There are many articles reviewing the use of smart phones amongst contact centre customers and how this changes the nature of self service.  Many call centres are seeing a rise in incoming traffic from mobiles – both calls and ‘data’ (apps and mobile web access)

There is another mobility that should be important to your contact centre though – the mobility of your workforce.

This can be characterized on two levels – mobility within the contact centre itself, and a higher level mobility giving them ability to work in different spaces. Let’s call them in-building and wide area mobility.

In-building mobility is important because it can help your staff improve first call resolution by accessing information or support to resolve customer questions quicker.
Examples are that you can access products or a demo lab to test equipment, if you can do this whilst the customer is still on the call, then there is no need to call them back or put them on hold.  You can also get access to customer or product documents, again, to help resolve queries in real time.  And finally, people – with all organisations portfolios becoming more complex, the likelihood of one person being able to fully solve an issue is getting smaller. With in building mobility, you can find a colleague or expert (or a supervisor can come to you) to gain their help and collaborate on a solution.

This in-building mobility is fully enabled through a Plantronics wireless headset. Great sound, audio protection and in building mobility combine to make this an ideal contact centre solution

Wide area mobility is the ability and empowerment to work outside the contact centre. It is very unlikely that customer service teams will be working in locations such as cafes, but they can work from home.   This has very many advantages for both the organisation and the individual employees.  Higher staff retention, increased employee satisfaction, reduced building costs, disaster recovery plan – all of these are achieved by implementing home working for contact centre staff.

As we’ve said before, work at home is great. You gain many things, but you lose the acoustic control that is present in many contact centre buildings (tiles, carpet, barriers), therefore need a great headset that is reliable and has high noise cancelling to ensure great sound quality.

So as you prepare for the mobile customer, start planning for the mobile contact centre employee also.