Clearly the last few months contact centers were focused on ensuring the safety of their employees by moving everyone to work from home very quickly, while trying to keep operations going seamlessly. There were significant advantages for those on a cloud-native foundation. They were able to immediately and successfully move to working from home because of the simplicity inherent in this approach. What do I mean by that? It’s because it extends your contact center capabilities to home and the only things employees need is internet access, a simple computer and web browser. And since security is built into the browser, the IT support staff doesn’t need to install or manage any VPN hardware. So cloud-native contact centers merely told their employees to take their computers home and just log in according to their assigned schedule. As a result customers continued to get the service they had to come to expect.
A cloud-native foundation is built for business continuity and resiliency. Because the applications and hardware are centrally managed in a data center, the IT team can easily access it from their homes just as they did when in the office. In a typical configuration, the management is actually done by a platform provider in support of the IT team. So in most cases, issues are identified and resolved before they are noticeable to the employees. What is also very important is that a cloud-native solution has multiple points of backup so should there be a hardware or software issue, agents desktops can be quickly repointed to another datacenter. This is particularly important in the current crisis since even things such as the reliability of electrical power and telecommunications can be impacted. So the ability to have your agents served by a data center in a location outside their area, provides an additional layer of protection against any service outages.
A cloud-native foundation is elastic and not limited by a specific server capacity. As a result it can easily scale up to respond to interaction volume spikes. I recently heard the CEO of a large wireless provider say daily call volumes since the crisis started are now double that of Mother’s Day, the busiest day of the year! You know that many of those calls are going into a contact center. If you have a cloud-native foundation you can easily handle that.
It is common for contact centers to schedule agents to handle an expected interaction volume, and in the case of spikes you may bring on team leads, supervisors and even trainers on to handle the additional volume. But when you talk about these huge increases in volume - this would not be enough. A combination of at home agents AND a cloud foundation is better able to respond to this. If you think about it, a contact center is a fixed number of desks that is geared for the peak number of interactions and agents required to handle them. Let’s say you have a contact center of 750 agents where about 40% are in the office at one time so you need 300 or so work stations. When you have drastic spikes in volumes that may mean you need everyone online at once! What’s great is that in a work at home environment you are no longer limited by workstations because everyone has their own home office space!
What is also happening is a change in when volumes are occurring. Many schools are closed so kids are home with their parents, some who are also working from home. As a result, we are seeing interaction volumes move from typical business hours to well into the evening after the kids are in bed. Where those volumes used to be between let’s say 9am and 5pm, they are now squeezed between 8pm and midnight…more volume in half the time! This puts huge strains on traditional contact centers but as you can see, can be solved with a cloud foundation.
So far I have covered what I think of as the hard “foundation” of a cloud-based solution, but if you think of all the other critical applications that a contact center uses…like routing, scheduling and performance management….all those things that help you meet business KPI’s, how does that change when you move agents to home? Well very simply, it doesn’t. The applications that you had in the office and the way they function is exactly what employees get when they are at home. And if you think about it some of those applications are more critical than they probably ever were. Take routing; as I mentioned before, interaction volumes are really volatile so being able to manage them across both voice and digital channels is critical. Cloud-native allows you to do that and what is really amazing is you can also easily integrate new channels, so you can provide your customers additional ways to interact with you. And of course, you can also manage a single customer interaction across multiple channels to provide a seamless customer experience. This can only be done with a cloud-native foundation.
I have covered organizations with a cloud-native foundation, but how about those organizations that moved to WFH with their on-premises infrastructure. What are they doing now to transition to a cloud-native foundation as a long-term approach? Those organizations with on-premises solutions and a well-rehearsed business continuity plans were able to move agents to home, although with some delay. Unfortunately some organizations didn’t have a plan had to cease interacting with their customers completely. Those that did transition are generally operating with much more limited capabilities than they had in the past because things like quality and performance management were done manually.
If you had to cease operations completely, you should first focus your efforts on routing as the first step in a cloud-native approach. For those that did transition, focus on quality and performance management. We are past the initial stages of this crisis and therefore emotions are accelerating further for both customers and employees as frustrations about restrictions on movement as well as financial issues come to the forefront. This can result in a decrease in customer satisfaction and result in customer churn. A cloud-native foundation starting with quality management and performance management enables organizations to automatically score 100% of the interactions and provide automated feedback to agents without the need for a supervisor. Organizations can then focus adjusting agent behaviors to better deal with these new circumstances. This is just one example but there are many more based on each individual customer.
The need for flexibility has never been more acute in the contact center and customer service environment than today. This is especially true with the transition to mass remote working due to COVID-19, which is forcing businesses and employees alike to quickly adapt to the upsurge in demand for customer service. A cloud-native foundation enables organizations to easily transition and manage their contact centers as they had did when they were in the office.
I am interested to hear your feedback! Feel free to email me at david.wasserman@nice.com.
The blog post is following my LinkedIn Live Broadcast – which can be viewed here:
