Before the Covid-19 pandemic there was a common fear amongst customer service executives that if their agents worked from home then quality, productivity, and security would all be at risk. The pandemic demonstrated that none of the work from home disasters they expected need to be true.
It’s possible to deliver a robust customer service strategy for major brands with all the agents working from home. Look around – every single company managing contact centers is doing it right now because of Covid-19.
This has led to a dramatic increase in opportunities for GixCX. If you are going to design a customer service strategy that has all your agents working from home then why would you build your management processes to reflect how they worked inside an office? For example, 8-hour shifts and being paid for a shift regardless of productivity?
GigCX embraces the possibility to work anywhere, but it goes far beyond the office workers that have been sent home because of the pandemic. GigCX allows you far more flexibility over when people are working and for how long. You can schedule shifts that the agents then sign up for and this can be controlled down to the nearest half an hour. You can also focus on rewarding agents for each time they help a customer – pay them based on results, not time.
GigCX facilitates this change in approach, but I can sense that some executives are unsure about the gig economy in customer service because they feel that in-house agents must be better or more reliable.
I think this is just a change in approach, a mindset shift. What makes a great customer service agent? Usually it’s their ability to communicate and their knowledge of the products they are supporting. Once you can go national (or even international) with your recruitment then you can ensure that you select agents who love your brand and actively want to support your customers.
Agents recruited this way – to specifically work from home – are generally older than those working in a contact center. They have more experience of the products they are supporting and life in general. They are more likely to value the flexibility of GigCX and actively want to choose when they can work more hours and when they can take a day off. GigCX attrition is dramatically lower than that seen in contact centers because these agents want to work flexibly from home. They like their job.
So GigCX means you can access more experienced and knowledgable agents, but what about security, training and quality?
Our technology ensures that only known agents can login and access customer data. We believe that our systems are even more secure than most security systems deployed inside office environments. Many security breaches are inside jobs and which agents are a bigger threat – the ones who love the flexibility their job provides or the ones staring at a clock in a contact center?
GigCX agents are remotely trained for each new account they plan to work with and refresher training is applied as needed. Our training was always designed to be delivered remotely and is not just re-packaged slides from an earlier training course that used to be delivered in a contact center.
Quality is always monitored and because you are directly managing the agents using our system you have complete control over the metrics and how agents are managing your customers – there is no account manager or business process outsourcing company in the middle that needs to be managed.
At the end of the day one of the major advantages of building a GigCX solution is not just the increase in productivity and efficiency, but the fact that you are hiring agents who actively want to be working from home. They want the flexibility that GigCX offers them. They want to be supporting customers in brands they enjoy working with. They don’t quit at 100%+ attrition levels because these agents are building their work around their lifestyle – they want to do this.
Contrast this to the difficulties many contact centers have when engaging their employees. You can wear funny hats and decorate the office in bright colors, but if they are really just there for the pay check then don’t expect any loyalty and don’t expect unengaged agents to deliver a great customer experience.
GigCX is about more than just flexibility. It’s about finding people who really want to engage with your customers. Don’t fear GigCX agents – it’s highly likely that they will love your customers far more than any agent in a traditional contact center ever would
