Expanding a business internationally can be an exciting endeavor, but it also comes with a unique set of challenges.

One of the most critical aspects to consider when venturing into new markets is ensuring compliance with local employment laws and regulations. This is where an employer of record services can play a vital role. In this article, we will explore the significance of an EOR in international expansion and highlight key considerations for businesses.

What is an Employer of Record?

An Employer of Record is a third-party entity that serves as the legal employer for a company’s employees. The EOR takes care of various employment-related responsibilities, including payroll, benefits administration, tax compliance, and HR management. By partnering with an EOR, businesses can navigate the complexities of local labor laws and focus on their core operations.

Ensuring Compliance with Local Employment Laws

One of the primary reasons for engaging an EOR is to ensure compliance with local employment laws. Each country has its own unique set of regulations governing employment, including minimum wages, working hours, leave entitlements, and termination procedures. Failing to comply with these laws can result in severe penalties and damage to a company’s reputation. An EOR stays up-to-date with local labor laws, ensuring that the company remains in compliance and avoids legal risks.

Navigating Payroll and Benefits Administration

Managing payroll and benefits across international borders can be a daunting task. Each country has its own tax requirements, social security contributions, and benefit schemes. An EOR takes care of these complexities by managing payroll processing, tax withholdings, and benefits administration. This relieves businesses from the burden of understanding and implementing complex payroll and benefits systems in multiple countries.

Mitigating HR and Administrative Burden

Establishing a local presence in a new country involves various HR and administrative tasks. These can include employment contracts, onboarding, performance management, and employee terminations. An EOR takes care of these responsibilities on behalf of the company, ensuring smooth operations and consistent HR practices across different markets. This allows businesses to focus on their core objectives without being overwhelmed by administrative tasks.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the role of an Employer of Record in international expansion cannot be overstated. From ensuring compliance with local employment laws to managing payroll, benefits, and administrative tasks, an EOR simplifies the complexities of expanding into new markets. By partnering with an EOR, businesses can focus on their growth strategies while leaving the legal and administrative aspects to the experts.

If the festive season left your frontline staff frazzled, now is the time to give them a welcome energy boost. Magnus Geverts shares his top tips for beating agent burnout—and the competition—in 2023.

Despite the cost-of-living crisis, research from Statista predicted that retail sales during the holidays were expected to reach more than £82 billion in the UK, the busiest shopping period of the year when customer queries typically increase dramatically. Great news for businesses that rely on the festive season to tide them over during the leaner months but extremely stressful for agents in contact centres. 2023 has arrived and the same tough economic challenges prevail, requiring urgent remedies to beat agent burnout and restore the contact centre to full health for a profitable New Year.

Your 5-step Detox Programme Starts Here

The New Year is the perfect time to turn realistic health intentions into reality. Blend strategies for enhanced emotional wellbeing with the latest agent-empowering technology to ensure frontline staff are feeling fit and healthy. Here are our top tips:

1. Get the foundations right—start by tackling the major stress triggers in your contact centre when the calls flood in from customers wanting to return or exchange their gifts. Don’t know what they are? If you don’t have automated analytics tools then simply ask agents directly—they will welcome the opportunity to be involved and asking shows you care and value their input. Next, rethink flexibility—what does it mean for your agents in 2023? Could experimenting with different scheduling techniques be effective? Remember to build mandatory rest time into schedules so agents can recharge their batteries. Managers might also consider developing a special DIY de-stressor kit, full of practical tips to reduce stress levels, whatever the season.

2. Build a team of brand guardians—as consumers continue to tighten their belts, competition is fiercer than ever and contact centres need to engage more intimately with customers to influence brand perception, win sales and build longer-term loyalty. Encourage agents to perfect a compelling storyboard that makes your product or service offering stand out from the crowd. Inspire and motivate team members through gamification, offering rewards to those who share their successes and learning with others. A quick Zoom call at the beginning of the day or an online video that can be watched at leisure is all it takes. This gives everyone the chance to embrace their new role as brand guardians while customers will pick up on their positive energy and enthusiasm.

3. Focus on soft skills—today’s brand guardians require a broader skillset because today’s customers want efficient service with the human touch.  Reassess agent training programmes to make sure they are ready for the year ahead. Blend traditional hard skills such as speedy resolution of customer problems and product knowledge with softer skills. Focus on the top five behaviours that are the hallmarks of good customer conversations: empathy, helpfulness, adaptability, active listening and patience. To minimise stress, empower agents with practical coping mechanisms for dealing with frustrated customers. For example, rather than over-use the word ‘sorry’ to pause a conversation or fill voids, encourage frontline staff to show genuine empathy with an opening response such as, “I know late deliveries are not acceptable and very frustrating for you”. Closing the conversation with a positive resolution of, “let’s see how we can put this right,” is a simple way to keep customers on your side while boosting agent confidence.

4. Introduce ‘lifestyle’ scheduling—and make it an intrinsic part of your wellbeing strategy to beat agent burnout. Self-service automation allows agents to build and edit their own schedules around their life rather than the other way round, in real-time, using their mobile devices. This new form of ‘lifestyle scheduling’ is particularly beneficial to hybrid working when domestic chores and work duties naturally heighten stress levels. Moreover, giving agents greater control over their work-from-home (WFH) regime will leave your brand guardians energised to deliver exceptional customer experience (CX).

5. Analytics are the way forward, inside and out— these modern-day miracle-workers capture and analyse data from within the contact centre and beyond, converting data into valuable business intelligence that can be used to enhance the agent and customer experience. Consider deploying Voice of the Employee (VoE) analytics to capture how agents are feeling to identify those who are struggling and need extra support. Next, boost agent confidence to deliver stellar customer experiences by introducing Voice of the Customer (VoC) analytics. These clever tools release intelligent insights that give frontline staff a complete understanding of their end-to-end interactions including mood on every step of the customer journey. Meanwhile, they help supervisors uncover potential knowledge and skills gaps to refine and strengthen agent coaching and training. It’s a winning combination that allows the whole contact centre to flourish as brand guardians and make 2023 your best year ever.

For more ideas on how to beat agent burnout and deliver an outstanding customer experience, download Calabrio’s Workforce Wellbeing Toolkit or visit www.calabrio.com.

About the Author

Magnus Geverts is VP Product Marketing at Calabrio.

Calabrio is a trusted ally to leading brands. The digital foundation of customer-centric contact centres, Calabrio helps enrich and interpret human interactions, empowering the contact centre as a brand guardian.

We maximise agent performance, exceed customer expectations, and boost workforce efficiency using connected data, AI-fuelled analytics, automated workforce management and personalised coaching.

Only Calabrio ONE unites workforce optimisation (WFO), agent engagement and business intelligence solutions into a true-cloud, fully integrated suite that adapts to your business.

Smart resellers are already adding significant value and stickiness to their contact centre deals with innovative workforce engagement management (WEM) solutions and it’s time to join them says Pippa Rhys at Calabrio. Just be sure to check the label: is it true or fake cloud?

Contact centre, UC and CRM vendors are rushing to develop or acquire workforce engagement solutions consisting of quality and workforce management, AI analytics and performance monitoring tools – albeit to a greater or lesser degree of success.  Have you ever stopped and wondered why this is happening and why now?  Quite simply, the exceptional conditions over the last few years have created an incredibly challenging environment for contact centre leaders already battling to maintain service, revenue and staff levels within tight budgets.  

Contact centres have changed and there’s no going back

Press the replay button to early 2020.  Three deciding factors converged during the course of the last two years which have changed contact centres forever:

1. Simple economics – when the first lockdown was imposed, consumer spending hit the pause button as bricks and mortar shops closed and people didn’t know if they had a job to go back to after the pandemic.  Fast-forward to today – soaring household bills, inflation and economic anxiety mean people are again tightening their belts, reducing their spending on travel and subscriptions, hunting for deals and returning more of their purchases.  In parallel, the demand for support services has increased exponentially and no sector is untouched.

2. Customer loyalty is changing – there is no doubt that customer attitudes have altered. Cost and convenience have turned the tide on loyalty. Customers now expect a seamless experience with more than 75% quoting consistent customer experiences and customer service will improve the likelihood of them doing business with a brand.

In 2022, it’s safe to assume that most interactions that customers have with organisations will be digital – via their phones, laptops, smart TV’s etc. Loyalty is now a digital experience. Consumer research indicates that 70% of customers expect an omnichannel customer experience across all channels but only 29% of brands are successful in delivering one. From Calabrio’s own research, 70% of customers expect multiple channels and a similar amount want personalised communication with heighten levels of emotional empathy What is more, as consumers switch to digital channels and re-assess what good customer service looks like, they are more likely to swap brands and share good and bad experiences.

3. COVID has reshaped the workforce – until recently, the majority of UK contact centres worked on a traditional, centralised model, with fewer than 4% of agents working remotely at home on a permanent basis. Compare that with today when 65% of agents work remotely, either part or full-time. It’s a complete sea-change. In addition, flexible working has expanded the talent pool outside the traditional office-based locality, meaning agents have a greater choice of employers and expect the right tools and technology to be in place to support them, wherever they are. 

WEM to the rescue: one solution – additional revenue

Advancements in WEM represent a modern-day miracle by boosting operational efficiency and improving agent and customer experience at a single stroke.  Adding the right WEM solution to your portfolio is a fast, efficient way to deliver significant value to clients by solving today’s top contact centre challenges while increasing the value of your sales.

Workforce engagement management (WEM) solutions driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI) are a ‘must have’ in the complex world of remote or hybrid work and increased customer expectations. Agent empowerment technologies like AI-powered Chatbots and self-scheduling facilitate a healthy work-life balance, helping remote employees to mark a clear distinction between being ‘on’ and ‘off’ duty.  Meanwhile, clever interaction analytics that provide a complete view of customer journeys enable agents to deliver outstanding CX. Behind the scenes, desktop analytics in WEM systems quickly identify when clunky IT systems or processes are slowing agents down, while sentiment analysis and stress predictors nip employee motivation issues in the bud.

Aim for an all-in-one package that combines integrated Workforce Management (WFM), analytics, data management, quality management and performance coaching then look for a vendor that takes data seriously.  The best WEM solutions capture and analyse unlimited amounts of raw data and transform it into valuable intelligence and actionable insights.  They have inbuilt data-silo busting capabilities to eradicate the dangerous black holes that get in the way of your customers delivering joined up agent and customer experiences.

True versus fake Cloud – don’t get caught out

Finally, guide your customers towards a cloud-based WEM solution.  It might sound obvious but many organisations still operate their contact centres on-premise and miss out on all the proven benefits that only the Cloud can offer – such as reduced costs, increased revenues, improved CSAT and ESAT scores.  Overcome your customers’ fears and objections by choosing your WEM cloud vendor partner carefully.  After all, there are a number of new kids on the block with dubious claims about their omnichannel and AI capabilities.  Before signing on the dotted line, grill vendors to check they are not spinning a fake cloud story – that will land you and your customers in hot water at a later stage.

True cloud solutions are easy to use, easy to integrate, are available anywhere and at any time.  They also offer a range of capabilities including multi-tenancy, continuous delivery and the highest levels of compliance and real-time security.  Calabrio’s handy new guide leads resellers safely through the potential minefield of cloud jargon and myths with the key questions to ask.

Why not join us?

There’s never been a better – or more profitable – time to sell WEM.  Why not join the Calabrio partner community?  Our Global Partner Programme provides resellers everything they need to offer innovative contact centre solutions that stand out from the crowd, impress customers and boost sales.  For more information, visit https://www.calabrio.com/calabrio-partners/.

About the Author

Pippa Rhys is Partner Acquisition Marketing Director 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.

Blend new technologies with tried and tested favourites to refresh your contact centre. Magnus Geverts at Calabrio shares his top spring-cleaning tips for supporting home-working agents.

Until recently, the majority of UK contact centres worked in a traditional, centralised model, with fewer than 4% of agents working remotely at home on a permanent basis, according to a report from analyst ContactBabel. That all changed when the realities of serving customers at the height of the pandemic forced many businesses to embed flexible working practices into their business continuity plans as a matter of survival. Today, 65% of agents work remotely, either part or full-time, while a hybrid model is on the rise and more popular in the UK than in the US (33% vs 22%).

The pros and cons of remote and hybrid work

While agents have embraced flexible working with open arms because of the greater control it gives over their schedules and reduced commute times, it also yields significant business benefits in terms of recruitment and retention. For an industry often plagued by staff shortages, remote working instantly deepens the talent pool by opening the door to more people. Those who might not otherwise look for employment in a typical contact centre may be happy work in their own home responding to customer enquiries.

On the flip side, contact centre leaders generally find it more difficult to on-board, train and coach agents when they are based remotely. Likewise, home-working agents can quickly become isolated and disengaged from each other and their employer. Concerns over security and fraud, cited by 1 in 3 contact centres to be the greatest hurdle also inhibit adoption of remote working – especially in the financial services sector.

Five ways to connect with home-working teams

To maximise the positives and reduce some of the negatives associated with remote and hybrid work, it’s time to look at key contact centre technologies through fresh eyes:

1. It’s all about the individual – so make team communication count – focus first on your leadership style. Be accessible at all times and show staff you care and value their contribution by checking in regularly and giving them the autonomy to do their job without micro-management. Next, make the most of instant messaging and collaborative tools like MS Teams, Zoom and WebEx for instant (WFH) bonding. Real-time message boards on an agent’s desktop, short video clips from senior executives and online Town Hall meetings are all great ways to create a sense of belonging while keeping frontline staff updated.

2.  Be WFH savvy with cloud – the majority of contact centres (66%) have already implemented cloud-based call routing functionality, while speech and CRM/desktop analytics are next on the list. Cloud is integral to remote and hybrid working. However, it is important to involve IT in assessing every home-working agent’s personal devices, broadband speeds and security software to guarantee WFH-readiness.

3.  Think digital-first, think WFM – the pandemic has taught us that automating scheduling and forecasting is a powerful way to improve the efficiency, productivity and cost-effectiveness of the contact centre. Make workforce management a core component of your digital-first strategy but encourage good housekeeping. Make sure that agents’ contact information is up-to-date and available to management, on and offline, and put in place easy-to-follow log on and off procedures for agents and their supervisors to ensure agent adherence and agreed response times.

4. Focus on the Voice of the Employee (VoE) – understanding how agents truly feel about their work helps identify and address the causes of boredom, burnout or areas of underperformance. Launch a VoE programme alongside your regular Voice of the Customer (VoC) programme to optimise customer experience (CX) by improving employee engagement. Involve staff in both programmes by encouraging them to add customer feedback into VoC initiatives. This will make them feel an important part of the business as well improve CX. Remember that successfully using VoE insights is a long-term, ongoing project rather than simply being a snapshot of a moment in time. It’s also important to gain buy-in from the top by sharing goals and insights with senior management and linking any results to improvements in business performance.

5.  Make people feel loved, introduce self-service automation – using the latest innovations in self-service, agents can help build their own schedules and improve their work/life balance. Finally, apply modern AI-infused analytics for performance coaching to reveal skills gaps and give agents the flexible, personalised training they deserve for meaningful career progression, wherever they are located.

For more hints & tips, read the report “The Inner Circle Guide to Remote & Hybrid Working Contact Centre Solutions” featuring Calabrio, download our Workforce Wellbeing Recovery Toolkit or visit www.calabrio.com.

About the Author

Magnus Geverts is VP Product Marketing 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.

As Calabrio deploys its true cloud Workforce Optimisation (WFO) offering via AWS in South Africa, Olle Düring at Calabrio outlines five reasons why this latest news matters to customers in the region. 

When it comes to digital transformation, the huge potential of South Africa is fast becoming a reality thanks to the arrival of new Amazon Web Service (AWS) Region in Cape Town in 2021, comprising three availability zones. Utilising more than 60 AWS services, the Calabrio ONE WFO suite brings the cloud advantages of performance, security, agility, scalability, reliability, and ease of use to organisations in South Africa from start-ups to enterprises & Business Process Outsourcers (BPOs).  This will allow our customers in the region to provide superior customer service and reduce costs, quickly and with ease.  Customers like Standard Bank, the continent’s largest bank, that recently implemented Calabrio Workforce Management (WFM) for 4,000 agents alongside its Amazon Connect Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) platform.

The race to accelerate South Africa’s cloud journey

Cloud adoption has been a growing trend in the region for most of the last decade. However, a shortage of local data centres has hampered the ability to transition to the cloud as quickly as in other parts of the world.  For example, data centres being located outside the African continent can result in latency delays, while many organisations have been reluctant to embrace cloud-based services over growing concerns around data sovereignty.

Fortunately, these barriers to effective cloud adoption are fast disappearing as international companies develop data centres on the African continent and AWS has recently expanded the number of AWS services deployed within the AWS Cape Town Region, such as Amazon Connect launching in Q1 2022.  Today, companies such as banks that traditionally operated in-house servers and data storage facilities are increasingly switching to cloud services.

Five reasons why Calabrio ONE and the cloud matter

At Calabrio, we have a proven track record in establishing local cloud presence to build customer trust, through lower network latency, superior performance, data privacy and local support.  In 2021, we announced our roadmap for data sovereignty across Southeast Asia with a local data centre in Singapore after successfully on-boarding many new cloud customers in the APAC region.  That launch effectively introduced a blueprint for data sovereignty that could be replicated in other parts of the globe.

So, what impact will the introduction of Calabrio ONE’s full cloud suite via the AWS Cape Town Region have on customers in South Africa? Here are five reasons to lead the move to the cloud:

1. Accelerate digital transformation – fully cloud-based contact centres are proven to be further advanced in their digital transformations, while two in three on-premises and half of partial-cloud contact centres feel limited by their current solutions.  True-cloud solutions automatically serve all customers simultaneously across a shared, integrated platform for fast, efficient service.  New features are added continuously meaning the most advanced functionality is always powering your contact centre behind the scenes – you don’t even have to think about it.  Offering superior levels of scalability to meet the rapidly changing needs of your business while guaranteeing high availability and uptime, true-cloud solutions also provide enhanced security to make changes and updates in real-time while protecting customer and end-user data.

2. Enhanced employee engagement – according to employment giant Michael Page, only 26% of South African employees worked from home before the pandemic but this figure skyrocketed to 79% once lockdowns hit – without diminishing motivation or job satisfaction levels. In fact, 50% of employees felt even more motivated and 46% of job applicants were more satisfied with their work.  Technology has a valuable role to play in supporting work-from-home staff.  With cloud-based solutions, South African contact centres have the flexibility for remote and hybrid working models to nurture and harness this employee motivation. They also instantly get access to the latest, modern employee engagement technology such as agent self-scheduling automation, a real bonus whilst the trend towards flexible working continues to rise. As mentioned above, cloud-native software supports faster innovation of digital tools to revolutionise the employee experience, including agent-facing virtual assistants that can support them in their schedule planning and changes.

3. You can rely on cloud in a crisis – the entire reputation of communications service providers like AWS depends on protecting customer data.  AWS employs leading experts in the security field as well as continually making deep investments in its infrastructure to stay one step ahead of the latest cloud technology and data security protocols.  Moving to the cloud means this level of security for your data is instantly available to you. Add this to Calabrio’s real-world experience in transitioning hundreds of companies to the cloud during a challenging global pandemic and you have a winning combination.  Our customer-centric approach blends high levels of technical security with comprehensive training, proactive support and the opportunity to have a real say in future product development – everything organisations need to accelerate their cloud journey, wherever they are and whatever challenges they face.

4. Increased speed and agility – with AWS data centres and Calabrio ONE’s true-cloud WFO capabilities now within direct reach of organisations in South Africa, local companies can spend less time managing their cloud infrastructure and worrying about the integrity of their customer data and instead focus 100% on running a successful business.  According to Brett Bossenger, Head of Voice Capability at Standard Bank, in addition to supporting 4,000 contact centre agents in South Africa, “Calabrio WFM is an intrinsic part of our digital transformation, the key to accelerating growth whilst delivering exceptional experiences for our staff and our customers across the African continent.”

5. Greater data sovereignty – in the past, one of the main reasons organisations in South Africa were reluctant to move to the cloud was they were concerned critical customer data might be compromised if it didn’t reside within the country. This was especially true for financial and government institutions.  With on-the-ground support via local partners and in-region data centres, South African customers will have more trust in the cloud to protect their data and comply with local privacy laws. Calabrio customers such as Standard Bank appreciate the tangible steps we are taking to address data sovereignty.  As Africa’s largest bank, it has chosen to engage with us primarily for our reputation as a cloud-first organisation with localised data centres in South Africa.

Cloud is fully on the horizon and Calabrio is proud to play an active part in that journey. AWS in Cape Town brings countless opportunities to developers, start-ups, enterprises and governmental organisations. Since the pandemic, some 82% of South African businesses have increased their cloud spend, underlining a growing awareness of the benefits of cloud computing for various-sized companies. With Calabrio, you can now migrate to CCaaS and cloud WFO.

Are you leading the charge or falling behind? For more information, contact Calabrio.

About the Author

Olle Düring is SVP of Sales, International 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.

Personal and organisational growth go hand in hand.  Ross Daniels at Calabrio shares his top tips for an effective wellbeing programme to build a happy and productive team.

In this workforce wellbeing management series, we’re bringing a magnifying glass to the current state of the contact centre, the rising stress levels in contact centres, and the action plan required to address them. In our last article, I outlined technology guides to enable heightened wellbeing across the contact centre and de-stress employees in the face of increasing complexity. I summarised the benefits of Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) solutions and their power to de-stress agents, supervisors and senior managers.  In this third and final part of the series, I’ll delve a little deeper and explore the more subtle elements of wellbeing as a means to promote personal and organisational growth. The two are closely interconnected: the success of one depends on the success of the other.

Top executive challenges

Of course, stress is nothing new, but agents today are far more vocal in raising concerns about it.  This poses some tough challenges for contact centre supervisors as well as for senior managers responsible for customer experience. Top of the list for managers are:

• Recruitment and retention – how do you keep your existing staff happy while attracting new talent with the right skills to best serve your customers?

• Employee onboarding – once hired, the pressure is on to motivate workers—whether remote or in office–while arming them with the competitive knowledge they need to thrive in their jobs.

• Performance coaching – ‘out of sight’ should definitely not mean ‘out of mind’.  With the rise of hybrid working, regular performance coaching and mentoring are now more important than ever before.

7 essential elements of an effective wellbeing strategy

So what can supervisors and senior managers do to build a happy and productive team?  Here are a few ideas to getting started:

1. Make agents feel valued – when agents feel valued, their work is infinitely more meaningful and less stressful.  Agent pay actually ranks third when it comes to the top reasons for leaving after ‘being unhappy in job’ (36%) and ‘limited growth opportunities’ (26%).[i] Personalised training that encourages individual strengths while addressing areas for improvement and clear career paths are the way to make agents feel more valued.

2. Keep pushing flexibility further – after higher pay, which is at the top of agents’ wish list, they next want flexibility (at 34%)[ii] Give agents the autonomy to control their own working day through agent-driven scheduling processes and real-time flexibility to accommodate the unexpected.  Take away the burden of managing schedule changes, shift swaps or overtime and time-off requests by introducing the latest mobile self-service chatbots for agents.  It’s like giving them a powerful time management tool in the palm of their hand.

3. Invest in agent-empowering technologies – based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning.  Our own research tells us that agents welcome innovative AI tech as a means to free them from tedious tasks (40%) and focus on more fulfilling and higher-value service that only experienced human agents can provide (30%).[iii] Personalised dashboards are an added bonus for remote-working teams, enabling agents to track their own performance, stay focused, and remain motivated.

4. Strengthen emotional connectedness – asking agents how they feel and what they are doing to de-stress might sound obvious but with so many other distractions away from the traditional office environment, very few supervisors actually do it.  Encourage supervisors to build regular one-to-one sessions into their schedule to increase your agents’ sense of belonging–then maximise analytics to close the wellbeing loop.  The latest VoE (voice of the employee) analytics capture and analyse how frontline staff are feeling in order to identify agents who are struggling, while desktop analytics uncover clunky IT systems that are slowing them down.

5. Aim for easier – as agents deal with more complex customer issues, navigating their way around new technology is essential. And it starts with good training.  Do your agents know what technology they have to make their lives easier and do they know how to use it?  Take a closer look at your systems.  Aim to give agents a consolidated view of customer information all on one screen, then embed VoC (voice of the customer) analytics to support more meaningful, empathetic interactions. 

6. Focus on performance coaching – make mentoring and personal development a priority and take a personalised approach by providing plenty of upskilling opportunities to boost agent confidence and enhance their sense of wellbeing.

Invest in automated performance coaching solutions and make them an intrinsic part of your staff engagement programme, helping to identify skills gaps, individual areas of struggle, successes and opportunities for personal development.

7. Be a connected enterprise – by developing joined-up technology, processes, information and thinking to help staff excel in their roles.  Create a connected culture to collectively impact positive customer outcomes that drive opportunities for organisational growth.

Grab your copy of Calabrio’s brand new digital guide “Workforce Wellbeing Recovery Kit: Practical Strategies & Resources to Turn Workforce Wellbeing into Your Competitive Advantage.”  It’s a practical guide that reinforces the take-aways of this current series of articles while providing additional tips to future-proof your wellbeing strategy.

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.

With stress levels in contact centres as a constant, Magnus Geverts at Calabrio discusses how to balance the needs of employees and the business with a fresh approach to agent self-scheduling.

I have been in the Workforce Management (WFM) business for over 20 years and during this time, contact centre leaders have again and again told me that one of their biggest challenges is balancing the needs of employees with great customer service. Recently however, the situation has reached crisis point with the pandemic ushering in a new era of ‘The Great Resignation’, where employees are reassessing the impact of their jobs on work/life balance, mental health and overall life goal fulfilment.

This has hit the contact centre industry hardest, where higher-than-ever levels of stress are driving serious agent retention issues. According to Salesforce, 71% of service agents in the US have considered quitting in the past six months, while 86% report they need more from their company in order to stay, citing monetary compensation, career growth opportunities and better management at the top of their wish list.

Other than ‘higher pay’, customers often tell me their agents crave ‘more flexibility’ in their job. While many attempts have been made to address this, such as introducing shift bidding, shift trading and shift preferences, nothing has really worked 100% in favour of frontline employees. Granted, these new ideas catered for the needs of the business but they were not flexible or easy enough for what agents really wanted – that is until now.

7 ways to crack the code using agent self-scheduling

By blending radical new thinking with breakthroughs in technology, I believe that contact centre leaders finally have the opportunity to crack the code, offering businesses the dual ability to give agents more freedom to self-manage their own schedules and keep service levels under control.   When agents are able to plan their work around their life rather than the other way round, stress levels naturally fall and customer satisfaction rises. Here are a few ideas to getting started:

1. Change the mindset – in a world where there are too many customer interactions and not enough agents, the culture has to change. Traditionally, the notion that the customer comes first has prevailed, but at Calabrio we see more and more companies coming to us and saying, “My customers are really important, but my employees are also really important. I can’t afford to lose my people.” Now that is a radical change in thinking.

2. ‘Easy and smart’ does it – and that’s certainly the case when it comes to agent self-scheduling solutions that allow agents to build and edit their own schedules in real-time and on the move, using their mobile devices. Frontline employees can move lunches, catch-up with colleagues and make time for new learning as customer demands or domestic events occur throughout the day. I often hear customers say self-scheduling is a “brilliant idea” because the simple act of having lunch and taking breaks together helps – in their words – “build teammate chemistry.” 

3. Give agents the freedom to create the ideal work-life balance – one of the things agents love most about self-scheduling is it is “easy to fit around their lifestyle”. Adopting modern self-scheduling capabilities empowers agents to achieve an even greater influence over their working day, while allowing contact centre managers to keep control of overall staffing levels.  For example, agents can now add work hours on either unscheduled or scheduled days.  Someone looking for extra shifts can go to the self-scheduling app, see where there is a need for agents and sign up for more hours. At the same time, they could even consider making partial-day shift trades with their colleagues.

4. Remember the secret sauce to self-service automation – comprehensive rule sets and real-time intraday service level controls across all skills ensure that agents can completely self-service, build and modify their schedule, without any intervention from the WFM team. Without this secret sauce of rule sets, the WFM-team would have to manually check and approve changes – far too slow and time-consuming for most busy contact centres today.

5. Build in self-regulating guard rails – look out for agent self-scheduling tools that are configured to automatically take into consideration global work regulations as well as the legal parameters of individual agent contracts. Being able to track and manage an organisation’s compliance against important employment laws means you can always rely on automated approvals to protect you and your staff while building in the highest levels of efficiency to best serve your customers.

6. Raise the status of self-scheduling – make what we call at Calabrio ‘lifestyle scheduling’ an intrinsic part of your strategic Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) framework. Agent self-scheduling is just one way to engage and motivate employees. When combined with modern call recording, quality management and performance coaching, today’s analytics-driven solutions offer a complete, end-to-end personal development toolkit. Personal development plans and insight into individual/self-managed performance boosts employee experience and as a consequence improved customer experience follows.

7. Take inspiration from real-life successes – such as National Debt Relief, an early adopter of agent self-scheduling which claims “it lets agents manage and change their own schedules as unexpected things happen throughout each day, without negatively impacting the contact centre’s service level.”  National Debt Relief is just one of 80% of Calabrio’s customers who say WFM increases their ability to balance both business and agent needs. Why not follow their lead?

Don’t just take my word for it

Self-scheduling is easy and smart for the agent and for the WFM-team – and contact centre staff just love it. As one of our satisfied customers enthused, “Self-scheduling is the best!” while another confesses to be “in love” with self-scheduling because it helps them get over the routine aspects of their job.  Self-scheduling also delivers tangible business value, enabling organisations to gain a critical edge over the competition when it comes to recruiting and retaining the best contact centre talent, essential for business success. Visit Calabrio’s Self-Scheduling hub for more information.

About the Author

Magnus Geverts is VP, Product Marketing 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.

Stress is a major barrier to success and it is affecting everyone.  In a new three-part series Ross Daniels introduces Calabrio’s campaign to support improvements for people, processes and technology to enable greater wellbeing across contact centre organisations. 

This first article outlines the key triggers for agents, supervisors and senior managers and shows why it pays to take a comprehensive approach to organisational wellbeing

The impact of the past few years has been wide-reaching and traumatic.  Flexible working practices, growing customer demands and a fast-changing competitive landscape are all taking their toll.  And these stressors are affecting everyone in the contact centre and beyond.

Let’s start with frontline staff

Stress levels among agents are rising sharply with 96% claiming to feel stressed at least once a week, while 33% of agents are stressed multiple times a week – up from 25% in 2017. Is it any wonder, given that they are dealing with 14.4 additional omnichannel interactions per day?[i]  At the same time, many people are still adapting psychologically to an often disorienting ‘work from anywhere’ culture while faced with the practicalities of juggling home and work life.

Agent stress has a knock-on effect on supervisors and customer experience (CX)

A recent study revealed that 60% of respondents agreed that staff attrition and absence, while initially pandemic-related, is still causing CX issues.[ii]  Just how do those running the show (aka the operations of the contact centre) juggle agent schedules and skills throughout the day while planning for future recruitment, coaching and training, as cost-effectively as possible?  Contact centre leaders also need to understand the bigger picture, such as why staff are leaving for the competition or why customer churn rates are higher than usual.  The pressure is on contact centre operations to manage agent stress while at the same time dealing with hybrid working and increased numbers of digital communication channels.  Add to this the need to optimise performance, keep teams connected and meet ever increasing customer expectations.  It’s all created a perfect storm for anxiety and stress that threatens the wellbeing of employees and the long-term prosperity of their organisations.  What can be done to reverse the trend?

Three ways to improve wellbeing

Wellbeing translates into agents who are empowered, taking control of their working lives and the customer experience; where supervisors support the business with a motivated workforce that surpasses key metrics and service levels and where executives strike a fine balance between cost control, innovation and business expansion.  Here are three ideas for inspiration:

1. Take an all-round approach – find out what is working and what isn’t – for your agents, supervisors and senior managers.  Look beyond the contact centre and think about involving other parts of the organisation, including subject matter experts, to improve knowledge, boost contact centre performance and enhance wellbeing.  What processes are in place to share best-practice CX learning so that all departments are encouraged to do better and increase their own sense of wellbeing?

2.  Make the most of data – with customer and employee loyalty in flux during the pandemic, companies need deep, relevant insights inside and outside the organisation to help protect and grow customer relationships while keeping staff from straying to the competition.  All too often however, valuable information gets trapped inside the contact centre.  Essentially, many organisations are sitting on a goldmine of intelligence that isn’t used effectively – are you being held back by data silos or clunky IT systems?

3. Follow the leaders – success depends on gaining control over data using data-driven technologies.  For example, Thomson Reuters wanted to understand how the introduction of remote agent onboarding and training, due to COVID-19, was affecting its business.  Using the latest analytics, the company identified calls with long and multiple hold times, then worked to establish the reasons why this was happening.  The goal was to eliminate putting calls on hold.  As a result of the analytics programme the company enjoyed significant benefits with a wide-ranging impact on organisational wellbeing.  For example, the Tax & Accounting Professionals Business Unit potentially saved up to 3% of its contact centre’s annual operating budget.  Meanwhile, average call times reduced by more than 90 seconds, call holds per call dropped one-and-a-half times and there was a 6.4% increase in customer satisfaction.

Success depends on removing stress at all levels of the organisation.  In our next article, discover how modern Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) solutions including AI-infused analytics are the answer to wellbeing.  We will also look at how technology can be integral to enhancing staff engagement, optimising contact centre performance and boosting profitability.  Head to the new “Workforce Wellbeing Recovery Kit” to gain hints and tips for three key stakeholders, with the main stressors to target, checklists to process change and tech buyer’s guides. 

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.

Ross Daniels at Calabrio looks at the recently published 2022 Agent Management Value Index Report from analyst firm Ventana Research, for insights into how to structure software selection processes – to help organisations pose the right questions to get the right answers.

In its recent report, Ventana Research came to the conclusion that, “The pandemic created the circumstances for a complete reassessment of the tools and processes used in contact centres to manage agents”. Based on this insight, it is likely that many organisations will be considering business improvement projects and software selection processes to enable the changes driven by hybrid working, increased demand and employee churn.

Unless you use the most relevant selection criteria and pose the right questions, you can easily choose solutions which aren’t right for your operation, can’t address the most pressing issues and won’t prepare you for the future. Selection of the right platforms and technology is vital for the success of a modern business, however, it is not an activity that is undertaken regularly. Often the solution choices and technology options evolve so rapidly that the criteria used in previous selection processes become outdated and no longer fit for purpose.

With this in mind, it is great to see analysts, with close to two decades of experience, providing independent advice on how to structure RFI/RFPs and the selection processes for Agent Management solutions. The 2022 Agent Management Value Index Report “provides a baseline of knowledge that organisations can use to evaluate vendors and products, to manage and improve agent management processes.” Access the report reprint here.

A process for evaluating vendors

Ventana Research believes that “business improvement efforts should be based on best practices that research indicates deliver value quickly”. The analyst firm has developed what it calls the Value Index which can be used to evaluate agent management business systems and tools. It advocates using the index as part of a structured approach to ensure the right choices are made to provide the required results. 

In its Value Index for Agent Management, Ventana Research evaluates software against seven key categories, of which five are product experience related and two cover customer experience. The categories are:

• Usability
• Manageability
• Reliability
• Capability
• Adaptability
• Vendor Validation
• Total Cost of Ownership and Return on Investment (TCO/ROI).

Ventana Research used its own index categories to evaluate solutions from 18 vendors and I’m pleased to say that Calabrio was placed in the leader tier as an Exemplary Vendor and a Value Index Leader for Capability, Usability and Manageability.

Build the categories into selection processes and weight them as needed

The Index categories are also useful to build into your own organisation’s RFI/RFP software selection process. The categories can be weighted to match their importance to specific needs. In this way, you can evaluate and score solutions, and vendors objectively against common criteria to help drive a structured and documentable selection process. This step provides the evaluation tools necessary to move from a long list of vendors and solutions to a shortlist which can be evaluated in depth to make the final selection.

An ordered, transparent and auditable selection can be useful to:

• Speed up the selection process itself
• Reduce the cost of the selection
• Drive a common understanding across your organisation
• Gain sign-off from Purchasing and Senior Management for the selection made
• Provide criteria to measure success.

The Ventana Research report provides an evaluation of vendors and a methodology which can be used in your own evaluation and selection processes.

A framework for a technology-driven business improvement project

The report also outlines eight steps which should make up a technology-driven business improvement project.  These include the importance of establishing technology evaluation criteria and how to evaluate and select the right technology to match the specific business requirements of your organisation more efficiently and accurately. The report in particular helps readers to complete these two phases.

Download the report to help you ask the right questions

As operations reassess the tools and processes used in contact centres to manage agents, it is vital to ask the right questions to gain the right answers. To learn more about how your organisation can utilise Ventana Research’s approach, go to Calabrio’s reprint of the Agent Management Value Index: 2022 Vendor and Product Assessment to download your own copy.

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. Through AI-driven analytics, Calabrio uncovers customer behaviour and sentiment and derives compelling insights from the contact centre. Organisations choose Calabrio for its ability to understand customer needs and the overall experience it provides, from implementation to ongoing support. Find more at calabrio.com and follow @Calabrio on Twitter. 

Trying to think of ways to adapt your business in 2021 as you continue to work remotely throughout the pandemic?

With many different companies and industries having to quickly shift and change to employees working from home, it has been difficult to maintain a clear and effective level of communication between both colleagues themselves, and customers/clients that a business is trying to reach.

Getting started with your own business and need inspiration on some of the best ways to reach the right people? Perhaps you’ve already been working remotely over the last twelve months, and are wondering if there’s something additional that you could be doing? Whatever the case may be, here are three key tips for reaching customers and clients remotely in 2021.

Leveraging Social Media

Social media is an imperative tool for marketing a business online in the modern day, and with a huge number of people using platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter in order to stay in contact with friends and family during the pandemic, now is the perfect time to start with a social strategy if you aren’t already. Additionally, using the messaging functionalities on these different social platforms will allow you to stay in contact with your customers, which can benefit both parties.

Tip – If you don’t necessarily have the time to employ a social media strategy across all platforms, then perhaps think about the core demographic that you want to reach, and then the specific sorts of platforms they’re more likely to use as a result. After all, there’s no point targeting a platform that your audience and customer base aren’t using.

Using the right technology

Aside from making sure that you’re using the right social platforms for your audience, you also need to make sure that you’re offering remote, technology-driven solutions that allow for you to continue to provide a high level of customer service. This includes making sure that you’re set up on the right video conferencing software (Teams, Zoom, Skype, Google Hangouts etc.) when talking to customers/clients, and also having the ability to send them key pieces of information in sleek digital formats when required.

UK-based RWinvest are a great example of a company providing these sorts of technology-driven solutions to their clients. Not only do they utilise video conferencing software and varying pdf/podcast formats in order to showcase the latest property investment opportunities, but they even use virtual reality as a way to give investors a next-best-thing answer to viewing properties in person.

Being widely available

To finalise, this one goes without saying, but being available at all times and easily accessible to your clients/customers will not only build up trust, but also ensure that you can get the job done properly, and also secure repeat business. Being able to establish a clear line of communication between you and your clients/customers will make them feel valued, and it’s good to add a layer of personability to your service, too, so that the customer won’t feel like they’re talking to a faceless corporate entity on the other end of the screen.