COVID-19 has had an enormous effect on businesses this year. As well as having to close up shops and adapt to social distancing, their contact centres have had to deal with floods of phone calls and reassure their understandably anxious clients and customers (despite often having fewer staff members to do so).
A Rise in Demand for Contact Centres
According to This is Money, to help companies deal with extraordinary numbers of calls, call centres have reported a sharp rise in interactions during lockdown. Now, 89% of UK contact centre leaders agree that the coronavirus has had a permanent impact on the industry.
So, how has Prolog dealt with this impact?
We have already talked about how the coronavirus pandemic has affected the eCommerce sector. Now, we have spoken to Amanda, Head of our Contact Centre Operations, [pictured] about how we have stepped up to the challenge for our clients during these difficult times.
How Prolog Has Responded
“During the pandemic, we at Prolog have managed to keep our office open and deliver all our productivity and quality service-level agreements in full. Overall, we have saved over £400,000 for our clients, protected our highest-value customers and maintained a 90% CSAT score throughout. We have also managed to pick up over 70,000 new jobs to support offshore teams impacted by office closures, primarily in South Africa and India.
“By implementing new forms of operational management, we allowed 50% of our staff to work from home in a 2-week window. (This led to a 15% increase in compliance checks for all staff at no additional cost.) Using Microsoft Teams, we also delivered remote training for our new systems for all those working from home.”
Our Advice for Other Contact Centres
For other contact centres with staff working from home, here is what we recommend for providing excellent service:
- Make sure everyone is fully aware of how to use digital tools such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
- Ensure you have everyone’s phone number and contact details.
- Have regular briefings and contact is made with staff working from home.
- Check that you have robust compliance procedures in place to check work completed by staff working from home.
- Make sure performance metrics are well understood and monitored while staff are working from home, making comparisons between staff in office and staff at home.
- Try to manage workflows in such a way to take into account the fact that your staff working from home. Where possible, play to their strengths.
- Aim to keep your working-from-home staff feeling part of the team via Teams chat and/or video calls.
- Think about the type of work you would want staff to do at home. Do you have more transactional or straightforward work? Is it better to do this work at home? For more complex work or for talks for more valuable customers, do you want this work done at home or in the office?
- Consider if your managers have everything they need to manage the team from home (reports, systems, accesses, etc.)?
- Test if you have a robust but easy-to-use authentication process for logging on from home, keeping with stringent security standards.
And remember to stay safe!
How Are You Responding?
How is your business dealing with your customers during the pandemic? Do you, like so many others, need help supporting them and keeping them satisfied?
To find out more about the contact solutions we offer, visit our Contact Centre page.
