(eBook) Contact Centres in the Fast Lane: The Rise of a New Operating Model

Contact Centres in the Fast Lane CoverCaught in a wider organisational response to the pandemic, contact centre leadership is busily responding to the demands of customer, employee and organisation.

Their combined impact is starting to redesign the way that contact centres work.

Imagination has been liberated as new responses are urgently demanded.

Many outstanding ambitions such as digital first engagement, omni-channel effectiveness, actionable insight, AI fuelled decision making, front line empowerment are now in production and being scaled.

This eBook explores why the contact centre is likely to remain in a state of accelerated change and what it might look like as part of a broader digital first capability that now underpins most organisational transformation.

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(eBook) Contact Centre Homeworking: 10 Key Operational Challenges

How do you:

  1. Recruit and onboard homeworkers?
  2. Maintain visibility of homeworking activities?
  3. Manage Performance?
  4. Communicate with homeworkers?
  5. Train homeworkers?
  6. Ensure your homeworking environment is compliant?
  7. Ensure your homeworking environment is secure?
  8. Deliver homeworking work-life-balance benefits (such as split shifts)?
  9. Enable real-time collaboration?
  10. Manage homeworkers?Read our eBook today and get on top of these major remote management issues.

Read our eBook and learn how to get on top of these and many other remote management issues.

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(Webinar) Homeworking, Digital First and Cutting Cost-to-Serve

– Thursday Aug 13th, 12 – 1PM (BST) –

On this webinar, Emotive CX specialist Martin Hill-Wilson will discuss the contact centre industry’s next major challenge – how to deliver CX at much lower cost – as well as the Digital First agenda that a growing number of organisations are adopting.

Sensée homeworking specialist Rob Smale will then ask ‘What contact centre homeworking model is right for your business?’ discussing the pros and cons of a range of options:

  • 100% homeworking Vs hybrid (home/office) working
  • Single flexible shifts Vs split shifts
  • Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)/Bring Your Own Broadband (BYOB) Vs company-provided equipment
  • Company-supplied desks and furniture Vs homeworker-supplied

If work-from-home is not your area of expertise, Rob will also discuss what help is at hand to help you through the initial stages of your homeworking journey.

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Home delivery companies face significant customer service challenges in the run up to Christmas

(Reprinted courtesy of Internet Retailing magazine)

Fabulous news from Hermes last week with the delivery specialist announcing over 10,000 new jobs and predicting a near-doubling of parcel volumes in the run up to Christmas. And it’s not the only good news from delivery firms during lockdown. DPD announced 6,000 new roles as part of a £200m investment, Kingfisher 3-4000 jobs, and online giants Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Amazon and Morrison thousands more. Online fashion and cosmetic retailer Asos revealed a 10% boost in sales to £1 billion in the four months to June 2020.

They are exciting headlines. But they also beg the question ‘how will the sector cope with the severe service centre challenges this expansion will create?’

It’s also interesting that Hermes’ news should break on the same day as reports of a Covid-19 outbreak at a customer service centre in Scotland, and the same week as the announcement of the results from a major survey into the future of contact centre working. 89% of the 102 contact centre leaders responding to the “What will your contact centre be like post lockdown?†survey said that the Covid-19 crisis has changed the contact centre industry forever, with only 3% saying that it hasn’t (the remainder stating they were unsure).

When asked “What Will Your Working Environment Mainly Look Like in 2021?†57% of contact centre leaders chose an image of a Socially Distanced Centre, 35% a Work-from-Home centre, and only 7% a Normal Contact Centre. The survey was conducted by the South West Contact Centre Forum (SWCCF) and Call North West (CNW) in partnership with Talkdesk.

In the current environment, there’s little chance of delivery companies expanding their bricks and mortar contact centre operations to meet the growing demand for service… which leaves just one realistic and feasible option: work-from-home (WFH).

Homeworking has been a business phenomenon during lockdown with 77% of UK contact centres having 50% or more of their employees working from home during the Covid-19 crisis according to the survey.

Despite these impressive statistics though, homeworking has not been easy, and has thrown up unique and significant challenges. For example, what makes a good customer service homeworker? How do you recruit and train people virtually? How do you manage people’s health and well being? How do you manage performance and quality, communicate effectively with remote workers, maintain infosecurity, stay compliant. And one can add to this long list the requirement for eDelivery support staff to understand the end-to-end customer journey and be familiar with common digital customer experience tools.

To achieve excellence in running a WFH customer service team calls for a very different mindset – one that starts with learning how to recruit the right homeworkers and extends to creating a virtual mindset across everything from training, planning, managing and reporting…… within a technology ecosystem that is secure, robust and flexible enough to scale up and down with the eDelivery company’s business needs.

With 35% of leaders predicting that their contact centres will mainly be homeworking in 2021 according to the SWCCF/CNW/Talkdesk survey, the need to find a practical service solution for the Festive Season retail peak is very much on.