The Challenge:
Rapidly scale the onboarding and rollout of a 20,000-agent guidance program
A health crisis of gigantic proportions
When the covid-19 pandemic required fast action to help control the spread, the British Government had to find a way to move at pace and support the public in tracking active cases of the disease. The ability to rapidly deploy a brand-new system to fully support contact center agents was a crucial part of their response to the crisis.
Over 20,000 new home-working contact center agents were recruited and many of them had never worked in a contact center before. The new platform, therefore, had to solve 3 specific challenges.
1. Linking legacy systems
With many of the agents never having worked in a contact center before, information being housed across multiple systems, and an anticipated high volume of calls, it was vital that the information agents needed could be accessed quickly and easily to avoid unnecessary increases in handling times.
The Government required a solution that would link multiple systems together and present agents with the right information at exactly the right time to enable seamless, reliable and efficient support for the general public.
2. Meet the strict regulatory criteria for Government projects
For any service provider working on a Government project, they have to be able to demonstrate adherence to strict regulations, often granted in the form of certification or accreditations. With so much potential risk to the Government’s reputation and to the well-being of the public, the selection process for choosing a provider is stringent. For this project, the Government needed to be sure that the company they chose to partner with could meet all regulatory criteria.
3. Rapid onboarding of 20,000 agents
Onboarding over 20,000 home-working agents within a matter of weeks created a logistical challenge for training, as they had to learn brand new processes and be able to navigate their way easily through them. It was imperative that each call would be handled accurately and efficiently according to important procedural steps.
Expecting agents to memorize processes and scripts before they made and received calls was unrealistic as it was essential that everything moved at pace. The Government needed a solution that would enable faster onboarding and provide reliable support for the agents who were taking the calls.
How Creovai Agent Workflow helped
The British Government selected our Agent Workflow product, via our partner Sitel, as the agent guidance platform that would support their contact center agents through one of the most difficult times in modern history. This platform provided dynamic guidance capabilities so that agents could be presented with the information they needed, exactly when they needed it, reducing call handling times and increasing capacity.
Agent Workflow presented the appropriate guidance to agents as they reached out to citizens who may have come into contact with the disease. The agility of the platform and its adaptability to support a large number of users meant that it could be swiftly utilized for other critical incidents, including working with Government agencies where businesses had gone into administration, or when companies had significant data breaches.
If a citizen tested positive for the disease, they received a call from one of the agents who followed a script, guided by Agent Workflow, to explain the isolation steps they had to take. With real-time guidance, the agent was also able to explain the necessary steps and capture the details of anyone who had come into contact with the infected person, enabling them to quickly step in to also contact those citizens.
The benefits of a collaboration with Creovai
Across nearly 20,000 agents, Agent Worfklow delivered an impressive:
- 241,000 script runs per day
- 6,100,000 script runs per month
- 57,840,000 script runs per year
Although many of the agents had never worked in a contact center before, let alone a home-based agent position, Agent Workflow gave them the support they needed to confidently navigate through each call. With so many fast-moving situations surrounding the global crisis, the Government were able to trust that each call was being handled in the right way to help protect the public and support the response effort.
