The unprecedented coronavirus pandemic has pushed all the IT leaders to adapt to the new normal – when Call Centers’ agents were highly in demand.
Many call centers including the ones that carefully crafted their disaster recovery plans were not prepared for something like the coronavirus tide.
Call center operations after transformation have gone increasingly remote but this pandemic has transformed and accelerated the work from home CX support trend.
According to Gartner, 35% of the customer experience employees will work from home by 2023, up from 5% in 2017. But right after the pandemic hit the world, most of the CX organizations failed to have plans for enabling the staff to work from home.
Most organizations had to have CX professionals fielding customer calls remotely.
When all the businesses came under enormous pressure to continue services of customers the organizations were faced with long waiting times, trying to understand the unprecedented crisis and realizing the life-changing new normal.
After a lot of re-evaluations, is the rise of transformed call center – Work From Home Call Center Solution.
There was a quick transition where agents had to adapt to the work-from-home environment in no time.
Many organizations have revealed that a robust work from home platform enabled work at equal or even quality of work has improved compared to the traditional workforce in offices or centralized functioning.
5 Secrets to an effective call center transformation:
Ramping up workforce flexibility
All the organizations that embrace change should consider the need to revise onboarding, improvement of employee engagement virtually and training processes because of the remote nature of transformed call centers.
Intelligent assistants help mirror in-person experiences ad activities in a work-from-home environment by hosting and leading on-going training for the employees to provide better services for the customers. Virtual one-on-one coaching enables the employees to continuously develop within the roles and responsibilities with the necessary tools to stay engaged, efficient and to deliver optimal customer experience.
During such downtimes, transformation of call centers create flexibility by upskilling employees on new channel skills
Enhancing the remote-working model
Home-based call center models are increasingly showing results in productivity than premises-based employees. The communications platform is very important in the transformed work from home environment. Organizations with communications as its main service should adapt their remote workers and train them with both voice and other media to track productivity as well as call quality.
Working individually or in a team, the supervisors still can monitor the quality of the services offered. Training, team updates, or social meetings with remotely working employees should log in to be able to experience a sense of continuity and comradeship.
All the tremendous changes in AI and natural language processing have improved dramatically on-call systems during the transformation of call centers.
Continuing to shape customer expectations
The new generation of voice-based customer service employees or chatbots is easier to train, quicker to deploy and more likely to be able to provide an experience that answers the need of the customers without any intervention.
The entire transformation of the call centers seems to benefit both organizations and customers since it is now a multi-channel and follows an omnichannel customer experience approach with cloud-based, thoughtfully designed interactive voice responses and strong/powerful reporting capabilities.
All thanks to artificial intelligence in this field – natural language processing, chatbots &many more technologies which made the work from home environment work incredibly in shaping customer experiences
Reinforcing culture & connection
Boosting morale among home-basedtransformedcontact center agents especially during COVID-19 reality is necessary to fix isolation and avoiding damages in engagement and performance.
Let the organization stay aligned with the company’s culture as it is the backbone of any company. Culture is the basic foundation of employees operating as they do. It heavily influences the employees as to how they behave.
To maintain culture and connection among the employees, we do not need everyone physically present to take the needful actions. Retention and satisfaction of employees keep the company’s mission and vision statement alive. Recognize and coach the employees.
COVID-19 Control room
Organizations should consider creating a control room within their firms. A COVID-19 control room would address the impact of the crisis on the organization and report to the central nerve system of the organization.
The cross-functional team of the customer care during its transformationintocontrol room have to facilitate clear decision making and their roles and responsibilities evolve as the situation changes according to time. This helps to quickly scale to the challenges ahead
Preparing for a workforce made up of both remote and on-site employees is the real struggle.
As the organizations rethink the viability of shifting or transforming the call center services permanently to work from home model, they realized that call center facilities are now an over-investment
This helps in making significant investments in this path like include leveraging robots in the activities of call centers.
Going forward, we believe that most third-part organization’s services will include a work from home component and incorporate it into their service agreements.
Organizations that balance in protecting the business in the present times while re-tooling for the future of the business will outsmart the other players or competitors and thrive beyond the daunting coronavirus pandemic or any other unprecedented disasters.