Every challenge is an opportunity in disguise. Similarly, the Covid-19 situation, too, has given us some important lessons that will stay with us for a long time. With the pandemic around, companies went into business continuity mode.
During this time, we have adopted many practices that allowed us to carry out our business operations with minimum disruptions. Today, we will discuss the business continuity best practices we have learned as a call center during this unprecedented situation.
Lesson One – It’s time to adopt a work-at-home delivery model
With social distancing becoming the new norm, we were forced to transition a section of our workforce to a home-based setup. By the end of April, we transitioned 90% of our workforce from our brick-and-mortar locations to a home-based setup. It allowed us to support the business continuity plan of our clients rightly. During the transition, we were able to maintain zero disruption to our client’s processes. Our clients have appreciated our efforts to support their business continuity needs.
It seems that the work-at-home delivery model is here to stay in at least some capacity with us in the near future. And in case such a situation occurs in the future, we are far more prepared to respond to its challenges with our work-at-home capabilities.
Lesson Two – Focus on meeting the changing customer needs
As a global call center, our job is to meet the customer communication needs of our clients. With the pandemic impacting our client’s businesses, their call center service needs have changed too. In some cases, we have seen drastic changes in our clients’ needs.
For example: the patient queries in the healthcare sector have gone up. In contrast, the contact center needs for the travel and hospitality sector have gone down after an initial spike due to cancellation and refund requests. To accommodate them all, we had to adopt a flexible and agile delivery model that allows us to quickly scale up or scale down our workforce within a short notice.
Lesson Three – Communication is the key
In an unprecedented situation like this, constant communication is the only key to run a smooth business operation. With our team becoming geographically dispersed, maintaining the communication flow was a big challenge for us. We have overcome this challenge by taking a multichannel approach within the team.
Our managers and team leaders were in constant touch with the team members using chat, email, voice calls, and various online meeting platforms. Our proprietary workforce management tool also helped us to deliver important official communication to all our team members. The tool is also useful to capture every agents’ mood to avoid agent burnout. The tool is also being used to provide real-time feedback to our agents and monitor their performances.
During this troubled time, Fusion CX has been in constant touch with its clients and has provided them with necessary support as and when needed. We are regularly providing updated and reports to our clients and are dedicated to meet their and their customers’ changing needs during the pandemic.
The pandemic is something the business world was not prepared for. So, it has caught all of us off-guard. While every industry is trying its best to respond to the pandemic’s challenges, we, the call center companies, have an even bigger responsibility – to support our clients’ businesses and their customers the right way.
So far, we have been quite successful in that and have earned numerous accolades from our clients. However, we believe these challenges are lessons in disguise, and they will help us stay better prepared for future disruptions.
