Following a dramatically different period for customer service professionals around the world, new research by Enghouse highlights the successes and failures of this challenging time.
While for many people the start of 2021 felt depressingly similar to the year just departed, Jeremy Payne, Enghouse’s Group VP Marketing & Alliances, sees it as a watershed point for business — which is now looking to a sustainable future for customer service, instead of a crisis response.
A game of two halves
“Last year it was a case of, just give the agent a laptop and send them home, try to keep the business going — and most businesses did indeed get through it. But now in 2021, a more strategic approach is emerging, a road-map to a longer-term hybrid working future.”
Further research conducted by Enghouse Interactive in association with Contact Babel supports this and showed a dramatic shift of 98% towards the uptake of collaboration technologies, in particular Microsoft Teams.
But when read in conjunction with the Enghouse survey it’s clear that there’s still a gap, in the way that customer service teams feel connected with one another. The same tools we use to communicate with customers on their channels of choice can easily be deployed to create space for team connections and interactions, which shape culture and promote interaction, help to fill that need for spontaneous conversation, which will become even more important for long-term home-based working as kids and partners leave the call handler to work in peace.
Unstable internet and connectivity was the biggest issue highlighted in the survey, and this is one of the biggest lessons, about providing the right working environment for the long term. Payne said, “Most companies weren’t properly geared up for anything like this, they didn’t have the right contingency plans, or their systems in the cloud — never mind auditing their staff’s broadband situations. People were just told, go home and log in, do what you can.”
