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An effective cloud-based contact solution allows businesses to properly schedule and staff agents, maintain meaningful interaction with customers, manage call handle times during spikes in volume and increase first-call resolution.
As the national response to COVID-19 continues to limit in-person interactions, organizations must adapt to service customers on alternative channels. Critical to this mission is customer experience (CX) resiliency with business continuity plans that connect customers with your home-based agents in a virtual contact center environment. In the current climate of social distancing, organizations may not be able to conduct operations face-to-face. But retaining a human touch and responding to customers who may have a heightened sense of urgency remain critical to your CX experience, and the overall reputation of your business.
Ways to get your organization ready:
Ensure you are reachable. Call volumes can spike, sometimes exponentially. Augment your ability to handle increased call volume with features such as Voice Call Back and Proactive Notification to make it easy to be reached.
Scale more easily with Digital and Voice Self Service. Providing 24/7 omnichannel connectivity with intelligent chatbots relieves the pressure on agents and gets answers to customers when they need it.
Deliver peace of mind with voice security. Strong customer voice authentication can be automated without the need for additional questions about a customer’s Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
Protect your operations. Make sure your agents are equipped with computers that have up-to-date antivirus software, and that they have what they need to securely log in and work — remote user name, password, secure hard tokens, VPN connectivity and headsets.
Test your readiness. Load test your customer care environment with third-party tools that can simulate stress-level traffic for each channel, including home-based agents.
Remember you can continue face-to-face meetings with clients using collaboration tools.
Ways to get your employees ready:
Expand your talent pool by hiring agents to work from virtually anywhere, and empower your workforce to take control of their hours via workforce scheduling services.
Train agents to work in a work-from-home (WFH) environment, reviewing and updating your training program with additional training to empower your agents to be ready.
Drive agent engagement with immediate feedback from agent performance dashboards.
Incentivize agents and reduce burnout through gamification tactics.
Additional help:
Verizon Virtual Contact Center
Voice Call Back
CX Professional Services
Tough Love and the Customer Experience Culture
36%
Percentage of survey respondents who chose “customer satisfaction” as the most important measurement that a contact center tracks.1
50-60%
Percentage of calls to contact centers resulting from bad website service or a failure in another channel.2
80%
Percentage of respondents who abandon self-service call sessions because the self-service function does not offer what they want.3
7.1M+
Number of customers in 2018 who chose to receive a call back rather than wait on hold.4
225M+
Minutes of hold time eliminated as a result.5
1, 2, 3 ContactBabel, 2019-20 US Contact Center Decision-Makers’ Guide (12th edition).
4, 5 Based on Verizon Voice Call Back customer experiences and data compiled by VHT, January 1, 2018 through December 31, 2018.