COVID-19 Outbreak Blog #1, Furnishing Retail & Cloud Contact Center
COVID-19 Outbreak vs. Cloud Contact Center, Blog #1 Furnishing Retail
How the contact center responded to the black swan incident during COVID-19 outbreak.

Under the influence of the epidemic, the call center industry is going through a change. The call center is rather a crowded place, so in principle, to follow proper social distancing rules, enterprises have to send the agents home therefore put all call center services on hold.
However, the ongoing services to customers not only cannot be stopped, but there are also many new scenarios where phone calls become crucial during the epidemic for a wide range of companies and associates such as hospitals, city hotlines and etc. Under such circumstances, AsiaInfo Veris Cloud Contact Center could help many companies achieve rapid recovery and efficient production during the epidemic, and the elastic nature of cloud service is of great help.
In this article, we are taking a closer look at a few examples how AsiaInfo Veris Cloud Contact is serving business critical missions with its product competency.
01 How large furnish chain resolves retailing problems
1. Furnishing Retail - Issues
1) Nearly 2,000 home-experience pavilions were closed due to the pandemic, and store employees were sent home.
2) As epidemic prevention measures and social distancing, the customer service team cannot return to the headquarters to work.
3) The online customer's active consultation request cannot be taken offline, current customers cannot be maintained, and the potential customers in the store cannot be served properly.
4) Employees are scattered throughout the country, the home office environment is not standardized, there might be situations like no proper computer setup, underperforming broadband and etc, which makes it difficult to work remotely.
2. Furnishing Retail - Customer Requirements
1) There is an urgent need for a remote agent solution that can go online quickly, allowing customer service center employees and chain store business personnel to remotely access and actively contact customers at home during social distancing and isolation under pandemic measures.
2) Remote agents can meet the needs of telephone dialing. The call center system can communicate with the CRM system, and the headquarters distributes services with quality, responsiveness and consistency.
3) Unified management of employees' remote working status, unified monitoring of operation indicators, and quality inspection of business processes.
3. Furnishing Retail - Solution
1) Omni-channel solution for PC + Mobile App. Depending on the employee’s home office setup or other conditions, one can choose a PC or mobile app to access the contact center system, bind a landline or mobile phone, and provide consulting services to customers.
2) The cloud contact center is deeply integrated with the business system of furnishing company, and the group assigns official website visitors and client inquiries to the business staff in their regional stores. They see which customers need to be contacted with scheduling and the indication of the follow-up status in the app.
3) PC and mobile data are connected. After completing the communication with the customer, the data is summarized and managed in the system in a unified manner. The mobile terminal and the PC data are interconnected. The call history and recording can be checked back throughout the process.
4) Intelligent quality inspection optimization service is applied to all calls. In order to improve the level of business consulting and service quality, voice transcription is also enabled, all the intelligent quality inspection features and other functions are properly setup to solve problems in real-time and optimize service quality with remote agents.
5) Unified management and monitoring service is setup to enhance the service level. The person in charge of business operations monitors the operation indicators in real time, understanding the customer service consultation status of the sales staff in stores across the regions and sometimes even the whole country, and export the operation report analysis at any time to adjust the work arrangement.
4. Furnishing Retail - Results
The remote agents are all actively working, completely independent from working locations and physical limitations, the solution completely reactivated the sales system, accumulated a large number of effective customers, and laid a solid foundation for resumption of work during the special time of COVID-19 outbreak.
Summary
How the contact center defends against the "Black Swan" incident
Through the COVID-19 epidemic, AsiaInfo fully appreciated the dynamic of the environment, whether it is the mother nature, the social environment, or the economic environment, the enterprises might have to deal with difficult situations or even crisis sometimes, and that is when we have to introduce the resilience and flexibility of the enterprise’s business supporting systems, against the black swans.
Compared with traditional call centers, we can see that remote agents based on cloud contact centers have advantages in terms of implementation, cost, deployment cycle and service. AsiaInfo Veris Cloud Contact Center provides the dual platforms + high availability communication capabilities, one the most important reasons for the rapid expansion of remote access for our customers.