COVID-19 and the Contact Center Cloud Imperative

The onset of the COVID-19 virus, also known as the Coronavirus, has impacted the contact center in a way never before experienced in the nearly 50-year history of the industry.  Business as usual has been disrupted in ways not thought possible since the “Great Recession” of 2008, yet contact centers are still being tasked with maintaining operational best practices and optimizing the customer experience under extremely difficult circumstances.

Latest guidance from the U.S. government’s Center for Disease Control (CDC) has recommended social distancing of no less than six feet between people and having no more than ten people together in the same space.  In the contact center, where agents and supervisors typically work in close confines, it is nearly impossible to comply with these CDC recommendations.  Contact centers are faced with the choice of shuttering operations or finding alternative work circumstances for agents and supervisors.

The obvious solution to this dilemma is to allow agents and supervisors to work from home and the most expeditious way to accomplish this is to deliver the technologies necessary for agents and supervisors to perform their jobs through cloud-based solutions.  The on-premises solutions that most contact centers have are not able to deliver the functionality required. 

Buildings are rapidly being closed in order to stop the spread of the virus, and those businesses that are open are not allowing outside visitors into the building.  Beyond that, the weeks or months it typically takes to integrate and implement new premises technologies would be beyond the scope of acceptability given the immediacy of the COVID crisis.

The contact center industry has been gradually moving toward cloud adoption, as illustrated in the following graphs.  The data in these graphs are sourced from the results of the 2020 survey of contact center professionals conducted by Saddletree Research in conjunction with the not-for-profit National Association of Call Centers (NACC). The data is statistically valid at a 95 percent confidence level and a margin of error of 3.8 percent.

As the data illustrates, about 40 percent of the market has their call routing in the cloud in 2020 and approximately 48 percent has one or more core applications, such as WFM, IVR, CTI, etc., in the cloud.  These are the contact centers that have the advantage in terms of being able to react quickly to the current COVID disruption and rapidly transition their brick-and-mortar workforce to an at-home workforce in a short period of time.  A robust cloud-based solution should be able to accomplish this transition in 48 hours or less.

Your expectations of the tools available within the cloud solution for your at-home workforce should be the same as what you have when your agents are in the office.  This includes compliance and quality management, performance management, analytics, and automation.  The features and functionality of these cloud-based tools should be identical to their on-premises counterparts in features, functionality, and the ability to monitor agent and team performance.  No adjustments or special considerations should be necessary when managing an at-home workforce.  

For premises contact centers that must make this rapid transition to the cloud, be assured that agents will have access to all the same tools they rely on in their daily work.  Everything available on legacy on-premises technology is deliverable through the cloud.  Beyond that, cloud omnichannel capabilities will enable the transfer of customer contacts between channels.  Voice inquiries could, for example, be answered through digital channels in order to more evenly distribute and respond to customer contacts.  This could be a crucial capability in the weeks ahead as voice channels are overloaded with customer inquiries and requests for assistance.

For those contact center executives who have been hesitant to move to the cloud for any reason, the time for indecision and hesitation is over.  It is imperative that contact centers function from the cloud now or face consequences such as the loss of customers and, quite possibly, the loss of the business in this highly uncertain time.

Make no mistake - the only way for contact centers to maintain business continuity during this unprecedented global crisis is to transition to an at-home workforce, and the only way to accomplish this transition in a short, efficient and acceptable period of time is via the contact center in the cloud.  Expeditious action in the face of the COVID pandemic will save your customers, save your business, and save your company’s reputation.  To act now is critically important.     

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