Risk Management Is One Of The Most Important Reasons To Consider A More Flexible Approach To Customer Service
A major risk to contact centers is service disruption from power outages, storms, or transport strikes. The yoummday cloud-based platform mitigates this by enabling agents to work from home, ensuring continuity and flexibility. This approach reduces physical location dependency, allows efficient scaling, and provides access to diverse, skilled talent with AI support.
What is one of the largest risks to a contact center - whether it is an internal customer service operation or managed by an outsourced service provider?
A disruption in any service that is essential to that centre.
If the electricity goes down, or water, or heating, or an earthquake or storm causes structural damage to the building then the entire customer service operation cannot function. In January, large parts of Germany were flooded causing wide-spread business disruption. In 2022, millions of British people were without power for several days as Storm Eunice swept across the country.
It doesn’t take a tornado or earthquake to knock out a contact centre. If all public transport has been disabled by a storm or a strike then your customer service agents will struggle to get to the office anyway. Many companies in Paris are anticipating a wave of industrial action on public transport networks during the Paris Olympic Games this summer.
So how can companies manage this risk more effectively? We saw during the Covid pandemic how critical customer service can be for many brands. The New York Times published a story titled ‘275 minutes on hold’ and that was in November 2021 - the airlines were still suffering long after the worst period of the pandemic.
The simplest way to manage customer service risk is to diversity the location of your agents. By using the yoummday cloud-based contact center platform you can access highly trained resource without needing an office. The agents (we prefer to call them talents) all work from home and connect remotely.
This could apply to your entire customer service operation. There is no reason why the entire team cannot all work from home and be managed remotely using the yoummday system. Or you could maintain a core in-house team and then add the yoummday team on top to create a layer of flexibility.
Imagine if you could also applying an industry-leading artificial intelligence (AI) system to this flexible environment too? Not only do you reduce risk by creating a more diverse team, but that team has access to AI-powered assistants and analysis. Not only is the team highly flexible, but it would be far more productive too.
This flexibility allows you to scale up for Black Friday without cancelling vacations and calling everyone into the office. Manage peak periods without the panic.
It also ensures that there is no possibility of a catastrophic failure of customer service just because one building is unavailable. Your team can be located anywhere - you can hire nationally or even internationally allowing you to find the best possible talent to talk to your customers.
This has additional benefits beyond risk management alone. The ability to hire from anywhere means that you can find very specific skills. If you need the customer service team to be experienced MMORPG gamers, because that is the service being supported, then you can find these people. You don’t need to ask customer service agents with experience in insurance to try supporting gamers.
Offering work from home customer service roles where the agents can select their own working hours also welcomes a much more diverse group of people. Anyone with caring responsibilities, anyone with a disability that makes it difficult to spend all day in an office, anyone that doesn’t live close to a contact centre.
There are also other groups of highly skilled people that can be accessed with this flexibility. There are people who have retired from full-time careers and have many years of experience - offer them the chance to use their skills for however many hours a week they want to work. They will not commute to a contact centre for an eight-hour shift but they might be happy to do a couple of hours each day.
Working with a cloud-based contact center system, such as yoummday, offers all these advantages to businesses that need to manage the risk of any disruption to the customer service processes.
Access to skilled talent, access to new skills, continuity of service even when local areas may face a specific crisis… it’s all possible with this approach.
