I recently discovered an article from McKinsey & Company, Delivering the US manufacturing renaissance, that conveyed how US manufacturing may be poised for an overhaul and a rebound. The article is about a year old, but it’s an interesting read regardless.

The article went on to share how any reinvigoration of US manufacturing would also require reinvention. And that companies around the world were taking a fresh look at the paradigms that have dominated the industry’s evolution for decades—making manufacturing more sustainable, more digital, more skilled, and more resilient.

This prompted me to give some thought to how the contact center at your manufacturing facility can join in on how to become more sustainable, digital, skilled, and resilient.

Addressing sustainability

Manufactures rely heavily on fossil fuels, and there is a move afoot towards sustainable, renewable energy sources. How can your contact center join in?

Well, one could say the fact that contact centers around the world had to move their customer service agents home during the pandemic has had a significant impact on long commutes, impacting the consumption of gasoline. A recent article from FlexJobs stated, if you get 20 miles per gallon and the average price of gas is $4.50 a gallon, you'll spend $1,188 a year just on gas. However, if you work from home even two days a week, you'll spend $756 a year, saving you $432. Not bad. And that is just gas. There are other savings as well, car maintenance, insurance costs, clothing expenses, eating out and tax breaks. And don’t forget, no more stressful commutes.

Also, as we know, many contact centers are located in remote locations where office space is plentiful and inexpensive. This required agents and supervisors to travel, sometimes long distances, to show up for an eight hour shift. With the shift to remote work, this not only eliminated the commute, but it also expanded the number of jobs available to agents wanting to work remotely. It also expanded the type of hours worked and even the workforce itself. Now, shifts could be three or four hours with no need to travel, and part-time opportunities can expand to stay-at-home moms and dads, as well as retirees.

Cloud-based solutions allow employees to cut down on travel while maintaining peak performance in your contact center, while old premise-based systems software installs and upgrades require onsite support to load and configure the software on physical servers. Partnering with a manufacturing software development company can be a strategic move for contact centers looking to optimize their operations and embrace more sustainable practices.

Onsite support of a premise-based solution can also sometimes employ a small army depending on the size of the contact center. This means lots of people commuting daily to be onsite, traveling on weekends home to be with family, and when upgrades to new software versions are required, everyone travels back to install the latest features and functionality. The cloud eliminates this with remote installation, configuration, and upgrades, and yes, troubleshooting and fixes. This not only reduces the use of gasoline, but also stress on families, because travel is cut back and possibly eliminated in some cases—another nice by-product of cloud-based software.

Digitally transforming your contact center

Digital transformation in the contact center has been a trend in the industry for some time, but not all businesses have joined in. However, leading manufacturers are now applying digital technologies at scale in their operations. And these leaders are realizing KPI improvements across sustainability, productivity, agility, speed to market, and customization.

Just as adopting digital technologies can impact manufacturing on the floor, digital transformation in your contact center can have significant impact, as well. First, by adopting digital channels in your contact center, you take a step forward in customizing each customer or supplier experience. With the ability to choose the channel or channels they use to engage with your business, it can make the overall process of communicating with your facility faster, easier, and more seamless. This transformation alone can impact a number of KPIs in your contact center including CSAT, NPS and FCS, all while adding to your bottom line production and revenue targets. In fact, according to McKinsey, a customer experience digital transformation can increase the revenue of a company by 20 to 50%.

Improving your agents’ skills

The article points out a couple of different ways companies can address skill gaps in their workforce, hire new staff with the right skills, and build skills internally by retraining the existing workforce for new roles.

In the contact center we prefer the latter. And no, we are not suggesting preparing your agents for new roles. We are encouraging you to coach and train your existing agents and help them hone their existing skills.

By using quality management and analytics tools you can identify where improvements are necessary and target training and coaching to help your good agents become great ones. In addition to proper training, keeping your agents motivated with incentives including bonuses, awards, company-wide recognition, and perhaps some good natured competition amongst teams, you can retain great talent and avoid the expense associated with agent attrition.

Data from SQM Group shows the average call center turnover cost per agent is $20,800 to replace an average performing agent. It just makes sense to invest in training for your existing agents instead of trying to replace them. In addition, well-trained agents are more productive, provide better service, and as a result are happier. And you’ve heard this before, happy agents equal happy customers.

Maintaining resiliency

Downtime in any industry can be devastating and for manufacturers disruptions on the floor, to supply lines, with internal and external communications, or just about any process or system impacts the entire business. This includes the contact center.

To maintain resilience in the contact center you must look to a vendor that can guarantee uptime regardless of the situation. This could be anything from the internet going down, to a natural disaster, to human error.

To combat these situations your contact center vendor must have redundant solutions that can switch traffic between systems or locations depending on the situation and without dropping an interaction or losing data. This requires your provider to have multiple data centers, running highly available systems with guaranteed uptime. This may sound overwhelming. However, if you have a contact center provider that adheres to these mandates, you should not see any interruptions in your service, and your customers should never experience the impact of any disruption.

There may be a renaissance coming for manufacturing as an industry. At 8x8 we want to make sure your contact center comes along for the ride.

Next steps

To learn more about how manufacturers are taking advantage of 8x8 solutions download this case study from Kubota Tractor Corporation. Also, to learn more about how you can leverage 8x8 download this Manufacturing Solution Brief.