Contact Centers Face Radical Change: Customer Experience Consultants Share Call Center Best Practices In Wake Of COVID-19

In the world of call/contact centers, the landscape has shifted almost overnight, providing new challenges and some surprising opportunities. My recommendations as a consultant on customer service and customer experience for my firm, Micah Solomon & Associates, have been changing apace, as have those of Colin Taylor, a storied expert on contact centers, of Toronto-based firm, The Taylor Reach Group, Inc.

Colin and I were brought together recently by the customer engagement software company, Freshworks, for a webinar I hosted, titled “Contact Center Solutions for Tumultuous Times.” You can view this contact center webinar here, and you can sign up for additional webinar episodes—there are five more to come–via this page. The series is titled “Rethink CX” and is hosted by me, and I do hope you’ll join us.

Micah Solomon, Senior Contributor, Forbes.com; Customer Experience Consultant: Let me start by stating the obvious: The ways that contact centers (call centers) operate has been changing drastically in the face of COVID-19, accelerating a number of pre-existing trends. Not just the obvious–Work from Home (WFM)–but a new push for AI and automation and a preference for the cloud.

Colin Taylor, Chief Chaos Officer and Contact Center Consultant, Taylor Reach Inc: Yes, Chatbots and voicebots are becoming more popular, Because of the surges in contact volumes. And, as you mentioned, the move to the cloud for telephony and CRMs, has accelerated. 

Micah Solomon: It can be tricky to suss out which of these are temporary in a crisis-specific way, and which may be gaining a real foothold. I’ve been advising my consulting clients–in broad strokes–to not expect to go back to how things were before.

Colin Taylor: These trends predated the crisis, but this has been quite the accelerant. It wasn’t a question of should we move our staff to work-from-home, or could we handle the security or management implications of working from home. It became an existential requirement if we were interested in staying operational. And, yes, now that that has become a norm, I’m not sure that many people are itching to get back to the office.

Micah Solomon: The adjustment, having to carry it out so quickly, presented some challenges, some of which are ongoing. And because we did this so quickly, there are loose ends that still need to be tied off, both technical updates and policies and procedures.

Colin Taylor:  A lot changes when we work from home, and it’s best not to be improvisational about this. The way we supervise, coach, train are all different; the processes we’ve relied on for quality management and workforce management aren’t effective in the new normal.

Micah Solomon: With business futures seeming more tenuous than ever, some of my clients are eyeing the current landscape as an opportunity for cost reduction. I support them in that–we have to support the bottom line, especially now!–but, of course, as I think everyone knows from my writings, I am first and foremost about maintaining and improving this essential connection with customers. I’ve therefore been promoting cost reduction opportunities only where I see them as a win-win.

For instance, the move to messaging is so strongly embraced by customers, and it is lower cost compared to voice calls (because an agent can multi-task). It’s looking like Work From Home may be a long-term cost reduction opportunity as well that is also a win for the quality of customer service, because of the improvement in employee morale and (it seems to date), agent retention. And bringing AI, ML, and automation into the mix has been a focus of my work recently–and making sure they are deployed sensitively.

Colin Taylor: A voice call is the most expensive channel, whereas a live chat can be effective in resolving the inquiry can cost much less. A second cost reduction strategy has been shifting to lower cost locations–and I can’t think of anywhere less expensive for a company than our agents living rooms–plus, for now and the visible future, social distancing means that we can expect to lose about 60% of the center’s capacity.

It has been estimated by Global Workplace Analytics that companies can save $11,000 per employee annually and the employees themselves can also save $2,000 to $4,000 per year in reduced costs to them personally. And, yes, we can reduce cost through automation and self-service; by employing chatbots or voicebots we can allow customers to self-serve and do more themselves. This can be as simple as searching FAQ’s, tracking a package, or verifying their identity.

Micah Solomon: Any parting thoughts before we go home? Oh, wait, we are already home.

Colin Taylor:  Give your customers choice. Be in the channels that your customers wish to use, chat, SMS, messaging, Facebook etc. Implement self-service, AI and automation with the aim of delivering service without adversely impacting the customer experience or customer satisfaction. Provide your frontline staff with the tools that they need to be successful. In this time of Covid19 remember that your staff may feel isolated and stressed, as they are now working in an unusual environment. Check in with them often to see how they are coping and to support their wellbeing.

Micah Solomon: And my parting thoughts would be: For all of us in customer service, let’s keep remembering that what we do is important. In these times of crisis, our value often goes beyond the text of the conversation–or the text of the text message, for that matter!–to deeper opportunities to assist. So I advise my consulting clients, over and over and over, as I know you do as well, that a call center is not just a cost center.