Contact center staffing and work-from-home (WFH) topics led the blog reading list in April, indicating that centers may soon be ramping up for the post-COVID era. Our top posts share insights and advice on the current challenges of the WFH workforce, as well as trends and issues that will impact contact center recruiting and staffing strategies.
Are There Better Ways to Staff the Contact Center?
Executives regularly ask contact center leaders to explore new operational paradigms that could benefit their organizations. Some of these ideas come from things they hear from peers or vendors. Others result from their own research or exposure to analyst perspectives that speak to innovation and disruptive change.
How to Foster Diversity & Inclusion in the Contact Center
Customers and employees increasingly want to support brands that are racially and ethnically diverse. As more consumers and workers hold businesses accountable for creating diversity in society and the workplace, leaders are looking to expand their D&I efforts from an executive checkbox exercise to tangible actions to promote diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
Recruiting for the Contact Center of the Future
For more than a decade, a push toward virtual contact centers with work-from-home (WFH) agents has been moderately successful. However, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated that trend at lightning speed as contact centers around the world were shut down to comply with stay-at-home orders and forced to enable associates to work remotely almost overnight. Now, as many countries begin to open up with social distancing protocols and best practices in place, it’s becoming clear that the model of hundreds of associates sitting side-by-side in an enclosed building isn’t going to be reality for a long time.
Moving Contact Center Agents Home for the Long-Term
2020 was quite a year for the contact center industry. Most contact centers have had to learn quickly how to move their agents home and manage a contact center operation remotely. If you are like many, you may be asking yourself, what now? As an organization, you’ll be making many critical decisions in the coming months—deciding whether to remain a work-at-home operation, bring your agents back on-site, or run a hybrid center. If you are considering a long-term work-at-home model, making changes will be inevitable.
Davy Crockett, Analytics and the New Frontier
I wasn’t planning on ever sharing this information with anyone, but we’re all friends here. Right? According to my parents, when I was a little boy, I would start to cry anytime I heard the song, “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.” It didn’t have to be on TV or on the radio to have this effect. Even if my mother started humming the first few bars of the song I would, according to her, start sobbing.
