How a post-pandemic procession to the cloud is resulting in personalised service

I don’t know about you but the idea of a career in customer service has never appealed to me. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done my fair share of work behind a bar and had chefs shout at me while I have a plate with a “cold,” yet half-eaten, burger in my hand. But my ambitions of working in a public-facing job took a dive when I was fired for pouring tea wrong.

It is for this reason that I have the utmost respect for those on the other end of the phone when I’m inevitably too stupid to sort out my own problems and have to consult customer service.

The old image of a call centre is changing now though; for one, it has been rebranded as a contact centre. But the image of a grey room organised into rows of computers with headsets coming out of them has been replaced by laptops on the kitchen island or home office, as the agents have dispersed.

As a result, according to Head of International Carrier Sales at Enreach for Service Providers, Iain Sinnott, the call centre as we used to know it “seems to be at an end.”

“Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) technology has revolutionised the contact centre agent at-home experience, simplifying the way that customers can be served by agents, regardless of device, location, or network.

“While some large organisations still require and want dedicated contact centre solutions, many also require what is increasingly referred to as ‘casual contact’ centre features, which are delivered as part of a UC platform, and are part of the increasing convergence between CCaaS and UCaaS. 

“In other words, contact-centre style features can be added to the overall user environment, accessible from existing apps, rather than requiring a complete additional system. And, by integrating customer contact with, for instance, a CRM system, a more holistic 360 view of the customer relationship is visible.”

That holistic view of the contact centre also extends to the agents as Hilary Oliver, Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer at Tollring, explains: “Cloud deployments of call centre solutions have enabled greater accessibility to systems and continuation of customer service.

“Customer expectations do not waiver when agents are working remotely and the cloud enables customer service levels to be managed, measured and maintained. Internally, agents can work effectively using the tools provided, whilst supervisors can manage their teams and drive performance, no matter where they are located.”

Maintaining Standards

Given the people who they interact with, maintaining agents ability to provide a quality service whilst outside of a call centre will have been at the front of managers minds when making this transition.

Out of sight does not necessarily mean out of mind, and not being able to see agents and how they are working can be a stressful experience for the team leaders responsible for them. 

However a key way to maintain standards, according to Oliver, is to set key performance indicators (KPI) for agents to measure their own success on.

“Monitoring and measuring performance is critical, but with agents working remotely there is more reliance on systems for visibility, collaboration and access to information,” said Oliver. “As a result, agents are more empowered with access to more information than ever before. “Cloud-based solutions empower agents with the knowledge to improve their own performance, and visibility of how well they are achieving this, against personal, team and business KPIs. They can now effectively influence outcomes, and feed back information to improve processes, for example script optimisation or call scheduling.

“New collaborative workspaces, empowered by analytics, enable supervisors to understand customer interactions, predict trends, and influence the performance of their agents, whilst agents on the front line have control over customer communications and access to performance views to ensure they can consistently deliver the best customer experience.”

This ability to mark their own homework leads to a more empowered workforce according to Craig Angus, Vice President of Commercial Sales within 8×8 for EMEA, which leads to more investment in the workforce.

“When agents are more empowered and more successful, it’s easier for business owners to invest in these people’s development and careers,” said Angus. 

“The cloud contact centre is what really gives people the opportunity to do that, and ultimately the aim of the contact centre is to improve customer satisfaction, increase agent retention and increase operational efficiency. If you can tick those three boxes, every business owner is going to be laughing, and the cloud contact centre gives them the option to achieve this.”

Agent satisfaction

The old adage about doing what you love and not working a day in your life might not apply to customer service agents, but churn of these people can be an issue for call centres.

The estimated recruitment fee for sourcing a single customer service agent is £3,158, while the average cost of agent turnover is estimated at £202,125 per year for a typical contact centre.

It’s no wonder, as talking to people who can be impatient, angry and, frankly, rude from nine to five on top of the stress of paying rent, picking up the kids, and working out what’s for dinner must be exhausting.

“If you think about the reasons why people leave businesses, a lot of the time it’s because these people don’t have the skills or the training to be successful in their role,” said Angus, “but the adoption of cloud contact centres, as an industry, is key to changing that. 

“Staff retention is really important, because it’s far more expensive to hire somebody new than it is to retain staff. 

“If you think about the world we live in today, businesses are concerned with agent’s satisfaction, their mental health, how they’re handling the stresses and pressures of having the role, as well as physical health and their output.

“Agents in the contact centre are now balancing home life and work which can be tough. So being able to provide an agent experience that has improved, takes one of those pressures away which allows them to be more satisfied and more fulfilled in their job.”

Working from home is a key improvement to the conditions agents find themselves in when talking to customers. That, according to Martin Taylor, Co-Founder and Deputy CEO of Content Guru, could not have happened without the cloud.

“The cloud has unlocked the potential of hybrid working on the contact centre. The cloud has enabled agents to be a part of the contact centre from anywhere, and not just a central location. Agents can simply log in via a web browser or mobile app and have access to all the tools they would use when physically in the workplace.

“Having learnt new behaviours, office workers in general now expect their employers to provide hybrid working, and call centre agents are no different. Agents expect flexibility and this has become a key differentiator in deciding where to work. 

“The higher satisfaction derived from the hybrid workplace is then passed directly onto customers in the service they receive. At the same time, the business’ expensive property assets can be worked harder for longer.”

On top of this Piyush Tripathi Lead Engineer at Square points out that the talent pool has also increased: “Almost 56% of US call centres have implemented remote work due to the Cloud. This has allowed call centres to hire agents from anywhere in the world, resulting in a larger pool of talent and increased flexibility.”

Better Resolution

“The experience for both the customer and the agent has changed significantly,” continued Tripathi. “Customers can now receive support from agents located anywhere in the world, resulting in faster response times and increased availability.”

This decrease in resolution time is a key performance indicator that agents have hit since the turn of the decade. With Sinnott adding that flexibility of the cloud is allowing agents to make themselves available and to take calls around their day-to-day lives.

“Since cloud-based contact centre technology enables staff to engage with external audiences from anywhere and at any time, customers can expect more timely responses. With the customer experience increasingly the main differentiator in many markets, this quality of customer service makes a huge difference.

“Employees, on the other hand, can enjoy greater flexibility around their working days, for instance, choosing to respond to incoming customer enquiries when working from home, while waiting to pick up the kids from the school gate, or on route to the gym.”

This maintenance of standards is key according to Taylor, who simply said: “Customers should notice no change and it’s highly unlikely they’d be able to determine if an agent was in an office environment or working remotely.”

Combining Channels

Improving customer experience is not just limited to customer calls though. As customer interaction methods change, so too does the requirement to be available where customers would like to communicate with brands.

According to Sinnott, the cloud is a great enabler for businesses to be able to interact with their customers across different channels, adding: “Cloud is a major contributor to converged contact.

“Fixed voice, mobile, video, chat, email, SMS, social channels and more can be blended into one, seamlessly integrated, user-controlled, context-based and flexible environment.

“We can expect to see more forms of contact being blended into the cloud contact centre. Voice is important, but it is just one way in which to engage with customers, who increasingly want SMS, chat, and other options. 

“This benefits businesses too, because most of those channels lend themselves well to automation, meaning that customers get fast answers and human interaction is saved for when needed, saving valuable staff time.”

Taylor added that being able to support converged contact, otherwise known as omni-channel communications, is a distinct advantage of embracing cloud. “Cloud is powering the CCaaS model, which overcomes fundamental challenges presented by legacy, on-premise solutions by providing rich omni-channel features to suit today’s digital customer. 

“Omni-channel communications mean customers and agents can effortlessly maintain interactions across phone, webchat, instant messaging, email and social media, which is simply not achievable through a legacy telephone system. 

“Multiple touchpoints from the same customer are ‘orchestrated’ into a 360-degree view of that individual’s interaction and transaction history at the point of contact.”

Personal Experience

Being able to address people where they prefer to interact is a key advantage of the cloud systems as systems enable brands to provide a personalised service, which only increases brand loyalty.

“The personalisation of how customers engage with businesses is key,” said Angus. “With a cloud contact centre businesses can personalise each customer experience based on why they’re calling or emailing which is key.

“Based on whether someone is getting in contact digitally or using voice, businesses can tailor the vehicle that a person takes into the business based on what the individual customer would prefer. 

“I’m still voice-first because I like to articulate the problem and explain what’s wrong. With cloud contact centres, businesses can tailor my experience to my preferences. On top of that, omni-channel allow multiple agents to do multiple things. 

“Every single business at the moment is trying to do more with less. If you have highly skilled agents who are able to handle voice, email, SMS, WhatsApp or Twitter, you can handle multiple interactions at the same time. If you add a chatbot there, you take a tonne of those interactions away from an agent which is another way businesses can optimise their commercial output and provide a better service.”