When designing contact centers, some level of overhead should always be built in. It might be supporting a 120% estimated peak for incoming contacts, or the ability to rapidly add on 10–15% more representatives. But, very few organizations have built their contact centers to address the volume they see now from consumers. In this unprecedented time of emergency, contact center operations are being pushed well beyond any anticipated capability.
Whether it is consumers trying to understand if their money is protected by FDIC or scared account holders trying to get trades in to minimize their losses against the downturn in the market, they are flooding contact centers with questions.
For more traditional contact center systems, adapting to this challenge can mean high costs, from adding licenses to your contract, rush configuration changes, and HOPE you don’t overload your existing infrastructure.
But the good news is there are solutions and resources available to you:
What This Could Mean For You
- On-Demand Cloud Contact Center: As clients surge in and out of the market, adding capacity for traders to execute trades or just talk to jittery clients for negligible infrastructure costs could address a lot of customer concerns. Creating a standby contact center, powered by Amazon Connect, could rapidly scale to the necessary capacity (agents, calls) and revert to a dormant, low-cost environment when not in use.
- Remote Agent Workspace: With the need to have only people with specific registrations preforming certain tasks and the government mandating only a certain percentage of the workforce can be on site, ensuring remote workers can support consumers is crucial. We can deliver a remote agent experience, with a complete Windows-based desktop and call center powered by Amazon Connect + Amazon Workspace.
- Call Triage & Deflection: The best way to handle spikes in volume and minimize wait time is to proactively and automatically answer the most common questions. Using natural language processing (NLP), the AI model of Amazon Lex can learn how to respond to most frequently asked questions (FAQs) and quickly give customers the information they are looking for. For more complex questions or requests, calls can be routed through your regular contact flows.
- Call Center Flow and Optimization: Often, after a call center goes live, it is rarely reviewed to increase efficiency, so there can be inefficiencies throughout your current process. We can provide situational consulting designed to identify bottlenecks by reviewing existing call flows (e.g., volume, “dead ends,” success rates, transfer to agents), and redesign them to meet your demands and minimize the impact on customer satisfaction.
- Legacy IVR Overlay: If, as a financial services provider, the bulk of the surge is focused on executing trades, we can front-end an existing IVR with a call flow designed to address critical customer needs more efficiently, while diverting all other interactions to the legacy solution, maintaining data push/pull.
Key Takeaways
- This is an unprecedented situation, but your consumers still need excellent service.
- This is a time when your staff needs more flexible and creative support.
- There are many quick ways to address the stress your systems and staff stress have.
Many of these solutions can be implemented within days and have an immediate impact on your ability to serve your consumers and support your staff, something that is of paramount importance in this difficult and challenging time.
