Since 1971, David Bowie’s Changes has blared out of the radio reminding us to “Turn and face the strange”. Decades after its debut, it suddenly feels very relevant. COVID-19 has impacted people’s lives, health, families and employment. The workplace is no exception. Nobody gazing into their crystal ball could have predicted that Twitter would say that all employees can work from home forever, if they want to.
Although most of the UK’s 6,000 contact centres have the reassurance of disaster recovery and business continuity plans (BCPs), it would have taken a time-traveller to predict social distancing and working from home. The model where large numbers of agents are hooked up to a legacy phone system in large facilities was already on its way out but has it become obsolete overnight?
While it might be tempting to act like an ostrich and keep your head in the sand ignoring the inevitable, your contact centre needs to evolve fast to be relevant as we move into this ‘new normal’.
There’s no doubt this is a tough ask with the intense pressure of coping with the unprecedented demand. Consumers and businesses are keeping all channels busy with queries about furlough schemes, payment holidays, insurance claims, changing season tickets and of course amending all those travel bookings. Recognised as key workers, the 800,000 employees in the UK’s contact centres are on the frontline helping consumers and businesses at the same time as balancing the restrictions of social distancing and pivoting to face a new reality.
The solution is a cloud-based contact centre that eliminates the need for specialist telephony hardware so you have the flexibility that your agents work from any location, be it home or office with the same experience. While the only technology requirement might be a laptop and broadband, many of us who have had to work from home would also suggest that it also easier when schools are open to reduce the risk of interruptions from children, although that is now part of the new normal.
The idea of transitioning from a hardware to a software model might feel overwhelming with so many other business difficulties to juggle at this time, but it needn’t be difficult if you work with an IT services partner to do the heavy lifting for you. Necessity is the mother of invention and for one large client we have proven that it is possible to set up a contact centre using cloud technology in just 48 hours. This contact centre was able to deliver the same experience customers expected yet was manned primarily by agents working from home.
Platforms such as Amazon Connect work on an as-a-service model to easily scale up and down as demand fluctuates. They also provide the agility to update features and capabilities rapidly. This gives call centres the flexibility to address the challenges that have arisen because of COVID-19 – particularly increased call volumes and long wait times.
The following are real-life examples of how businesses have used the flexibility and agility inherent in a cloud-based platform to respond to changing requirements since COVID-19:
- Provision a BCP service by delivering incoming calls to Amazon Connect with a simple call flow enabling agents to work from home through the provision of a soft phone and call control panel onto their device
- Adding the ability for customers to request a call back and holding their place in the queue without the need to stay on the phone. Also allowing customers to schedule call backs at a time convenient to them, resulting in a positive experience with the brand.
- Set up front-end messaging that provides the latest information to customers, in many cases avoiding the need to speak to an agent to get an answer. It pointed customers to online materials, FAQs and email addresses, and is being enhanced with the addition of Chatbots that access the FAQs directly.
- Creating targeted services for specific COVID-19 situations, which route particular customer calls so they can be handled more effectively. For example, a helpline specifically for vulnerable individuals.
A cloud-based contact centre can bring you closer to your customers but as with any major transformation project, you will need to get your priorities straight from the start – and straightening out your people, process, and technology issues – is critical.
Your executive team needs to spearhead the shift from a traditional model to a more agile organisation capable of moving at pace using Pods, new tools and methodologies such as DevOps. You need to do this while also ensuring the right controls are embedded in the right places for any regulatory or compliance purposes.
Customer self-service and automation can be driven using Artifical Intelligence and Machine Learning, making it possible to land in the sweet spot of agility, innovation, speed and control.
Don’t be over-awed by the prospect of moving to a cloud-based platform to support your distributed workforce. With the right partner to immerse your team in new tools and update your organisational culture, it can be seamless. Not only will you be able to support your customers queries more effectively, you will be able to have your employees working flexibly and be set up for the new business environment beyond COVID-19, whatever shape that might take.
Guest Blog by John Ing, Customer Experience (CX) Product Owner at IT services firm, ECS
