This is the third article in a series of four where I will be explaining the opportunities and value that can be achieved by exploring GigCX. In this article I will be exploring how GigCX can offer improved business resilience by helping to enhance flexibility.
Flexibility will be an important driver of customer experience (CX) resilience in the coming months and years. By flexibility, I mean the ability to quickly adjust the when, where, and how you are delivering customer service and how a change in strategy can dramatically improve your future resilience.
Think about a traditional customer service solution. A contact center is at the core of a traditional solution, but since the challenges everyone faced during the Covid-19 pandemic every contact center providers has created a list of recommendations and best practice.
They have probably suggested that you consider a multi-site footprint, so risk is spread across several contact centers. This can also be reduced if you are using multiple geographies, so a problem in one country will not affect your contact centers in other locations.
They may also have advised on an improved automation strategy, so more customer interactions can be handled automatically without requiring the contact center. Almost certainly, they have also recommended the use of agents working from home (WFH) so this is blended with the contact center delivery. WFH was a natural response to the quarantine period, but it is now accepted as as integral part of the post-Covid-19 business reality.
McKinsey research found that 80% of people now working at home actually prefer it to their office. 41% said they are more productive than ever before and 28% say that their present productivity is equal to before they moved into a work from home delivery model.
McKinsey suggests that companies bringing their employees back to the office need to be careful because the office environment will be very different to how it was before the pandemic. Their research says: “Many companies will require employees to wear masks at all times, redesign spaces to ensure physical distancing, and restrict movement in congested areas (for instance, elevator banks and pantries). As a result, even after the reopening, attitudes toward offices will probably continue to evolve.”
Let’s consider all the recommended flexibility and resilience-boosting actions for contact centers in turn and explore them in the context of how a GigCX approach might work:
- Multiple sites: with GigCX we are hiring agents to work from home so they will naturally be dispersed. If you have 200 agents on your team then you have spread the risk across 200 sites.
- Multiple geographies: likewise, if you have a preference to hire native english-speaking Americans for your customer service team then they don’t all need to be physically located in the US. You could have global travelers on the team, partners of overseas ex-pats, and Americans that have just ended up living elsewhere.
- Improved automation: with a central cloud-based virtual contact center acting as a hub for the agents it’s easy to add additional tools, such as a chatbot that provides 24/7 first line of support – transferring to an agent only if required.
- Increased WFH: with GigCX we are focused on a 100% WFH solution so there is no need to manage blended or hybrid solutions or problems like isolation – the people who choose GigCX want to be based at home – they aren’t missing the office.
The industry analysts are all talking about building CX resilience in 2021. I think the only way that an organization can achieve this is by designing extreme flexibility into their customer service solution. You can build resilience by creating the possibility to access resource from anywhere at anytime.
True resilience is never going to come from trying to extend a temporary WFH situation into a long-term business solution. Design your customer service from the ground up based on GigCX principles and all the problems of hybrid WFH and contact center solutions vanish. Think GigCX for a flexible and resilient future.
In my next article in this series I will be focusing on the opportunity for greater business transparency offered by GigCX. Stay tuned because it will be published soon!
Check out our LinkedIn page for more ideas and information on GigCX and feel free to leave a comment here with your own thoughts or get in touch directly via my LinkedIn.