Contact centre specialist Opal is urging contact centre managers to consider the ‘hidden’ benefits of virtual contact centres which, flexibility and cost savings aside, can include a more contented team, greater brand affinity and even increased sales.
As virtual contact centres - allowing staff to work ‘on-demand’ from home or remote locations using their personal phones - continue to grow in popularity, Opal, together with a leading contact centre psychologist, has investigated the holistic benefits of implementing the technology and how this matches what customers demand from their contact centre experience.
The study examined the contact centre preferences of more than 1,000 consumers from across the UK, and almost half – 48% - of people surveyed said that they generally dislike using contact centres, demonstrating that the scope to improve the customer experience is huge. 47% of respondents also felt that speaking with unprofessional staff would make them feel intimidated during calls when consumers were asked to disclose personal, sensitive or financial information.
However to counter this, the vast majority of those surveyed - 75% - strongly agreed that speaking to a positive and happy operative would make them more likely to view a brand in a positive light and a quarter admitted that friendly contact centre staff would strongly influence their purchasing decisions and had previously persuaded them to sign up for new services.
Many industry experts believe that home working can help to foster positive, happy staff and as a result, increased productivity. John Wilson, Researcher at the Institute of Psychology at Sheffield University and author of The Contact Centre Training Handbook: A Complete Guide to Learning and Development in Contact Centres, said:
"Contact centre staff can suffer from stress in what is a high-pressured, often repetitive environment, but if home working is offered as part of a balanced approach, employees can be happier and often more productive as a result. In a target-driven industry where sales are based on phone communication, it makes sense to offer virtual working options that can directly influence people’s ability to be more positive and productive.”
The study was conducted to coincide with the launch of Opal’s new Contact Centre proposition that supports virtualised working; a highly flexible and scalable IP based contact centre solution based upon Avaya’s latest Aura* technology. The proposition complements Opal’s next generation network, which boasts the largest service provider IP backbone network in the UK.
Employing the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to interconnect user devices and main switching equipment, the location of users becomes extremely flexible with support for large and small office clusters, or remote individuals, while retaining a full set of management information and control.
Mike Matthews, Product Manager for VOIP, Systems and Mobile team at Opal, said: “For contact centre managers, upgrading your customer contact capability to include new facilities like virtual contact centres is an important customer service investment that can offer significant business benefits, including scalability, faster, more reliable call handling, as well as the ability to route calls through to separate external hubs at remote geographical locations. This effectively minimises caller waiting times and the likelihood of jammed lines.
“But more importantly, from a human resource perspective, next generation networking services offer huge opportunities for contact centres to boost their services, speeding up call handling processes as well as offering alternative working options for staff that ultimately result in happier customers. We would urge all contact centres to review their current systems to take a long-term view and upgrade their networks to really capitalise on our research and deliver the strongest caller experience possible.”