As inflation rises globally, the customer experience (CX) industry and its employees face a substantial financial and operational challenge.
On the business side, fuel and energy are on a continuous upward trajectory. Employees are also requesting higher wages and leaving jobs that can’t meet their demands, leading to higher, costly attrition rates across the board.
For most CX agents, the increased cost of rent, fuel, and food is significantly impacting their lives, prompting them to move to lower-rent areas and seek out remote positions to eliminate transport costs.
Alongside these internal factors, CX providers must also transform how they engage with customers who face the same financial challenges. Empathy, understanding, patience, and trustworthiness are essential to a customer base struggling to make ends meet, leading to additional costs related to training, coaching, and recruitment.
The CX and BPO (business process outsourcing) industry’s traditional business methods won’t cut it in this environment, so organisations must adopt a more cost-effective approach to employment, operations, and customer service delivery if they want to weather the storm.
Countering New Vulnerabilities
As the number of low-income households increases (compared to pre-inflation levels), CX organisations are more likely to interact with customers and employment candidates living with complex financial situations. Affordability is on everybody’s minds, so brands must find ways to lower the cost of their services and products for customers and offer more attractive, high-margin jobs for employees. In addition, retention is critical since businesses cannot afford to lose customers or talent in these trying times.
One of the most effective ways to counter this issue is by adopting a work-at-home, remote CX delivery model. People are crying out for virtual employment opportunities, well aware of the financial and quality of life benefits they offer. Plus, it’s well-documented that happy workers lead to more satisfied customers, which can make or break a brand’s reputation, particularly during global volatility.
From an attrition standpoint, virtual employment opens the door to an unlimited talent pool. CX providers with work-at-home strategies are not restricted to specific recruitment markets, allowing them to cast the net further, scale quickly, and easily fill vacancies. Employing a remote workforce is also cheaper if there’s any scope to downsize brick-and-mortar operations.
Still, some work-at-home costs can be high for large-scale CX operations when supplying devices to employees. For example, logistics, security, device procurement, depreciation, and maintenance represent ongoing expenses related to work-at-home CX delivery. Therefore, successfully reducing these expenses is vital to any inflation-battling strategy.
How ThinScale Can Help
Here at ThinScale, our endpoint security and IT management solutions reduce the cost and complexities of delivering the modern CX workspace; whether it’s on-site or WfH.
By enabling a secure BYOD (bring your own device) environment, Secure Remote Worker eliminates many costs associated with security breaches, compliance, device procurement, logistics (device loss, delivery, and recovery), IT support, and employee downtime while simultaneously increasing the lifespan of corporate-owned devices. The software installs on agents’ personal devices, making it 40% more cost-effective than purchasing company-owned laptops or PCs.
Then there are the savings related to operating a physical contact centre since the CapEx and OpEx related to traditional brick-and-mortar operations are significantly higher than remote, work-from-home employment. With BYOD, the cost of procuring facilities, equipment, transportation, technology, and other physical necessities disappears, leaving far more financial flexibility to scale operations.
Plus, employees want more control over their lives and jobs, especially in times of financial crisis. With a robust BYOD operation powered by Secure Remote Worker, agents can comfortably work from home, eliminate commuting costs, move to a cheaper location, and feel more committed to their roles, which will boost job satisfaction and drastically reduce the associated costs of attrition for the company.
Finally, Secure Remote Worker empowers organisations to scale their operations rapidly. BYOD brings a whole range of efficiency and flexibility benefits, reducing the time and cost associated with employee onboarding and turnover by taking equipment management out of the equation. Secure Remote Worker’s centralised device management console also makes it simple to scale IT operations by removing repetitive administrative work related to hardware ownership.
For corporate devices, ThinKiosk turns your existing Windows PCs into secure, centrally managed Windows-based thin clients, dramatically reducing hardware and management costs, while also improving the end-user experience.
By eliminating the need to re-image devices, ThinKiosk is ideally suited to on-site deployments as well as WfH, enabling the seamless use of secure shared desktops for contact center / training room/ onboarding scenarios.
And by helping to extend the lifecycle of your existing stock of corporate devices by an extra couple of years (sometimes longer), ThinKiosk allows you to maximise ROI on hardware.
Final Thoughts
The cost of living crisis is exposing businesses, employees, and customers to new vulnerabilities, but solutions are available to companies that are open to transforming part of their CX operations.
The CX industry has always been resilient, innovative, and capable of emerging from any challenge with newfound strength. If providers can pivot quickly and work with the right providers, overcoming inflation will undoubtedly become another achievement in a long line of industry conquests.
