Response to the pandemic by customer contact operations has been varied with some organisations diverting everything online, others striving to operate as normally as possible with a mixture of home working, outsourcing and retaining some office activity.

The short to medium term operational model for contact centre operations is likely to be a hybrid model of increased home working, with residual centre operations subject to strict safe distancing regulations.

The degree to which home working will prevail depends on a range of factors:  personal choice, regulation, residential factors, availability of robust Wi-Fi connections and other technological links, productivity measures, channel suitability.

CCA Global Standard© Version 7 was created to help build better customer experience in a digital world with criteria and guidance in place to examine some of the issues most organisations are facing today including homeworking, vulnerable customers, colleague wellbeing, health and safety and mental health.

An important factor has always been the non-prescriptive nature of CCA Standard©. It does not dictate how you should run your customer operation, but rather focuses on the strategies and operational decisions made and assessing them against an industry agreed framework of best practice.

Homeworking has been successfully implemented by many organisations; however, it is important we continue to keep a focus on standards. The CCA assessment team are industry practitioners with 30+ years’ experience of managing and leading customer service operations, locally, globally, outsourced, mixed models and with flexible/home working operations.

The current situation is an ideal time to use CCA Global Standard© to provide reassurance to business leaders and to colleagues that the organisation is complying with industry best practice and is committed to putting colleague and customer needs first.