Many businesses have been scrambling to enable their teams to work remotely as part of measures – some voluntary and some mandated – designed to stem the spread of the COVID-19 Coronavirus. How are contact centers faring with the transition? Our resident contact center expert Jeff Ross, convergence specialist for FlexIP Solutions, shared his observations and experiences in this interview.
What are you seeing in the contact center industry right now as a result of the pandemic?
We’re not actually seeing any issues with the transition to remote contact center agents. We’re a little bit unique because we actually sell the concept of Flex Contact Center working with softphones or remote phones. A lot of our clients come to us because they want to enable agents to work from home.
Some of our clients also have traditional centralized call centers, but all we have to do to enable their agents to work from home is activate a softphone client and they can use that as their phone on a desktop computer.
Are your clients requesting help to enable more remote contact center agents?
We’ve been working on this now for six weeks. Our contact center clients knew this was going to happen. The larger environments were trying to get themselves prepared for working remotely. We have been spending time retrofitting over the last month and a half, getting ready for this. So, instead of having phones in carrels in a traditional contact center at a physical location, we’re enabling softphone clients to be prepared for utilizing voice service anywhere.
Were contact centers ahead of other businesses in the work-from-home migration?
Yes, it’s because call volume matters to contact centers. They’re getting staffed up for it, especially in some of the industries (e.g., supporting critical infrastructure) that are seeing significant increases in call volume. Those are the ones that have been very progressive in terms of making sure that they are ready to go from a remote work perspective.
What technology is key for contact centers looking for work-from-home solutions?
Cloud-based technologies and the ability to use a softphone client on a desktop or mobile device are foundational to enabling remote contact center agents. But they also want to be able to track attendance. With our solution, we can still see how many hours they’re actually logged on and available to take calls. We can see the individual agent capabilities in terms of how many calls they’re taking, their average time that they’re taking on those calls — all from a daily, weekly, monthly and historical viewpoint.
What are the long-term prospects for centralized contact centers after COVID-19?
Once call centers are able to see that they were able to keep the abandoned call rate low, that they were able to respond to their customer, and that they were able to maintain and monitor the activity of their agents, I think more call centers will leverage remote contact center agents moving forward.
Why not? If the experience is the same for the caller, and the agent has the capability in their own home to work, there’s no reason why we have to actually bring those employees back into a physical office location. Plus, there are other benefits like reducing your carbon footprint and providing an easier way for employees to work.
Are there any good news stories you can share in the midst of this extraordinary situation?
I think the good news is there are companies that literally have not lost a beat by having their employees work at home. Hosted VoIP technology has proven itself out. There’s not going to be a company that’s going to ask whether or not this works. There’s not going to be any questions by businesses today about using this technology as part of their disaster recovery plans.
How is your company coping with deploying solutions when we are cutting back on face-to-face meetings and essential travel?
We’re not out in the field. Everything is being done remotely. We can do installations remotely using our Flex Meeting service to share desktops. We can install an application for them and demonstrate how it works on their own computer. And, the fact that our employees can actually do this from their homes is even greater value.
We’re still delivering on our FlexIP Perfect-Fit Promise, our white-glove service. Right now, it’s challenging since we’re dealing with hundreds of calls an hour. Ironically, we’re using a contact center callback feature to manage it. That way we serve our customers in the order their call was received, but they don’t have to wait on the hold.
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