Across every industry, companies big and small, have to make a decision. Now that vaccines are widely available and distributed, do you stay fully remote, go back into an office full-time, or operate a hybrid workforce?
It’s an interesting conundrum to take on, with major benefits and major challenges for each. In other words, there’s no perfect solution.
For the contact center, there’s at least one of the three options that’s being tossed out by the majority - operating fully remote.
According to the Post-Pandemic Contact Center Report that polled 250 contact center leaders across the U.S., the majority (56.3%) will transition to a hybrid workforce, and a large part of the remaining will return to office full-time (36.5%). That leaves just 7% staying fully remote.
And in some industries it’s even more extreme, with 100% of financial services organizations going hybrid or full-time onsite.
Why are contact centers hesitant to stay remote?
A swath of challenges have arisen with the rapid shift to remote work, including compliance, agent performance, QA, and learning & development. Only 9% of leaders surveyed reported no new challenges with remote teams.
Ensuring quality assurance (35% report this to be a challenge while their team is working remotely), ensuring compliance (31%), compromised ability to see what is happening with customer interactions (31%), ensuring that personally identifiable information is redacted during calls (30%) and delivering consistent customer experience (28%) are some of the most widespread difficulties experienced by teams working Remotely.
And a whopping 75% of surveyed business decision-makers believe that it is more challenging to ensure compliance remotely versus in-office.
Looking for more on what’s next?
The full research report includes various statistics around the state of the contact center in 2021, decisions made to maintain resilience, and future plans. Read the full report here.
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