Let’s face it. Running a contact centre has become more confusing, complex and challenging, even for the seasoned enterprise professional. With more demands from consumers across a multitude of channels, alongside the need for different technologies and compliance requirements, ensuring end-user loyalty in an efficient manner has never been more difficult. But it need not be that way, provided the right business model is in place, one that leverages the best people, platforms and processes.
One of the core areas of any business model must be ‘People’. Operating a home-based agent model, we are fortunate because we can attract an abundance of top-quality applicants interested in pursuing a home-based contact centre career.
Team members can choose the campaign that they want to work on, helping create a highly experienced and engaged workforce… which equates to better service for our clients and their customers.
A home-based model offers our people the ability to work anywhere in the UK, in a way that suits their lifestyles while providing full-time employment and a full set of benefits to ensure team members’ financial stability. This has a major and positive impact on driving down attrition. Moreover, team members can choose the campaign that they want to work on, helping create a highly experienced and engaged workforce… which equates to better service for our clients and their customers.
Our experience contrasts sharply with those of many bricks-and-mortar contact centres, which often have great difficulty finding a strong base of applicants. In the current near full-employment UK economy, many struggle to retain the talent that they have. With due respect for the traditional contact centre model, the target agent profile is under heavy demand from not only customer experience providers but from other sectors, such as hospitality, travel & leisure, retail and front-line financial services. Combined with recent increases in the minimum wage, it is little wonder that good agents for bricks-and-mortar contact centres are harder to find and costs are increasing!
As a home-based contact centre, we can avoid these pressure points. Our recruits are drawn to customer service as a career. They like working from home; it fits their lifestyles. And because we recruit from across the whole UK – not from a finite pool of labour, typically within a fifteen mile radius of a ‘traditional’ contact centre – we do not experience the regional workforce pressures that many operators do in contact centre hotspots like Manchester, South Yorkshire, South Wales, Glasgow and the North East.
I believe that 2020 represents a great opportunity for business whilst operationally being a challenging time for customer experience delivery.
The virtual model allows home-based contact centre operators to focus on pulling in specific skill sets that would otherwise be very tough to recruit for in a traditional contact centre. We are able to better serve clients across sectors by attracting agents with specific experience, higher education levels, language capabilities or professional certifications. This results in a higher-touch point between the brands that we represent and the consumers we serve.
I believe that 2020 represents a great opportunity for business whilst operationally being a challenging time for customer experience delivery. The key for enterprises that want to focus on consumer retention is fresh thinking around the traditional way of doing business. Embracing new operating models that concurrently deliver the best results alongside efficiencies that can be passed back to the client.  As consumers, we continue to grow more discerning than ever, and Sensée’s virtual approach is designed to exceed expectations.