Variable pricing can ensure your customer service team is always ready to serve

If you use Uber then you will be familiar with variable pricing. With Uber it is usually a negative experience for the user because there is a standard price and when the service is in high demand they will implement ‘surge pricing’ – so the price goes up. Anyone that has tried to call Uber late at night – when it is raining – will know about this.

A more positive way to think about variable pricing is the happy hour in your local bar. Most bars have a quiet period in the late afternoon and early evening. It’s too late for the lunch customers and too early for the evening visitors – especially in the middle of the week. This is why many will offer a ‘buy one get one free’ deal effectively offering half price drinks.

So we are all familiar with variable pricing in various ways in our daily life, but we rarely see this in the workplace. People usually get paid a fixed monthly salary or a fixed hourly amount – it doesn’t change during the week like a happy hour.

But there is no reason why not.

One of the reasons that our talents (we call our customer service agents talents) are so happy is because they work from home, they choose the brands they want to work with, and they choose their working hours. They don’t need to commute across a large city to an office each morning and they can take a few hours off in the middle of the day if they have family commitments.

Different clients pay talents at different rate each time they help a customer. There is a standard rate for each client, but it can vary depending on the time of day or night and even dynamically. If the client suddenly gets busier than usual and we want to attract more talents to login to the system we can send them a text saying that for the next two hours there is a much higher than usual rate on offer.

We find it always works. People are happy to give an extra hour or two because they know that they are getting extra.

The talents are not forced to login. They are not penalized if they don’t login because they are busy at home that day. The offer is just like that at a happy hour – you don’t need to come to the bar today, but if you do then you get twice what you are paying for.

Traditional contact centers can’t manage this kind of dynamic call volume management. Everyone can predict what is expected – we do this and every other customer service company will predict how many agents they need on a Friday evening.

The difference is, what happens when the prediction is wrong? A traditional contact center has very little choice. They can’t call additional agents on their day off and ask them into the office to do an extra shift. They just have to let the customer sit on hold for as long as it takes – we have all experienced this.

With our team it is entirely different because we can offer variable pricing to react to a dynamic situation. The talents are at home. They might be available to work or they might not be. If we send all of them a text offering a bonus to help get through the busier-than-expected period then we can also ensure they get a bonus.

Our team also has industry-leading artificial intelligence support. We have a modular suite of different AI tools that can be applied to help the talents – by removing manual administration tasks – and offering deep insight into which processes are really helping customers. This realtime insight is almost impossible in a traditional contact center environment.

It’s similar to the way that traditional contact centers manage busy periods like Black Friday or other major sales. They cancel vacations, ask people to work longer hours, and generally force the team to all work harder – it’s hard to increase the team size temporarily when your contact center has limited space.

Our team can estimate the increased volume and scale up as needed. If we expect the call volume to be 300% of the normal volume then we can just ramp up the number of talents we are working with. If it goes even higher than expected then we can offer extra hours to the talents that are not working – using a bonus on the regular rates to attract them to do an hour or two extra.

Modern brands need agility to survive. Your customer service function is no exception. Variable pricing is a tool that has worked for generations of happy hour customers – why haven’t you applied the same principle to your customer service team to give them a bonus when they are needed most?