The tide has turned for CX in the Twenties and digital transformation for many has fast-tracked to a new level of adoption and execution as organisations navigate how to re-establish a level of certainty in what appears to be a period of constant change. Alongside the technical side of transformation, how we plan workforce utilisation and is now top of the boardroom agenda, which is moving the needle on the urgency and readiness to look strategically at the role of open talent as a sourcing strategy as well as creating a new mindset that looks to understand more closely the relationship between workforce optimisation and greater customer and organisational outcomes.

Traditional models have not and do not need to disappear overnight. Instead, a new ecosystem has evolved that allows for innovative and traditional workforces to thrive symbiotically, complementing each other to deliver the best results for both customer experience and business success.

Concentrix has lead this charge for a number of years, innovating with a unique interconnected customer management ecosystem, a dynamic workforce trifecta that operates from Site to Home to Crowd, one that is perfecting the role that open talent can have in delivering highly responsive, quality customer support that nurtures top talent and raises the bar on CX with Solv Crowdsourcing.

The Value of Open Talent in the Customer Experience Ecosystem

Solv Crowd taps into deep domain expertise from a highly flexible freelance talent pool and offers the ultimate elasticity for organisations to optimise their accessibility for customers at any time of the day, to be truly present at a time that is convenient to them and provide the highest level of support in the language they choose to engage in.

This level of personalised responsiveness can contribute to 40% more likelihood for customer loyalty and satisfaction and attraction for the workforce is equally compelling - a woke population that, contrary to perception, spans different age groups, countries and diverse backgrounds that want to better align life-work balance, create incremental income streams with convenience and who can contribute an incredible skill and knowledge that the industry might otherwise get access to in its traditional and somewhat dating form.

As the business world pushes through the challenges of the 2020 pandemic outbreak with a more versatile outlook on business continuity and reality check on customer expectations of the 20’s, the focus is moving towards a talent pool that can deliver great experiences through subject matter expertise that pre-exists in customers, users and fans of brand services and products and the predictions from the analyst community are gaining increased momentum that points to 30%+ organisational adoption of open talent for customer support related activity by 2023.

The ROI does not disappoint either. Solv continues to yield more than 50% reduced cost by nature of its virtual construct, which is unshackled from the overheads of the traditional premise-based or fixed shift based traditional operating models and opens the doors for a wide array of consumer and business driven processes and ‘micro-tasks’ to be crowdsourced at higher dexterity and lower cost than before.

Fusing Crowd Innovation with your Existing Business Model

Concentrix has proven that disruption with innovation doesn’t equate to extinction of tradition. The inclusion of a crowd solution is the next natural evolution for business strategists to optimise CX, with low barrier of entry for adoption. There are nuances on how to implement and deliver a gig-based model in your business compared to the traditional employee-based model, yes, but they can be complementary to one another, very successfully.

Implementing a gig program with Solv is something that can be mobilised quickly in weeks, not months. A combination of agile tooling integration and sophisticated customer-driven workflows creates a protective layer between customer data exchange and the Solver and an intuitive user interface enables an anytime-anywhere access that fosters an engagement model that is empowered to be responsive and always-on for customers.

Sourcing the crowd talent pool is equally agile. Solv’s existing and growing 4.5k registered userbase can build new candidature in as little as 48 hours, even for niche skill sets, and can ‘surge’ crowd availability in minutes and hours where traditional sourcing can take weeks.

Stemming from global expertise in CX design, Solv’s Crowd playbook has adapted best in class operating processes and policies for a customised operating model that guides newly adopting organisation into this innovative space, navigating all aspects of set up and delivery with leadership and community expertise that enables it to be exclusive to yet co-exist alongside traditional support models elsewhere in the business.

This value-driven approach has not been lost on enterprise contact centre executives and, to validate it, Concentrix partnered with Ryan Strategic Advisory to assess GigCX/Open Talent strategic intent. In Ryan’s Front Office Omnibus Survey of 540 captive operators across Western Europe, North America and Australia, cost management was seen as one of the most compelling reasons for incorporating gig as part of a well-balanced CX strategy.

For those forward-thinking organisations that are already well advanced on their journey with Open Talent and Solv Crowd, the rewards are already very visible:

- A global tech partner implemented Solv in less than 6 weeks and continues to benefit from Customer Satisfaction in excess of 85% and first contact resolution over 80% with 10% reduced cost and volume from repeat contacts, now for multiple global customer markets

- E-commerce flexibility with global lead benefits from a fixed Solv team all year round that can flex 10x during single day promotions. Solvers supporting this brand are spending 25% more with them since becoming Solvers

- A global leader in consumer electronics has improved customer response time by 80% on emails since Solv assumed ownership of this support in 2019

The Power of the Crowd

Open Talent models have the power to supercharge customer experiences for organisations of all sizes. Large enterprises can innovate 20-30% of customer volume at a much lower cost, which may enable repatriation planning or simple cost-out, whereas smaller starts ups and growing organisations might embrace the prospect of a crowd-only solution, help them appear larger and benefit from a mature and sophisticated support experience that they might not yet have on their commercial roadmap.

Business isn’t just digital these days—it’s competitively experience-driven. With the vast majority of customers noting that their experience with a brand is equally important to the products and services it offers, there’s no ignoring quality of service. New ways of doing business like Solv are creating exciting opportunities for companies to differentiate themselves in the marketplace. As the standards of customer experience remain high alongside the need to keep costs low, companies will need to keep pace with the technologies that will allow them to compete at scale. Person-to-person customer care hasn’t gone anywhere—it’s just a human-led digital engagement now.

Regardless of the business type, open talent and Solv provides the gateway needed across the entire industry spectrum for a lean, agile solution that provides end-users with great CX, delivered by entrepreneurial and innovative front-line brand advocates.

Learn more and see how Solv could be right for your business:

Contact paula.kennedy@concentrix.com or find us us at www.solvnow.com and www.concentrix.com