This year's COVID-19 pandemic has put "virtual" in every company's vocabulary. Lockdowns and social distancing have accelerated digital operational changes to a degree many businesses are still grappling with.

While many teams have returned to the office, many more have decided to go online permanently. They've realized it simply doesn't make sense to shoulder the overhead costs of in-person work when everything they do can be accomplished digitally.

Nowhere is that truth more apparent than in the rise of the virtual call center, or contact center as a service (CCaaS). Mobile phones have been the norm for more than a decade. The disruptions of 2020 represent the final nail in the traditional contact center's coffin. Here's why:

Employee Safety and Preferences

CCaaS allows businesses to conduct customer service without having people in the office. CCaaS providers use a VoIP-enabled online platform to field inbound and make outbound calls. 

Companies without CCaaS systems were forced to jumpstart virtual procedures when Covid-19 struck. T-Mobile transitioned 12,000 employees from 17 global locations to work from home.

Having realized they can do their jobs from home, many employees aren't keen on coming back to the office. A September 2020 survey by IBM found about two-thirds of people would like to continue working from home at least on occasion. 

Some companies are learning that employees working from home are more productive than they were in the office. Taken together with the employee safety and retention benefits, enhanced productivity is enough to convince many leaders that customer service personnel should be allowed to work from anywhere.  

Historically, employee preferences haven't been reason enough for executives to transition contact centers to the cloud. 2020 has presented a powerful business case for doing just that.

Customer Experience and Efficiency Enhancements

Many CCaaS systems integrate with popular CRM systems to give customer service representatives immediate access to account details. They log essential call information, automatically developing account records.

Virtual call centers also use interactive voice response systems to route customer calls to the best service representative. They use keywords spoken by the customer, as well as account records, to determine who should field each call. 

When calls are routed to new representatives, the new technician can read the history. This review saves the caller from repeating their story, which often increases their frustration. 

Some CCaaS tools also include voice recognition technology that can catch changes in tone, verbal pauses, and other signs of stress. Embedded AI can identify compliance-related speech or curse words. In some cases, the computer can share scripts and prompts with the employee to help de-escalate situations.

Supervisors can use CCaaS dashboards to track employee performance. They can share efficiency hacks, tips on how to solve sticky situations, and feedback on specific calls. In sales, that translates to more conversions; in sales and customer service, it's about delivering the sort of customer experience everyone hopes for when they call in about an issue. 

Global Operations

Although contact center offshoring is far from new, 2020 has shown that we truly do live in a global economy. CCaaS makes it incredibly easy to incorporate international talent into customer service operations. 

Not all contact center team members are native English speakers. CCaaS software makes it possible to record and share calls with supervisors, who can provide vocabulary and accent-management advice for representatives who speak with U.S.-based customers.

Even accounting for linguistic and cultural barriers, geographically diverse hiring makes it easier to provide 24-hour service. Companies with complex products and services may struggle to accommodate customers' needs with online chatbots. Customers of these companies expect to be able to speak with a human being, regardless of their local time.  

Process and Tech Innovations

Abrupt shifts in workflows have a way of revealing weak spots in a company. Covid-19 showed where their processes and technologies had room to improve.

A good example is team meetings: Getting a physical call center's team together is easy. During the pandemic, companies had to figure out ways to do it digitally. 

CCaaS systems make it possible for agents to seamlessly transition from voice calls to video to social media. That skill is useful not only for working with customers, but for internal communications as well. 

The same is true for companies' tech infrastructure. American Express's internal call center relied on proximity to run software on employees' computers. Computers needed to be near the company's servers to run efficiently.

It wasn't until the pandemic forced American Express to send its team members home that the financial firm realized just what a problem that was. It built out its network and added new processes to track performance. 

Contact center technology upgrades, as well as process improvements, are major investments. Even once the pandemic passes, companies won't suddenly forget they made them. Bringing everyone back under the same roof would be a step backward, in many executives' eyes.

Social distancing has solidified the fate of the virtual call center. Workers want it, executives have invested in it, and customers enjoy a better experience because of it. The virtual call center is the new normal.