Contact centers in the hospitality industry are a more labor-centric business than most people realize. Agents are responsible for providing customer service on behalf of their organization to a wide variety of clients 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They employ a large workforce with a unique mix of skills and needs, and which accounts for most any center’s operating expenses. This labor force is also highly transient, which creates the need for a continuous pipeline of hiring, incubation and training.
The pandemic affected every corner of the hospitality sector and led to a dramatic shift to remote and virtual work environments, forcing the entire industry to reconsider many of its conventional assumptions about its workforce. While hospitality organizations were largely successful at relocating agents from centers to remote locations and workers’ homes, doing so revealed some of the stresses that had long existed for both supervisors and agents. Issues emerged related to communications and collaboration, data security, and training and budgeting, on top of the existing structural problems of turnover and quality control. The sudden disruption in operations created an opportunity to review the underlying technologies used to manage agents, along with the processes that guide them.
