Are you ready for what’s next?
Over the last few months, we have spoken with our customers on how they managed their remote working strategies to address the urgent requirement of the COVID-19 crisis.
It’s immediately apparent that many of the quick fixes they implemented to maintain a level of “business as usual” are not sustainable beyond the short term. We’re now working with clients to help remove any limitations and create viable long term solutions…
The main focus areas include:
– Ensuring delivery of a quality customer experience
– Integrated employee tools to provide better collaboration and business visibility
How ready do you think your business is to deal with whatever comes next?
Based on our customers’ experiences, we are happy to share this 8-point plan of what we believe is required to make a business sustainable in this new reality. With tough times undoubtedly ahead, now is the time to evaluate your systems and ensure you continue to deliver the best service for your customers.
New business models are blossoming…
We have spoken for decades of expanding the contact centre principles of managed communications to other business use cases and teams. It is finally happening. The pandemic has blossomed new business models.
Succeed in the job you have today, not the job you had three months ago…
COVID has brought around an essential elevation in the importance of the contact centre for delivering the organization’s customer experience. Now, contact centres are considered an essential service, which wasn’t always the case before. Where callers may have been more upset about a poor call in the past – now they want that human interaction.
- Use of Contact Centre technology for non-call centre teams and enabling new business models
- Understand contact center needs and consider how callback and artificial intelligence (AI) services can help ensure service-level agreements
- Create short instructional videos and cheat sheets to help users with WFH technology
- For many enterprises, one size doesn’t fit all. An enterprise might need specialized contact centre customization to fit unique business processes, CRM tools and other customer experience facilities
- You must be ready to communicate and collaborate on many communication channels to accommodate customers individual preferences
- Make sure you can scale your services when the need arises and that your providers can handle it
- Adapt Your Scheduling —contact centers have seen increased interaction volume, which means managers must adapt agent scheduling to accommodate the load. One recommendation was to use shorter shifts rather than full-day blocks, since agents don’t have to commute. This lets the contact center optimize agent scheduling without unduly burdening the employee, who is at home the whole time anyway, and might actually benefit from split shifts if they have other responsibilities to attend to.
- Manage Agent Performance —consider doubling the amount of coaching time with agents. This is critical to helping them succeed in “the job they have today, not the job they had two months ago.”
Find out more about how to improve customer experience here.
