It’s getting to be that time of year: fall leaves, fireplaces, mulled cider and the annual seasonal call center ramp-up. It’s also the time of year when companies such as retailers must plan on doubling or even tripling their call volume during their busiest time of year.
Once upon a time, it used to be a nightmare out of a dark fairy tale. Taking on temporary call center help, which is what many, if not most, contact centers are required to do, meant filling sits that normally sit empty during the years. It also meant finally using all those extra software licenses the company paid for, but used only once a year. This year, 43 percent of retailers plan to hire seasonal workers, many of them for the call center, according to a CareerBuilder study.
“Many of these positions being offered for the holiday season will supplement existing customer service teams,” wrote Andrew Sheridan for Business2Community. “CareerBuilder’s study found that 40 percent of seasonal jobs this year will be customer service positions. Macy’s alone will be hiring 1,125 workers for their customer service centers in Ohio, Florida, Arizona, and Missouri. However, not all companies have the physical space, hardware, or budget to support such large call centers.”
Luckily, technology presents a great way to overcome physical space limitations. Thanks to the idea of the cloud-based contact center, companies can take on more workers in the call center without having to rearrange desks and over-crowd the parking lot. Temporary workers based in another facility, another country or even the worker’s home can log in and become an active part of the contact center without ever making a physical appearance. Thanks to twenty-first century cloud-based workforce management, call recording and quality monitoring, managers can ensure remote workers are performing to the company’s standards.
“Unlike traditional call centers, virtual call centers don’t require any additional hardware, any software installation, or the hiring of any implementation and maintenance teams,” wrote Sheridan. “Instead, each seasonal employee can use their own computer and phone and can work from any location they desire. This gives businesses the ability to keep costs low while still providing customers with excellent phone-based support around the holidays.”
In addition to the ability to use home-based agents, hosted contact center solutions offer another tempting benefit: companies can use only what they need in terms of seats for as long as they need them, and then scale back down after the holidays to normal call volume mode. There’s no need to buy licenses that are used only once a year, costing a company wasted dollars and gathering dust.
Thanks to the prevalence of hosted contact center solutions today, the annual call center holiday nightmare may be increasingly turning from nightmarish to jolly.