The "big sick" of New Zealand's Omicron outbreak has forced many businesses into solutions they should have been looking at years ago, according to a leading telecommunications expert.
Kelly Brickley, solutions consultant for business telecommunications company Digital Island of the Spark Business Group, says Covid and the Omicron variant wave in particular have created massive disruption for businesses and placed huge pressures on contact centres.
"The big sick has been driving huge customer call volumes which, together with problems caused through sick staff isolating at home, has meant call wait times are up," she says. "But thankfully, technology - what I call desktop nirvana - is helping relieve some of this pressure."
She says the 'nirvana' involves the use of innovative technology platforms which not only help businesses ramp up their contact centre firepower but enable staff to focus quickly and efficiently on important customer issues while leaving less urgent matters to be dealt with by automation or self-service.
"Offering easy-to-use omnichannel cloud contact centre solutions for businesses to provide customer service at a lower cost is becoming the norm in an increasingly remote workforce," she says.
"In many ways this is the best thing that has ever happened to contact centres because it has forced companies to make investments in futuristic technology to handle demand - and is something many should have been doing 10 years ago."
Digital Island's customers include those in government, health, retail, IT, automotive, logistics and fintech sectors, many of whom it is helping to connect to Amazon Connect, a platform which provides intelligent and embedded communication across multiple channels including voice, SMS and email.
Brickley's comments come as organisations and companies across the country have been reporting significant increases in calls in the wake of the Omicron wave. Last month emergency ambulance services across Aotearoa recorded the highest ever 111 call volumes.
St John and Wellington Free Ambulance said 2322 calls were made into its centres in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch on one day. This was about 100 more calls a day than the previous record, according to a Radio New Zealand report.
St John also said there had been reports of record wait times of up to seven-and-a-half minutes for a 111 call to be answered while other reports revealed Omicron-related schedule changes contributed to the busiest week of the year for Air New Zealand's contact centre team.
Brickley says new systems are not just about easing the frustrations for customers but helping contact centre agents to be more effective in working with customers.
"It's about offering the right form of interaction and whether a customer call can be handled by a person or through digital self-service," she says. "A chatbot can provide staff with all the information they need to solve a problem quickly (for example, has a customer called before and, if so, what about).
"This helps get rid of a lot of unnecessary work. Time is the new currency, so if you reduce the phone conversations required, as well as the length of time for each call to be resolved by providing the right information at the right time, contact centre teams have more time to deal with the important things."
CEO Leon Sheehan says while many businesses are responding rapidly to short-term Omicron-related pressure, longer-term, people want options for how they communicate with businesses, not just via phone calls.
"We are seeing how platforms that offer true omnichannel capability - including customer interactions across email, text and social channels like WhatsApp and Facebook - are growing in popularity and proving customer demand for interacting on platforms that suit their preferences," he says.
"It's important for these systems to integrate into other databases so customer information is seamlessly tracked. This helps priority customers feel valued - but not at the expense of other customers.
"In this way you can deal with high-value engagements first, while more transactional requests can be directed to self-service digital options."
Sheehan says many Digital Island customers have experienced positive results. LANtech, a large IT services provider, has, through its newly acquired Amazon Connect capability, seen calls reduce by 24 per cent, time spent on service delivery drop by 20 per cent, and a major new client on its books.
He says another client, Farmlands Co-operative, recently adopted Amazon Connect and, as a result, caller queries were sorted faster and wait times shortened, helping farmers spend less time on the phone and more time on their farms.
"Now the Farmlands customer team can work from anywhere on a secure cloud-based system, rather than in a centralised contact centre, meaning Covid restrictions haven't influenced service."
Sheehan says while some might think artificial intelligence is set to wipe out jobs, Digital Island sees it as allowing people to do their jobs better and more efficiently.
"This technology isn't just about improving results for businesses and customers; it's also about making it easier for contact centre agents to do their jobs.
"We've all read about pandemic-induced overload on the workforce. The Great Resignation has shown how tight the labour market is, so every improvement to work conditions will help to reduce absenteeism and increase staff tenure."
For more information go to: digitalisland.co.nz/amazon-connect