Whenever bad weather hits, businesses can’t help but be affected. But for call centres, the impact of flooding is twice as bad.
Of course, you’ll need to cope with a general shortfall in staff attendance. According to data from the Environment Agency, in the wake of the 2012 floods, staff working days lost contributed to a cost to companies and local economies of £33 million.
But at the same time demands of your service will increase. If you’re an outbound call centre, now’s the time to reach people at home. If you’re an inbound call centre, now’s the time you can expect to be busy!
So how can you keep up with the challenges of flood days, even with fewer agents? Here are four essential tips.
1. Improve call centre agent efficiency
In an outgoing call centre, coping with flooding means maximising call volumes per agent. On average, call centre agents spend between 33 and 40 minutes calling every hour. The rest of their time is spent waiting for calls to come through or doing manual follow-up tasks like dispositioning or sending forms.
A hosted predictive dialler is a great way to maximise talk time. With Hostcomm’s predictive dialler, you can automate common tasks and eliminate waiting time, unlocking as much as 50 minutes talk time every hour.
2. The advantage of a multichannel contact centre
For inbound contact centres, improving efficiency can mean distribution across different types of contact. For example, offering high quality social media updates can be a great way to reduce the number of incoming calls you receive.
We offer a comprehensive multichannel contact centre package that lets you provide information to your customers in more ways, reducing the load on each.
3. Monitor and maintain call quality
It’s a bad situation if a third of your workforce can’t make it into the office. But it’s even worse if supervisors, team leaders and managers can’t be there to lead the agents that remain.
Another benefit of a hosted predictive dialler is a wallboard that’s accessible from anywhere. So even if you’re at home, you’ll be able to see queue lengths, call outcomes and other useful metrics through any web browser.
As a result, you can see how your team is doing in these difficult circumstances – and find opportunities to improve performance.
4. Act quickly with remote conferencing
Finally, coping with a flood day means acting fast. If you can respond at short notice, you can maintain performance – whatever the weather.
Hostcomm’s solutions let you set up ad-hoc conferences remotely, with automated notifications to every participant. That means you can arrange a meeting with your leadership team from home and talk as if you were in the same room.
So bad weather doesn't keep you from making good decisions.
Choose agile, flexible hosted telephony solutions
Our four tips for coping with flooding provide a simple yet effective way to keep your call centre efficient. But we all know how unpredictable the weather can be.
At Hostcomm, we let you prepare for bad weather in a scalable, flexible way that doesn’t cost you a fortune when you don’t need it.
Because our solutions are hosted, they can be instantly scaled up and down based on demand. So however your needs change over time, you can access an intelligent hosted telephony solutions, including a predictive dialler, without the capital expense or commitment.
