By Insight Editor / 20 Sep 2021 / Topics: Google ChromeOS
For contact centers everywhere, the start of the pandemic saw a rush to off-site work. Today, more and more organizations are enabling at least a portion of agents to work remotely. Long-term, contact center leaders anticipate a hybrid work environment with 53% of agents working in the office and 47% working off-site.
A Gartner survey sheds light on what’s changing and why. Personal safety and efficiency considerations both play a considerable role, but agents’ changing preferences are a mounting force. Today, 70% of customer service and support employees say they want to continue working from home after the pandemic ends, something call center organizations will need to be mindful of if they hope to recruit skilled staff and provide an attractive work environment going forward.
Indeed, call center companies everywhere are taking major steps to make new contact center work styles a viable and effective reality for both staff and customers. A recent McKinsey & Company report highlights that the contact center industry has seen a 24 times increase in migration to cloud technologies, a 27 times increase in deployment of new service technologies, and 43 times increase in the deployment of collaboration technologies specifically for customer service.
While the shift to distributed workstyles and new cloud technologies may have come with certain growing pains, an increasing number of call center organizations are now recognizing and reaping the benefits. A recent report revealed that three-quarters of managers agree that moving to a cloud-based infrastructure allowed organizations to be more strategic and business-oriented throughout the pandemic.
In fact, companies leading in customer service continue to accelerate their digital transformation, adopting new models for work and reimagining their mix of service channels. According to Deloitte’s 2021 State of the Contact Center report, today, 77% of service organizations are either adopting or accelerating their work-from-home programs. To support the change, contact center leaders are using targeted investments to support new employee and management needs. To this end, cloud-based contact centers have become the majority, with three quarters of contact centers now operating in the cloud (44% fully and 31% hybrid).
Supporting new operating styles requires fit-for-purpose technology. IT teams need to be able to deprovision devices and onboard new agents quickly from anywhere while tapping into easy cloud management of user settings, policies, apps and devices. Agents need access to user-friendly, integrated case management tools and quick access to internal collaboration tools such as chat, video and email. Meanwhile, businesses need to make secure tech investments with high and quickly realizable ROI, drive customer satisfaction and ensure staff retention.
Thanks to their cloud-centric design, ChromeOS devices are giving call center organizations of every size a more efficient, productive and secure route to distributed work. A familiar, intuitive user interface allows fast and easy onboarding for new agents while downtime is reduced daily with background updates. Built-in productivity tools for easy multitasking help speed workflows, while leading security protects business and customer information from ransomware, malware and employee errors. With over 500 configurable policies, devices can be drop shipped and deployed seamlessly from anywhere.
Plus, leading Contact Center as-a-service (CCaaS) solutions are put through a rigorous verification process by Google engineers, ensuring top-quality application performance and quality on ChromeOS devices. The result: business-critical tools work seamlessly for agents everywhere. Moreover, organizations that require VDI can utilize VMware and Citrix to easily virtualize their environments.
As more and more call centers and service organizations make the shift to distributed workstyles, having the right technology is set to become a key differentiator. With ChromeOS, contact centers can discover a better way to empower agents, secure business data and support IT teams for a more flexible, resilient approach to providing top-tier service in the new world of work.
Not sure where to start? Our dedicated ChromeOS team can analyze your current environment for optimal ChromeOS device implementation. You may also try our new ChromeOS Device Selector to find the perfect fit for your contact center teams.
