3 Ways The Pandemic Will Change Companies Call Center Strategies
Listen this virus will effect the call center business long after the pandemic has fallen out of the news. The clients will make policy changes that effect the industry forever.
The first way it will change the industry will be TRAVEL. Early in the viruses history companies like Apple stopped all non essential travel and many Fortune 500 companies followed with the same strategy. As the virus turned into a worldwide pandemic, travel has all but stopped to all foreign countries from the US and US carriers are flying empty planes or near empty planes domestically.
US companies are already making plans to change strategies to meet the travel restrictions created by the US and by their companies superiors. Some will move essential travel to private jets. Most will not have that option for many reasons. As companies realize they can do business with less travel they will look at adopting that strategy long term. This will lend to less travel to locations like India and Philippines which will lead to companies looking to bring some jobs back into the US and possibly looking more at nearshore labor than offshore labor. This could drive more nearshore BPO operations to growth while offshore BPO’s may lose seats to the US and Nearshore.
The next way this is likely to change the industry is less outsourcing of more skilled labor. Most clients of BPO send a person to the location to get the initial staff trained and set up and then there are usually several follow up gap training visits for the more complicated processes. Companies may look to keep those jobs closer to home to reduce the travel. Many processes can be set up and trained remotely but the more complex actions require much more hands on training and with travel reductions by many companies they may choose to keep those jobs in-house or nearshore.
Lastly the BPO’s will be forced to do more travel to the clients locations for training and client retention which will take away the advantages of places like Jamaica where the clients come to train and vacation at the same time. That silent sales tool of the lovely beaches may be gone if the client is not traveling and has restricted travel. BPO’s may have to send groups to their clients locations in the US to get trained. This will increase costs and change the staffing requirements as US visas can be hard to get for many foreign staff.
Longterm effects will exist, it is too early to be sure what all of them will be but these three factors are the most likely to occur in my opinion.
