What happens when your contact center doesn’t have enough trained professionals ready to handle your customers? Those customers end up waiting a long time for their call to be handled – or they just give up. Customer satisfaction drops into the basement.
But what about the opposite scenario – your contact center is overstaffed so you never have a problem with long wait times. That’s great for improving the customer experience, but at what cost? Can you really afford to build so much slack into the system that for large parts of the day your agents are just waiting for customers to call?
Neither solution is ideal, but why do most contact centers struggle with this problem? Because the agents are usually scheduled to work 8-hour continuous shifts. It’s convenient for an agent that may have to commute to a contact center to work, but it is unlikely to really match up with what might be required by the customers. Even when those agents are asked to work from home, because of the Covid-19 pandemic, none of those companies has fundamentally changed how they work. If the calls don’t come in, then they are idle.
With GigCX there are no physical contact centers. Nobody has to commute to work. You tell the system how many shifts you need – down to the nearest 30 minutes – and agents sign up for those shifts. You pay them only when they answer a customer call. You can pay only for what is delivered, not for agents sitting idle waiting for customers.
Think about the financial implications:
- You are not paying for expensive contact center buildings
- You are not paying for thousands of computers at contact center desks
- You are not paying for people to be idle – they only work with needed and they are only paid when they deliver for your customers
Most of us already understand and appreciate the differences between fixed and variable business costs. Think about Microsoft as a good example. In the past we had to buy a license for each individual copy of Word and Excel in the Office business tools suite. It didn’t matter if you had desks at work with the software installed, but nobody using it, you still paid for that software. Now you just get users to login and use cloud-based business tools on Microsoft 365 – there is zero waste because only the active users pay and you don’t need to pay anything upfront.
If you hire a contact center company to manage your customer service then obviously their price includes all those buildings and the IT infrastructure – you are paying upfront for all of that and what if you don’t need it?
The solution for many American companies has been to offshore their customer service function. Moving your customer service in Mexico can easily cut costs by 30% and to the Philippines even more. But what if you could cut all that infrastructure out of your customer service cost and pay American agents a better rate than they get from contact centers – and still reduce your own customer service budget? That has to be interesting, especially as the pandemic means that a closer-to-home, but distributed, business model is far more resilient than a contact center.
We have a number of different models where we can manage the virtual contact center or you can take over everything yourself, just using our platform. You can even run a simulation to predict the cost savings based on your typical volumes – take a look at our website for some ideas now and feel free to just ask me for more information directly on LinkedIn.