced our fixed costs, meaning we actually see savings when we reduce users, a significant improvement. Plus, we’re no longer tied into those long-term, expensive, iron-clad contracts, giving us much more flexibility.

This transition has been great for our IT team as well. Previously, the engineering effort to keep everything running was pretty complex and expensive, but ChromeOS requires fewer resources from them. This is a stark contrast to our old system, where users understandably faced frustration with performance slowdowns, especially audio and lag issues. Those problems resulted in a huge number of support issues—we were dealing with over 7,500 tickets a year! The shift to ChromeOS has streamlined things for everyone.

Don’t send me back: The unmistakable benefits of ChromeOS

The results have been nothing short of transformative. Overall feedback was positive, with users praising ChromeOS simplicity and speed, and the elimination of VDI screen switching. For years, VDI issues were consistently one of our top three IT tickets. Since moving to ChromeOS, those tickets have been reduced to none. Now, if there’s an issue, it’s almost always user error, not a problem with the underlying technology.

I’ve heard direct quotes from our users like, “Don’t send me back!” That’s the kind of enthusiasm that validates every decision we made. Log-in times are now measured in seconds, not the agonizing 10 minutes they once were. We’ve also seen less latency on certain applications, which has made a real difference in our agents’ ability to serve our customers efficiently.

And when it comes to security? ChromeOS security model, automatic updates, and sandboxing have dramatically reduced our attack surface. Our security team has provided positive feedback, noting the peace of mind that comes with knowing devices are inherently more secure, with less manual intervention required from their end. The built-in protection is a game-changer for a company of our size and with our current IT resources.

Looking ahead, we’ll begin assessing the remaining call center population, with the goal of replacing all legacy laptops and desktops with ChromeOS by the end of year. Embracing ChromeOS has been one of the best decisions we’ve made. It’s not just about simpler IT; it’s about empowering our employees, improving productivity, and building a more secure and resilient foundation for Wayfair, one “Don’t send me back,” at a time.