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How to Brace Your Support Team for COVID-19

Written by Amanda M. | Mar 17, 2020 1:29:00 PM

Customer Experience is a people business.

At ArenaCX, we care deeply about the health, safety and security of contact center employees. They are often the front lines of the businesses and brands that they represent. Today, they are providing customer service to a population that is stretched thin and feeling uncertain about the future.


Our commitment to you


With COVID-19 escalating rapidly, we want to share some of the measures we are taking to better protect contact center employees while maintaining a high level of service. To limit exposure to COVID-19, within a matter of 3-4 days, over 90% of agents within our contact center network began working remotely. Our contact center partners have enacted their business continuity plans and are committed to maintaining the level of service that our end-customers need during these times.


The COVID-19 outbreak is making it difficult for support leaders to staff appropriately.

These are trying times for business operators. Not only are you taking precautions to protect yourself and your loved ones from the spread of Coronavirus, but you are struggling with maintaining business continuity as you deal with the staffing issues associated with the virus. The outbreak may even cause an increase in ticket volume for certain industries, thus compounding the problem of reduced support capacity.


The challenge of continuing to deliver excellent customer service


If your support team loses a significant portion of its capacity, you could find yourself in a tough spot. Hiring new staff is probably not a viable solution. Most departments will only need to increase their capacity temporarily, and hiring will certainly be a difficult task during this time of crisis. Support leaders need easy access to more flexible labor options in order to ensure business continuity.   


Outsourcing alone isn’t the answer to agent shortages.


Outsourcing has its downsides as well. The time it takes to research contact centers, conduct an RFP process and get a new contact center onboarded is significant – and not a solution to solve short-term capacity constraints.


ArenaCX is here to help.


Our BPO partners are ready and able to take on new customers. In fact, one partner recently onboarded a large team of agents within 48 hours to help the State of NY with COVID-19 responses.

ArenaCX is the only marketplace for customer support that pairs brands up with contact centers who are readily-available to assist with support interactions. With the ArenaCX platform, there’s no need for extensive research on contact centers or RFPs; Support teams can scale quickly and flexibly using our pre-vetted network of contact centers who all operate under one master service agreement. 

The ArenaCX marketplace offers unique on-demand customer support services for businesses of all sizes. The ArenaCX platform leverages gamification to route tickets to the best-performing teams, based on metrics that you determine (cost, CSAT, time to first contact, etc.). This leads to a virtuous cycle of performance improvement and cost reduction.

We know these are difficult times. Having been customer support leaders who experienced periods of seemingly unending ticket backlog, we know how overwhelming it can be. That’s why we’re waiving our platform fees for a limited number of companies affected by coronavirus over the next few months. Our goal is to make your customer service operation run as smoothly and efficiently as possible. Please let us know how we can help.