What are the most common problems that every Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company and contact center has to manage? I know that every different manager will list them in a different order, but based on my own experience working in contact centers, here are the key challenges from my point of view:
- Attrition: the ongoing need to hire and train agents because you know that the contact center is never stable. A center with 500 agents might need to hire and train over 40 new people every month just to stand still.
- Managing CSAT: the constant need to keep customer satisfaction levels high.
- Managing ESAT: agents need to be engaged, yet they might not care at all for the insurance policies they are supporting. How do you constantly improve employee satisfaction when they might only be there for the cash?
- Technology Creep: new systems are added, new clients use different systems, and and it can end up like a spaghetti of systems where the agents can only make it all work by using cut and paste.
- Boosting Performance: the constant battle to keep improving performance.
- Constant Training And Reminders: agents forget details about products and services they may not be familiar with, but they need to support. How do they remember if they don’t really care?
- Concentration: keeping agents focused and performing consistently throughout their entire shift, not just at the start of the day.
- Peak demand periods: Typical advice in the industry suggests improving your forecasting, hiring more agents, and improving your training. This is all good general advice, but it will never be good enough if you face peak periods where demand for service increases several times – Black Friday weekend for example.
Meanwhile, contrast all of these problems with Gig CX. You don’t have an attrition problem because you are hiring people who love the brands they are supporting and this feeds directly into both CSAT and ESAT. You have all your systems in the cloud so they are more easily updated and improved. You don’t need to worry about performance and concentration because, once again, you have hired people who enjoy working with the brands they are supporting and they are not forced to work full-day shifts. If they want to just do an hour, that’s fine.
But most of all, the problem of how to manage peak periods is entirely different when using Gig CX because you have no constraints on how many agents you make available to help customers during these periods of peak demand. Your only constraint is the need to plan ahead so enough people are trained and ready to go.
For all these reasons I believe there is an enormous opportunity for existing BPO companies to partner with Gig CX providers, such as LiveXchange. Imagine the ability to build a flexible group of Gig CX agents into your delivery model so you can always ramp up when needed – and down again immediately. These agents don’t have a problem concentrating and don’t need close supervision or performance-boosting management. They will choose to work with the brands they like working with.
BPO and contact center specialists have always struggled with peaks, but as I listed, there are many other ongoing issues they all need to manage. Finding a Gig CX partner could help resolve many of these challenges – and fast.
What do you think? Let’s keep the #GigCX conversation going. Please drop me a line with your perspective. Follow LiveXchange on LinkedIn to make sure you don’t miss our regular commentary on how Gig CX is changing the CX industry.