Over the past 2-3 months, countless businesses have struggled to maintain operational continuity as they have been forced to rapidly move to teleworking strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic. For some, it’s been a relatively easy transition – especially for those who already had implemented cloud strategies to support mobile and remote workers. While transitioning entire workforces is no easy task, the technology was available.
Others, though, needed to seek out solutions that would enable workers to function effectively from their homes and ensure they could continue providing seamless customer service. Fortunately, there’s an abundance of options available – perhaps the hardest part is determining which is best for your business.
Business communications provider Onecom was among those businesses. Telecom providers have been in a unique situation – while the company itself had to comply with stay-at-home orders, its services remained key to its customers’ ability to operate during the crisis. As such, it was critical for its sales and customer service teams to be able to function as though nothing had changed. Fortunately, given its line of work, it had a good sense of how to ensure a smooth technology migration and workforce transition, as well as a high level of familiarity with some of the best solutions available through its technology partnerships.
Onecom settled on Vonage’s contact center solution, which it was able to deploy overnight to provide a quick and painless transition to a 100% remote workforce, without any customer service disruption to its more than 90,000 business customers in the UK.
“Vonage has played a key role in the biggest change we have ever made to our working practices. Our contact center seamlessly transitioned from zero to 100% of our people working from home overnight,” said Stu Jeffries, Head of Customer Service at Onecom. “Insightful bespoke reporting, combined with the ability to make real-time changes to our IVR options and customer messaging, have created flexibility and tangible efficiencies which will reap benefits for many years to come.”
With the cloud-based Vonage Contact Center solution in place, Onecom was able to integrate all its communications channels without exorbitant costs or hardware upgrades, and was able to connect the platform to its CRM system to ensure customer service continuity. The company employs some 300 customer service agents, who now benefit from dynamically managed call queues and routing, reducing wait times, average handle times, and helping drive higher customer satisfaction rates. The Vonage Dialer helps reduce manual dialing errors, and reduces time between interactions for agents, allowing them to engage more customers in a shorter time frame.
Regardless of where they are located, agents are able to log into the platform and have access to the entire suite of services, and managers are able to customize reporting can call recordings to identify development opportunities and pick out keys to successful interactions. Onecom says it has exceeded it forecasted uplift in contact rate, grown revenues, and increased it operational efficiency since deploying the Vonage Contact Center solution.
Edited by
Erik Linask
