There has been a lot in the news on the “Great Resignation,” an anticipated major wave of job changes as the pandemic slows down. Some resignations are simply pent up from people who didn’t want to make a move during “these uncertain times,” some are people just wanting to make a change. Various sources expect 25-50% of employees to seek a job elsewhere in the next year or so. Imagine if your business experienced a 25% turnover in the next year. What would be the likely impacts on your customer communications? Let’s take a look.
If you find yourself with a steady stream of going-away parties, you will expect your remaining coworkers to have more work to do. If this work is customer-facing, like sales, service or customer support, you will want to digitalize as many processes as possible. Any call you effectively move to a self-service process on your app or web portal reduces your workload before it leads to frazzled employees that hurt your customer experience. Look to use chatbots and RPA integrations to turbo-charge the staff that remain, as keeping them is important to delivering consistent customer experience.
Digitalizing processes around communications helps you deliver a high degree of service while your staff levels decline. With this efficiency gain, you may learn to operate your teams at a lower staff level with automation lightening the load for your customer-facing employees.
As DOCUMENT Strategy readers know, almost every enterprise has one customer communication system that nobody likes to talk about. Maybe it has large swaths of undocumented code. Worse, maybe it’s mysterious because only a compiled version survives. What if one of the only staff members who keeps it operational is part of the 25-50% of workers considering participating in the Great Resignation?
Now is the time for you to de-risk these systems. There are a variety of next generation AI- and ML-based migration options that ingest, process, reorganize and optimize communications from these mysterious systems before moving the critical communication to an omnichannel capable customer communication system. These new approaches are removing years from complex internal analysis projects. If these key staff members only give you two weeks warning, it’s too late to get their input in any way that will help.
Eventually, things will find a new normal. Even if you have digitalized relevant processes and started approaching some of those scary system migrations, the people who moved on will be replaced. This means a large burst of new employees for you to onboard. If you’re onboarding a lot of new people, look at the systems you are training them to use. If your interactive systems are 10 years old, a decade’s worth of enhancements has probably made them more complex than necessary. This makes it tough to get new employees up to speed. Consider how you can quickly upgrade systems that are unnecessarily complex, so your new employees can be fully functional as quickly as possible.
You have a choice. Maybe the Great Resignation will come. Maybe it won’t. If you digitalize processes that can be digitalized, de-risk your legacy systems and streamline the systems used by your customer-facing colleagues, at the very least, you will be delivering better customer experience with less risk and lower cost. Your business will be set up for growth, great customer experience and a lot of great new colleagues. Preparing to de-risk your business from high probability events is always a sound business decision.
