how to create flexibility in your contact centre ... · demand support when resolving customer...

How to create flexibility in your contact centre operations in response to COVID-19Rapid deployment of GigCX will enable your staff working from home – and your best customers – to provide service, fast.

April 2020

Limitless

Business Continuity Playbook

| Business Continuity Playbook

Call Centre Store

SmartCrowdTM

Expert

Employees

Customers

Agent

Employees

Executive Summary In response to the coronavirus pandemic, Gig Customer Experience (GigCX) allows you to empower your employees and crowdsourced Customer Experts to resolve contact demand via messaging, simply using their mobile phone or laptop. Business continuity planning has become the number one topic in our industry – with many contact centre operations looking for ways that their agents can work from home. The management of voice calls, emails and webchat sessions typically requires agents to have full access to IT systems – which is a barrier to many home workers from a technology and information security perspective. At best, only a small proportion of your agents can seamlessly transition to home working to provide exactly the same type of customer service that they can do from your operational centres.

Limitless SmartCrowd™ Business Continuity package removes these limitations so that any of your employees can work from home using a personal device – mobile phone, tablet or PC – to securely respond to customer requests received via messaging channels. The SmartCrowd™

platform - which is ISO27001 compliant - is already used by corporate giants such as Microsoft, Unilever and Sage where Customer Experts get rewarded for delivering on-demand support when resolving customer enquiries. And now this approach can be applied to customer facing employees who are working from home – whether they are existing contact centre staff, retail employees or field service staff.

This guide helps contact centre managers to more effectively plan for a scenario of increased customer contact with reduced resources. And when that situation occurs, Limitless SmartCrowd™ provides an innovative and flexible answer that provides the resource pools required to protect Service Levels and maintain Customer Satisfaction.

Diagram 1: An overview of the Limitless GigCX solution

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What’s the problem?

In a matter of days, Coronavirus has changed the way that we all think about work. Most businesses are now faced with the impact of lockdown, meaning that only essential workers can travel to work. Many are now restricted to working from home.

Whilst no one knows how long these restrictions will last, there are two assumptions that operational managers are now taking as ‘future truths’:

Customer demand patterns will

change

– with an increasing proportion of

customers seeking reassurance about their current and

future plans, creating unexpected surges

in demand that even the best Resource

Planning teams will struggle to predict.

The obvious answer is rather than expect agents to commute to your centre each day then you allow your employees to do their job as call handlers from home. This is easy to say, but for many operations much more difficult to implement. Most agents use desk based PCs, and if they are to work remotely then they either require company laptops or virtual agent desktop technology to allow them to access company systems from their own personal computers or tablets from home. Either of these options has significant technology and information security implications – severely restricting the numbers of staff who can operate as BAU agents from home.

A new way of working is therefore required whereby agents can undertake some – but not all – of their daily tasks working from home using their mobile phone or personal tablet. It is quickly becoming clear that we need to consider these new options as many traditional BCP solutions for remote working are just not proving to be viable.

The time to start thinking differently is now.

Staff absence rates will increase

– either through

employees catching the virus and being

off-work or from staff taking dependents leave as a result of school closures or family members

needing care.

It is quickly becoming clear that we need to consider these new options as many traditional BCP solutions for remote working are just not proving to be viable.

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A new type of solution - GigCX

SmartCrowd enables your agents, employees and customer Experts to securely start working in a matter of hours on any device, anywhere in the world to handle support tickets via messaging.

Here’s how in three simple steps:

1

Identify the contact types and volume of

informational enquiries

The coronavirus pandemic has created new types of demand

from customers seeking reassurance and

information

Many of these enquiry types can be resolved

through information and signposting - using available

knowledge

Many organisations are now using digital self-

service – such as webforms – to handle a mass influx

of enquiries relating to high volume transactions (such as

cancelling bookings)

Employees and Customer Experts are ideally positioned

to help other customers to understand the situation, providing an empathetic

human response

2

Determine how to route those informational

enquiries to the crowd

Deflect customers to the Limitless Live Messenger

tool

From any website page or mobile app when customers need help to complete digital

transactions

From IVR messaging as an alternative for your customers

when queuing

From an automated chatbot interaction, when customers

need physical help

3

Identify the users who you want to access the system

Find, invite and onboard the crowd

Agents, employees or customer experts can be

onboarded onto the platform in hours anywhere in the world

Empower the crowd by curating the knowledge

articles needed to help answer the contact types

They can access SmartCrowd and serve customers via any personal device - mobile or

laptop.

The platform is available in any language

SmartCrowdTM

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Initial solution: Quick and easy to deploy asynchronous messaging as a coronavirus response solution

Step 2

Ticket is submitted to Limitless platform. Information enquiries

are routed to your crowd. Any topic

requiring access to customer details (PII) will be redirected to alternative contact

channel

Step 1

Customer submits request via Limitless Live Messenger – via any webpage or from

within your mobile app

Step 4

Employees and Customer Experts can either earn money for

resolving tickets or points depending on

the Crowd Model

You pay Limitless either per resolved case or per Expert

licence depending on the commercial model

you adopt

Step 3

Employees or Customer Experts respond,

customers rate their experience & confirm their query is resolved

Responses can be

peer reviewed by other Agents to ensure

100% of responses are checked and rated

Responses can be peer reviewed by other Agents to ensure 100% of responses are checked and rated

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Using Customer Experts to extend the reach of your SmartCrowd

GigCX customers can build a service strategy on three key principles – availability of resource, trust and consistency

Exploit the characteristics of the gig economy to

access additional resources when you need them most

In a well run contact centre then the utilisation of agents is high

as the operational planning teams will be doing a good job of aligning the supply of agent

resources to expected demand. But the downside is that there is little spare internal capacity

in terms of agent resources that can be flexed up instantly in response to any unexpected

increase in demand.

This is where the working pattern of your Customer Experts can

help, with the gig resource pools typically being able to handle a surge in demand of up to 10 times greater than forecast.

That’s because these resources are available on-demand and

typically choose to do work when they have the time and they

know that there are opportunities available.

So when the contact centre is struggling with excessive demand then pushing more

work out to a pool of existing customer gig workers is a ready-made solution that you call upon.

Customer’s trust their peers

When trust is high - customer satisfaction in delivery of the

service will go up.

This means that you should expect customer service tasks that are resolved by customers

to command a higher CSAT rating in terms of feedback than your contact centre agents can achieve in providing responses to those enquiries - typically an

uplift of 5-10%.

Knowledgeable customers – who use an organisation’s

products or services day-in and day-out – have a unique insight

into how to solve what may seem like routine or general

enquiries that other customers face. And given that customers

can rate each and every gig worker experience, this ensures that only the very best people are helping other customers.

Consistency of responses

Traditional contact centre undertake quality reviews and

customer surveys only on a small fraction of total customer

interactions. They are reliant on agents having the personal knowledge and experience to

provide the right response.

With SmartCrowd you can ensure greater consistency using a combination of the

built-in knowledge base used to curate customer responses plus

an ability to peer review every new and unique response – not

contained in the knowledge base – before its gets sent out.

And every customer enquiry is only classified as resolved

when the customer confirms it as complete. And they can give feedback that provides insight.

A powerful capability of the Limitless GigCX proposition that enhances the overall Customer

Experience.

The outcome is a capability that you can extend across multiple channels and integrate to your CRM

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GigCX outcome: Customer interactions across multiple digital channels are fully integrated to your CRM

Step 2

Tickets are stored and/or routed via CRM, into the

Limitless SmartCrowd platform

Step 1

Customer submits support ticket via Limitless Live

Messenger, email, mobile messaging, community or

social channels

Step 3

If the ticket meets agreed criteria it is routed to the

Limitless platform for your Employees or Customer

Experts. If not, the ticket is routed to Contact Centre agents as normal. Time out limits are also set to auto-forward if not

responded to

Step 5

Employees and Customer Experts can either earn money for resolving tickets or points

depending on the Crowd Model

You pay Limitless either per resolved case or per Expert licence depending on the

commercial model you adopt

Step 4

Employees or Customer Experts respond, customers rate their

experience & confirm their query is resolved

Responses can be peer reviewed by other Agents to

ensure 100% of responses are checked and rated

Step 6

All data is returned to your CRM to maintain a single customer

view

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How to start? You can rollout the initial solution at pace

The first two weeks:Start by identifying a pool of agents or employees who are working from home but are without access to systems. Identify an initial use case, curate initial knowledge content, configure the messaging channel and test the end-to-end service

Subsequent two week sprints:Extend these capabilities through sprint phases to prove the concept using these internal employees with a view that this service is then scaled using crowdsourced Customer Experts. You can achieve this rolling programme of service enhancements by focusing your internal agents and employees to design/prove additional use case(s).

Commercial considerations:Whilst using employees working from home maybe an initial expediency, the maximum flexibility of SmartCrowd comes from having access to a crowdsourced customer talent pool so that you can deploy these resources when needed as a surge management tactic:

Typically our existing GigCX customers can source, assess and onboard a customer talent pool within 1 to 3 weeks. The lower-end estimate is based on having an existing community forum where customers are already engaged which gives immediate access to relevant resources, with additional time required to use social media campaigns where no such community place already exists

Commercial arrangements - you can pay for SmartCrowd through two different models. If you are using employees then a monthly platform license fee applies with your employees incentivised through a points system. Alternatively if you are using Customer Experts then a cost per resolved case applies which comprises a platform fee plus the customer expert reward

Reward options for customers are also important – our GoodGig® Charter ensures that all reward fees are fair in each local market & paid in local currencies. There is also the option to provide service credits – for example if you are mobile phone provider then rewarding customers with extra service minutes/data allowances or an upgrade package at no extra cost

Cost to serve – When implemented well, you should expect GigCX transaction costs to be below that of your internal or outsourced contact centre and those savings could be significant – up to 50% - when compared to resolving surge enquiries through staff overtime payments and/or premium escalation rates etc.

Whilst using employees working from home maybe an initial expediency, the maximum flexibility of SmartCrowd comes from having access to a crowdsourced customer talent pool...

2w

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Quality considerations:You should also put in place tracking to manage the effectiveness of the service i.e. to ensure the right tasks are being sent to the crowd, the quality/CSAT at an acceptable level, and the cost-to-resolve for completed tasks (the platform fee plus the reward fee) are appropriate for the value of the interaction.

The SmartCrowd platform enables this by allowing customers to rate their experience & confirm their query is resolved. They can also provide feedback on the level of service received, which is a great way to motivate your employees who are dealing with these enquiries

And when a customer does need to speak to the contact centre to resolve a specific transactional enquiry, the employee can use their service skills and empathy to set the customer expectations around how best to get the situation resolved.

Promoting the new messaging service through social media:Social media channels are an excellent way to keep customers informed, particularly as a one-to-many broadcasting medium. When you are in an operational situation where you are forcing those customers who need to speak to the agents in your contact centre to wait – for example complete a transaction such as rebooking their cancelled flight, or setting up a deferred mortgage payment arrangement – then keep those customers informed about your expected wait times. And promote new ways that they can get in touch through digital messaging.

Providing regular updates over social media, where messages are consistently applied across all channels – online, through the telephone IVR as well as being used across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram – will have a combined communications effect greater than the sum of the parts in managing expectations and changing customer behaviour

Page 9 | Business Continuity Playbook

Talk to us to see how you can set up your own on-demand gig crowd in less than 2 weeks https://www.limitlesstech.com/business-continuity/


Talk to us to see how you can set up your own on-demand gig crowd in less than 2 weeks https://www.limitlesstech.com/business-continuity/

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