Snowed in, but still keeping the customers happy

Why homeworking makes even more sense during extreme weather conditions

I’m sitting at my desk, there’s eight inches of snow outside already and the weather forecast says it’s going to keep snowing for the rest of the day. Realistically travelling to work today would be stupid, however – like many UK employees – I’ve got my work laptop with me, I’ve got broadband at home and a mobile, so I can work pretty much as normal.

That’s not the case for most of the UK’s 1.2 million contact centre workers, who now represent almost five percent of the country’s workforce. According to Sabio’s ‘Voice of the Contact Centre Agent’ research, nearly two thirds of the UK’s agents either drive to work or share a lift with a friend, and when they get to work it’s always difficult for them to find parking.

That’s why this week we’re seeing a lot of empty agent desks across the country’s call centres – and that translates directly into longer call queues, and real pressures on customer service quality and performance.

While the Federation of Small Businesses has been quick to put a cost on this week’s winter weather disruption, Ł3.5 billion at the last time of asking, the reality is that many of the country’s emergency services – organisations such as the AA and Homeserve for example – already have continuity plans in place, with some now including a ‘homeworking’ element that connects callers through to a growing number of contact centre agents who work from home.

Initially targeted as a contact centre productivity measure – with organisations targeting productivity gains of between 10 and 20 percent through the use of flexible working and split shifts for example – homeworking can also play a key role in an organisation’s business continuity strategy. Traditional DR (disaster recovery) approaches are based on the presumption that if a contact centre can’t function, then its operations and agents need to move to alternative premises. In extreme weather, however, this wouldn’t do much good.

Homeworking offers a potential solution, allowing centres to keep on operating, and providing additional resource and what can be an organisation’s busiest period in terms of customer contact. Adverse conditions create the events which typically generate calls to motoring organisations, utilities or emergency services, and that will continue for a few days as the snow thaws to create further challenges for these organisations.

Forecasters may predict that this week’s weather will only happen every 20 years, last summer we had floods, and we are experiencing extreme weather in UK more frequently now than ever before. I believe that it’s important for customer contact operations to take full advantage of the technologies and solutions that can help alleviate pressure in their contact centres. This is potentially a lot simpler than you think, with the thin-client distribution of existing contact centre applications running at less than Ł1,000 per agent. In normal conditions, contact centres can achieve payback in less than a month – in adverse weather conditions, the benefits are even stronger.

Organisations should also look at how they can help customers to help themselves. Self-service and automation techniques have a huge role to play, particularly for utilities who can use IVR techniques to communicate service messages to customers, even offering outbound communications in extreme circumstances, or to give customers a clear indication of service delays and their likely outcome.

With an estimated one-in-five workers staying at home because of weather-related or childcare problems, we really can’t afford to let our customer service operations grind to a halt any longer – particularly in today’s economic climate. Rather than just accepting this as an unfortunate winter event, however, we believe organisations should be taking immediate steps to make sure they’re better prepared next time.

Stuart Dorman
Principle Solutions Consultant
Sabio