The fact is, brands are learning to expect a different kind of unexpected. “We’ve all prepared for a snowstorm – a day or two,” said one executive. “What’s the long-term strategy? Quality can’t stop because we’re working from home. How do we as a company guarantee that we remain consistent in our operations and the service we deliver? What are we doing for the customer, for the employee, and the business?”

Taking a Realistic Stance on Travel

Companies are struggling to “right size” their response to the potential health risks associated with travel. “There’s a lot of misinformation going on,” a CRS attendee pointed out. “We have to have a proportional response, not an over- or under-response.”

“Everyone is sitting on edge waiting to see how it’s going to expand,” another said. “Everyone is doing everything they can do without going overboard. Right now, we’re telling our employees they don’t have to travel if they don’t feel comfortable with it.”

“Safety first and foremost – partners and clients,” said an executive whose company recently grounded all international travel. “You could end up sick yourself, or you could end up quarantined just because you got on a flight with someone who is sick.”

Focus on Hygiene Reinvigorates Existing Policies

Many CRS attendees with operations in Asia said they have doubled down on workplace hygiene policies already in place. “We have strict regulations around compliance but over time we’d gotten a bit lax,” admitted one executive with 80,000 agents in the Philippines. “In addition to providing more tissue packs and antibacterial products we are also doing daily temperature checks – every person gets one. If they are running a temp they are sent to our full-service medical staff for assessment and, if necessary, they can self-quarantine.”

Said another, “We’re doing the basics – we’ve got thousands of masks ordered, and they’re in the centers. Hand sanitizers have always been there but we’re doubling up or tripling up on quantities. We’re also trying to find ways to make hand washing fun and less of a chore.”

Attendees agreed that transparency in internal communications is key. “We’re keeping consistent messaging in terms of ‘sanitation’ of the workspace. If someone thinks they need to be quarantined they can self-declare without fear that their job is in danger. It’s all about comfort and clarity around who’s coming into the center to work, when it’s safe to do so, and why we have these policies in place.”

Benefits and Limitations to “Work from Home”

In the most severely affected areas, governments are telling workers to stay home. But even in industries where working from home (WFH) is a viable option in theory, a lack of supporting infrastructure poses significant challenges as quarantines stretch from weeks to months.

“In China first and now Japan, when people started working from home volumes went through the roof because they couldn’t use their laptops due to security and privacy issues, and we couldn’t send enough desktops to their homes,” said an outsourcing manager at a global consumer electronics company. “How do you solve for 30% of capacity at 200% of volume? You can’t,” he said, adding that, “We’re using translation services to reroute volume from China. We’re also relying on gig workers to bridge the gap.”

“WFH may make sense if it’s just a few people, but it just doesn’t work for 600 employees,” the executive pointed out. “And you can’t move equipment around because of travel bans.”

“We don’t have an at home model, and it’s just not something you can pull the trigger on unless you already have something in place,” another agreed.

Some forward-thinking companies have been stress-testing WFH as part of their BCPs, however. “Business contingency planning is hard. There’s no way to just think your way through it – you have to test it,” said an executive from a major car manufacturer. “One challenge we encountered around WFH was server capacity, so we addressed that. You have to try these things out before something happens. You can’t just do it in theory.”

“We’ve equipped our agents so they can work from home both for flexibility and convenience but also in case of emergencies,” said an attendee with a call center in earthquake-prone Mexico City. “We’re switching this month to make my entire department WFH.”

An executive from a smaller company said, “All of our workers have desktops and “go bags” to be equipped at home. We’re a small team so we can’t afford to lose people.”

“WFH doesn’t always work for every country and every culture,” one attendee noted. “You have to get buy-in for the model if you want to explore this as a long-term solution.”

How BPOs Are Handling the Crisis – and Clients’ Concerns

For business process outsourcers (BPOs) — particularly those operating in Asia — the situation has made clients uneasy. A few attendees said their BPOs had contacted them proactively to explain the precautions they are taking in their contact centers, but many said they are still waiting to hear from their business partners. “Getting that proactive communication really made me feel more comfortable,” said one attendee.

“As an outsourcer we’re taking another look at our response,” said one BPO. “It’s a partnership between us and our clients and it’s going to lead to some interesting discussions on how best to move forward.”

A representative from a gig sourcing provider said his company is offering to allow clients’ in-house agents to use its platform in a pinch. “This is a contingency plan – the platform isn’t really set up for in-house teams,” he cautioned. “But it does work on personal devices.”

A Potential Shift to New Business Models

How can brands leverage their current experience to strategically prepare for a future that may include more long-term global disruptions down the road? What’s the role of technology in mitigating their impact?

“This coronavirus situation definitely makes us think about offering more self-serve options and speed up development on those services. Machine learning and predictive service models could help deflect volume as well,” said an attendee. “We’re just at the cusp of a lot of these service offerings but, given the current outlook, it seems these technologies might limit our exposure in future.”

The Bottom Line

As the business impacts of coronavirus continue to reverberate across the globe, brands are being forced to re-evaluate contingency plans designed primarily for short-term and potentially long-term operational disruptions. Companies that take this opportunity to leverage new technologies and strategies that can help insulate them from major global events like coronavirus will be well-positioned to maintain continuity of service if — or when — the next long-term crisis occurs.

Are you a CX Leader at a consumer brand? Continue the conversation on “Know It All” (KIA), our private online discussion forum where senior CX executives are connecting across industries to innovate and share best practices. Click here to visit and request to join.

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This will all be transparent to customers, and you can’t do it by stringing point solutions together or patching add-ons to an aging system. Instead, a holistic approach needs to be put in place to understand where complexity is impacting customer experience (CX), and which technologies can address that to support seamless customer service. Understanding and then managing that complexity is another key 2020 trend we’re seeing in this space. As a starting point for developing that holistic approach, the following are two forms of complexity that all contact centers must address.

Complexity of Technology

There have never been more technologies for contact centers to manage, and new technologies are transforming every aspect of contact center operation including support for omnichannel engagements. Although telephony may still be the dominant channel for customer interaction, new technologies make other channels viable options, such as video, web chat, mobile messaging, and various forms of social media. These offerings are complex for IT in different ways, but they provide new elements that makes seamless CX possible.

Digital transformation and the emerging world of AI is also bringing chatbots and new forms of self-service, along with predictive analytics that drive more personalized customer interactions. In all of these cases, the technologies are complex by nature, but with the right vision from IT, they can be deployed in ways that reduce complexity for agents and enable them to provide seamless CX, where the customer journey can be understood in ways never before possible.

Complexity of Meeting Customer Needs

On the receiving end of customer service, your customers are being impacted by these same technologies, and that adds another layer of complexity. They now expect the same CX regardless of how they engage with your contact center – via mobile, from a home phone, PC, or even social channels – and sometimes a mix of these during the same session. Not only must agents have omnichannel capabilities to seamlessly roll with this in real time, but they must also have a broader mix of communication skills, as each of these channels has distinct rules of engagement.

With these new technologies, we have a far greater range of touchpoints for collecting data about customers. There are numerous repositories of customer data that feed into the contact center’s collective understanding of customers. Agents are supported by multiple information sources including databases, contact center and business applications including CRMs – all adding to the complexity of the agent desktop and the understanding of the customer journey. As buying behaviors shift online, AI applications are now able to map out complete customer journeys and provide agents with highly specific and prescriptive guidance that extend their role beyond being reactive problem solvers.

How to Move Forward

A holistic approach is needed to reduce the complexity on the agent desktop, leverage existing and emerging technologies to streamline and automate workstreams for greater efficiency.

These are just a few examples of the increasing complexity in contact centers and the need to understand and support customer needs. The relationship between agents and customers has never been so complicated, and it’s increasingly being shaped by today’s technologies. IT decision-makers don’t need to have a granular understanding of all this complexity but need to understand how these technologies can make that complexity manageable.

What’s most important is being able to deploy complex technologies in a way that both enables and empowers agents to provide a seamless CX. This is harder than it looks, and the process begins with focusing on the end result – seamless CX – and working backwards to collaborate with the right technology partners who know how to support that.

Upstream Works provides enhanced omnichannel contact center solutions that make CX personal, seamless, and effortless. We empower agents with a feature-rich, unified desktop and seamless integration across multiple applications and CRMs for data-driven CX engagements and better outcomes.

Contact us and see how we assist organizations like yours reduce contact center complexity with a holistic approach to an amazing, seamless customer experience.

Guest post written by: Upstream Works

The post Why Seamless CX Matters More Than Ever appeared first on Execs In The Know.