Hybrid work is where office life meets your home comfort zone, making sure you get the best of both worlds.  

Far from being merely a band-aid solution during challenging times, combining remote work with regular office environments is carving its path as an enduring setup beneficial to everyone involved. Shifting towards flexible working spots is flipping the script on traditional office life and, it’s actually boosting how we serve up happiness to customers.

Happier Employees, Thriving Customers 

The formula is simple but profoundly effective: happier employees lead to happier customers. When employees are granted the flexibility to choose their work environment—be it from the comfort of their home or in a dynamic, shared office space—they report higher levels of job satisfaction and engagement.

Happier workers naturally lead to happier interactions with the folks they help, making every exchange with the company a bit more cheerful and upbeat. And not only do happy employees make happy customers, an Oxford University study found that employees are 13% more productive when they’re happy. Brands like Zappos and Amazon are really nailing it with their blend of office and remote customer service.

The Role of Flexible Workspaces 

Flexible workspaces are at the heart of the hybrid work model. Here, you can choose your workspace based on today’s task list or mood – whatever feels right to you. Gone are the days when everyone was expected to fit into the same office setup. Nowadays, flexible workspaces are stepping up, offering something for every kind of worker out there. You’ll find everything from hushed spaces perfect for zoning out and focusing hard, to lively spots that boost creativity and get the team vibing together.

Being versatile pays off twice over. Think of it as setting up a space where employees can truly shine because the space around them just gets what they need. What’s also great is how much more empowered everyone feels. When companies let their team members choose their own work setup, it’s not just about flexibility. It plants seeds of trust and respect which grow into stronger relationships with customers.

Flexibility Meets Efficiency 

In a hybrid model, the physical distance created by remote work is bridged by digital connectivity, ensuring that collaboration and communication remain uninterrupted, regardless of location.

Thanks to the flexibility that comes with working beyond the typical office clock, businesses are now able to welcome customers at pretty much any hour – perfect for serving folks in various time zones or with unique schedules.

Finding the right balance between office and remote work isn’t just good for morale – it turns out it’s also good for customer happiness. It looks like we’re on track to hit new heights of serving customers well thanks to satisfied employees lighting the way.

Embrace analytics to boost your wellbeing strategy. That’s the message from Ross Daniels at Calabrio. Here, he takes a closer look and gives 3 reasons why you can’t afford to ignore the latest advancements in technologies designed for modern workforce optimisation and engagement.

 In our last blog, we asked the question ‘what does wellbeing really mean?’ and came to the conclusion that the major barrier to wellbeing – stress – affects everyone in the contact centre and beyond. The major stress triggers of hybrid working practices, increased customer demand and a fast-changing competitive landscape are taking their toll as people adapt to a new world of work.  We shared several coping strategies and introduced the importance of data in promoting wellbeing across the whole organisation.

In this second blog of the series, we explore why technologies that humanize experiences through the likes of AI-infused analytics and intelligent automation, such as modern Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) solutions, are the next step towards developing a robust wellbeing strategy.

 3 ways to de-stress the workforce

Today’s WEM solutions offer the perfect de-stressing tool for agents, operational supervisors and senior managers. Use them to enhance staff engagement, optimise contact centre performance and boost profitability:

1. Your day, your way – agent stress is a powder keg just waiting to explode.  Agents cite managing their work/life balance as the biggest stress factor (41%) followed closely by ‘complex customer issues’ (36%) and ‘too many calls’ (34%). When agents take control of their working environment, their mood lifts, they feel energised and stress levels fall.  Bring calm to chaos by introducing self-scheduling tools so your agents can move lunches, catch-up with colleagues and make time for new learning as customer demands or domestic events occur throughout the day.  Equally, give them the chance to add extra working time to their coming week if they need to earn overtime. Self-scheduling gives agents independence and access to instant changes, yet approvals can be automated based on staffing-need parameters.

Why not add personalised dashboards to the mix so your agents can track their own performance to remain focused and motivated?  This is a particular bonus when the majority of people are working remotely.

2. Superstar managers with a listening ear – being a supervisor today is hard work.  They are expected to excel operationally and be excellent people managers but often lack the data and tools to manage the fast-changing dynamics of their contact centre effectively. While many organisations are busy leveraging analytics to uncover the voice of the customer, the same cannot be said when it comes to truly understanding agents.  Roughly half (48%) of contact centre managers report they are not doing enough to focus analytics tools on their teams and cite training opportunities (37%), employee satisfaction (33%) and productivity (33%) as the top missing insights.

Using analytics for personalized performance coaching has been made easier by the introduction of AI enabled recording and tracking of 100% interactions and agent performance metrics. This data can facilitate coaching conversations, while identifying individual or team skill gaps to allow managers to provide better training and support to agents who need it most. Data-driven performance coaching increases agent confidence, satisfaction and productivity while easing operations and a manager’s path to achieve these results.

3. Reap the rewards of a connected enterprise – to grow, organisations need a 360-degree view of their data. Yet, according to Harvard Business Review, while 83% of companies stress the importance of turning data into actionable insight, only 22% of senior executives feel their company is successful at doing this. How can business leaders possibly make informed decisions and improve profits if they have no clear visibility of what is happening across their organisation?

Successful leaders recognise the importance of connectedness in every sense of the word – IT systems, information, ways of working and thinking.  It’s an approach that overcomes the harmful silos that often get in the way of becoming a connected enterprise, where all parts of the organisation work together to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

The foundation of a successful customer-centric organisation lies with positioning the contact centre at the heart of the business intelligence platform.  Sharing valuable data on the real thoughts and feelings of customers depends on seamless integration with other departments using technology such as Calabrio’s enterprise customer experience intelligence (CXI).  Organisations benefit from becoming more connected to their customers and their employees, and pervading stress just melts away.  

In our next blog, we delve deeper into the concept of wellbeing and how it can be used to drive personal and organisational growth.  For more ideas and inspiration on identifying stress triggers, process improvement checklists and tech buyer guides for managing wellbeing across the entire workforce download Calabrio’s Workforce Wellbeing Recovery Toolkit.

About the Author

Ross Daniels is Chief Marketing Officer at Calabrio

Calabrio is the customer experience intelligence company that empowers organisations to enrich human interactions. The scalability of our cloud platform allows for quick deployment of remote work models—and it gives our customers precise control over both operating costs and customer satisfaction levels. Our AI-driven analytics tools make it easy for contact centres to uncover customer sentiment and share compelling insights with other parts of the organisation. Customers choose Calabrio because we understand their needs and provide a best-in-class experience, from implementation to ongoing support. Find more at calabrio.com/ and follow @Calabrio on Twitter.

Benedict Bleimschein, COO and Vice President of Customer Success at Mindbreeze looks at the challenges for customer service employees working in a hybrid workplace and suggests new tools that can help them.

One size does not fit all when it comes to customer service strategies. The most successful companies will be those that adapt to and appropriately manage the hybrid workforce that is becoming the new standard among businesses today.

Companies are embracing flexible work arrangements as a means to recruit and retain employees. However, many companies are encountering challenges in managing and supervising a hybrid workforce and keeping customer service departments staffed and supported. Real operational advantages are realized when managing a hybrid team by taking a more custom and sophisticated approach than in the past.

Managing Customer Service in a Hybrid Workforce

Today, companies need to be as strategic with their approach to hiring, retaining, and promoting employees as they are with their overall strategy for serving customers. Creating the right culture and training will prove to be the most effective and sustainable way to attract and retain a diverse and talented team — both in their job title and in their title structure.

Sticking with an outdated, one-size-fits-all curriculum can be challenging, especially as companies navigate the challenges of returning to the office, whether full-time or part-time. It is best for employee retention to deploy a hybrid program that covers the needs of both current and transitioning employees. This type of sustainable model will allow for flexibility in both hiring and training representatives.

If you’re running a business with a hybrid workforce, you’re likely facing unique challenges keeping your customer service department staffed and supported.

For example, ticket support professionals or customer service hotline staff are often desperately looking for the relevant contextual information to help customers at a moment’s notice, which can be challenging. Finding these crucial pieces of information quickly and efficiently will largely dictate your team’s success. The secret to success in accessing and managing company data is in enabling holistic views of data for your customer service team.

What you Need to Know About Holistic Views of Data for Your Customer Service Team

Holistic views of customer data and the analysis of this information from multiple sources help uncover trends, answer questions, and provide actionable insights. Having a holistic view of data and a strategy for data-driven decision-making will help prevent your customer service department from falling behind within your respective competitive market.

Enabling holistic views entails bringing together structured and unstructured data to search for otherwise siloed data from different departments. The best way to do this is to implement an enterprise-level intelligent search solution that is AI-driven and can provide relevant insights for your customer service team. This is critical to consider when adopting a hybrid customer service strategy to maximize employee engagement and retention and ensure success with your company’s hybrid policies and practices.

Customer service professionals need a platform to make data-driven decisions. They need to quickly identify where silos of data intersect to make frequent predictions of customer behaviors for high-event or high-value interactions. This process requires support and updates from an AI-driven search platform powered by large data sets and human data from internal services and training.

Most customer service teams have several tools at their disposal, but no single system puts all that data together and helps them make sense of it. This problem, however, is only going to intensify with the added circumstances of the new hybrid workforce. That’s why it’s crucial to ensure that everyone in your team has access to the right tools and information so that they can respond efficiently and effectively as soon as there’s an issue. Enabling your team to effectively work with large amounts of data is a vital aspect of ramping up your hybrid workforce for the future.

About the Author

As COO and Vice President Customer Success at Mindbreeze, Benedict Bleimschein is dedicated to boosting team collaboration. His expertise in digital technologies and organizational development makes him the go-to expert when it comes to delivering cutting-edge projects that benefit both Mindbreeze’s internal and customers‘ organizational structures.