There has been a number of things we have had to get used to over the past few months, like crossing the road to avoid people walking towards us, cutting our own hair and having our contact centre agents working from home.
It is amazing how quickly we have been able to adapt. In fact, many contact centres are now questioning whether a ‘remote’ model is really a bad thing and whether there are advantages to adopting this model long-term. A lot of agents love being able to avoid commuting and having more flexibility over the hours they work and I am sure contact centres would welcome the opportunity to reduce costs of large buildings and through flexible working, extend their talent pool and be able to better align resources with demand.
Becoming a truly virtual operation
Although customers may have been patient as society adjusts, we should not be fooled into thinking such patience will last. Customers will quickly become unforgiving of long wait times and service levels that don’t quite live up to their expectations. If contact centres are to embrace the ‘remote’ model, they will need to progress from the quick fix that kept them operational and adjust to being able to deliver the experience that customers demand now and in the future.
We will need to make sure that Andy the agent is empowered to be as effective from home as he would be in a contact centre, and that Suzie the supervisor can instinctively orchestrate her team remotely as well as she would walking the contact centre floor.
Six ways contact centres can adapt
You have shown your contact centre can operate remotely, the question now is what do you need to adapt to embrace ‘remote’ working longer-term? Here are the key things we believe you need to consider.
Agile Technology
Having a cloud-based solution that enables agents to work seamlessly from any location and that provides you with the elasticity to respond to demand and extend the contact centre into every part of the business.
Customer Experience Focus
Offering your customers choice in how they interact, utilising intelligence to match conversation types to the agents who are best equipped to service those needs, and empowering agents with a holistic view of the customer’s journey across every touchpoint.
Drive Operational Efficiency
Efficiently utilising resources by operating a universal queue across all channels of interaction and leveraging AI powered self-service to deal with simpler interactions, freeing up agents to deal with more complex enquiries.
Providing Visibility & Insights To Managers
Providing real-time views into agent activity, customer demand and how well you are responding to this demand. Presenting supervisors and managers with the insights to spot trends and respond to these before they impact performance.
Ensuring Security & Compliance
Leveraging such tools as Link Pay+, a super simple one-click payment method for card transactions that ensures agents working from home can take card payments while complying to PCI DSS and information security requirements.
Leveraging Voice Analytics
Overcoming the fact that managers cannot walk the floor by utilising automation and speech analytics to review every interaction and identifying those agents or conversation types where managers need to focus their attention.
Let Cirrus be part of defining your future
We are a contact centre solution provider that was born in the cloud. Those essential ingredients that will enable you to have a highly effective remote contact centre were designed into our platform. In helping you define your future you will find us:
- Refreshingly different in how we think about customer experience
- Forward thinking in terms of empowering agents to be highly effective
- Innovative in terms of how we leverage our platform and applications to solve your challenges
