COVID-19 Closes Second Verizon Contact Center

While the contact center serves on the front lines of customer service, your agents are also serving on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic. South Korea illustrated an extreme example recently, and moving here to the states, Verizon (News - Alert) is doing its best to avoid the same fate.

A week ago, Verizon suspended operations at its Elgin, South Carolina contact center, this week the Wilmington, North Carolina closed its doors after another Verizon employee tested positive for COVID-19.

“We can confirm that an individual who works at a Verizon facility in Wilmington has tested positive for the coronavirus,” says Kate Jay, South Area Communications Manager for Verizon. “We immediately closed the facility for deep cleaning, notified any individuals that were in close contact and continued to serve our customers by routing calls to other call centers as well as to our home based agents who are able to answer calls from their homes. In order to increase social distancing to flatten the curve of the pandemic, we’re working to ensure more of our call center reps have work from home capabilities.”

The telecom company urged its current team members working from home to continue to do so.

The choice to closed doors was an easy one for Verizon, and other call centers should follow suit – but do so in a proactive manner. The model is moving the contact center to the cloud, empowering agents with the same capability safe at home as they would in the office and hunker down until the coronavirus dust settles.

In your contact center in the coud?

Edited by Maurice Nagle