News outlets have recently reported that in the US alone, more than 30 million people have requested government assistance for unemployment — in addition to reduced work hours and pay cuts observed by employees across many sectors — since the COVID-related shutdowns began in March. These aren’t just numbers; they reflect people that must find ways to not only survive the downturn, but adapt to the post-COVID economy to continue working.

Contact Center: Post-COVID

No one has a crystal ball that predicts what the world will look like after COVID-19. But if early indications from economies that have opened fully or gradually are any signal, contact centers will have a greater number of sanitary measures regulating employee movement and presence within offices — at least for the foreseeable future.

To this point, Aberdeen recently surveyed 307 contact center leaders regarding their current and planned strategies. The findings revealed that while only 14% of contact centers had remote work capabilities in place before COVID-related lockdowns began, this number has increased to 52% of contact centers as of June 2020. Data also shows that 62% of contact centers plan to continue increasing their remote work capabilities well into 2020 and 2021.

While the findings regarding the surge of remote work capabilities are interesting, they don’t signal that contact centers are transitioning to an entirely remote work model. Rather, they indicate that more firms are planning to blend their use of remote work with office-based work. Expanding remote work capabilities means that many employees working in restaurants, transportation services (e.g., airlines, taxis), hospitality, movie theaters, sports organizations, and even healthcare can now work remotely as contact center agents if they’re concerned about exposure to COVID-19.

The Gig Economy

The gig economy is set to enable contact center leaders with a diverse set of talent across numerous industries. Gig economy workers are not salaried full-time employees — they work part-time, typically pick the services they want to deliver, and often don’t have contractual commitments tying them to a specific employer. This means former employees of many restaurants, hospitality, and entertainment firms can provide their services to companies based around their own schedule. In fact, even current restaurant, hospitality, and entertainment industry workers can take advantage of the contract work for added income as a contact center agent working remotely.

To take full advantage of gig economy in the contact center, firms must ensure that talent providing their services is qualified to deliver top-notch customer service for the organization. Hence, it becomes even more important for contact center leaders to build a profile of the skills of their top-tier agents, so prospective gig economy talent can be evaluated against the “ideal” skill set. Because the long-term availability of gig economy workers is often unpredictable, this means that contact center leaders must also increasingly use automation capabilities to automatically adjust forecasting and scheduling activities based on changing customer traffic, availability of full-time salaried contact center agents, and ‘gig economy agents.’

Leveraging Gig Economy Agents for the Future

It’s important to keep in mind that contact center agents — whether they’re salaried employees or gig economy agents — have a direct impact on business KPIs such as customer satisfaction, service cost,s and first contact resolution rates. As such, it’s crucial to track and measure the performance of gig economy agents and score them for their performance. This allows firms to continue using the services of gig economy agents driving desired results and avoid those that fall behind KPIs.

As an added benefit, contact center leaders may uncover that some of the gig economy workers are high-performers in achieving KPIs, offering the opportunity to find new talent without the added cost and effort of finding, hiring, and onboarding. Considering the high churn rate impacting agent retention across many contact centers, gig economy provides firms with the chance to partially address churn.

While gig economy as a topic is not yet top-of-mind for many contact center leaders, now is the time to consider how your company may leverage the availability of such talent to continue delivering top-notch service, while now having the agility to quickly expand your service delivery capabilities when needed.