How to move your contact center to the cloud to prepare for the pandemic

The coronavirus outbreak has had an unprecedented impact on businesses around the world. As businesses implement work-from-home strategies, the need to adjust daily operations to cope with the realities of the “new normal” has become mission critical. This is especially true for contact centers.

In times of pandemic, contact centres play a key role in responding to citizens who need answers, information and support. Enabling contact centres to quickly move to a remote work-from-home model is essential to maintaining business continuity amid a dramatic increase in call volumes. According to industry media Economist, the UK contact centre industry employs 1.3 million people, or 4% of the country’s workforce. It is therefore vital to ensure that this large workforce is able to work from home in the current situation and reduce the unnecessary risk of coronavirus transmission.

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However, transitioning to a remote work model is not without its challenges – everything from employee performance and well-being to the management and security implications of a distributed environment needs to be addressed.

Quickly launch a flexible remote work infrastructure

With social distancing measures in place during the pandemic and uncertainty about how and when normality will return, many organizations face the very real possibility that flexible working options will be initiated while the pandemic lasts and become the norm once it is over.

Having the right technology in place will ensure that contact centres can respond instantly and put all or selected workforces into home working mode. As a result, many contact centres are accelerating the adoption of cloud-based technologies that can enable employees to remain productive and efficient anytime, anywhere.

Cloud-based Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platforms represent an “out-of-the-box” service that provides organizations with the speed and flexibility they need to get a remote workforce up and running in days. Unlike traditional on-premises infrastructure, these browser-based solutions make it easy for organizations to take action quickly, with little or no notification, and support a mature remote work infrastructure. All agents and business leaders need is an internet-enabled device, and they can deliver the seamless omnichannel customer experience that was previously available from a physical contact center.

Contact center as a service (CCaaS) platforms have all the management systems and processes needed to support an effective remote workforce, quickly and easily providing agents with the same capabilities they have in a traditional contact center environment, including email, text, chat and social media channels. In addition, these cloud-based solutions provide organizations with the scalability, reliability and availability to meet customer needs, including the ability to quickly add new agents.

Many contact centres find themselves unable to process payments in a PCI-compliant manner. The best cloud solutions can provide secure payments over the phone up to the highest PCI DSS Level 1 certification, meaning full transaction functionality will remain after decentralisation.

Even the largest contact centers that currently operate on-premises can build a cloud contact center to benefit remote workers in a very short period of time, often within a few days.

Enable a remote workforce

Keeping customers engaged and satisfied and ensuring employees are doing their job well when working without supervision are top priorities for many contact centre management teams.

Today’s contact center as a service (CCaaS) platforms have all the management systems and processes needed to support remote employees to operate effectively and securely. In addition to automated service, intelligent routing and queuing capabilities, and real-time reporting, they also have familiar desktop features, including call recording and integrated information databases.

Screen recording capabilities enable supervisors to monitor employee work while giving employees confidence that their work is being monitored and that they can access virtual training upon request. For example, sharing the screen to enable constant monitoring will ensure that supervisors can step in and offer comfort or support at any time when calling an employee.

Leading cloud computing solutions provide complete oversight of employees from anywhere, including the ability to join calls or chats and privately message employees, while state-of-the-art dashboards provide real-time visibility into employee performance.

These characteristics provide supervisors with opportunities to recognize outstanding employee performance and recognize that excellent customer experience standards are being maintained in the current challenging work environment.

Caring for others

While it’s important to get employees up to speed quickly, supervisors need to recognize that the work-from-home model presents new challenges in managing employee well-being.

Ongoing communication and monitoring between calling employees and supervisors will help employees feel supported while away from their coworkers. It is also critical for spotting when a high volume of calls may be leading to employee burnout or determining when training is needed.

For example, combining contact center as a service (CCaaS) with a unified communications platform can help organizations gain a more complete view of the entire environment and support enhanced collaboration and support among team members. For example, this can take the form of group "huddles" where group members can ask questions or discuss current issues and share insights and successes. Using these insights, management teams can adjust workflows to better meet customer needs and support, and streamline how employees interact with callers and access the information systems they need to perform optimally.

Screen recordings give organizations insight into employee behavior, specifically highlighting any areas where they may be struggling. Combined with scorecards and audits, this allows for comprehensive quality management monitoring across decentralized operations.

By analyzing recordings of key interactions between call employees and customers, trainers will also be able to determine what best practices look like and where knowledge gaps need to be filled.

Prepare for an unpredictable future

Organizations that turn to cloud-based contact center as a service (CCaaS) platforms in response to the current crisis will have laid the technology foundation for maintaining and improving “business as usual” operations, no matter what the future holds.

For many, the home working model currently being implemented may well form the basis for lasting changes in how contact centre operations are resourced in the future. Creating flexible working models that allow employees who want to work from home to cover their shifts while supporting 24/7 operations.

By implementing the right technology now, organizations will be able to quickly respond to the challenges posed by the coronavirus outbreak, providing consistent and trusted support to customers while taking care of the safety of their employees during the pandemic. But they will also be able to unlock new ways of working and build a culture that supports work flexibility while enhancing operational resilience in the face of the current evolving global health crisis.