Covid-19 crisis has speeded up contact centre digital transformation
Summary
According to Leigh Hopwood, chief executive of the Call Centre Management Association (CCMA), many of its members believe the industry has “jumped forward five years in three months” because of the opportunity afforded it “to implement new technology to support a mass migration to homeworking and to deliver a digital transformation”. While Michael points out that some organisations experienced “incredible failures that shouldn’t have happened” because of inadequately provisioned offshore contracts and/or a lack of internal investment, most managed the transition reasonably effectively – after an “initial couple of weeks when everyone was scrabbling” to deal with a difficult scenario. Here are two organisations that reacted quickly to these trends and are now reaping the benefits: To cope with the usual peak in call volumes during the student clearing period when all of its agents were working remotely this year, the University of Huddersfield decided that a virtual contact centre was the only answer. Despite facing a number of challenges when dealing initially with the Covid-19 pandemic, a mixture of public goodwill, internal flexibility and the judicious use of technology has resulted in UK Power Networks’ contact centre boosting its customer satisfaction scores. “This means that if there were any problems with the system, potentially vulnerable customers couldn’t get through to us, whereas if employees are in the building, they are inside the firewall and so everything would still work.” After the initial shift, the next step was to move as quickly as possible into “business as usual” mode by providing good levels of service and low wait times.