Along with much of modern life, the contact centre is forever changed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Workers in affected regions simply are no longer able to travel to and sit closely together in traditional contact centres which has led to an increase in contact centre agents working remotely. To do so, in addition to good connectivity and devices, they need access to enterprise-grade systems that enable them with all the capabilities of the traditional call centre in their homes.
The first phase has seen a temporary wave of fire-fighting initiatives aimed at keeping the organisation’s call centre capability operational but the next step will be to take a far more structured and strategic approach to managing a more permanent situation. It’s likely that, ultimately, a blend of home-working and traditional call centre working will emerge with functions like training happening in the centralised office while much of the day-to-day call handling happens at agent’s homes. The big barns with hundreds of staff working terminals are likely to house fewer workers as social distance is kept and ultimately may switch to smaller facilities.
“There will be less face-to-face business and more virtual business – at least for a while,” said Johnnie Wilkenschildt, senior director of product management for SAP Contact Center 365 at SAP Digital Interconnect. “Although we will still visit bricks and mortar locations, the new world will see much more done online and people will order more digitally. This means hyper demand on contact centres and that is putting demand on agents who are working from home.”
He added that, even before COVID, enterprises were looking at ways to improve contact centre experiences and enable remote working. “Companies were already looking to minimise the amount of on-premise systems their IT teams need to maintain and the answer to that is, of course, the cloud. Having the contact centre solution available in the cloud means companies no longer need to maintain on-premise hardware and software. It’s taken care of by providers such as SAP who ensure the contact centre solution is available 24×7.”
“For agents working from home, the cloud contact centre offering from SAP allows them to use our contact centre app over their regular internet connection, without requiring VPN,” said Wilkenschildt. “We’re seeing more and more customers asking about having their agents work from home without the slow-down that comes from connecting to their current on-premise solution through VPN. My answer is, of course, SAP Contact Center 365, the omni-channel solution that supports voice (phone), email, web chat, video chat, SMS and social messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, WeChat, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Viber. Agents can be up and running SAP Contact Center 365 in no time.”
Wilkenschildt points out that SAP Contact Center 365 is simple to use. “It’s browser-based and has a beautiful user interface providing agents with a great user experience,” he added.
“SAP Contact Center 365 has an intuitive look and feel and agents immediately get how to use it. You want agents to be able to get up to speed quickly if they’re working from home so this is really important.”
Another vital capability for contact centre operations running large numbers of home workers is the supervisory capability. “Agents sometimes need guidance and support from their team leaders who also work from home so you also need supervisor tools like real-time dashboards to see what the call load is and how the contact centre is performing with respect to service level. The tools that allow supervisors to do this are crucial to making working from home possible for contact centre workers. In the old world, supervisors would take a walk on the call centre floor to check-in on people and see how they’re doing. Now, dashboards can alert them to who needs help and how the contact centre is performing.”
