Even At Times of Social Distancing, Customer Service Branches Have An Important Role

On a previous blog post, we've discussed some options for stepping up to the unique challenges of the current health crisis. One direction suggested for when face to face interactions become impractical is transitioning to digital, and particularly video interactions. One would be forgiven for assuming this means shutting down the service branches, and concentrating instead on digital contact centers.

Well, not necessarily. Closing down branches means putting people out of a job, temporarily or permanently. Doing this while hiring for digital contact centers makes no sense. A much more economically viable move would be to connect the network of branches to virtual queues and allow their staff to provide digital customer service.

This situation is precisely where a competent omnichannel software solution would be worth its weight in gold (more, actually, as 1's and 0's don't weigh much). After all, an omnichannel system should allow a business to:

• Handle all customer interactions similarly, regardless of the communication channel
• Have agents responding to multiple channels with the same user interface
• Offer customers a consistent experience across all channels
  

But – and there's a BUT here – many systems might not actually support the transition of walk-in service branches into digital service branches, or vice versa. The reason being that most of the omnichannel solutions on the market were not designed to manage face-to-face interactions.

Q-nomy's Q-Flow platform is a very different beast, in that it evolved out of face-to-face service management, later becoming the full omnichannel platform that it is now. As such, Q-Flow does support the transformation of walk-in service branches into digital branches.

Q-Flow also supports intermediate modes of operation, where face to face appointments are reduced but not completely eliminated. Service representatives would then need to handle hybrid queues; that is, a mix of walk-ins and digital communications, routed to them intending to keep them busy and productive.

Learn more about Q-nomy omnichannel solutions