With the recent outbreak of CoVID-19, and the need to protect staff, many businesses whose employees can work from home have been forced to implement, often untested, home working plans in substantially reduced timelines.
Bierce Surveying was faced with this challenge, having to transition all office employees to home working as fast as possible, including the call handlers within the multi-channel contact centre. The Digi Desk product is a cloud-based solution which is accessed by the user through an internet browser. All the user/s needs are a laptop or desktop computer an internet telephone or soft phone, which runs on the la top or desktop computer and a reliable broadband connection.
Nicholas Ainger, Bierce Surveying’s Managing Director, commented: “ContactOne rapidly reacted, initially offering comprehensive advice on how to configure the home working environment and subsequently working with us to move all of our staff to home working. This included the back-office team who were just using telephone extensions and the call centre Digi Desk users. Considering we had no homeworkers or experience, it was surprising how quickly we adapted to this, knowing that we are protecting our workforce as well as continuing to operate a good quality and professional service. All our inbound callers do not know we are working from home, which is a strong testament to the technology and partnership we have with ContactOne. Furthermore, our contact centre supervisors can visually see, in real-time, exactly what’s happening and, if necessary, listen in to calls to help agents as required.”
The Digi Desk contact centre solution that Bierce Surveying uses is a cloud-based service that utilises VoIP technology; it has been designed to natively support both office environments and any type of agile or home working; all that is needed is a reliable broadband connection. Fortunately all of Bierce Surveying’s employees, like many others around the country, all had reliable broadband, so the process was as simple as the agent taking home their desktop PC, monitor (or laptop) and phone, and then setting them up at home. With this approach Agents and back-office staff alike continue to work in the same way, with the same equipment and software meaning that everyone was up and running within an hour of getting home. Some as quickly as 10 minutes. This approach ensured customer/caller user experience remains unchanged, with end customers unable to distinguish between home workers and office workers. It also ensured rapid deployment and access as neither Agents, Supervisors nor Back Office staff needed any re-training.
One of the major operational benefits the management team has is the management information (MI) available, which covers every aspect of customer interaction, agent performance and key performance indicators (KPI’s) for the business. This enabled the senior management to understand how the current situation was impacting the contact centre in real-time as it unfolded.
Supervisors were able to manage the agents effectively as the supervisor wall boards show, in real-time agent statuses, whilst remote call monitoring enabled supervisors to eavesdrop on calls and whisper, helping less experienced agents to handle the more challenging calls, a key support mechanism for home working agents. As there is no limit on the number of wallboards that can be used, Bierce Surveying were able to quickly configure additional wallboards to meet the evolving needs, such as real-time call volumes by partner.
“As some of our partners who were less prepared than ourselves decided to close their offices, we were able, with the help of ContactOne, to instantly create additional voice routes into our now home worker base and assist them in maintaining their customer facing presence”, Nicholas added, “this enabled us to continue to offer an exemplary service to both our partners and their customers.”
Bierce Surveying Ltd provides a range of services to support energy saving/monitoring initiatives, surveying, property marketing, risk assessments and certified quality audits. They do this through several partnerships and some of the fuel poverty outreach schemes are monitored and audited by the energy watchdog OFGEM. ContactOne and Bierce Surveying have been working together for over 18 months. Bierce Surveying uses ContactOne’s Digi Desk cloud based multi-media contact centre platform. It allows Bierce Surveying to seamlessly work with their different partners using branding optimised for that partner. At a glance, agents can see which partner is contacting them, what the customer call is in relation to and deal with this interaction in the most efficient way. A key benefit to agents is that they can also see when the customer has contacted Bierce Surveying in the past across all the implemented channels.
To find out more on how the multi-channel Digi Desk solution works or if you would just like some advice on your current technology set up or working practises please call the ContactOne team on 0330 880 4444.
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