How to Cope With an Influx in Your Customer Interactions

Stephen Ball of Aspect Software shares his advice for better handling seasonal rises in contact volumes.

Last weekend marked another bank holiday in the UK, and with the warmer months settling in, you will have undoubtedly began to experience influxes in customers, both physically and online, as millions of people started to switch off from work and become more focused on leisure activities.

So how can you ensure you’re prepared and provide a consistent service when you experience this uplift?

Customer Engagement Technology

Firstly, it’s essential that contact centres have the right tools in place to enable staff to be able to effectively cope with higher demand while also maintaining a high level of service.

This means ensuring the customer experience function is responsive to the demands of an increasingly online and mobile-focused generation.

Automation and self-service options provide excellent support here, allowing simple customer queries to be dealt with efficiently, without the need for human interaction, leaving more complicated issues for the customer service agent.

It’s also important to give customers the freedom to choose how they interact with you, as meeting their requirements will immediately keep them more engaged. This means not only providing a range of channels, but also having an omnichannel strategy so that those channels communicate seamlessly with one another.

Workforce Optimisation Technology

Secondly, it’s crucial that employee engagement remains high during these periods and ensuring staff scheduling is forecast correctly and fairly are both important considerations.

Shift planning may become more difficult as people take annual leave, and many staff might be looking to spend time with their families, meaning an effective cloud-based shift scheduling tool is beneficial.

This is where cloud-based workforce management (WFM) software really comes to the fore as it eases the challenges attached to accurately planning and forecasting staff requirements, including across all customer-facing inbound, outbound and back-office resources.

If implemented in the right way, WFM can be transformational in the way the schedules of employees are governed, and how future workloads are planned.

By getting a better handle on this crucial aspect of the business, you can reach a point where worker morale remains high due to their shift schedules being accurately planned and communicated.

With both the best of breed customer engagement technologies and workforce optimisation technologies, your contact centre has a winning formula for providing a consistently high customer experience, regardless of sharp influxes in demand or lower staffing levels.