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It’s 5 am, and Tina is soothing her six-year-old daughter, who’s suffering
from a moderate fever and other flu-like symptoms. She starts her remote
work job at 8 am and is thinking through how to care for her daughter before
her day starts. Go to the emergency room, visit urgent care, or give her
daughter a fever-reducing med and hope the illness passes?
She gets on a virtual call with her healthcare insurance provider to
understand her options and speaks to a remote-working customer service
representative. The rep recommends starting by calling a telehealth service,
where she speaks to a nurse practitioner working at her home and gets quick
advice on caring options.
The resounding theme in this story is how Tina gets the assistance she needs
from two remote-working customer support agents. Tina lives in a rural area,
so visiting a hospital or urgent care facility would have forced her to miss
a work day. She’s thrilled to get the support she needs at a critical
hour.
The insurance company and healthcare provider aim to improve their
customers’ experiences but also must consider how to run efficient call
centers while hiring and retaining top professionals. They know that
86% of consumers prefer humans over chatbots, and supporting remote call center agents is part of their strategy to
improve both customer and employee experiences.
Providing hybrid and remote-work options
for agents has been an important success factor for companies where customer
service is key for delivering breakthrough customer experiences and high
customer satisfaction (CSat) scores. One study shows that
90% of administrative and customer support managers face challenges
finding skilled talent, so expanding where people can work has significant benefits. CIOs and
general managers can increase talent pools and improve customer support by
enabling people to work remotely effectively and efficiently.
Excelling at remote work is a digital transformation force
multiplier
CIOs, CDOs, and heads of innovation are overwhelmed with digital
transformation priorities. In companies with large-scale customer-facing
operations, including inside sales and customer support functions,
prioritizing innovation and transformation initiatives often requires
tradeoffs. But that doesn’t have to be the case when
Digital Trailblazers
identify investments targeting multiple strategic drivers.
Upgrading remote work solutions
and excelling at hybrid work practices is a digital transformation force
multiplying initiative. Here’s how:
-
Improve the customer experience by delivering high-performance and
reliable virtual conference calling when customers interact with
remote-working sales and customer support agents. -
Simplify employee experiences by providing easy-to-use technologies
for employees to be happy, productive, and efficient when working
remotely. -
Expand operations by supporting a distributed workforce and making
hiring and retaining top talent easier for managers. -
Drive customer centricity by enabling collaboration between sales,
customer support, marketing, IT, and operations on delivering
product and service innovations. -
Reduce costs and risks by
standardizing remote work technologies
and configurations, making it easier for IT to resolve connectivity issues
and for infosec to manage security configurations.
The return on investment for remote work solutions has operational benefits
today, and the longer-term benefits stem from expanding access to talent and
leveraging
5G networking capabilities.
Professional service industries excel with remote work
Tina’s ability to virtually call her insurance agent and a healthcare
professional off-hours illustrates one example of organizations building a
competitive advantage with remote work solutions. Consider the following
scenarios in different professional service industries.
-
Banks can deliver more personalized financial solutions to SMBs,
consumers, and institutional investors by enabling more one-to-one
relationships to be developed during off-hours between customers and their
financial advisors. -
B2C insurance providers can grow a more diverse talent pool by recruiting
people from different backgrounds, language skills, and preferred working
hours across the country. -
Retailers can excel at customer service by hiring customer support agents
with deep product-category knowledge and are willing to work part-time
when remote work options are available. -
Manufacturers with large service operations can reduce the time to resolve
customer issues by enabling their expert support staff to connect remotely
during off-work hours. -
Professional service organizations, including management consultants, IT
service providers, and marketing agencies, can more easily connect
multidisciplinary remote teams to work on customer projects and resolve
issues.
Healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and finance are several industries that
will
benefit from 5G
and should turn network connectivity into a competitive advantage.
Standardizing remote work and enabling hybrid work impacts several digital
transformation strategies, especially in improving both customer and
employee experiences. When evaluating which digital transformation
initiatives to prioritize, professional service organizations can improve
customer satisfaction, reduce costs, and grow top talent by investing in
remote work solutions that enable
hybrid and remote work.
This post is brought to you by
Verizon
The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do
not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Verizon.
