Explore fresh, expert perspectives on customer engagement and innovation

Since March 2020, how many times have you heard ‘due to Covid, we can’t do x, y and z’ or ‘there’s a delay due to Covid’? More than a handful, we bet, and over a year on, the excuse is starting to wear thin. Whilst Covid and its restrictions have seriously impacted people and businesses, UK consumers are fed up with brands STILL using Covid as an excuse for poor customer service.  

A recent UK study of 10,000 people (by the UK Institute of Customer Service) showed that a quarter of us said organisations had used Covid as an excuse for poor service, including late deliveries.

Jo Causon, the institute’s Chief Executive, stated that the crisis has “exposed” a lack of proper investment in service.

Increasing consumer demand, skills and people shortages and lack of proper investment in tech infrastructure have added an immense amount of pressure for companies walking the tight rope of pleasing customers whilst dealing with issues behind the scenes.  

And for what result? Complaints about customer service are at the highest level since 2009.  

In contrast to this, nearly a quarter of us have told a brand that we were happy with the service we received when we weren’t and well over half (55%) of us make excuses to end conversations with company representatives.  

So, what’s changed during the pandemic?

During just two weeks during the pandemic, the average company in a Harvard Business Review study saw the percentage of calls scored as ‘difficult’ more than double from a typical level of 10% to more than 20%.

Issues related to the pandemic dramatically increased the level of customer emotion and anxiety in service calls, making a job that is hard for reps on a ‘normal’ day far more challenging. In addition to this, teams were battling tech issues and working from home. The study showed ‘a massive uptick in instances of both customers and reps saying, “I can’t understand you,” and some companies in the study saw hold times balloon by as much as 34 percent and escalations (calls sent up the chain of command) skyrocket more than 68 percent’.

Where are brands going wrong?

Covering over the cracks

If your business has not got the right technology or systems in place, hasn’t got all the answers for customers, is running on less employees than is needed, and asking your customer-facing teams to do ‘their best’  – you’re creating a recipe for disaster. It’s time to realise the need for proper investment in the right tech, tools and staffing levels for teams to do their job properly.

Processes that help the company, not the customer

‘Due to our process…’ is probably one of the most irritating lines any customer can hear, with it instantly coming across as a get-out clause for anything slightly tricky, especially when said process does nothing to help a customer. Organisations shackle reps with standard customer-service policies (such as rules about extending bill payments) that pre-date the pandemic, and agents are often ‘powerless to help’. A study found that low-performing reps were 27% more likely to hide behind policy on Covid-19 related calls than their higher-performing peers.

The moral of the story is to update processes for the world we live in, giving agents the flexibility to amend based on the circumstances and thus adopting a customer-first approach.  

What is speech analytics?

Call centre speech analytics uses technology to analyse recorded phone conversations between call centre agents and customers. AI powered speech analysis helps to identify trends, patterns and areas for improvement in customer service, agent performance and overall contact centre operations.

Speech analytics isn’t a new thing. In fact, it’s been around for nearly two decades. But thanks to developments in AI and natural language processing (NLP), speech analytics is growing in popularity and is a powerful tool for contact centres. But why is speech analytics needed?

Why do call centres need speech analytics?

75% of customers will spend more to buy from a company that offers a good customer experience (CX). On the other hand, nearly half of consumers would ditch a brand for a competitor due to poor CX.

In other words, good CX is a huge win for your business. Customers who are happy with the experience you provide will spend more with your business, forgive your occasional mistakes and recommend your products and services to others.

The problem is that it’s not always clear if your customers rate their experience as highly as you hope they do.

Many customers stay silent about their issues, leading businesses to miss crucial feedback. It’s not malice on the customers’ part, but discomfort or wanting to avoid hassle. This silence hurts business and can result in low customer satisfaction (CSAT), higher customer churn rates and reduced sales revenue.

Businesses can’t fix what they don’t know. So, how do we encourage open communication for happier customers and thriving businesses?

How does speech analytics software work?

Speech analytics empowers contact centres by automatically analysing call recordings to understand both agent performance and customer sentiment. It identifies keywords and phrases which reveal customer satisfaction or frustration, even if they didn’t explicitly say it. Looking beyond spoken statements, speech analytics software analyses voice characteristics, like intonation and pitch, picking up on emotions such as happiness, anger or confusion.

To measure agent performance, call centre speech analytics tracks metrics such as time on hold and silence periods, giving insights into both agent efficiency and customer satisfaction.

How is speech analytics used to improve contact centre operations?

The ability to analyse every customer interaction is a powerful tool but how is speech analytics used and what are the benefits?

1. Real-time speech analytics software can boost customer satisfaction by 20% and reduce churn

• Proactive Issue Identification: Speech analytics can be used to understand call drivers including emerging problems. Real-time call analysis can alert agents to any new issues and encourage them to address the issue and implement corrective measures to nip the problem in the bud.
• Real-time Sentiment Analysis: Call agents are able gauge customer emotions more accurately throughout the call, allowing them to ease any frustrations and personalise interactions, which all lead to happier customers.
• Targeted Upselling Opportunities: Eradicate the need for relying on your agent’s memory of what’s been said on the call. Real-time analysis can review calls and push alerts to agents to discuss new products or services, driving revenue by 10%.

2. Insights from ai speech analytics can be used to improve agent performance and drive engagement

• Personalised Coaching: Coaching your call centre agents is easy with post-call analysis. Review performance and develop targeted training and development plans based on individual strengths and weaknesses.
• Compliance & Quality Assurance: AI-led speech analytics can automate compliance checks across all calls. Real-time analysis (alongside post-call analysis) also prompt agents to read the relevant scripts while the call is taking place. This leads to increased agent compliance and reduces the risk of fines associated with non-compliance.
• Performance Benchmarks and Recognition: Use insights from speech analytics to identify and reward high-performing agents and showcase their successes to motivate and inspire the entire team.

3. Automated call analysis can be used to enhance quality management and call handling efficiency

• Quality management: Be more confident in the validity of your quality scores and agent assessments with speech analytics software that automates analysis of all calls rather than relying on a small sample of contact centre interactions.
• Reduce average handling time (AHT): Customers want quick and efficient resolutions over the phone. Speech analytics software can give you powerful insights that help you design better scripts to reduce AHT and cut costs.

One solution to the problem of reticent customers is speech analytics. You’ve probably come across hype around speech analytics before – the technology has been around for nearly two decades. The difference today is that it actually works.

The industry certainly seems to think so too. One recent study estimated that the market for speech analytics will grow at a CAGR of 22.14% over the next five years. And we believe its popularity is entirely justified.

Why choose AI-led speech analytics from MaxContact?

Our speech analytics software will help you to make better business decisions, and understand the ‘why’ behind 100% of your contact centre interactions.

We’ve kept it simple

High-level data is displayed on an intuitive dashboard and further information can be accessed from a central control panel. Simple to set up and easy to understand, MaxContact ai speech analytics provides sophisticated insights at the click of a button.

Powerful filtering at your fingertips

Our advanced solution pre filters nearly 70% of critical and problematic conversations that need further attention. This lets contact centre managers focus on priority issues before it’s too late. Thanks to faster response times, timely interventions and streamlined operations, managers can enhance performance and improve customer satisfaction by coaching agents in real-time.

Easy to integrate

And if all this sounds expensive and complex, it really isn’t. We offer a fully integrated platform designed to work seamlessly with our feature-rich, cloud-based contact centre software.

Speech analytics from MaxContact gives you the information you need to deliver market-leading CX, even if your customers are not always as candid about your service as you’d like them to be.
Book a customised demo to learn how our AI-led speech analytics can understand customer sentiment, improve call quality, and reduce churn in your contact centre.

Leveraging speech analytics for contact centre improvement

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Let’s face it, Contact Centre workforce management (WFM) is a bit of a minefield.  

The goal of WFM is obvious enough. You want the right number of agents with the right skill levels in place for every shift. Get it right and you maximise revenue opportunity, reduce churn rates and create better customer experiences, while lowering operational costs.

Get it wrong and the opposite happens. Either you’re left with too many agents, or you’re left with too few. In the first instance, agents are left twiddling their thumbs while you hemorrhage money. In the second, customer dissatisfaction grows and overworked staff contemplate less stressful futures elsewhere.

Now add the pandemic into the mix, and the fact that team leaders can’t physically judge the overall productivity of their agents by simply scanning the room. In these circumstances, WFM becomes trickier still.  

Getting the balance right?

So how do contact centre managers go about getting the balance right? Traditionally, it’s been a mix of intuition, experience and basic number crunching, but this analogue approach is no longer enough.  

That’s because scheduling staff shifts in modern contact centres is more complex than ever. It starts with a forecast of the likely number of inbound enquiries, based on previous experience and known upcoming events. Anything from a Bank Holiday to the start of your latest marketing campaign can seriously impact your inbound forecasting.  

Then you have to match that forecast to your available agents, while considering rotas, workload, skill sets, contracted hours, holidays and workforce wellbeing, among other factors.  

And depending on your business, you may have to factor in the SLAs you offer your customers, and the ever-changing metrics your C-suite uses to measure the health of the business.

And let’s not forget that contact centres are often omnichannel these days, meaning your responsibility isn’t just to customers who pick up the phone. If you advertise SMS, web chat, email and social media as ways to get in touch, you’d better have the right people on hand to answer digital queries in a timely manner.  

We could go on, but you get the picture. Like we say, it’s all a bit of a minefield.

Workforce management: the old school approach

So how do contact centres absorb this tsunami of information, create an accurate forecast of need and allocate agent resources appropriately?

Many of them still do it using a spreadsheet.  

It’s an admirably old school approach, but it makes WFM a hugely complex and time consuming task, as businesses manually try to match call volumes to staff availability while also meeting all the criteria mentioned above.

The spreadsheet method also introduces the very real possibility of human error. Put the wrong figure in the right box, or the right figure in the wrong box, and your entire plan could be pushed out of balance.  

In fact, this manual WFM approach simply isn’t equipped to handle the complexities of a modern call centre. Many WFM spreadsheets use what’s called an Erlang formula, a mathematical calculation for matching staff numbers to service needs.

If that sounds high-tech, don’t be fooled. The Erlang formula can’t take into account peaks and troughs in call rates, priority callers, omnichannel solutions are scores of other criteria that affect the resource requirement of contact centres today. It’s an outdated solution that errs on the side of caution and frequently leads to overstaffing.

Modern workforce management: accuracy and insight

The alternative is a digital WFM solution. The best of these use sophisticated statistical analysis to make sure call centres always have the right staff in place to reach their goals.

They do all the number crunching for you, freeing up management time for more productive tasks. They take away both human error and the over reliance on outdated mathematical formulas.

So how do they work? Well, MaxContact’s industry-leading WFM uses statistics from the last 12 months to create highly accurate forecasts based on the actual reality of your business, rather than vague assumptions about the sector, or educated guesswork. By analysing data from a full year, the algorithm accounts for seasonal peaks, historical trends and more. By doing so, it provides a highly accurate and cost-effective workforce schedule.

It takes all this information and automates the labour intensive task of shift creation. This takes minutes with MaxContact, though it can take much longer with competing solutions. Rotas can then be assigned to agents with a single click, via email, SMS or calendar integration.

Predicting the future

And MaxContact’s WFM goes further. It lets you build ‘what if’ scenarios, predicting future performance based on past performance and new variables. For example, if you want to answer more calls or reduce call waiting times, feed the figures into the WFM solution and it will estimate the extra resource you need to meet your goals.

Importantly, it also allows you to measure the performance of home based agents, and provides real time reporting on call traffic, cost analysis and more. This data-driven approach makes it much simpler for contact centres to adopt permanent remote or hybrid working models without sacrificing efficiency.  

In addition, it makes it much easier to fill in gaps in cover with part-time, home-based agents who need to fit work around childcare or other responsibilities. By doing so, MaxContact WFM gives you the flexibility you need to succeed in a new world of work.

MaxContact’s powerful WFM solution automates a highly labour-intensive process and adds a whole new level of precision. Use it to make the most of your talent, while reducing churn, minimising costs and adopting new, more flexible ways of working. It’s a big step up for your staff, your business, and your customer experience.

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After the events of the last few years, contact centre and IT leaders are looking at their contact centre technology and asking if it could be improved. The shift from onsite to more remote and hybrid working arrangements emphasised the advantages of cloud-based solutions in all sorts of areas, and contact centre software was no exception.

Cloud vs. on-premise contact centre software

You probably know the script by now. Cloud-based software allowed agents to swiftly and smoothly transition to remote working almost overnight. It gave them all the features they had on their office handsets, only anywhere and on any device. It allowed managers to monitor productivity remotely.

In a nutshell, cloud was just a lot easier in a crisis than on-premise solutions.

And yet, some contact centre/IT leaders still doubt moving outbound operations to the cloud. That’s understandable. Handing control over crucial infrastructure to a third party is a leap of faith. When sensitive data and painstakingly nurtured customer relationships are at stake, it’s natural to be cautious.

Take a look at the table below for a snapshot of some of the other key differences between on-premise and cloud solutions.

We’ve discussed harnessing the benefits of cloud contact centre software more in-depth in another blog. However, in the rest of this guide, we will be  looking at cloud diallers from a contact centre leader’s perspective with four objections we hear every day,explaining how the latest cloud software overcomes them

Overcoming objections to cloud-based dialler

Objection 1: “We won’t be in a crisis forever”

Thankfully, the pandemic is over but life hasn’t exactly gone back to normal. Many companies are still offering flexible, work-from-home call centre agent roles.

So why struggle on with inflexible on-premise software? It’s widely accepted that cloud dialler software make it easier to equip remote workers.. Companies that continue to offer hybrid working as standard (when working time is split between home and office) will have a recruitment and retention advantage.

Quite simply, the best agents will favour businesses that give them more flexibility over where and when they work. Cloud dialler software makes that easier because your team can work from anywhere, without compromising functionality or quality.

Objection 2: “We can’t afford ongoing cloud fees”

Many leaders and Financial Directors like the one-off fee of traditional contact centre solutions. You buy it, and you own it. Whereas a cloud dialler license is essentially a rental agreement that has to be renewed every month.

But does that make cloud dialler software more expensive? No. Here’s three reasons why:

1. There are no upfront costs beyond handsets (or you can use softphones or BYOD for free) and no ongoing maintenance fees.
2. Updating and upgrading is handled remotely by your provider, freeing up IT staff time for more productive tasks. You don’t have the hardware refresh cycle of buying new hardware typically every 3-5 years.
3. Plus, you never pay for capacity you can’t use.

Get built-in security, high-availability and infinite scalability with cloud-based solutions.

This last point is important. With a cloud dialler, you can scale up your requirements with a couple of clicks. You can scale down again just as easily. You never have to invest in spare capacity ‘just in case’.

It’s the same with features and functionality. When you buy a desktop software solution, it’s essentially static. When a new upgraded version comes out, you have to invest all over again.

With cloud, your license fee covers updates, upgrades and new functionality – you get built-in security, high-availability and infinite scalability.

At MaxContact, we drive a continual cycle of innovation, and new features are pushed out to customers automatically (you can choose whether you want to use them or not).

We could go on, but suffice to say, that when you take all this together, cloud is both more agile and more cost-effective than on-premise equivalents.

Objection 3: “We love the contact centre features we have”

We get it. Your current set-up comes with a host of productivity-enhancing features and a predictive dialler that means your agents spend more time talking to customers and less time on unanswered calls. It’s a lot to give up.

Well, it would be if cloud-based alternatives couldn’t do better.

As we mentioned above, the beauty of cloud is that it allows for continual innovation, and that includes regular data-driven tweaks to performance algorithms. In our case, that’s made for a predictive dialler which performs far better than industry standards.

Let’s put it this way. Most diallers (on-premise and cloud) advertise a 300% uplift over manual dial. We set the bar higher, aiming for that level of uplift not just over manual dial but over other diallers too. Our outbound solution also manages itself over the course of a day, automatically optimising performance while you get on with other tasks.

With cloud, you don’t just get all the normal dialler features. You get new features as soon as they’re available.

With SaaS, customers benefit from 10 times more updates in a year than onsite dialling solutions – which normally offer an upgrade every six months.

And of course, you get full compliance, which in MaxContact’s case also means built-in proprietary features that reduce the chance of dropped calls.

We get it. Your current set-up comes with a host of productivity-enhancing features and a predictive dialler that means your agents spend ore updates in a year than onsite dialling solutions – which normally offer an upgrade every six months.

And of course, you get full compliance, which in MaxContact’s case also means built-in proprietary features that reduce the chance of dropped calls.

Explore our features >

Objection 4: “Cloud is a security risk”

All SaaS creators have faced this objection at one time or another, and it’s probably the biggest leap of faith contact centre managers have to make. You’re dealing with sensitive data. Any breach could threaten your reputation, your revenue and your future, so you’re right to be wary.

But in 2023, the best way to protect your data is in the cloud. Don’t just take our word for it. In the most recent KPMG/Oracle Cloud Threat Report, three-quarters of IT and cybersecurity professionals felt the cloud was more secure than their own data centre.

How does security pan out with cloud contact centre solutions? Well, our  services are hosted on the Microsoft Azure public cloud, which is backed by Microsoft’s huge security investment and the latest global security standards. By working with Azure, our solution is automatically protected by regular intrusion detection monitoring, penetration testing and virus scanning.

Security is also at the core of our software development. We rigorously test everything ourselves, and then we employ third-party experts to test everything again – and again. The upshot is a highly secure solution on a highly secure network.

Learn about our built-in security & compliance >

Ready to adopt a cloud-based dialler solution?

We’ve covered four objections we hear every day about migrating to a cloud-based solution including the changing work environment, fees, feeling comfortable with your existing features, and security and compliance. It is clear that the latest cloud software overcomes all of these and allows contact centre managers to enjoy efficiency, productivity, enhanced security and cost benefits.

Want to find out more about moving to a cloud-based solution in your contact centre? Book a demo today.

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As the main or only point of contact with many customers, contact centre performance fundamentally drives the business bottom line.

So how do you make sure yours is working as effectively as it can? MaxContact’s Product Owner, Sean McIver – who has worked on the contact centre front line – says it’s a mix of engaged agents and technology that helps teams to work smarter.

Here are his top tips for all contact centre leaders:

Your team

The importance of good agents can hardly be overstressed. During Covid, their worth became even more apparent, with agents in some sectors taking on frontline worker status. That hasn’t gone away and isn’t likely to long after the pandemic ends. Your customers are more accustomed than ever to judging organisations on the quality and efficiency of their customer service interactions. All efforts at contact centre performance management should start with your agents.

Give agents the skills they need

As agents have become more important, their knowledge of your products and services – and their ability to interact with customers in an empathetic way – is a huge differentiator for your business. Remember that customers will share a negative interaction far more readily than a positive one.

So continuous training strategies are crucial. Technical skills are essential but focus on softer skills too. How do you talk to an angry customer? How do you empathise with someone in distress? Give your agents the human skills they need to turn customers into ambassadors for your brand.

Consider their mind-set and wellbeing

The pandemic caused a shift in awareness relating to mental health. Workforce wellbeing is seen as a crucial part of business success. Internal empathy translates down the line to your frontline agents, so wellbeing should be part of any contact centre performance management strategy.

Engaging with staff, and making sure they’re doing the right things for their health and wellness, makes a world of difference.

Recognise and reward

Skilling up your team has the added advantage of showing employees that you care about their careers, and are keen for them to progress. Settled teams with low churn levels are more productive because they know your organisation and its products and services inside out. Retaining an experienced employee is always more economical and productive than recruiting an inexperienced one.

The better your call centre environment, the better your customer service. Incentives and rewards for good work are an essential part of call centre performance management. But don’t make it all about hitting targets. An employee who solved a customer’s complex problem deserves recognition, even if it gnawed away at the time they could spend on other calls.

My advice would be to ensure that you’re carefully considering the targets you’re setting for your agents. For example, you could find that if you focus on reducing average handling times, you could impact the quality of the service your team is providing. Be mindful that one target can introduce other behaviours that you need to look out for and understand.

Finally, it’s essential to look at productivity at an operational level and understand the actual business value (reputation, CSAT and financial) of first call resolution versus metrics like average handling time.

Be curious

Alongside rewards, giving feedback to your teams is crucial for call centre efficiency. According to PwC, nearly 60% of survey respondents said they’d like feedback daily or weekly. That number increased to 72% for employees under age 30. More than 75% of employees across roles believe feedback is valuable, and 69% say they would work harder if their efforts were acknowledged. Good agents want to know what they’re doing well and how they can be better, and they want recognition for going the extra mile.

Feedback is more important than ever right now, when remote or hybrid workers might be feeling isolated and out of the loop. Check-in with them often, and with empathy.

With MaxContact, it’s possible to talk directly to your agents while they are on the phone to customers. Ensure your managers are watching the wallboards and helping out your teams with live coaching and monitoring where they can. The sooner the feedback, the more impactful it is. Productive feedback can help the agent feel more supported too.

But you shouldn’t just look to give feedback. Ask for it, too.

Your teams are speaking to customers all day, every day and have to follow the process your business dictates. Feedback from agents on both customer sentiment and how easy or hard it is to do their job using the systems they have is truly invaluable. As an example, if you have a self-serve option in your IVR but your agents are still fielding these requests, ask why. Perhaps there is a common failure point. Dynamic trial-and-error is one of the cornerstones of ongoing success.

Don’t assume your teams are proactively avoiding work if a stat doesn’t make sense. Understand it first and course-correct, whether that’s the process, messaging, feedback into product and propositions or even looking at investing in better software. Whatever it is, you need to keep as close with your agents as possible.

Your technology

When your technology helps good agents work more efficiently, you have the perfect recipe for an effective contact centre. Your technical solution is the middle ground between your customers and your staff, so it has to be robust and flexible.

Integrate and simplify

Perhaps most importantly, your contact centre software needs to simplify your agents’ lives, not complicate them. Agents flipping between tabs and tools to find customer information or answer queries is a recipe for errors, unhappy clients and increased call handling times. Integration is the answer. Use software that pulls data from numerous sources (CRM, billing systems, etc.) into one simplified platform. I firmly believe that agents need a ‘single source of truth’ – one place where they can get data and, ideally, input data as well.

Agents armed with easy access to all relevant customer information will deliver more ‘one call’ solutions, the holy grail of contact centre management. Effective scripting can ensure that your agents lead the customer on the most effective journey throughout the conversation, while reinforcing a sense of expertise from the agent, because they have the information they need in the moment at their fingertips – fewer ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ and unnecessarily placing the customer on hold to check things.

Intelligent routing will help here. Your software should help callers get to the right people first time, so feature-rich IVR (Intelligent Voice Response) is crucial. IVR also allows 24/7 operation for many routine requests and services – the average customer doesn’t want to speak to an agent, they simply want the ability to self-serve. Balancing this with ensuring that customers can still talk to someone if they need to is critical – we’ve all experienced the frustration of endless IVR options! Within MaxContact, customers’ ability to self-serve through payment IVRs, checking balances and setting reminders, and getting out of hours voice messages, are all examples of giving customers both choice and control.

One MaxContact customer who introduced our intelligent automated IVR saw a 22% reduction in call handling times and a 36% reduction in calls requiring agent involvement. Good IVR gives your agents more time to create memorable customer experiences and solve more complex customer issues.

Predict and succeed

There are lots of other ways in which good technology improves call centre efficiency. Predictive algorithms optimise outbound dialling. Omnichannel communications cut down on call times, impress customers, and permit the serving of multiple customers in parallel. Real-time analytics and sophisticated reporting help managers ensure contact centre teams work productively, which is especially important when agents work remotely. Technology is evolving at a breakneck speed within the contact centre industry, with mechanisms such as speech analytics and automation becoming the norm.

Another highly effective feature of high-end solutions like MaxContact is predictive workforce management. Our unique algorithm sifts all interactions with your contact centre and uses statistical analysis to ensure you have the right staff with the right skills in place for optimum, cost-effective cover.

We could go on, but the message is clear. In 2022 and beyond, the highest performing contact centres will be those where remote and office-based staff are valued and rewarded, and where technology is optimised to give your agents the tools and time they need to create better, more satisfying customer experiences.

Get in touch to find out how MaxContact can help you with this.

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Are we at the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning? As far as Covid-19 is concerned, nobody seems entirely sure. The vaccination rollout promises an eventual release from lockdown, but scientists remain cagey about when everyday life might properly resume.

In the meantime, many of your sales and customer service staff are getting used to working from home. They may be there for a while yet, at least until a combination of the vaccine rollout and better summer weather allows for a cautious return to the office.

Even then, not every business will be forcing staff back into work full time. Social distancing rules are likely to remain in place for the foreseeable future, limiting the number of employees in the same space at the same time.

There’s also growing speculation that many companies will never return to pre-Covid work practices, and that some form of flexible working will become standard practice. A recent Call Centre Helper poll showed that just 7% of contact centres planned to return to the office as normal², and ONS reported a 47% increase in demand for home working amongst call centre staff¹. The data’s there to see,  hybrid working, where employees spend some of the week in the office and some working from home, will become far more widespread once the pandemic ends.

The hybrid model of work

There are certainly benefits to it. According to research from Slack, most knowledge workers want a hybrid remote-office model in future. Hardly any want to return to the office full time. Those results are mirrored across sectors and industries, inferring that companies who want to attract the best talent may have to offer hybrid working as a benefit.

Even among businesses with large sales and customer service teams, the benefits of hybrid working may outweigh inevitable misgivings. Many businesses believe they can cut post-pandemic costs by reducing office estates and moving to smaller premises that only have to accommodate a proportion of a firm’s total workforce at any one time.

Put it all together, and it means remote working probably isn’t going anywhere, even after Covid. And even businesses that remain determined to return en masse to the office eventually have no real idea of when that time might be.

So, we’re trying to balance all of this, with changing consumer contact habits – increased adoption of new channels and differing contact patterns – as well as a globally reported increase in contact centre demand, with support firm ZenDesk seeing a steady 16 per cent increase in support contact requests above pre-pandemic levels³.

Productivity challenges

So instead of holding on to pre-pandemic processes, businesses might be better asking how they can adapt more effectively to the ‘normal’ of today while also preparing for whatever tomorrow might throw at them.

Or to put it simply, how do you equip your remote staff with the tools they need to work as productively away from the office as they can in it? How do you train and mentor your teams remotely? How do you continue to delight customers and drive sales when most of your team is working from home? When your workforce returns to a socially distanced office, or splits its time between the office and home, how do you maintain a consistent customer experience?

Businesses have been asking similar questions since last March, of course. But many now realise that the sticking-plaster solutions hastily implemented then are no longer enough, especially when it comes to customer contact. Communications platforms need to give employees the tools they need today, while future-proofing businesses for whatever next month, next year or even the next decade might bring.

Is cloud-first the answer?

It’s for that reason that businesses of all kinds are turning to cloud-based solutions. When your contact centre solution lives in the cloud, your agents can access it from anywhere, on any device, onboarding new starters and completing system training remotely is easier. And, with solutions like MaxContact, new features and functionality are consistently introduced as market trends and business needs change.  

But there’s more to a future-proof solution than simply the convenience of cloud. It has to be highly reliable, flexible and secure, while giving you the data you need to measure performance and implement change.

MaxContact is cloud-native for that reason. You get the assurances with the combination of a fully equipped contact centre solution that fulfils all these requirements combined with a resilient uptime guarantee of  99.999% so dropouts and downtime won’t affect sales and customer service. Whilst real-time dashboards and custom reporting give managers full transparency over their teams’ efficiency, wherever they happen to be located.

reduction in training, the issue of training a workforce in the contact centre fast and easily remotely has been of major benefit

This valuable data can eventually be used to inform decision making around post-pandemic working models, giving a real insight into the benefits and challenges of remote working models based on your specific circumstances for every campaign and every call centre agent. This data becomes invaluable in a world were presenteeism in some form has been part of most of our everyday lives for the past 12 months.

Security concerns

Working from home has meant that the companies networks – that were once a secure perimeter – have expanded to every employee home and the plethora of devices they use. There’s now an increasing need to deploy communications solutions with network and data centre security baked in. But we go further. Granular permissions mean you can limit the data your home working teams have access to and remove restrictions at the click of a mouse on those days when they are working from the office.

In fact, MaxContact gives you that kind of agility throughout your contact centre operation. You can add and remove users in minutes, and equip new sites in just a couple of days. MaxContact lets you calculate your staffing requirements using statistical analysis so that, wherever your workforce is based, you always have the right staff with the right skills in place.

In other words, powerful contact centre solutions like MaxContact don’t just solve the temporary challenges of remote working. They equip your business for an uncertain future.

Use our powerful cloud platform to create an agile, secure and streamlined contact centre that not only adapts to the unpredictable challenges of the post-pandemic world.

Sources:

1. https://www.bluearrow.co.uk/find-staff/workforce-insights/impact-of-covid-on-call-centres
2. Call centre helper, 2021 predictions webinar
3. https://www.zendesk.co.uk/blog/zendesks-benchmark-snapshot-impact-covid-19-cx/

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