CX Assurance Blog

Social distancing. Work from home. Flatten the curve. These are terms that are now part of our everyday lives. Our new reality impacts the way we live, work, and play, and everyone is learning to adapt to the many changes we’re experiencing thanks to COVID-19.

There’s no doubt about it… Customer Experience (CX) is a differentiator that will bring you to the front of the line, ahead of your competition.

My heart goes out to everyone affected by COVID-19; these are truly challenging times. I wanted to share some helpful, data-driven industry insight gathered from our contact center customers, and some ideas of ways to bring teams closer together even as we’re forced to work apart.

In the face of COVID-19, many organizations have had to shut down their contact centers, and send agents to work from home. This has been accomplished on impossible time tables.

One of the big concerns with at-home agents is whether they have the right environment to effectively handle calls. This includes physical environment – do they have a desk, a room free from background noises from children, roommates, pets, etc? Concerns also include home-based agents’ technological environments. While companies are provisioning employees with laptops and headsets, they must rely on the employee’s Internet service provider and Wi-Fi setup.

A little while back, Cyara’s Senior Strategic Accounts Director, Kelly Zunker, wrote a post on our blog about how much a SEV1 costs an organization. The piece covered the general definition(s) of a SEV1, or Severity 1 error, presented SEV1 examples, and explored the costs of a SEV1 error considering three main factors:

• Extended caller hold times
• Customer satisfaction
• Unplanned agent overtime

It's Friday! And, boy, it's been a long week. On Monday I posted tips for quickly setting up a home-office, followed by a post on Wednesday with some advice for secondary things that may make your mandatory work-from-home status a little easier. Today, I'm sharing a few ideas on ways to make this period of time as pleasant and productive as possible.

On Monday I shared the first of three blog posts I put together on the fly with tips for initial set-up of your home-office that you may have had to move to through a mandatory work-from-home order, which many business are - understandably - enforcing at this time.

Right now, there are so many great examples of fantastic, humanitarian efforts getting organized to counter-act the social and economic effects of COVID-19, like free educational services, temporary halts on things like evictions and utilities shut-offs due to late payments, and lightning-fast set ups of food and supply shelters. There’s a lot to be proud of!

In the wake of what’s happened in the last month, local and national governments have advised, where possible, that those who can work from home do so in an effort to limit exposure and prevent the spread of the virus. As a company with offices around the globe and a workforce made up of 75% remotely located employees, Cyara is lucky to be able to say that work-from-home is business-as-usual for us, but we realize that this is new for many others.

In the last few weeks, we have witnessed dramatic stock market swings, governmental actions and WHO announcements all related to the expansion of COVID-19 to pandemic status. Needless to say, the turbulence is unsettling to us all. While the reality is that these events have had or will have an impact on business as well as what we do in our lives outside of work, I want to share a message of hope and positivity.

A quick Google search for where the best US March vacation spots are will return a result of Florida, which is probably why the organizers of the upcoming enterprise communications and collaboration event – Enterprise CONNECT 2020 – chose the warm, sunny, and absolutely beautiful location of Orlando to host this must-attend conference! (Not going to lie, it’s also one of the reasons the Cyara team is already packed for this event).