I live in the coldest place in Northern Ireland. Officially. The weather station positioned at Katesbridge, a few miles from my house, consistently records the lowest temperatures in the North – –12°C was recorded in recent days. And, of course, living up a hill near the Mourne Mountains, accompanying these low temperatures are horrendously bad road conditions. Getting up our driveway requires climbing equipment, going outside requires so many hats, gloves, coats, scarves and welly boots for the kids and myself that I’ve almost lost the will to live by the time we are ready to leave the house. We have been able to sledge down the hill in front of us in recent days and yesterday I crashed the car into a ditch (well, actually, I did everything possible not to go into the ditch but the car refused to respond to any commands – loud verbal or otherwise).
Despite the bad roads in my area, I choose to live in a remote part of the country and don’t expect the gritters to come right to my door. However, I do expect them to clear the main roads that I need to travel to get the kids to school and myself to work and that hasn’t always happened. There are a host of reasons provided – lack of machines, lack of salt, exhausted staff, the duration and severity of the cold spell etc – but I can’t help thinking every time I hear another excuse that this is just bad planning.
And this is not acceptable – we deserve better. And I feel justified in demanding that because I know that in my professional life, gem delivers better. gem manages a number of accounts that experience pronounced seasonal fluctuations in volume from the travel, technology, telecoms, retail and media industries. We create surge management strategies for a number of scenarios for all our clients – in some cases, strategies can be activated within minutes, others within 24 hours. We expect the unreasonable, we plan for the unexpected and we prioritise for the important contacts.
This might mean that we need to monitor community forums for our technology clients to identify and proactively address any emerging issues for our clients. It might mean liaising with the operations sides of our telecoms clients to ensure that we understand any problems in the field and disseminate them immediately to their customers.
A good example, we have unfortunately encountered multiple times in the last few years, are security crisis affecting our travel clients which cause us to be both very reactive (handling excess inbound contacts) and also very proactive in dealing with the consequences (making outbound contacts to affected customers, IVR messaging, community forum updates) – manning 24 hour desks, using skill-based routing to direct complex enquiries, setting up triage services, making use of multi-channel communications to minimise handling times and extend our communications reach, using staff that we have previously trained for just such an emergency – in many cases getting all these methods active within 24 hours of the crisis starting. Our responses then get better over time, not worse.
We also monitor news sites etc to anticipate any potential problems affecting our customers and immediately start working on managing anticipated surges in volumes – we don’t wait until the cars hit the ditches!