How contact centres have changed in the face of Covid-19

The ways that contact/call centres operate has been changing drastically in the face of COVID-19, accelerating several pre-existing trends. In addition to “work from home” (WFH), a new push for AI and automation and a preference for the cloud has been accelerated.

Let’s be honest, for any contact/call centre to remain operational, they will have to come up with ways to stay operating with more than half their staff working from home and introduce more tech tools like chatbots to do most of the work. Otherwise, they may not be as effective as they used to be.

Let’s look at some of the ways ccaas in the UK are changing in attempts to cope with Covid-19 guidelines.

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  Work from home

A lot of things change when your staff works from home, and it’s best not to be improvisational about this. The way we supervise, coach, and train workers that previously relied on quality workforce management is not so effective in the new normal. One must use companies like odigo in the UK, which are helping contact centress to set up working remotely, and so far, they are doing it right.

• Interactive voice and chat response systems

If you have ever called any customer care centre, you should know the inbuilt voice that lets you choose an option. This voice is an automated recorded voice with options to choose according to your needs. It is helpful since it covers all the simple inquiries that people usually have. Companies are increasingly buying chatbots too. So, a user is provided with pre-made inquiries that one can choose with a bot replying. This kind of system saves the company time and resources.

Customers get to skip the long queue that usually frustrates them as they wait for a free agent on the line. However, with complex inquiries, one will be required to call an agent for directions. But this only means fewer people will call in, which reduces the congestion, and waiting for a free agent won’t take that long.

• Artificial Intelligence

AI is becoming a crucial player in both the financial and economical sectors. In the business of contact centres, AI is used to interact with customers. The more advanced AI gets, the more it can help with complex inquiries from customer by learning the behaviours of those calling and making predictions on what their questions are and what they need. Since cloud computing is used in different businesses and their ability to handle a lot of data, AI tools can use this advantage and be used in call centres to handle customer inquiries.

• The contact centre as a service

Some companies offer software that’s data-driven to improve customer experience tremendously. It’s hosted in the cloud, so it’s easy to scale and enables staff to work from anywhere. During these hard times, companies need to shift to offer such as contact centre cloud services to remain effective.

One such company is Odigo – located in the UK and is positioned as a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) in 2019. It offers data analytics and sentiment analysis that helps gain more insight into what your customers want.