According to the research, a crisis creates three psychological states of mind. The first is a state of emergency, when an event comes from nowhere or catches us off guard and we find a clear sense of purpose, grow in energy and become more productive. How long you stay in this state varies by person, for example a crisis junkie, like myself, often enjoys spending time in this mindset so may prolong this period.

The next phase we move to is regression. When the uncertainty of a situation makes you lose purpose and can lead to withdrawal, irritability and a drop in productivity.

The third and final phase is the recovery. We start to reorient ourselves, check with our goal, adjust if necessary, and then get our heads into how we move on.

Individuals move through these phases at different speeds, which you may have witnessed when observing your colleagues’ behaviours as they have dealt with the Covid pandemic.

How have ‘we’ coped?

Many contact centres were very quick to prepare their staff for homeworking, with equipment and technology made available so people could work and service could be maintained. Non furloughed staff had clear objectives and knew what they had to do to make things happen. Rooms in the house were turned into working spaces and new daily patterns established…all with the intention of ‘making homeworking operational!’

After several weeks in lockdown, many people will have naturally started to drift into regression. The uncertainty of how long the crisis will last had kicked in, with the lack of interaction and normal patterns of communication starting to impact on how people felt. Work started to feel laborious and customers (who were also going through the same behavioural patterns) became a bit more irritable. Family were not as understanding as they were, which created its own problems.

All in all, things began to feel much harder.

Then we moved into ‘lockdown lifting’, which may or may not change your working arrangements. With some homeworkers heading back into the office and others remaining at home. That said, there is a potential for staff to see ‘light at the end of the tunnel’.

Supporting staff in the transition to the ‘new norm’

As a leader with staff working from home, what can you do to help support team members and your customers as we tiptoe towards recovery?

Keep up the staff communication

Firstly, on a human level, check in with your teams. How are they getting on? How are they feeling? What is happening in their personal life? Show them that you care about their wellbeing and as people, not just ‘doers’.

Secondly, give your team insight into the business. What is happening within the organisation? How is it performing? What is their part to play? Given that they may well have felt a loss of purpose, now more than ever is a time to direct them back to that and be sure to make it clear. Connect the dots very obviously, thereby creating a renewed sense of purpose in what they are doing.

Set expectations for customers

According to research, many people have had mixed experiences dealing with contact centres during Covid. I personally found it infuriating being told my wait time was 5 minutes (due to demand) and then waiting 45 minutes before giving up as had to join a meeting. Conversely, my bank has a message in its IVR explaining that they are doing their best and that their staff are working from home. My expectation had been set so I understood that I might hear noises in the background due to family life still going on. I was happy with this. Not only did it set my expectations, but I had immediate empathy with the person on the other end as I too have had that struggle.

My advice for leaders is to keep up your communications with homeworkers, both on a personal and organisational level, to remind them that they matter and that they have a purpose. Help your customers to be aware of what you are doing to help and how your teams are operating. Bring a personal level and some empathy to your conversations. Keep up the encouragement and give regular gratification. Life will get easier as we head towards recovery so remain positive and focused on your goals.

Concerned with staff wellbeing and productivity?

If you require help improving team member wellbeing and productivity, we can assist. At CCP, we are skilled at assessing and implementing progressive cultural change. Our extensive experience of working with a large range of clients, including large multinationals, SMEs and charities, means we have the expertise to help any business. For further information click here or get in touch for a chat.

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

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?

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?

We’re here to help

None of us know what the coming months will look like, but the 2020s are already changing how we approach our lives and work. With this in mind, we are wanting to support the industry as best we can. This will include regularly keeping in touch, with a view to helping our industry in navigate these challenging times and beyond. We will support people and businesses, be a friendly voice and share our knowledge and experience to help continue to forge and maintain strong partnerships.

As part of this, we are creating a programme of content with industry leading experts on subjects such as technology, PCI Compliance, GDPR, homeworking engagement, leadership and operational management in the context of the current and anticipated landscape.
If you have any questions related to this article or on what’s happening in the industry or would like to provide feedback, email hello@contactcentrepanel.com.

Interview with John Greenwood, Head of Technology & PCI Compliance.

As many businesses are forced into homeworking, the need for remote access to internal systems to enable home-based agents to provide a full service has never been higher.Companies who can adapt quickly will improve their chances of long-term survival, emerging from this crisis with higher customer satisfaction and lower attrition rates.

We spoke to our very own John Greenwood, lead contributor to the PCI SSC Information Supplement (Protecting telephone-based payment card data) and authority on payments compliance in the contact centre and BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) sector. We asked John what advice he would give to organisations with customer service teams on coping with these pressures and his tips on how to rapidly build an improved operation for the future.

What new challenges are businesses facing?

John explained some of the major factors affecting business decisions in the sector today, “Quick alterations in the way customer service departments and contact centres work are placing new challenges in front of organisations. To maintain business as usual, major changes are having to be made to how people work. Amongst the issues that need to be dealt with are:

These operational challenges are daunting enough, but now there is a requirement for rapid deployment of home working solutions, which many existing technological solutions struggle to cope with.”

What are the biggest risks of a rapid move to homeworking?

John stated that, “Moving system access and agents away from a central site carries some significant risks. The introduction of chip & PIN payment technology moved payment fraud away from face-to-face and towards the ecommerce payments acceptance channel. As the minimum international data security standard for taking card payments (PCI DSS) has evolved to reduce ecomm’ fraud, so crime groups are adapting and the payment card industry is playing a continual game of catch up. Payment card details are valuable and easily monetised to fund organised crime, criminals are increasingly targeting businesses who use the MOTO (Mail Order, Telephone Order) payment acceptance channels. Contact centres have been an obvious target and now mass homeworking offers the unscrupulous a new opportunity.”

He continues, “It is not easy for organisations to fully replicate all the people, process and technology security measures that are in place in their contact centres, particularly as the transition to homeworking is happening so quickly. Many organisations have simply not had time to run a full risk assessment or discuss their significant changes in risk profile with their acquiring banks. Whatever your circumstances, working from home and handling payment card data puts your homeworkers at risk of being approached by organised crime.”

John added, “Data breaches and compromises of personal data can be hugely damaging both financially and reputationally, with prosecutions making headline news. A breach of the Data Protection Act will also attract action from the acquiring bank on behalf of the payment brands (Visa, Mastercard etc). This means ‘penalties’ of up to €18 per card exposed and potential notice to withdraw payment facilities until evidence is provided that minimum data security standards were being met, which means PCI DSS compliance being certified. If a breach is found, it is likely that your operation will be suspended, at least temporarily but potentially permanently. This will have obvious effects on the business and your teams. The reputational consequences on top of the obvious financial implications could seriously damage your organisation in the long term. Put simply, you may lose the ability to take money through your agents in the short term, risk reputational damage and risk an ICO fine. Then there would be the added costs of forensic investigation, increased transaction charges and for either achieving or maintaining PCI compliance.”

He continues, “From a liability point of view, your customers are protected. The financial burden is on the merchant. Certainly, from a data protection standpoint if the merchant had failed to create a defendable position, by documenting a risk assessment to support the security of personal data in the home working environment.”

What does your business need to do to safely move into the ‘new world’ of homeworking?

Enabling homeworking on a large scale is an opportunity for brands to improve operations, manage costs and increase flexibility in the workforce. It’s vital that your business approaches this opportunity in the right way.

John says “Take the chance to reduce and remove risks from your operations. You can do this by carefully choosing your technological and communications platforms, finding solutions which are easy to implement and enable compliance with PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards). There are compliant and rapidly-deployable options available including Ciptex RACE, built on the Twilio platform – which it shares with some of the world’s most successful, reliable and secure apps including WhatsApp, Airbnb, and Uber.”

By implementing effective systems rapidly, you can protect not only customers, but your homeworkers and ultimately the business. The rethink, which has been forced upon us all by a global pandemic, might be responsible for organisational improvements and increased protection.

Do you need to safeguard your remote payments?

If you’d like to talk about a technology independent way to quickly implement safe payment processing for your business, the team at Contact Centre Panel can help. We’ve built a technology network by helping contact centres to safely and securely meet business and customer needs.

The impact of not getting important information through to your customers?

Just imagine that a problem is found with one of your most popular products or services, meaning you have to contact all your customers to offer a solution or replacement. How would your service team, or your outsource customer service partner, cope?

Now, stop imagining and start planning. The last 12 months has seen some major brands fall foul of poorly handled product recalls or poorly communicated service failures. Nat West’s Black Friday experience was a prime example, where a lack of regular updates about the bank’s online banking failure, on the busiest online shopping day of the year, created further frustration for thousands of customers, who shared their discontent across social media. By not updating customers, the bank gave the impression they didn’t care, while no doubt they were working very hard to resolve the problem. Worse still, there was no apology once the issue was resolved leaving many customers feeling let down.

Product recalls, if not handled well, can have a very detrimental effect on a brand. Recalls are relatively common in sectors such as automotive, electrical appliances and pharmaceuticals. They must be handled well as the corporate consequences of failure can be serious. The reputational damage can be difficult to recover from, but more importantly, in some cases, there can be a genuine threat to personal safety.

How would you get critical messaging to all your customers?

If you had to get essential information to every single customer, how would you do it? If your customer service planning doesn’t include this as a possibility, there’s a risk that a product problem will result in a huge influx of inbound enquiries, flooding your team and leaving many customers unhappy with your performance. By getting ahead of the problem and proactively communicating with your customers, dissatisfaction can be minimised. A well-handled problem can result in genuine brand advocates, but a badly handled one can irreparably damage your brand reputation.
Critical messaging solutions can vary – using different channels according to the needs of the clients. However, they tend to be built on an initial SMS (text message) transmission. SMS messages, on average, achieve delivery and open rates of well over 90%, so with a suitably clear message, a huge number of customers can be reached and engaged extremely quickly and inexpensively.

The initial SMS will usually contain a call to action, a link, or rich media for an app like experience, that enables customers to self-serve and take control of their own problem resolution. This could be to make an engineer appointment or to arrange collection of a defective product. This is much more resource efficient than waiting for inbound enquiries following a news story or even a proactive email campaign.

Customers are also given the option to engage via SMS or social media to ask questions: this is also far more cost-effective than prompting calls, as agents can typically handle four text conversations at one time, and customers are more accepting of slower response rates via SMS or social chat (via your brand’s Facebook page, for example) than on the phone.

When you compare the self-serve option to staffing up your customer service department, or securing outsourced seats to handle a massive spike in demand, it is both cheaper and quicker, reaching customers more effectively and delivering the required results with minimum human involvement. This is more likely to result in more satisfied customers, despite the obvious initial bad news about their purchase.

How do you turn a negative situation to your advantage?

So, by adopting a proactive, planned approach to dealing with critical messaging, your brand can:
• Reach your customers quickly
• Get resolutions acted on efficiently
• Allow your customer service team to focus on just the complex cases
• Maximise cost-effectiveness
• Convert potential brand damage into happy customers

At CCP we work with specialist partners who are able to deliver the latest crisis management and critical messaging solutions, so if you have any customer service issues, or are concerned that your business is not setup to handle a crisis, get in touch. We’d love to help.

Most commonly, people associate Contact Centres with the long-established, bums-on-seats “cost plus” model, where clients are charged based on the cost of agents plus overheads and a margin, for an agreed contract or campaign period.

However, our industry is changing. You only have to read some of the articles on CCP’s News pages to understand that the dynamics around the introduction of automation technologies, the need to add value and planning for the future mean that traditional commercial models have to be challenged by Contact Centres and clients alike, to achieve the best results going forwards. If clients and are going to keep customers happy and Contact Centres are going to remain profitable, the charging regimes need to reflect the clients’ desired results much more closely.

To get a perspective from within the industry, we looked back at some research from within the sector and spoke to David Gauntlett, Managing Director of The Prospect Factory.

The Prospect Factory is a business built on outbound calls aimed at generating leads for business-to-business (B2B) clients. David set up the business in 2008 following a number of years in the Contact Centre industry, where he’d worked to generate sales leads for some of the biggest brands. Initially, on the client side for large automotive brands, David employed telemarketing agencies using a traditional retainer model and became frustrated that the charging models didn’t always reflect performance. As a result, he chose to set up The Prospect Factory to focus on results-oriented lead generation for clients who preferred to pay for qualified prospects.

David’s perspective should give some food for thought if you’re thinking of moving towards a payment-by-results model… although it’s important to remember that not all campaigns are outbound lead generation, so there are clearly environments where other commercial models will work best.

What makes a pay-per-prospect model different?

David explains: “We use a pay-per-appointment low risk telemarketing model to get appointments for our clients’ sales teams. This contrasts with the fixed price per day or hour that most Contact Centres charge, regardless of success.

“We agree in advance what a good prospect appointment looks like and we audit against those criteria, so we only send results to the client if they meet those criteria. Then our clients are billed per appointment each month. Any appointments that get cancelled are rebooked, ideally, or credited if we can’t reschedule them.”

As you’d expect, every appointment-generation job has a different level of complexity and difficulty, so the commercial model has to be adapted to reflect the client’s needs and the characteristics of the prospect audience. David gave us some examples, but it’s vital to use experience and industry knowledge to set pricing and expectations, which is where an in-depth knowledge of the client’s sector can be very handy:

“The price depends on the difficulty of the task. In the automotive industry, for example, there is a wide range of prices per appointment, averaging less than £300 but ranging as high as £700 for the most complex (but most rewarding) appointments.

“It’s also possible to have a tiered approach, where a lower price is charged, for example, for a webinar or conference call for a smaller opportunity or more exploratory sales conversation. This reflects the size of the opportunity or the stage in the sales funnel.”

What types of client do cost-per-result models suit best?

“Any business with a tangible product offering which salespeople need to be outselling can benefit from a cost-per-appointment arrangement. The salaries earned by salespeople in high value markets mean that their time is not well used prospecting – they can add value much more effectively when they’re in front of their targets having sales conversations built on high quality, qualified appointments.

“There are many sectors that don’t suit the model though. These include the Telecoms, IT and Software, Management Consultancy and other sectors. Also, it’s virtually impossible to apply a cost-per-appointment model to any sector that isn’t B2B as there simply isn’t the value per sale to justify it.”

Considering newer commercial models

David’s opinions about the future are worth noting: “The Contact Centre and Outsourcing sector is fairly settled, with most large operators continuing to price on an hourly retainer basis. It’s not very easy to find a great Contact Centre that’s happy to charge on a per-success basis. I don’t envisage much change in the short term, because the traditional retainer model is what most Contact Centres have built their business around. It’s what they do and it’s what they’re going to prefer to carry on doing.

“That’s what makes businesses like the Prospect Factory different. We’ve built our business on a cost-per-result basis and whilst that makes us careful about who we work with, it’s what makes us different and the right match for our clients.

“There are some very useful extensions to the cost-per-success commercial model though. Contact Centres like ours are also able to offer complementary services such as mid-life customer retention calls, renewal solutions for clients with near-expiry customer contracts, and customer satisfaction calls. These all build on the positive strengths of our pre-sales appointment-setting work and add value for clients who are looking to maximise returns from their outbound Contact Centre work.”

As well as the value-adding outbound services mentioned by David, there are a number of other commercial charging models that can be applied to Contact Centre and Outsourcing work. The right model to choose depends on factors such as what a good result looks like, agent availability, industry served and the length of the campaign/relationship, but typical examples include:

• Cost plus – The more traditional approach, agent costs plus overheads plus margin, based on volume forecasts and agreed in advance;
• Unit pricing – Per call/second/minute/incident – or per appointment/sale. This model can also be adapted by volume steps or complexity levels e.g. Lower cost per sales call than for a full meeting
• Fixed price – Typically per agent hour, especially useful for inbound work
• Incentive based – Per sale/appointment, but also rewards for other metrics such as First Call Resolution, Time per call etc. Payment for results, not for time
• Gain sharing – The client and outsourcer share a proportion of the results or cost savings, often beyond a minimum threshold
• Managed service – A fully customised payment regime based on client/outsourcer partnership agreement

How can Contact Centre Panel help?

At the Contact Centre Panel, it’s our role to find the perfect match between a client’s needs and a Contact Centre’s strengths. Ultimately all negotiations about commercial agreements are between the client and the outsourcer, but we are able to help in a number of ways.

At the outset of working with any client, CCP holds a consultative discussion around the pro’s and cons of various commercial models which might be able to meet the client’s needs. The general commercial terms of engagement are then set out and reflected in the brief we send to appropriate members of our Network of over 80 Contact Centres and Outsourcers. We’ll only approach businesses that can meet the needs of the brief, including the commercial model/s chosen.

We’re profiling all of our Network Members to establish which of our 80+ partners can satisfy a wide-ranging series of client requirements, from commercial models to compliance, from lead generation to excellent customer service.

It is important to us that our clients are able to compare potential partners fairly. We carefully prepare our briefs to ensure that apples are compared to apples, that fair comparators are included in our brief so that results are expressed properly.

Following receipt of responses to the brief, CCP collates all commercial solutions in a comparative matrix, allowing the client to compare like for like. Within this stage of the process, CCP will point out any obvious anomalies. This gives our clients the best possible information to choose their preferred Contact Centre partner, to meet their own specific needs. One size does not fit all!

If you’re not sure whether your Contact Centre is meeting your needs, talk to us here at The Contact Centre Panel for an unbiased review of your current status – just contact us by email or call 0114 209 6120 to talk about your needs. We won’t push: we will only help if you need it.

Keep in touch

Follow CCP on LinkedIn for regular industry news and updates. It’s not all about us! Just look at our website’s News & Publications page for many more helpful articles.

To find out more about working with the perfect partner for your business, give us a call on 0114 209 6120 or contact us using the form on our website.