A contact center solution is essential for businesses where customer service teams need to directly talk to the customers and resolve their issues. But what happens when the workforce cannot come to the office or travel? The Covid-19 pandemic posed this exact issue. When 2020 started, no one thought of a pandemic that would bring the world to a standstill. 

A company is a system with two inputs and one output. The inputs are people and money; the output is products and/or services. Whatever happens in your business, people and money will keep flowing in, and products and services will keep flowing out. That’s how it has to be: the business has to produce something. The business must also stay alive long enough to make that happen. 

The months following March 2020 have been a rollercoaster of unexpected events and experiences for any business out there. The pandemic changed the way we think about CX today. In this situation, organizations could react in two ways:

1. They could stop serving their customers, or 
2. They could find innovative solutions to keep their customers satisfied.

Adapting to the work culture

The key to survival for any business here is adapting. Businesses need to be resilient enough to survive any natural disaster, man-made crisis or any other disruption.

This means the adoption of technologies to keep the business running. For contact centers, it means the use of virtual cloud call center software.

Working from a distance is not that new but has been around for decades. However, it has been gaining momentum the last few years with the development of more advanced technologies and increased accessibility of internet connection. Work-from-home policies are becoming more popular with many companies.

Using remote technologies 

A contact center solution is an essential component in delivering consistent customer service. Customer service is no longer a siloed department but rather an integrated function that represents your brand. Work from home required the workforce to adapt quickly and use remote technologies such as a remote contact center solution. With this businesses could reach more customers even in the pandemic while cutting costs.

Keeping up with the employee experience and motivation

We usually think of management as a practice you implement for the employees: you motivate them, manage them or direct them. And, motivation is crucial for any business. In a call center, the agents are the backbone of your business and they interact directly with your or your client’s customers. So it is essential to keep them motivated and satisfied at all times

When the pandemic hit,  focusing on employee experience (EX) was crucial. The contact center managers themselves needed motivation and direction to get the best out of their team. They needed information about what their fellow contact center agents were feeling, thinking, and doing. 

The call center companies were expecting to lose clients and even employees during the pandemic because of fear of the situation and lack of physical communication between each other. The businesses and call center companies needed to undertake initiatives to ensure that they would not only survive but thrive as a result of the pandemic. 

Some of the initiatives included:

• Making emergency contact information for all their employees available to clients and their families.
• Assisting employees in finding transportation home from work (that fall under essential), should they become infected.
• Ensuring that clients had a 24/7 point of contact for their projects
• Having policies in place to tackle any positive cases and many more.

In order to manage remote employees, it also is essential to have a unified view of all customers and employees. 

Conclusion 

While the pandemic was a tragic event, from a business perspective it did have some positive effects. Businesses that had the resources to stay open and provide services at all times during the pandemic were able to retain their employees. Many employees were encouraged to work from home or other locations outside business premises.

There is a potential third wave coming to India, with another lockdown in the talks. Organizations must plan before providing exceptional customer service for them to remain competitive in their respective industries.

intalk.io is an omnichannel contact center solution