Does extreme weather mean contact center meltdown?

As everybody in the travel, transport and related insurance industries knows, extreme weather events typically trigger widespread delays, cancellations, breakdowns, and accidents. And your customer care center is the first place customers turn to for help and advice. Of course, this is actually your reason for being. But because there is no consistency as to when, and to what extent, your services will be required, show-time is typically as stressful for you as it is for the customers you are there to reassure.

So, how do you get through it? Do you have the telephony infrastructure, system capacity, and relevant licenses to open more lines? If you do, do you hire more staff or outsource the extra work to a third-party? And does that effectively ease the stress? Or do you just battle on through and hope for the best?

Whatever solution you implement, if you still find yourself working to capacity, both your agents and your customers are undoubtedly feeling the stress. But more than this, your company or brand reputation could be at risk. There’s a high chance that a lot of customers are not even able to get through.

You probably know there are calls waiting to be answered. But you can’t see the full picture of what’s going on behind the scenes. You don’t know how many customers are angrily hanging up because they’re fed up with waiting. Or how many don’t even get that far because all they hear is a busy tone. In both cases, only to try again later and add to the pressure from the baying crowd. Getting more and more frustrated, and losing confidence in the company or brand you represent, with each long wait and each failed attempt.

How can you solve this? At Sound of Data, we provide a complete cloud-based package of easy-to-implement solutions that spread the workload, ease the pressure and give your customers a far more satisfactory experience.

We provide ample stress-reducing, reputation-saving benefits as standard to everybody who uses our intelligent call routing services. Our overload solutions automatically kick in whenever the need arises. So whenever the next disruptive weather or other unexpected event happens, our customers can rest assured that we’ve got their backs.

At Sound of Data, we aim to create happier businesses, happier staff, and happier customers by making contact center meltdown a thing of the past. No matter what system you’re using or where you are in the world, we provide the capacity and technology to ease the overload. At any time. Without changes in ways of working, investment in equipment, or increase in telephony budget. In fact, many of our customers find their expenditure goes down!

If extreme weather, strikes, malfunctions, natural phenomena, or man-made emergencies cause overload misery in your contact center, talk to us about how we can prevent that from ever happening again. And take pride in your ability to assist anxious customers, instead of feeling their frustration.

Editors note: this post was previously published on February 18, 2018, and has been completely updated for comprehensiveness and accuracy.