One of the most encouraging aspects of the COVID-19 crisis is that BPOs and CX providers are bending over backward to protect their teams.
Whether they’re offering people the option to work from home, reducing in-center capacity to comply with social distancing rules, or implementing hand sanitizing stations and employee health checks, there’s no doubt that the industry is working hard to ensure the safety of their workforce.
While the industry’s dedication to COVID-19 safeguards is both admirable and necessary, brands should still be questioning whether these measures are sustainable for the long term. Are BPOs going back to brick-and-mortar too early, and what impact will this disruption have on employees and customers?
After months of uncertainty, many BPOs and their partner brands are desperate to reopen brick-and-mortar operations. However, even with social distancing and safety measures in place, all it takes is one positive case to reignite the spread of the virus, leading to another office shutdown, another bout of absences, another fumbled migration to work-at-home, and another psychological trauma for the team.
From our perspective, the push to return employees to the contact center so soon is quite frankly short-sighted. Any fallout from the associated risks will be detrimental to brand reputation, employee motivation, and, by extension, customer experience.
How do we know that? It’s simple: when people become Ambassadors at Activus Connect they never face those risks, so our team has been delivering enhanced CX throughout this entire crisis. During the pandemic—and long before it—we’ve never had any need to implement safety measures, no brick-and-mortar centers to worry about, and no negative impact on our Ambassadors or customers as a result of the pandemic’s restrictions.
One of the many benefits of the SmartVirtual™ model is that Ambassadors are never in harm’s way or exposed to environments that could be adverse to their health. By working from home, our Ambassadors never have to compromise on any potential health risks, and they know that we will always care for them to the best of our abilities. That feeling of security is part of what makes our Ambassador experience so great, which filters directly into our CX.
By extension, this commitment to our Ambassadors greatly impacts our partnerships, particularly with the brands that we support. When brands contract with Activus Connect, they know that we will never expect Ambassadors to pick and choose between their health or their career, which is essentially what they have to do when forced back to brick-and-mortar.
The pure-play SmartVirtual™ model is the most sustainable, health-conscious choice for brands that don’t want to risk the health and safety of their CX teams. Why stay awake at night worrying if you’re procuring services from a company that forces people to work in dangerous conditions? Not only that, can your brand survive the potential reputational damage of a contact center outbreak?
Part of the reason brands partner with CX service providers is to boost their reputation and increase their overall customer satisfaction. As a pure-play, work-at-home, SmartVirtual™ CX provider, we’ve seen for many years how great Ambassador experience is effectively the answer to improved customer experience.
So how do you enhance CX? By protecting your teams and keeping them safe in a SmartVirtual™ environment. Like it or not, the alternative is ongoing risk and uncertainty.
Looking beyond Coronavirus, whatever game-changing disruption the industry faces next will be devastating for employees, damaging their motivation and negatively impacting CX, every time.
As we head into Q3, brands need to face the harsh reality that their BPO and CX providers will continue to face challenges, which means implementing a robust business continuity strategy that ensures your CX campaigns can withstand any other disaster that gets thrown at them.
When brands partner with Activus they will never need to worry about geographic redundancy, reputational damage, or the health and safety of their teams because all our Ambassadors work from home in a safe and secure environment, rather than the single point of failure that a physical contact center represents.
If that’s not good for business continuity, I don’t know what is.