Kathy Sobus

Have you noticed that more and more automation is finding its way into our daily lives? Think of all the new (or near-new) conveniences we have available to us. Home appliances, self-checkout, consumer electronics, entertainment, medical devices and smart buildings help us every day. In a recent blog post, I talked about IVAs (Intelligent Virtual Agents), which are deployed widely to enhance the customer experience by streamlining and handling the customer need immediately, with little to no human intervention.

Healthcare: If any industry or vertical landed on the map more than ever this past year, it was healthcare. We’ve talked to more healthcare customers than any other vertical during this time, and it makes sense why: healthcare has touched all of us in some way or another this past year. Whether someone has been ill, needed checkups, or is now getting vaccinated, it has or will touch all of us.

Harvard Business Review published an article on “Reinventing Customer Service,” and I believe they—and one of our customers—are onto something.

What does it mean to do business with a one-stop shop—does it mean working with only one vendor? Does it mean working mostly with one vendor and using a few other third-party applications? Does it mean being free from the restriction of any particular vendor?

Pandemic this, COVID that… enough already, right? The situation was supposed to be temporary, but is it really? Many organizations I’m working with now are in a planning phase, and they aren’t planning for everyone to return to the office.

As the world struggles with the fallout from COVID-19, all aspects of life are quickly changing. Millions of workers are now working from home or other remote locations outside of the normal security configurations of an office. Fraudsters are taking advantage of this disruption to actively steal information that they can monetize. In many cases, companies were not prepared to deal with a large work-from-home workforce, and when they transitioned their employees to remote environments, they mainly considered threats like phishing or cyberattacks.

What is that one question that you’re answering repeatedly, every day?

The “bad guys” don’t sleep.

Now that we’ve thought about customer engagement and satisfaction, and remote employees/contact centers, we should turn our thinking to strategy. None of us at this time know how long we will be working remotely, or when life will return back to a level of normalcy we had prior to March of this year. One thing is certain, especially during this uncertain time: employees and customers will have questions and requests outside of the norm we experienced earlier this year. Because of perceivably higher volumes of contact into your organization from both employees and customers, perhaps it’s time to think about how you can enable those elements in a mid-term strategy that you can maximize when we return to “normalcy.”

These are times that many of us have never lived through or previously had to adjust to. Children have been sent home from school and for many college students, the rest of the semester is now adjusting to an online format. As for employees, most of our clients are asking for ways to allow their employees to work remotely. Mostly, with contact centers, they are the first ones to be tackled. This blog provides thinking beyond the technical aspects needed for a successful transition.