Uberization of Call Center Talents for Customer Success

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Single biggest challenge in the current call center model is the variation in the customer demand, where the supply of the service personnel (call center agents) is relatively fixed. If inbound call center traffic is less than the forecast, this results in higher cost per minute in customer calls. If the traffic is more than the forecast, then it results in lower service levels and frustrated customers. To make things even worse, both scenarios can happen in the same day.

Outsourcing the call center agent resources is not a solution either, since the same scenario applies to the outsourced call center model too. They can not easily expand and contract real-time and they often require minimum traffic guarantee from the businesses to break even.

The solution is the dynamic supply of the call center personnel which can track the inbound call center traffic real-time. When agent is not busy with the calls from one skill in a business, she should be able to handle calls from another skill for another business. With the larger talent pool, bigger swings in the demand can be managed much easily and cost per minute can be even lower. Businesses will only pay for the total number of minutes for the handle time and do not worry about agent occupancy, resource scheduling and forecasting.

Another benefit of this model is that it attracts higher profile human resource. Call center talents in this model will have the flexibility to work remotely and will be able to choose the working hours. These freelance call center agents will have the opportunity to double their earnings even before any performance incentives. High earner, freelance call center agents will have much bigger incentives to perform better. They will see call center agent occupation as a long-term career worth investing which offers better pay and work-life balance. That will improve the service quality of the call center agents and maximise customer satisfaction.

Uberization is a term often used to highlight the platform model where supply can dynamically track the variations of the demand. By using the network effects in the platform, we can achieve even better results; bigger the platform, better it can handle the variation in the customer demand. This model eventually helps to eliminate the concept of waiting in the call center queue.

Most important positive impact however, is making the human interaction more affordable by keeping the costs under control in this pay as you use model. Customers as long as they are humans, would always prefer to have human interactions rather than email, chat, bots or other indirect channels.

Yigit Zorlu
Yigit Zorlu has been working in the Customer Collaboration industry since 2002. He is the CEO of NoTime Inc. a remote modular workforce platform where businesses can find freelance talent to handle customer calls and pay per minute as they utilise them. https://notime.io

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