Following a dramatically different period for customer service professionals around the world, new research by Enghouse highlights the successes and failures of this challenging time.
While for many people the start of 2021 felt depressingly similar to the year just departed, Jeremy Payne, Enghouse’s Group VP Marketing & Alliances, sees it as a watershed point for business — which is now looking to a sustainable future for customer service, instead of a crisis response.
A game of two halves
“Last year it was a case of, just give the agent a laptop and send them home, try to keep the business going — and most businesses did indeed get through it. But now in 2021, a more strategic approach is emerging, a road-map to a longer-term hybrid working future.”
Further research conducted by Enghouse Interactive in association with Contact Babel supports this and showed a dramatic shift of 98% towards the uptake of collaboration technologies, in particular Microsoft Teams.
But when read in conjunction with the Whiteoaks survey it’s clear that there’s still a gap, in the way that customer service teams feel connected with one another. The same tools we use to communicate with customers on their channels of choice can easily be deployed to create space for team connections and interactions, which shape culture and promote interaction, help to fill that need for spontaneous conversation, which will become even more important for long-term home-based working as kids and partners leave the call handler to work in peace.
Unstable internet and connectivity was the biggest issue highlighted in the survey, and this is one of the biggest lessons, about providing the right working environment for the long term. Payne said, “Most companies weren’t properly geared up for anything like this, they didn’t have the right contingency plans, or their systems in the cloud — never mind auditing their staff’s broadband situations. People were just told, go home and log in, do what you can.”
A chance to make things better
And they did — as the research highlights, often to the point of burnout, stress, and excessive hours put in, grappling with poor home-based set-ups and lack of specialised management support, to the point that a great many are now actively considering their futures in this role.
“There’s a small window of opportunity for businesses right now, to learn the UC lessons of the pandemic”, Payne reflected.
“To backfill and fix the technology issues, and in parallel to put in a well-being plan for agents, so they feel more valued and don’t leave”
As well as simple fixes like upgrading a home internet connection or supplying a better audio experience, there’s a chance here to create a more unified digital workplace which employees can connect around emotionally as well as technologically — integrating their internal collaboration tools, around their CRM and VoIP capability. The ContactBabel research identified one-to-one communication as the greatest strength within CX teams working remotely, and this is a positive outcome which can be built upon going forward. To deploy the right smart solutions to support them in augmented interactions with customers, while at the same time automating away the routine and boring aspects of the work which people would rather control themselves anyway.
“We’re calling it a digital by design approach”, Payne concluded, highlighting the real potential for UC tools to provide clarity on the work-from-anywhere future for the contact centre and the people who work there. You can find out more and download the full report from Enghouse and ContactBabel today.
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