The message from the last few years is painfully clear: business needs to be able to handle and even thrive in disruption. Craig Gibson, Group Chief Growth Officer, looks at how executives can create a more resilient and flexible organization in the post-pandemic business environment, one that can scale, and flex as needed. 

Disruption is nothing new

When the pandemic arrived it created an immediate challenge for the majority of companies because few organizations had a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) that included a global pandemic as an expected scenario. 

This situation showed just how exposed some organizations really were. Take disaster recovery planning (DRP) as one example. Only 54% of companies actually have a company-wide plan for managing a disaster. 

Even those with a plan might only dust it off once a year for a quick review. Some research suggests that 93% of companies that suffered a major disaster were out of business inside a year – because they had no plan in place.

New times call for new thinking

We’re now living in the brave new business world that the pandemic created, and those new models are here to stay. 90% of customer experience (CX) leaders say hybrid and remote working will form a permanent part of their operations.

That means, inevitably, that deciding whether to transform operations is no longer an option. Our own research shows that 98% of brands are planning customer experience transformation in the next 2 years. 

There is also new instability in recruiting and retaining employees. Our Webhelp Anywhere research conducted in partnership with the industry analyst Frost & Sullivan backs up many of these questions and challenges.

A huge 40% of employees stated that they were ‘somewhat likely’ to leave their current jobs within 3-6 months, with 53% of employers reporting that they are experiencing greater voluntary turnover than they had in previous years.

The industry is responding to the challenge. For example, 78% of customer service executives agree, or strongly agree, that advisors will have more freedom to determine where they work after the pandemic. In fact, 91% believe that some advisors will permanently move to a work-from-home environment.

As an employer in the UK, we’ve seen this for ourselves, with an improvement in the quality of candidates when we hire WFH recruits. 

WFH has driven a 56% improvement in applicants, and the cost to recruit WFO (Work From Office) is 12 times that of remote workers, with WFO candidates 4 times more likely to drop out of the process. Hiring timelines are reduced significantly too, at 24 hours (WFH) vs 4 days (WFO).

For employers, our research also found that 40% plan an increase in offshoring, but 45% plan to increase nearshoring and 39% plan greater local recruitment. Service delivery is getting closer to home.

If the last few years have proved anything, it’s that traditional thinking can’t be relied upon to deliver competitive advantage anymore. Organizations need a holistic tech-enabled approach for the future, and if they’re looking to deliver across multiple regions, there are specific requirements they will need to address.

The bigger the ambition the bigger the challenges

Fundamentally, you’ll want a strategic partner to coordinate and drive the vision for personalized CX across the multiple regions you’re operating in, one with an ability to support customers with multiple native languages and ensure regulatory compliance wherever you are operating. 

Your delivery mix will need to be flexible and resilient, with a partner that can customize service to address any issues – from inflationary pressures to geopolitical concerns – while ensuring they can manage the competing drivers of quality, cost and risk.

How to build in resilience

So how do we learn from what’s happened and use it to build customer service processes that are scalable, highly flexible, and very resilient to disruption?

We’ve developed Webhelp Anywhere, our approach to designing CX operations that utilizes a unique best-shoring approach (onshore, nearshore, offshore) and combines it with a mix of onsite, hybrid, or virtual models. The codified methodology simplifies the decision-making process, to help our clients focus on the strategies that work, so we can continue delivering to their customers whenever and wherever. 

We start by thinking through how we can build operational resilience into business continuity planning:

  • Where do you work? Does your customer service team need to be very close to your customers or can you explore nearshore or offshore options? Could you create a mixed solution to ensure that multiple sites are available?
  • How do you work? Is there a reason why all of the team needs to be located in the office? Could you hire nationally by supporting a work-from-home model or is there a blended hybrid that offers the best of both?
  • When do you work? Do team members really need to undertake continuous 8-hour shifts? Could work be broken into smaller chunks, making it more flexible for the employee and enabling the client to focus more resources on busy periods? Can a layer of gig workers be trained and available to support the core team during peak periods – such as a retailer heading into Black Friday?

What’s the interface like between your brand and your customers?

Ensuring that the interface between your brand and customers is resistant to any challenge is the critical first step. This approach dramatically improves business resilience and the framework for a much more flexible customer service operation. By embracing a hybrid approach you are no longer constrained by the size of a physical office. By including a gig layer you can manage extreme peaks in business without service degradation.

Including more than a single location, by supporting customers in your home market and also nearshoring, offers an additional guarantee. If an office location is physically unavailable for whatever reason, then customers can be diverted to the alternative site.

Blending all these ideas can create a highly resilient, flexible, and scalable customer service solution; one that’s designed specifically for the 2020s, and the challenges yet to come this decade.

A recent paper explains the Webhelp Anywhere methodology and the Frost & Sullivan research in more detail. You can download a copy here.

Craig Gisbon - Chief Growth Officer

Craig Gibson

 Group Chief Growth Officer

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