The New Normal: How Organizations Can Cope With it

As people’s everyday lives are impacted by restrictive measures being put in place, it has led to an increasing call surge to contact centers, as individuals seek information. Thus, contact centers will see 3 fundamental impacts. This includes customer expectations, customer demands and virtual contact.

1. Managing customer’s expectations would mean that organizations would have to make extra effort to support them in the best ways during this crisis. The organizations that take this seriously would have an enhanced and protected reputation from their customers.

2. Managing demands entails effectively dealing with an increase in the needs of the customers. Some may get impatient and lose their tempers on the customer reps if demands cannot be dealt with effectively.

3. Managing the virtual contact centers requires organizations to work out technology and operational challenges. Adequate plans may not have been made from the onset, so there might be inadequate remote access. A conscious effort has to be made to manage the dispersed workforce.

The question posed now is, how best can an organization manage this new normal?

 

Key steps include

 

1. Listening and Communicating

Organizations should keep reassuring customers by communicating with them regularly, by this they make the customers aware of any reduced capacity and they points the customers to the existing self-service channels which may include emails, social media platforms, and automated telephone messaging. Organizations can as well build customer intimacy by using listening and reacting to their needs by using social listening capacity and contact analysis.

2. Helping your employees adapt

Remote working is a huge change that may seem weird and difficult to most organization that has never used it. Organizations may provide advice on how their staff should manage their spaces and time well. Necessary equipment should as well be provided for easy remote working.

3. Shifting channels to free up capacity

The right channels should be adopted so as to allow less chocking for staffs, and also to help staff manage multiple work at the same time,
Others include; Managing demands through existing intelligent automation and self-service, and Multi-skilling. Beyond the crises, we will see a level of penetrating demand giving further pressure on customer service. A flexibility customer service operation which uses intelligent automation and digital channels will be critical in managing thus demands and the reputation and relationship of the organization will build.