Neville Doughty, Author at Customer Contact Panel

The recruitment crisis has made headline news in recent times, with businesses being affected by labour shortages brought on by changes to both local and global economic conditions caused by the post-pandemic recovery and for UK based organisations, the aftereffects of Brexit.

In one sense it’s great that economies are experiencing a period of rapid growth after such a difficult 16 months but this has its challenges for many business owners, with recruitment and wage inflation becoming two of the biggest hurdles to expansion or in some cases survival.

According to figures recently released by Reed Recruitment, customer service has seen the highest overall salary increase of any sector (in the UK) with employee wages in 2021 up 32% compared with 2019. This wage inflation is adding huge pressure to both the ability to recruit and retain existing staff, within customer service and sales operations.

Add to this the increase in customer demand for query resolution and a return to business as usual from the consumer’s point of view, then the reality for many contact centres is that staffing is going to be difficult just as a period of peak demand, for many businesses, begins.

Challenges faced include:

Resource shortages driven by macro and microeconomic conditions
Post-pandemic recovery growth creating rapid expansion opportunities
Increased customer demand putting pressure on customer service teams
Outbound and inbound sales not being fulfilled due to resource shortage

What can you do to cope with staff shortages?

There are two alternatives to recruitment, which may work better for your business helping to save time and money, whilst improving your customer experience as well as increasing sales conversion and revenues.

These alternatives can both help to fix your short and longer-term resourcing issues and enable you to build a more sustainable business in the future, that can handle both foreseen and unforeseen demand fluctuations.

Outsource to cope with peak demand and recruitment transition periods

There is a wide choice of outsource contact centres, who provide a highly professional service, which presents itself to your customers as a seamless extension of your business. Choosing an outsourced partner to cope with your peak periods or to handle your less complex frequently dealt with enquiries, will free up your core teams to focus on areas that require higher levels of expertise such as complaint resolution and more complex sales conversion. This will enable your business to focus on the development of its higher skilled advisors and salespeople, resulting in greater loyalty, increased retention rates, higher customer satisfaction and increased revenues.

Outsourcing can also be used to meet customer contact requirements whilst your business is in recruitment mode. Measuring your recruitment needs can be difficult, as consumer demands fluctuate, and finding the ‘right’ people for your business can take time when the labour market has become so limited. Working with a partner while you rebuild your teams can help you to maintain customer satisfaction, reduce customer churn and protect revenues.

Identifying the right outsourcer for your business can be difficult if you do not have full visibility of the market or the skills to vet each outsourcer against your requirements. Working with the Contact Centre Panel team takes the pain away, making the process much simpler and ensuring you find the right match for your business.

Implement new technology to reduce demand on your teams

Implementing the ‘right’ technology solution can help your business to cope with demand fluctuations and improve how you handle enquiries in a more consistent and controlled way. Improvements in technology, particularly Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Bots are enabling contact centres to massively reduce the demand on agents by channelling low level enquiries away from expert advisors and resolving them. The cost of implementing new technologies is covered by a reduction in resourcing expenditure, improvements to working and process efficiency and increased sales revenues.

The key to implementing technologies successfully is to identify a solution that fits your current and future business requirements. With such a large choice of potential systems and providers, it can be difficult to make the right choice, particularly if you do not have full visibility of what is available and the appropriate level of technology expertise needed to accurately assess each solution.

Many businesses have, so far, chosen to wait in fear of making the wrong choice, either retaining dated legacy systems or delaying the adoption of new. When adopting new technologies mistakes can indeed be costly in terms of wasted time and expense, but if done correctly this can be the reverse. Successful businesses are now embracing the opportunity to streamline their operations and improve customer service delivery by implementing the latest contact centre technologies, guided by the right level of expertise.

Working alongside a trusted partner, such as Contact Centre Panel, to help you narrow down your options will help your business to adopt a measured, managed process to selecting the right technical solutions to improve and future-proof your operations.

Who can you talk to about the options?

Contact Centre Panel has built a network of over 140 contact centres and 50 technology providers. We’ve done this to find solutions to the greatest challenges facing the customer contact sector. Whether it’s staff resourcing to meet fluctuations in demand or to cover recruitment periods, or it’s choosing and implementing tools to improve customer interaction/experience and agent reliance, we can help.

We work closely with clients to understand their specific requirements before helping them to source the appropriate contact centre outsourcer or technology provider. We are entirely independent, so you know our recommendations are not driven by self-interest. Our selection process is managed by industry experts, so you will always be in safe hands.

The most important questions to ask for a winter of slow recovery

As different parts of the UK have been plunged into Tier 3 lockdown, and we’ve put our clocks back to welcome in Winter 2020, businesses across the UK are facing up to an immediate future of continued uncertainty.

Earlier this year, business leaders optimistically hoped that there would be a moment when the recovery from Covid-19 began; a time when we could welcome our teams back to the office and implement the lessons we’ve learned over a summer of hardship and accelerated change. Now the nights are drawing in, the truth is that this isn’t going to happen any time soon. The reality is that the contact centre industry is looking at a slow return to a new normality, and we’re not sure how that normality will look yet.

Setting up your business to get through this winter?

As winter is now officially with us, this is the time to ask difficult questions and make plans to emerge in Spring 2021, full of energy and enthusiasm as the sap rises and the green shoots hopefully emerge. We can’t be certain that recovery will happen in Spring or whether we will have to wait longer, but when it does your business needs to be ready.

Preparing to get through the winter months will build the new foundations and platform on which your business will be able to grow when optimism and stability gradually return. In this article, we ask some of the most important questions on how to help your business get ready for future success.

What is your core business?

When businesses are growing, there is an inevitable and natural momentum that results in non-core activities being fulfilled in-house. It’s often faster to solve a problem using your own resources than it is to seek expert help from outside the business. When times are more difficult, these non-core activities can appear as unnecessary costs or unavoidable evils.

Ask yourself:

What is your core business?
What are your fundamental processes?
What do you HAVE to do, that you’re not good at?
What processes can you afford to do without?

Answering these questions will enable you to identify parts of your business which may be disposed or divested relatively painlessly, or which you could outsource to reduce direct costs and improve agility. Outsourcing also gives you the opportunity to find true expertise for the processes you are having to complete through necessity, enabling your business to focus on its core strengths.

Identifying key team members and helping them perform

The role of an employer has changed massively in 2020. With key team members having an increased influence on your results, especially if you’ve had to slim down and decide who works when and where. Additionally, your HR team will have learned new skills whilst having to deal with your employees under new circumstances.

Many businesses in our sector will already have faced incredibly challenging times as employers. Imposed self-isolation of healthy and high-performing agents can be very frustrating, especially if you don’t have the tools to enable them to work well from home. Even worse for employers, can be the results of the NHS Covid app’s recommendations that teams of people who have worked together must isolate at the same time, due to a single positive test. Despite the laudable aims of reducing infection rates, a team checking out of the office for 14 days can have a disastrous effect on productivity.

Consider the following questions:

What’s the demographic of your agents? Are they in a higher-risk Covid bracket from a health or a cross-infection point of view?
How are they going to be affected by Covid self-isolation? Ask your staff how they really feel about working from home. You might be able to maximise productivity by being flexible about how individuals work for you.
Have you had an incident where team members or an entire team has had to take time away from the office yet? If so, did you have a plan, and did it work?
How will you retain your best employees if they are forced to isolate?

Arguably, there is a moral responsibility to make it possible for your agents to continue working whilst in self-isolation. In contact centres, rates of pay are generally relatively low compared to other sectors. If this is the case, paying Statutory Sick Pay may not be viable if you want to retain staff – isolation may force team members to realise that they need to look for a different job with better sickness benefits. Of course, there is also a strong productivity argument to enable agents to work from anywhere.

Have you found your best infrastructure to deliver customer service?

Throughout the course of the summer, most businesses have been finding ways to facilitate effective homeworking for their staff. The coming months are an opportunity to experiment to find the ideal mix of home and office, not just for Covid safety but for productivity, property costs and flexibility reasons. With the costs of maintaining city centre facilities, businesses can reduce their expenses by making better use of the technologies that have enabled them to simply keep operating in 2020. The future shape of your business might be slimmer, more agile and more flexible.

Take a look at your business today and think about these issues:

Do your systems enable your people to work from home productively for long periods of time?
Which processes need to be done in your main offices?
If you process payments, how do you do this securely and compliantly?
Where is your customers’ data stored and accessed?

Your systems may allow your work to continue but be careful: compliance with payment and data regulations might be compromised by the way you allow people to work remotely. So far, the consequences of this haven’t been obvious but, in our view, it’s only a question of time before a serious breach of customer data or payment information is caused by a weakness in systems used for remote access.

Where can you get help with the results?

With a little luck and a lot of good planning, your business will be in great shape to cope with this winter and emerge prepared for the recovery when it happens.

On the other hand, if the questions we’ve asked raise issues for your business, we can help. Contact Centre Panel has built up a network of over 150 partners who can provide answers for a huge range of challenges including business process outsourcing, flexible agent availability, technology solutions for remote working or payments processing, expert data compliance help and a comprehensive list of issues facing the contact centre industry.

For years we’ve been talking about how homeworking would bring opportunities and change how contact centres employ people and deliver service, creating flexibility for both people and organisations. It was a win-win and was coined as the great opportunity – yet it never really fulfilled its potential. However, due to the pandemic, in 2 weeks it has been delivered, but at what cost?

Who would have thought on New Year’s Eve, when we were celebrating with friends and loved ones, and pontificating on what 2020 would bring – the celebrations, trips, events and the hope that something would knock Brexit from the headlines, that we’d now be longing for the day we can just meet friends for a coffee or go around to see our families.

In hindsight, we needed to be careful about what we were wishing for and appreciate many of the things we’d taken for granted.

However, nobody could have foreseen this one, or maybe the signs were there as warned by Bill Gates in a TED Talk in 2015.

The impact

Initially, there were some who ignored the #bekind memo and put their own self-interests before others by panic buying and ignoring government advice around separation. I saw a comment that said “I feel the world has sent us to our rooms to think about what we have done”. Perhaps it has, maybe the world is being reset? The tragedy is that it’s taking something so epic, which will see so many people lose loved ones, for us to acknowledge that the world we have been living in will be fundamentally different after COVID-19. Perhaps our only option is to embrace this.

Reflecting back

We are undoubtedly social creatures and need contact from those around us. For the past 22 years I’ve been working in the contact centre industry, an area which someone said to me a few months ago “seems to hate itself”. This stopped me in my tracks. I’ve always loved being part of the industry as it has afforded me the opportunity to work with some fantastic brands, especially from being in outsourcing, and given me a range of experiences. I’ve been able to help so many deliver improved service or support to their customers and assist people when they need reassurance or information.

I’ve the utmost respect for all front-line contact centre staff, every day they are communicating with customers – dealing with questions, challenges, complaints and fixing issues. Their line managers supporting them, a role which has changed so much. When I first became a line manager things were simpler, compliance extended to whether DPA had been completed, there was no social media and people didn’t talk about their feelings. Now a line manager has to be so much more than just an excellent agent, they need to fully understand how people, systems and communication work and interact.

Maintaining the energy

Why am I raising this discussion point? Because what gets a team through the day in a busy contact centre is often the buzz, the camaraderie and the sense of belonging. I find the energy and feeling you get when walking through the door of a contact centre is an indicator of the culture and performance of the Team(s) within. The fear of saying the “Q” word for fear of creating an avalanche of calls and when you know there is a problem, due to a change in the volume level on the calling floor, that comes before the words “systems down”.

Contact centre people are problem solvers, I believe we thrive in a crisis and see the best of people when things are going wrong – whether that be for our customers, the organisation we represent or that team member who is having a crisis at home. It saddens me to see photos of empty call centres with their energy dissipated, leaving me with a unfamiliar feeling as ‘our’ purpose has always been to fill buildings with motivated people delivering solutions to customers. But a challenge was set and it appears many have delivered at pace against that need.

I fear however, that we are an industry running on adrenaline which is providing a temporary buzz. The novelty of homeworking and the focus on the broader needs of our society are providing a boost, but this may be temporary and fade in time. Our industry is therefore responsible for making sure any gap is filled and levels are maintained. We’ve heard some great stories of people using technology to deliver virtual meetings and team events, perhaps further advancement of gamification will provide extra impetus maintain the energy and engagement in the future.

The challenges of homeworking

The mission was to get agents and staff working from home, protect people from the virus and continue to support and serve customers, whilst maintaining revenues. But we now have further challenges, how do we ensure that those agents handling calls from emotional customers (and we are all in a state of heightened emotion right now) receive the appropriate support and guidance from their team? How do we ensure that the services being delivered are compliant and useable long term, when potentially unsecure interim homeworking solutions have been adopted first?

The future

The landscape has changed, if done correctly then there could be an appetite to maintain homeworking as it offers the flexibilities and opportunities as I previously mentioned. This was realised, when it was proved, that a solution to enable homeworking could be rolled out at the scale we are seeing now. In the future, could we see the contact centre becoming merely a hub for workers, offering the flexibility that many people require and giving options to both those who choose to work in the office or from home. It will open up new talent pools, enabling workers who were unable to adhere to constraints of working from an office i.e. parents with young families or people living in more remote locations. This will become the new norm so will you be ready to embrace this?