Agile resourcing starts with rethinking capacity planning: how do you plan the ability to deliver value without impacting productivity or service levels?

The traditional approach to customer management resourcing - which relies on meeting target service levels despite restricted resourcing budgets – has always been flawed because when agent occupancy goes up, service levels go down. As a result, operations are compelled to factor in expensive idle time to meet their services levels. And there’s lots of it! (40% is the UK Average according to Datamonitor).

And the situation gets worse as companies strive to keep up with the accelerated pace of business. A tough ‘ask’ for businesses that need to balance the conflicting requirements of great customer service and operational cost reductions.

Sensée’s proprietary remote delivery model, coupled with its remote resource management platform, TeamTonic®, helps clients overcome all these challenges by streamlining complex resource planning and enabling clients and managers – wherever they are in the world - to precisely match workload forecasts with an agile workforce, eradicating the idle time that plagues bricks and mortar operations. Furthermore, TeamTonic allows complete remote visibility and control over HomeAgent activity, underpins communication with and between HomeAgents, and enables employee development - 24/7, 365 days a year.

Find out how being agile helped PhotoBox enter new markets.

Your brand is your biggest asset. And as your frontline staff can literally make or break your customer experience credentials, the quality of the people that represent you is paramount.

At Sensée we don’t think businesses should be restricted to hiring only local people when you can tap into a world-wide talent pool. For example, if you are in need of insurance specialists and your customer service centre is in Cardiff, your options may be limited and your ability to acquire the right talent for your brand compromised. However by tapping into the homeworking community, we are able to recruit people from any UK region.

Homeworking 2.0 from Sensée overcomes geographic restrictions to access an extensive, untapped talent pool. More choice means better people, and aligning the right talent to your customer base is the secret to great brand experiences.

And Rank Digital is but one of our clients to benefit.

For any business, an unexpected event can challenge the customer service experience. Whether it’s a service disruption, a natural disaster or a new promotion that drives an unforeseen volume of enquiries, it’s crucial to continue to deliver consistent and accessible customer service at all times.

Sensée enables clients to instantly tap into a workforce of highly skilled and specially trained agents without the requirement to travel into the office, and without the constraint of dedicated shifts. Our tools empower our clients to request extra help in a couple of clicks with our SMS Alert system.

This immediacy can only be delivered by Homeworking 2.0. And as our technology supports every single imaginable business process virtually while providing the highest levels of visibility, control, security, compliance, scalability and resilience, you will have complete peace of mind that we’ll pick up where you (had to) leave off.

Find out how we give Eurostar disaster recovery peace of mind.

In addition to (or indeed instead of) in-house, offshore, and nearshore, Homeworking 2.0 is a vital part of the footprint optimisation mix. Why? Because in addition to unlocking scalability and reducing costs, it gives you strategic resourcing tools to optimise within your own operations. This helps your own centres perform better inside - through aligned teams and 9-5 shifts - and takes care of the disruptive variability outside, thanks to Sensée’s agile HomeAgent pool.

Furthermore, Sensée has systemised and virtualised the entire employee life-cycle, creating an employee-centric “ecosystem” underpinned by specialist technology, which enables and evidences employee tasks and behaviour, compliant customer interactions and events. So, in addition to providing supplementing your customer management operations with our HomeAgents, we can remote-enable your own people to work from home too, giving you the most optimised supply mix and delivering superior customer results.

Be it a need to increase or decrease office space or simply a requirement to let certain agents work from home full or part time, Sensée can optimise your footprint by enabling your own agents to use its specialist homeworking technology platform.

And that’s precisely what we did for Home Retail Group.

We recognise that clients perceive that there are risks associated with the adoption of homeworking which is why we de-risk the entire process by assuming accountability for performance and compliance obligations.

Sensée’s processes and technology have been designed to deliver the highest levels of visibility, control and security. Our proprietary operating platform, SafeOS™, secures and audits home agent workstations and tracks and records every single employee behaviour, customer interaction and event. Thanks to automated triggers and alerts, businesses are actually even more protected than they are inside their own operations.

Finally, to be a true outsourcing partner, we know it’s vital to be able to support businesses across all their customer service activities. In addition to PCI DSS compliance, we have also secured FCA accreditation so our clients can benefit from exceptional quality agents with the confidence that Sensée has met the stringent regulations required to become FCA accredited (and this certainly gave RAC confidence).

Sensée unlocks significant benefits by transforming the way companies work. Our multi-channel customer management services, delivered by highly skilled home agents, give our clients unprecedented agility, higher levels of customer satisfaction, c. 30% operational cost savings, unparalleled business resilience and continuity, and corporate social responsibility benefits (carbon footprint, workforce equality opportunities).

Sensée can do this because we are Homeworking 2.0. We blend best-practice homeworking processes, an unrivalled pool of skilled and committed home-based agents, and proprietary world-class, cloud-based technology to deliver a customer experience that drives the best outcomes for your business.

Last but not least, we recognise that any change in the customer management delivery model has a level of associated risk – perceived or otherwise. That’s why we developed a comprehensive co-managed model with the client, so they are in direct control of the new delivery channel. Finally, we work closely with clients to address their concerns before assuming on-going accountability for performance commitments and compliance obligations.

Find out how Homeworking 2.0 delivers better business performance.