Follow The Sun Customer Service Doesn’t Need Offshore Contact Centres

“Follow the sun” has been a popular customer service strategy for a long time now. Ever since IP telephony made it easier to start moving services around the world it became clear that locating customer service teams in different locations could offer important benefits.

American companies often worked with agents located in the Philippines or India. Because of the large time difference these agents could work during their day and the local agents could work during their day - creating the ability to offer 24/7 customer support without asking your local agents to work nights.

But a traditional follow the sun model does have some complexities because it typically relies on different customer service centers handing call routing and other processes off at specific times. As one center closes for the evening, agents need to wrap up calls and the software has to start routing calls to another location.

If you are trying to use 8-hour, rather than 12-hour shifts then you will need to spread the workload across at least three centers in very different parts of the world. If the service is based in Germany then support may need to be also managed from the west coast of the USA and the Philippines to capture the right mix of time zones.

This is where the yoummday platform can make a follow the sun strategy far simpler. You can use the same platform to manage all the talents that are working on the project. Just decide the required shifts and promote the availability of these shifts to talents in the correct regions.

Our modular approach to artificial intelligence also makes this solution more attractive when compared to a very traditional offshore approach. Our AI can advise on how to improve service in realtime, so agents get advice and tips based on other calls that are happening. They can also use our AI Assist tool - this removes much of the manual administration work that most contact centers ask their agents to perform. We are just focused on the customers.

This platform-based approach means that you don’t need to worry about handovers or routing. If the talent is logged in and available then a call can be routed to them. A local talent in Germany may be working early, or late, or even a night shift - the call does not necessarily need to be routed to the other side of the world if someone local is available.

Removing the complexity of managing different contact centers all over the world, and all the headaches this creates, means that you can focus on ensuring that your services are covered by enough talents and they can be located anywhere.

In some cases, it will be useful to build a bench of talent far from home so you can rely on a solid pool of people working in their daytime to cover your night operations, but once you open recruitment up beyond a physical contact center it is often possible to find local talents who want to work non-traditional hours.

The platform-based approach removes the reliance on remote contact centers and hiring people far from your customers. Your talents can be located anywhere that you can find great resource.

Follow the sun is possible without the difficulties of managing several off-shore facilities and complex routing systems. Ask our team for a demonstration of how it works.