NICE, a leading global provider of on-premises and cloud-based enterprise solutions recently shared some new findings with the communication landscape. According to NICE, there has been a significant increase in the number of agents adapting their contact centre schedules to suit a new working lifestyle in response to COVID-19. Agents have been highly engaged in helping their contact centres to meet with the rapid and unprecedented change in demand using a NICE solution.
The NICE Employee Engagement Manager, or ‘EEM’ solution, provides today’s agents with an exceptional solution for scheduling flexibility, as well as improving staff access and productivity. Groups with access to the EEM offering are experiencing rapid increases in the average use of self-service schedule changes. In some cases, change rates are as high as 193%, highlighting the fluctuating needs of today’s companies.
The Changing State of the Workplace
As companies move to a more remote working environment due to COVID-19, the demand for sudden changes in scheduling is higher than ever. This trend is evident across a host of settings, including Telecoms businesses, Healthcare, Financial Services, and more.
As well as changing their schedules to ensure that they’re more available for the contact centre, agents are also relying on flexible self-scheduling capabilities more today. These capabilities include things like automated self-swap of hours. The demand for that technology alone has increased by around 90%, according to NICE. Self-swap allows agents to instantly move shift intervals in the same day, or between days while maintaining the right hours workload.
Companies in the NICE community are also reporting high success levels with agents using self-scheduling tools to embrace extra hours, number of hours worked is doubling on average. What’s more, there has been a 43% reduction in voluntary time off over this period compared to previous weeks.
Contact Centre Agents are Adapting
As the use of self-service scheduling tools increases across all verticals, specific industries are demonstrating an incredible amount of elasticity in staffing responsiveness. Within the banking industry, for instance, agent initiated self-swaps have increased by an average of 408%. Additionally, at major telecom service provider locations, self-service schedule changes increased by over 700%. What’s more, the total of agent initiated extra hours worked increased in volume by 1012%.
Enterprise Group President, Barry Cooper, commented that it is truly remarkable to see contact centre employees in the current landscape rapidly adapting to their situation in such a time of uncertainty. The company is pleased to be doing its part with the EEM solution, which can empower employees to adjust and adapt their schedules more efficiently, even in remote locations.
