CEO Shirley Woolham has urged Yorkshire business owners to find ways of supporting each other during the coronavirus crisis.
We have started discussions with local businesses to see if Minster’s virtual contact centre can assist those businesses who are struggling due to increases in calls or reduced capacity due to higher levels of colleague absence.
We operate a 60+ people strong call centre, which is now fully remote and can maintain operations through the Covid-19 crisis. The contact centre handles on average more than 12,000 calls a month from customers and has the capacity to scale up further where demand requires it.
Shirley said: “We felt it makes sense to offer the expertise of our call centre professionals to other Yorkshire businesses who could do with some help. Many firms in the area are struggling to deal with calls, but our business continuity plan has been in place for almost 2 weeks and we’d like to put our expertise and spare capacity to good use.”
“With a tech-savvy workforce and a business culture that has long promoted flexible and remote working practises, we were able to respond very effectively to the restrictions placed on the business as a result of coronavirus. Our virtual call centre operation was up and running within 48 hours, minimising the disruption to our day-to-day operations.”
She said that many organisations are facing a raft of new challenges and concerns amongst the business community are growing about how they continue to serve their customers.
“There couldn’t be a more important time for regional business owners across all sectors and specialisms to come together and seek ways of supporting one another. We need to ensure our local economy, which supports the livelihoods of so many people, can continue to thrive beyond the current crisis.”
She added: “As one of the largest employers within the Wakefield area, we are in a good position to reach out to the wider business community in the region to offer our support in helping them with any challenges they may be facing. We are already speaking to a number of other customer-facing companies who need help and I’m urging any other local businesses that feel they could benefit from our support to get in touch”.