What We’re Hearing from Businesses Like Yours There have been 2 common top-of-mind questions recently that many companies and customer support departments are asking us about the current and post-COVID landscape as they evolve from real-time reactionary tactical action to strategic planning:
“With essentially everyone working from home for the last several months, have you noticed an increased interest in companies looking to increase their outsourcing?” “We have historically implemented the brick-and-mortal (B&M) call centers, but we now realize working remotely is ‘doable.’ It is time for our company to pursue outsourcing?”
With the current business, financial, customer experience (CX) and operational disruptions created by this global event, many companies are reassessing these 6 areas of traditional customer care:
The B&M captive-site models
Their CX vendors that may have been less-than-ideal “Partners” (and that may face operational challenges in the COVID era)
Geographies
Business-continuity plans (BCPs) and playbooks
The strategic value of transitioning entirely or partially to work-at-home (WAH) models from B&M
The readiness and resource availability to be a safe COVID management/operation
The global pandemic has raised many questions and has driven businesses to leave no stone unturned to identify smart strategic solutions to remain safely operational.
Key Areas of Customer Care & Outsourcing Planning Here are key areas that are driving the need planning and how business executives should approach the discussion with their “must-do” lists:
Organizations must identify where their current pre-COVID BCP needs to adjust and expand (most BCPs were built for a short-term system or access outage, or a weather impact).
Organizations must face social-distancing requirements and health-compliance guidelines that can vary significantly by city, state, region and country. Overall, these are compounding capacity-planning challenges that shrink available operating B&M space by 50%+ percent.
Organizations must reconsider the risks of geographies. Globally, regionally, by country, and by state/province/island/city, nearly all governments worldwide have implemented governance for captive and BPO sites to operate. For example, Jamaica was shut down for over 2 weeks due to one BPO not maintaining a healthy work environment. Europe has mandatory shutdowns; China had instituted strict health compliance measures proactively and immediately; the Philippines instituted mandatory shutdowns in Manila and now require that if 25+ employees in a building (not a BPO, but any building) test positive for Covid symptoms, all operations are shut down for a mandatory period.
As a result, many companies’ BCPs are now expanding to include a planned transition to move operations out of metro Manila and into other Philippines’ regions.
Many organizations must evaluate whether they are prepared to move to a WAH platform in a rapid or planned manner, implementing this themselves or with a partner. It is important to consider including technology requirements and adaptations, training and coaching needs, employee management, employee engagement, etc. If you are planning to implement this yourself, other considerations to include are the capital costs of remote systems, network access/security and compliance/the compute CAPEX, etc. In addition, it is important to note that not all employees thrive in a WAH environment; not all homes can support a WAH agent.
Many organizations must review their CX environment, specifically looking at voice to non-voice rations, channel segmentation, and redefining their new Customer Experience.
Organizations must focus on employee safety and healthy-environment management in new and important ways.
Organizations realize their BCP planning and playbooks must change
How VXI Meets the Outsourcing Challenge VXI Global Solutions has become one of the industry’s success stories during the last 5 months of disruption. Across our geographies, we’ve remained operational capabilities and continued providing uninterrupted services. We become an industry model of safety by engaging a leading physician specializing in Covid response .
Scale matters, and VXI’s large size provided the stability to acquire multiple new lines of business from both existing clients and new logos. In the Philippines, we secured long-term local housing for more than 4,000 teammates so they could remain safe and continue coming to work. We brought improved Internet connectivity into hundreds of agents’ homes who were working remotely.
In days, we ramped 9,000 employees to WAH models across our geographies in the Philippines, Jamaica, Guatemala, and the United States and used our award-winning tools to train them . In China, we moved 8,000 teammates to remote work in hours , then returned them to office settings when it was safe to do so, all the while maintaining 95%+ productivity. We even found time to earn our SOC 2 Type 2 compliance , a coveted designation highlighting our commitment to protecting customer data.
What all this means is that VXI Global Solutions is positioned to be your trusted partner. We’re here to help you deliver incredible CX. Whether you’re ready to work with a CX organization or not, I’m happy to help you ask the right questions and find the right answers for your business. Reach me at brad.levy@vxi.com .
