With the emergence of new technology, contact centers have many options to make their busy season easier than ever. Traditionally contact centers have relied on standard staffing methods or called on a BPO to help meet their anticipated service levels. The challenge with these approaches is they can become costly very quickly. 

At ShyftOff, we see a clear way that contact centers can reimagine their busy season by incorporating GigCX. A flexible model enables scalability. GigCX provides on-demand staffing, improvements in KPIs, and operational savings of up to 35%. Here’s how it’s done.

Leverage AI to Recruit and Retain High-Performing Agents

As your busy season approaches, most contact center managers think of recruiting agents in the same ways they always have. Write a compelling job description, post to dozens of job boards, and hope interested agents apply in time for their busy season. Once their application tracking software narrows in on a few decent candidates, a hiring manager must manually sift through applications to find the “perfect” agent to support their seasonal work.

Relying on the old way of doing things leaves room for error and is extremely time-consuming. Couple this with ongoing talent shortages, and contact centers must lower the bar to find a warm body who can answer the phone, let alone a qualified candidate who will excel at the job. 

At ShyftOff, we have the opposite challenge of most contact centers. GigCX, because of its schedule flexibility and competitive pay, attracts thousands of qualified agents who want to opt-in to this model. We don’t have to lower application requirements to find the right agents. Instead, we leverage AI to analyze and review applicant experience, soft skills, and personality traits to perfectly match agents to our partner brands. 

It would be nearly impossible to do this manually without inaccuracy, and our goal is to find the right agents as quickly as possible to meet the demands of our partners. By leveraging AI, we can parse hundreds of data points from each agent to align with the specific and often overlooked needs of our partners. 

As a result, we find agents that are not only extremely qualified and experienced yet also engaged–eager to do the work for our partners. Our partners can virtually eliminate absenteeism (a crucial requirement during busy season), skyrocket their KPIs, and hire these agents as needed while lowering operational costs. Not to mention removing the need to deal with front-line attrition during the most critical time of the year. This is the beauty of GigCX, as our clients only pay for agents when they need them versus keeping them on the payroll in the event of ‘what-if’ circumstances.

Optimize E-Learning and Adopt Accessible Knowledge Tools to Support Seasonal Agents

If you want to maximize seasonal agents quickly, your contact center must streamline your onboarding process so gig-based agents can service customers effectively. As you prepare for the busy season, a few questions to ask your management team are: 

• Can your existing training be optimized for seasonal agents? 
• What tools can you implement to support their everyday work? 
• Are there opportunities to reduce your training time?  

In our experience, the most successful contact centers adapt their training to include various training types like e-learning, hybrid, and in-person training models. They also aim to adopt knowledge hubs that are easily accessible for their seasonal agents. By leveraging these resources, contact centers can optimize their training requirements to meet various learning styles and leverage hybrid or remote workforces quickly and more efficiently. Coupled with knowledge bases, your training can now focus more on the specificity of handling your customer requests rather than having your seasonal agents memorize core aspects of your business. 

At ShyftOff, we work with our partners to transform their current training programs into efficient e-learning modules that enable us to closely monitor training performance as gig agents ramp up to support brands. Monitoring the performance during training adds another layer of vetting to further match the most proficient agents to our brand partners.

When contact centers combine optimized e-learning and accessible knowledge hub resources, they can build confidence in seasonal agents early on to help these agents to do the job accurately. One of the factors that lead to turnover for most contact centers during busy season is the difficulty of the work. When agents aren’t empowered to do their jobs, they often check out and, most times, leave. Great contact centers understand the value of adopting these tools so that agents have all they need as soon as they start.

Adopt GigCX to Scale Up and Down On Demand

One of the best ways for a contact center to save on operational costs is to improve the speed to hire. From recruiting to training, there are many expensive resources and humans needed to make seasonal hiring happen. The goal for contact centers this holiday season is to automate scaling their workforce as much as possible. By adopting GigCX, contact centers can scale agents on demand without hiring additional managers or workforce managers. Now, we aren’t saying that these roles aren’t necessary. But to bring on a high volume of agents, you must also find talent for these roles, which is harder than ever in today’s market. 

The best way to mitigate these challenges is to leverage GigCX partners like ShyftOff to integrate this model into your existing operations. GigCX is a complementary function that works alongside your existing team and BPO partners to achieve perfect staffing year-round. It is especially valuable during the holiday season when you need to ramp up your day-to-day gig-based FTEs by 2x or more. 

By design, ShyftOff’s GigCX model consistently identifies gig-based agents to be at the ready to serve our partners. This cuts out the costs of recruiting for contact centers. These gig-based agents opt-in to this work, knowing that opportunities with multiple partners are flexible, and they are incentivized to perform well on partner accounts to continue receiving opportunities for work. Not only are contact centers cutting recruiting and payroll costs, but they also maintain culture by eliminating the emotional tax of letting seasonal agents go. Instead, it is a seamless opportunity for our partners to scale up and down without impacting the expectation of our agents or impacting their company culture. 

Let’s make this holiday season your easiest one yet. Get started with your GigCX pilot this week. Contact our team to get started.