We would be delighted to speak with you

NEWS - Call Center Insights

The latest industry insights & news from CCSI, Specialists in Establishing Contact Centers in Mexico for Debt Collection, Customer Service, Sales, BPO and more.

call center needs and the benefits

Coronavirus Prevention Measures for your Contact Center

Coronavirus Prevention Measures for your Contact Center

Being prepared for possible health risks that might affect our business is not always at the top of the list, when the time comes, we realize we are not always fully prepared to manage a situation like the COVID-19

in a call center since it’s not an easy task.

Your call center is an important element of your business, even more so now that customers need remote services and are feeling anxious. It’s important to take care of your customer service and customer experience, but how can you manage it when your employees may be affected as well?

The key element right now is prevention. Here are some preventative measures you can implement at your call center.

 

Avoid Misinformation

There is a lot of misinformation and rumors on media, turn to a reliable source of information for your employees to avoid fear and anxiety. Create consciousness about the importance of their participation in all prevention activities. Remember they are the ones that speak with your customers and can transmit their emotions to them.

 

Actively Promote Prevention in The Workplace

Place informative signage in restrooms and common areas and send emails about hand hygiene, cough & sneeze etiquette. Turn your supervisors and managers into ambassadors of hygiene and prevention. Don’t forget to also implement policies for visitors and vendors such as using gel sanitizer at the moment they enter your facilities.

 

Encourage Sick Employees to Stay Home

Be more flexible with your Sick Day policies, allow employees to stay home when they feel sick or if a family member is sick with similar symptoms, this way you can prevent any workplace contagion. Communicate these flexible policies, so your employees feel assured to go home, and keep a registry with your supervisors to monitor the possible causes.

 

Promote a culture of hygiene

Make it so agents actively participate in cleaning their own stations every day. Constantly clean work tools and surfaces such as workstations, mice, headsets, biometrics, keyboards, etc. This will be a challenge for your cleaning and maintenance team as well.

 

Provide Disinfecting Products

As you promote this hygiene culture, you need to provide them the tools. Offer disposable wipes on the stations, hand sanitizer near entrances and exits and biometric devices. Provide face masks for people that might present symptoms and accessible medical personnel.

 

Plan for A Next Step

It is not a plan without clear objectives, for your employees, clients, vendors, and community.  Be prepared for an increase in absence, you can cross-train essential tasks in case a key person is absent. Evaluate how crucial is every business function in your company and then asses the possibility of working from home, if you don’t have already one in place, you need to start working on processes and policies for remote work. If for any reason you cannot stop a business activity and remote work will not work for that activity, reinforce the prevention measures, such as implementing new policies for social- distancing.

 

Multiple Location Planning

If your call center has more than one location, you can take advantage of this by managing your workflow and make use of the locations with lower risks.

However, it’s important to let each location manager have the authority to implement appropriate measures for their location according to the situation of their centers or specific country location.

 

Which of these measures are you already implementing? Which other measures are you implementing at your contact center? It’s important to share this information so we can prevent more cases.

We can’t know when this is going to be fully controlled, but we need to have faith and positivity that everything will go back to normal with the cooperation of every one of us, we need to transmit this feeling to our employees, it is our responsibility as employers, managers or supervisors to educate and protect our workforce and allow them to help others as well.