This is our second installment on how COVID-19 has impacted contact centers and the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry. In this article we are focused on the effect of work at home agents (WAH). We will discuss how technology can impact, support and improve the agent and customer experience. We discussed in The Changing Relationship Between BPO and Real Estate Post COVID-19 that call centers have been moving to WAH (work at home) for several years at a pace that was comfortable to them, their agents and their customers.
Covid-19 changed this slow and steady transition into an overnight pivot.
Contact centers across the world reacted to the Covid-19 pandemic by sending everyone home, including here in the US. Work at Home quickly became the default for most companies operating contact centers and this has changed the role of the agent – potentially giving them more power and control over their working life.
Although the shift to Work at Home was forced by the emergency situation, it was a very successful experiment and this is creating opportunities for both the agents and the companies that manage the contact centers. Companies can now hire the very best agents in the country – even globally – rather than relying on a labor pool within commuting distance of a contact center.
This also allows companies to tap into additional pools of talent that were not previously available. This could be people unable to travel to an office because of geography or some other reason or older workers that are happy to work flexibly from home, but would never want to work in a contact center. This creates enormous opportunities to meaningfully move the dial on diversity and inclusion measures.
When the wave of pandemic Work at Home initially started many agents were poorly equipped. Often there were few tools in place for management or oversight – let alone network security. This has changed in the past 18 months.
Agent attitudes have also changed. Many agents that enjoyed the greater flexibility afforded by Work at Home, not least the lack of a commute, want this to continue. Many job-seekers are now actively looking for companies that are planning to continue Work at Home after the pandemic. In this environment, offering Work at Home flexibility is now becoming a strong tool that can help companies to seek out and retain the best talent.
Much of the technology that makes it possible to continue offering Work at Home to agents did not even exist 2-3 years ago. In many ways, the entire world is fortunate that Covid-19 did not arrive a decade earlier because it would have been far more difficult to deliver enterprise systems that work in the home environment – and also for the personal connectivity that made it easier to cope during the various lockdowns. Disney+ launched just before the pandemic started and they now have over 100 million subscribers.
Since the pandemic began, we have worked with several clients and technology partners to design a Work at Home strategy that offers greater resilience for the future. These are some of the key technologies that are really making a difference today:
We asked each of these three partners to share how their product can help to manage a Work at Home strategy. As we have outlined here, all these partners provide a unique service offering that when combined can create a very effective Work at Home strategy.
QStory
Like many sectors, contact centers have been overtly affected by the pandemic. For an industry that has relied on agents coming into contact center buildings, working and managing within close proximity, the sudden lockdown, and move to home or hybrid working has been a huge challenge. On the whole, this challenge has been successfully overcome and many are seeing the benefits of having agents working more flexibly.
All of this can only be achieved if your contact centers are able to effectively manage and offer flexibility to their current and potential employees. Some are turning to Intraday Automation to work alongside WFM solutions. Intraday Automation continuously monitors trends in customer demand, communicates and alerts managers to potential problems before they arise, and suggests ways that gaps can be filled, what ‘idle’ agents can be doing during quieter periods (training and back-office work) and gives managers the ability to make informed decisions throughout the day, rather than having to stick by an advance schedule created weeks ahead of time.
This insight also sees a layer of flexibility added into the agents’ day allowing for last minute requests for personal time, change of breaks or holidays, with no impact to customer service. In this new world both contact centers and agents have the opportunity to create a very different working environment; one in which traditional rigid, advanced schedules are turned into flexible and productive realities, helping keep agents happy and giving contact centers the tools to attract and retain the very best talent.
Semafone
Payments are the lifeblood of any business, so when the global pandemic hit and companies transitioned to a Work at Home model overnight, they also had to solve the issue of processing secure, PCI DSS compliant payments. Meeting the security requirements laid out in the PCI DSS, which number in the hundreds, is notoriously difficult during normal times. With the additional challenges posed when agents work from home, it becomes a truly Herculean task.
Contact centers must never store sensitive cardholder authentication data; the simplest, most cost-effective solution is to keep cardholder data out of the business infrastructure entirely.
Semafone’s Cardprotect Voice+ and Cardprotect Relay+ solutions enable secure, PCI DSS compliant payments over the telephone or any digital customer engagement channel, respectively. With Cardprotect Voice+, when customers choose to pay over the phone, they can enter their card details using the telephone keypad, and the dial tones are masked so the agent can neither hear them nor see them on-screen. Agents stay in constant communication for the duration of the transaction, creating a better, more frictionless customer experience. Payment details are then sent directly to the Payment Service Provider, never entering the business infrastructure.
In the same vein, Cardprotect Relay+ allows agents to generate secure payment links they can send through email, SMS, webchat, social media, or any other digital channel. They receive a stream of real-time updates as the customer progresses through the payment process, allowing the agent to troubleshoot should any issues arise.
When it comes to providing agents the ability to process payments securely from a home environment, remove the risk of storing cardholder data entirely. After all, they can’t hack what you don’t hold!
https://semafone.com
Smartz Solutions
Smartz Solutions has from the inception created the foundation for remote workers, offering a simple user interface on a cloud-based system that will ensure your business can continue operating. With a best-in-class communication platform, clients can transition from a traditional to a remote contact center. This shift catered for the full spectrum of communication channels – social media platforms, telephony, email and SMS etc. – through a true omnichannel solution, Smartz Communication.
Driven by AI-based strategies, clients leveraged the Smartz A.I.D (Automatic Interaction Distributor) to monitor real-time Sentiment data, powering personalized customer-employee connections, boosting customer and agent satisfaction. Through intelligent routing, the A.I.D understands customers’ preferences and routes them to the virtual agent who will offer them the best service. In a WFH environment, this offers clients the flexibility to continue offering impeccable service. (To download a white paper on WFH, click here.)
Smartz Human Asset Management is a full-stack system that increases engagement, understands trends, empowers your team, gets accurate feedback, and retains top talent through a cloud-based platform seamlessly built around the employee experience.
Through surveys and integrated communication, teams can see the business structure and interact with the people they need to maintain productive working environments, all with low latency and minimal data costs.
ApexCX
ApexCX has worked with clients on technology implementation and optimization projects ranging from 25 to several thousand agents. We can work with you and your team to develop a Work at Home strategy which is best suited to your needs and will include establishing proper governance and oversight of employees, proper employee communications and an environment which is secure and productive. We have utilized our technology partners to enable oversight of employee downtime and implemented solutions for securing payment processing and securing PII information.
Contact our team today and let us get started on defining your path, creating your business case, and helping you achieve significant savings!
For more information on ApexCX and our contact center consulting and other professional services – including Work at Home and hybrid strategies – please follow our company page on LinkedIn or visit our website.
Please Contact ApexCX for all your customer experience needs.
( Dec 13, 2021)
