Unlike past times, businesses have a unique challenge on their hands today. They must ensure they respond well to a pandemic like COVID-19, as it can have a long-lasting impact on their brand image. Companies are facing a different set of challenges for being responsive to their clients/customers as they depend on contact center solutions to respond to their queries.
In times like these, it is very common for customers to reach out more frequently to the companies whose services they are using, especially healthcare organizations, insurance companies and financial service organizations. Contact center agents are usually not considered essential workers, but they’re sometimes one of the only groups of employees that are required to come into the office, even when other teams are told to stay home in situations like bad weather and government holidays.
Now is the time for all of this to change and adapt to the new normal. As it is clear that contact center services agents are essential to the success of their organizations, their safety should be the top priority while being responsive to the customers.
In this article, we bring you a few suggestions to be responsive to customers during pandemic while ensuring employees’ safety.
Here are a few suggestions for handling this situation:
- Establish formal lines of communication between your employees and customers. Communicate accurately & frequently with them to ensure all your employees know what is happening and what they are supposed to do. Doing this is vital as your agents should know what to communicate to your customers. And do stay in regular touch with your customers so that they know your organization is doing everything to provide them with uninterrupted services while ensuring your employees’ safety and health.
- Don’t ask all your staff to come to the office on the same day, rather call them in rotation. Encourage your teams that can work remotely to “work from home”. And employees that are required to report to the office arrange transportation for them to avoid travel in public transportation and make sure you adhere to the guidelines for sanitization and social distancing.
- Encourage employees who are feeling unwell or have a fever to take paid leaves. This is always the best practice, but with COVID-19 doing this is important as it can save lives.
- Look for cloud contact center solutions from reputed service providers. This will enable you to securely access your customer’s information and reach out to them efficiently. It is also about getting your basics in place that will allow your agents and supervisors to help your customers while working from home. Configure & deliver secure PCs, headsets and other tools to the employees who are going to work from home.
- Conduct training sessions and interact with employees that are working from home. This will help you to gain an understanding of what is happening with customers throughout your enterprise.
Ending Note
These were just a few ways that can keep your employees safe while being responsive to customers during the pandemic. From the above suggestions, it can be clearly stated that using cloud contact center solutions and having a work from home setup will help you achieve your goals during a pandemic. However, it may take a little time to get things going, but it is important to make the necessary investments so that your contact center staff can remain physically & mentally healthy while providing the best services to your customers.