Office politics: Pandemic sees onshoring trend ramp up
The Covid-19 pandemic has been devastating for communities, businesses and economies globally. Over the past 16 weeks, as lockdowns were enforced around the world, consumers retreated to their homes and offices and services closed their doors.
The lockdown has presented unique challenges to the customer service industry, much of which has been outsourced overseas over the past two decades. The one thing UK companies never anticipated when outsourcing these functions overseas was that pandemic resulting lockdown restrictions would cut them off from their outsourced call centre operations. Furthermore, they could not have foreseen that these operations would not be deemed Key Services in many countries unlike in the UK.
This has been devastating for many industries but in particular, companies operating in the financial and medical sectors in particular, many of whom had fully outsourced call centre operations, have found it totally paralysing.
The past three months have been incredibly tough for so many but have unexpectedly led to something of an onshore boom in the remote support customer services industry. We have seen an unprecedented rise in the numbers of UK and global firms wanting us to provide UK based customer services, helpdesk, remote switchboard and incident management support.
Almost overnight, when lockdown was looming, we saw UK based companies flooding to bring operations back onshore as call centres primarily in South East Asia and other foreign hubs were forced to close. In a matter of days we went from handling 10,000 calls and emails a day for e-commerce clients to over 100,000 calls in a weekend, as online sales boomed.
Fortunately, we already had large, spacious offices rather than the more typical cramped cubicle format, meaning that social distancing has been no real issue. The ability to move calls across our UK sites has meant that whilst London saw the first wave of the Pandemic the Northern operation centres didn’t, allowing the call volumes to be balanced.
In particular our Healthcare division has become a crucial support to a long-time client, the NHS & the E-commerce division customer services team saw accelerated growth as consumer spending online rocketed.
It’s heartening to hear that over the past 3 months we have had over 3,000 applications for jobs from highly skilled people from the hospitality, retail, and other industries that are still in lock down.
Like the FTSE 350 it has been the midsize UK based companies that have flourished. Agility to move quickly. Ability to flex and expand and being able to take advantage of their size both being large enough to handle influx of calls, staffing, and new contracts but small enough to have management support to move quickly.
I am pleased to see that the pandemic has seen the return of emotion and empathy which will hopefully mean we’ll see less of artificial intelligence led outsourcing where humans were being replaced by bots. Our call centres have seen average call lengths increase by 40% as people just want to spend a little longer talking to someone. People want to speak to people and customer interaction is now more valuable than ever.