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Coronavirus and the Customer Experience
Enabling Your Contact Centre Agents to Work from Home During Lockdown
Customer Experience and COVID19
“..to deal with the current disruptions due to the Coronavirus outbreak, organisations will need to embrace new technology and operational procedures..”
Derek Lewis, Head of Customer Experience
In addition to the back-office, most of our customers will be serving their customers through their contact centre and there are many ways Maintel can support you to keep your customer-facing operations running through this period of disruption.
Enabling representatives or agents to work from home
Just as back-office personnel can work effectively from home, contact centre systems can also be configured to support agents remotely logging in from home and supporting customers by telephone or other channels. Contact centre environments often have additional challenges when remote working such as:
- More stringent security requirements, for example, if processing credit-card payments or handling sensitive personal data
- The need for high call quality is paramount
- Agents also need to be able to help manage their shift patterns and availability
How Maintel can help:
- Testing and configuring contact centre platforms to enable remote access for agents, either by soft-client or with the provision of physical “VPN” devices
- Enabling secure remote access to contact centre applications (both line-of-business and contact centre operational systems) for home-workers
- Providing high-quality USB and Bluetooth headset devices to enable remote agents to provide a quality audio experience for customers
Supporting temporary peaks in demand
Many of Maintel’s customers provide mission-critical public services in health and social care, and these organisations are seeing an increase in demand. Several of Maintel’s technology partners and Maintel’s software, Callmedia, have made offers available to support customers to temporarily uplift the number of agent licences to support this peak in demand.
How Maintel can help:
- Temporarily or permanently increasing the agent capacity of many of our customers’ platforms
- Advising on other capacity thresholds that may be reached while increasing agent numbers, such as SIP channel provision, access to Workforce Management or other systems, or bandwidth into data centres and other critical locations
- Advising on the use of Workforce Management tools to help forecast and meet the additional demands in traffic and to plan to resource accordingly
- Provide support around customer experience and journey mapping to message clients and service users to deflect users to on-line and other resources to avoid overloading critical services
- Provide advice to support proactive communication to “flatten peaks” and reduce excess demand
Supporting Agent and other Staff Shortages
Some government modelling suggests that up to 20% of the workforce may be absent from work at any given time. Again, businesses and public service organisations will still be trying to serve their customers and service users.
How Maintel can help:
- Providing additional agent licencing on a permanent or temporary basis so that employees that aren‘t usually based in the contact centre division can log into the systems and help support the demand
- Providing support to supervisors and planning professionals in managing shift-patterns and workload using workforce management tools to minimise the impact of the reduced workforce
- Developing or advising on the development of automated services (voice-based IVR, web or AI-driven chat-bots) to manage some of the demand
Ensuring CX quality and compliance
As heavily regulated environments, the monitoring of compliance against regulations and assuring that a quality experience is being consistently delivered is critical. With a large proportion – or all – of the agents working remotely, that quality is more important than ever.
How Maintel can help:
- Providing advice on the use of Quality Monitoring and compliance management tools with remote agents, perhaps increasing the monitoring frequency or enabling recording for remote workers
- Providing collaboration tools to enable agents to request assistance from supervisors and team-leaders while working remotely
Mobile
Many employees will make heavy use of mobile devices when working remotely for both inbound and outbound telephone calls and potentially using mobile data – either natively in the device or by tethering to a laptop – to support remote access where local broadband services may not be available or have enough capacity.
How Maintel can help:
- Ensuring your tariffs and calling plans are correctly selected to support any increased call volumes, avoiding unplanned expenses and unnecessary device barring
- Ensuring your contracted data rates have sufficient capacity to avoid bill-shock or unnecessary device barring
- Providing additional devices and accessories to enable employees to remain effective while working remotely