By Omri Hayner, General Manager, WEM, NICE
The nature of work is changing, and there’s no going back. New generations have entered the workforce, fundamentally altering how employees behave and what they expect from their employers. Add in the lingering effects of the pandemic on consumer and employee behavior and a renewed emphasis on business resiliency, and you have a perfect storm of challenges.
Nowhere is the impact felt more than in the contact centre, which is known for historically high levels of turnover and a workforce of shift workers. The choices financial leaders make today in response to these changes will shape operational norms and processes, employee engagement, and customer service for years to come.
Here’s what you need to know about the changing nature of work in the post-pandemic era:
- The workforce is increasingly multigenerational: With the addition of Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) to the workforce, four generations are working side by side in an office for the first time in history. Each generation has different expectations of their employers, including how they do their job duties and how their performance is evaluated. They also have evolving preferences when it comes to how they communicate—and are communicated with.
Omri Hayner - Employees and consumers are tech-savvier than ever: Just as the pandemic catalysed digital transformation, it also made the workforce more tech-savvy. Today, the use of newer communications modes has become cross-generational, with employees of all ages comfortable using non-voice, asynchronous communication methods like Slack, SharePoint, or ASANA as part of their day-to-day interactions at work.
This workday familiarity with new methods of communication has spilled over into employees’ personal lives as well, and this is shaping consumers’ experience with their financial institutions. Boomers and Gen X have historically relied on voice and synchronous communications, which take place in real time and require an immediate response, but they now increasingly use non-voice, asynchronous interactions like text or email when they communicate with businesses. In fact, Boomers are now the fastest-growing demographic on social media, and they’re using it more than ever before for customer service.
Financial services organisations have responded by improving their digital capabilities to meet increased demand. This includes new or enhanced digital platforms, mobile apps, and online customer service, all of which continue to be a priority in the industry. And, with customers using self-service apps to handle routine issues themselves, agents are increasingly handling more complex, nuanced customer issues; as a result, the skills required of agents are shifting as well.
- The customer is in the driver’s seat: The pandemic also caused many people to reevaluate their habits and priorities, including who they do business with, and how quickly. Customers now expect faster, more efficient digital services, where and when they want them; the customer—not the business—now has power over when and where (what channel) interactions occur. This has increased the need for financial services firms to put the customer at the centre of operations and decision-making.
- The remote work revolution transformed how (and where) work is done: The pandemic forced companies and employees to adapt overnight to working in a fully remote environment, and some financial institutions reduced the number of physical branches and office space as remote customer support and digital services increased.
These shifts upended everything we thought about managing a workforce, managing contacts, and connecting with others. Agents who used to be charged with completing a piece of work (e.g., answering a customer call) while in the office are now participants in a work stream with many activities underway (for example, emailing a customer whose interaction began the day before with another agent on chat).
This has prompted businesses to rethink the design of their workspaces, creating flexible, activity-based environments that adapt to employees’ needs, mirroring the comfort and functionality of home settings, and ensuring that agents have easy access to the people and resources needed to solve a customer’s problem.
- Amid economic uncertainty, flexibility has emerged as a key enabler of resiliency: Banks and other financial services firms have historically operated with fairly structured policies for contact centre agents, with intraday schedule changes and shift requests often handled manually through emails between agents and managers—a time-consuming practice that makes it hard to meet changing business needs effectively and efficiently.
But that’s all beginning to change. With economic headwinds and the threat of a recession adding an element of uncertainty to the workplace, businesses are increasingly recognising the need to give employees the capability and flexibility to thrive in a fluid business landscape. As such, scheduling flexibility has emerged as a key strategy for enabling operational resilience.
Scheduling flexibility enables businesses with shift workers to expand and contract staffing levels along with demand. This has led to a much more flexible workspace, which goes hand in hand with more flexible work assignments and more flexible planning, scheduling, and forecasting.
Consider the case of TD Bank, which was seeing vacancy rates of 40% to 50% when the pandemic hit. The bank’s contact centre leaders leaned on their workforce management solution to intelligently identify solutions to address staffing gaps, proactively manage agent communication, automatically approve schedule changes that benefit the business, and automatically adjust schedules. Real-time alerts tailored to each business unit automate the monitoring of adherence, giving valuable time back to contact centre employees as well as team managers. This allowed the bank to increase scheduling flexibility while also eliminating the intraday stress of ensuring that staffing matches customer demand.
The end result? The workplace of today looks nothing like that of just a few years ago. With four generations in the workforce, organisations must meet the expectations and communication preferences of an increasingly tech-savvy workforce and customer base, all while enabling the operational resilience required to withstand an economic downturn. The nature of work has changed for good, and businesses need to rethink how they staff, schedule, and enable teams to meet the new requirements of the increasingly multigenerational, flexible blended digital office.