Maintaining Business Continuity for Our Customers

Customer Experience/ Cloud Technology by Route 101

If your organisation is currently struggling with continuing to serve customers whilst your agents (and everyone else) are in lockdown, you are not alone. This is a hard, scary time for all of us – and for those responsible for keeping their contact centres operational, the pressure must be enormous.

There isn’t a huge amount to be pleased about at the moment, so we’re taking good news wherever we can – and we’re really very proud of the way we’ve been able to assist some of our customers with time-sensitive requirements over the last week.

  • Up and Running Within 48 Hours

Last week, the Route 101 team helped to get a 500+ remote agent contact centre up and running within 48 hours for one of our major clients, to support their Coronavirus response. This would be impossible without an extremely reactive team behind us, and the inherent scalability of our partner platforms. The organisation in question is now successfully fielding more than ten-thousand calls per day!

  • From In-Store Support to Additional Service Agents

One of our retail customers have opted to pivot their in-store workforce to support their increased service volumes instead of serving customers in-store. Staff members are equipped with headsets, a broadband connection and a browser and can now support their customers remotely instead.

Since the customer is already using the Zendesk platform – which is renowned for being easy to use and intuitive for agents – training time for these new service “agents” is extremely short, and the business can now meet their higher volumes of demand. From the Route 101 side, we were able to mobilise extremely quickly; applying additional licensing for the new branch workforce and amending workflows to support more efficient service. Within around 3 days, our customer was able to deploy additional “agents” – alongside simply sending the existing workforce home to login to their platforms remotely.

Route 101 were also able to assist in setting up a dedicated HR line for employees to call for advice and information. This helpline was set up and operational within a single day. It is thanks to the cloud platforms we deliver that we have been able to help our customer to deliver the best possible service to both customers and staff within very short timescales.

  • Business as Usual – Everything’s Going According to Plan

 “I love it when a plan comes together” …

For some of our customers, the switch to working completely remotely has been seamless. When the platforms they rely on have an inbuilt capability to scale, their Business Continuity Plan largely consisted of “get everyone to go home and log in there instead”. Whilst we’re always happy to help our customers, the fact that most of them haven’t needed to get in touch at this time is a big endorsement of just how effortless cloud platforms make DR.

"Working with Route 101 is more like a partnership. Pushing for the right solution and delivery in a fast and agile way feels like a team effort, holding us all to account, which is driving the improvements we need. Route 101 also bring in other partners they supply, to boost and enrich the service we offer to our customers."

Whilst the team at Route 101 sit at laptops behind our own closed doors - along with most of the general population - we are still working with many organisations to deploy new remote contact centres or implement additional measures to deal with excess customer demand online. Now, more than ever, organisations are turning to cloud based contact centre platforms to meet requirements for scalability and speed.

If you’re struggling with deploying remote agents or feeling at a loss for how to adapt your existing IT infrastructure to support increased demand, we’re more than happy to offer some advice and/or recommend any specific tools, platforms or strategies which could help. You can reach us on 03330 110 400 or email info@route101.com