Luggage and handbag designer, Vera Bradley, launched their remote work program in 2018, with more than 80% workforce participation by the next year. So in the early days of the pandemic, they already had an idea of what a full remote workforce would look like.
The goal was simple: turn a hybrid in-office/work-remote contact center of 33-75 service reps into a 100% remote workplace. But they had to do it quickly. In leading the project, Susan Campbell, Vera Bradley’s Director of Customer Experience, laid out a roadmap of issues to be addressed.
Compliance isn’t Optional
One of the biggest hurdles was security. “Because we needed to be PCI compliant,” says Campbell “we did not want our agents to take any payment information.” They found the solution in CXone Interactive Voice Response (IVR). “Our agents connect the customer to the IVR, the customer enters their card information and then the call comes back to the agent to wrap up the order.” And when the agent frames this as a security measure, customers actually appreciate the extra step.
How to Manage with Just a Mouse and Your Ears
In this new reality, managers needed new tools to monitor their team remotely. Integrated reporting was key, Campbell says, something they didn’t have with the previous system. “There were different ways to look at reports, and everybody was looking at them differently. We have a true north now for our reporting, and that’s through inView Performance Management.” Managers have a shared dashboard view that displays KPIs, contacts-per-hour, CSAT scores, and other helpful metrics in one place.
Additionally, managers could no longer simply “walk the floor.” They had to listen in remotely. In the beginning, “the first few minutes of every call would be the customer venting about the long hold times, about our masks being sold out, just about their life in general,” says Campbell. “There were a lot of tears, more upset people than I've ever seen. These were strong customer service reps, dealing with so many upset customers each day. And they're not able to turn their chair and commiserate with their neighbor anymore.” Agents were dealing with a lot of complicated issues, and they couldn’t have a quick hallway conversation with an HR representative. So managers needed to not just listen in on calls, but be ready to really listen: to their agents and to the customers.
Getting Back
The transition to 100% remote work wasn’t easy, but it was generally a success. Then in June 2021 they turned around and came back to the office, this time with a structured hybrid model. “And that was a big move as well,” according to Campbell. “It was just as hard to move back into the office as it was to move out.”
After 15 months of the team working from home, readjusting to hybrid remote and on-premises work was uncomfortable. All the social distancing, testing and recovery quarantines that we all know by now had to be considered.
Ultimately, the team’s focus right now is on happy and engaged agents. Campbell thinks that focus is especially important because we’re in a moment where recruitment and retention are so critical. Two months into their transition back to the office, the labor market imploded “We came back in June. Then in August, over four million people resigned from their jobs nationally,” says Campbell.
The Great Disengagement
The massive shifts in the labor market caused by the pandemic have changed the conversation between employers and employees. Campbell says her agents want to be engaged in what they do, and they want their time at work to fit into the balance of their life. They’re not going to just show up for a paycheck anymore. “It's difficult to come back to the office after working remotely for as long as we did,” says Campbell. “We wanted to make sure that our team's engagement was maintained.”
At the contact center, maintaining engagement means making sure agents feel prepared, supported and empowered to make decisions. In Campbell’s words, “if a customer calls in and they're not happy with our product, the agent has the ability to take care of it on their own, but the idea is that they feel they're never alone.” And there’s a measurable benefit to prioritizing engagement: higher associate engagement results in higher customer satisfaction.
Keeping Up with the Bezoses
During this time, Amazon began building a large fulfillment center not far from Vera Bradley’s contact center in Roanoke, Indiana creating yet another competitive hurdle for Campbell and her team to overcome. “Are we being competitive right now?” they wondered. “So we did a review of everything.” In the end, they decided on a pay scale bump.
The team also re-evaluated the career paths available to employees. For service reps, this first involves building skills in other areas of the organization. They can work with the merchandise planning team, indirect sales or one of the retail markets. There are also career upgrades built-in to the service department: “Chatters have to meet higher satisfaction rates and be able to handle three chats at a time. We also look at higher contacts-per-hour to move people into those roles.”
Future Strategy
Campbell plans for the foreseeable future to continue with their hybrid remote work model, which is still complicated by Covid-19. “We're still making tweaks to our policies, working through exposures and variants,” she says. “And a lot of the predictions for 2022 suggest that The Great Resignation will continue.” So her team will continue to watch engagement and retention rates.
“No matter what is going on, we need to be able to maintain customer satisfaction and our productivity, no matter what challenges are in front of us.”
You can watch the full webinar on-demand to hear more of Campbell’s insights and the role CXone plays at Vera Bradley.