The crucial challenges of remote work for contact centers
The health crisis linked to Covid-19 that we are struggling to navigate has had numerous impacts and has brought about new unexpected constraints, to which professionals had to adapt very quickly. Nevertheless, the question of the importance of remote work (working from home) in our habits is not new. Or at least, not for everyone. Indeed, the world of customer relations has always been a fertile ground for bold evolutions! Remember, with the emergence of homeshoring in the 1990s, or the advent of the Internet, the development of ADSL and broadband in the 2000s had already initiated this process of managing customer relations remotely. Today, it is in a particular context that many companies must face this new challenge…
Towards a (r)evolution of traditional practices
The question of remote work in the field of customer relations is therefore not new. The health and economic crisis, by accelerating the boom of e-commerce at the expense of physical stores, completes the finalization of this process. This organization has imposed itself over time, thanks to robust infrastructures that are easily accessible, regardless of the connection point, ideally allowing for a constant maintenance of activity. Employers therefore had very little time to prepare for this upheaval, initially planned only as a short-term solution! In this highly uncertain context, several factors come into play to decide whether the roles of teleconsultants can indeed be carried out remotely. Indeed, the new era of remote work implies a much more significant and determining reliance on new management modes. And this highlights new challenges: when the agent is at home, left to their own devices, can they have the same tools as on-site? What means are there to communicate with their supervisor? Can they expect their availability and immediate support solely through similar digital tools? Very often, the answer is no! Remote work is a distinctly different mode of working, where traditional technologies prove to be much more restrictive and insufficient. And the current particular context has largely proven this. Let us then discover the technical prerequisites necessary for deploying a contact center operating remotely.
Adopting the right approach for optimal remote operation
In contact centers, productivity demands naturally create an extremely regulated environment. Customer waiting times not to exceed, customer satisfaction indices to reach (and justify!) at all costs, service quality (QoS) to maintain at a very high level, performance metrics to meet… Advisors are set a large number of daily quantitative goals to achieve, and their supervisors are constantly by their side to support them. But these constraints also apply to those working remotely!
Break times for pauses are framed within very limited and controlled times, and objectives remain unchanged, transferring the demands and even the stress of the contact center into the home. Whether on-site, working remotely, or offshore, the same labor and the same fatigue! However, if expectations do not weaken, it is then necessary to provide remote advisors with optimal working conditions, for their comfort and effectiveness. To this end, many conditions must be met:
Provide optimal work tools, accessible remotely and without interruption;
Benefit from a management solution for interactions that includes a softphone to enable the agent to work without their fixed workstation;
Ensure secure access and data compatible with remote connections, particularly through a permission based on the SSO method;
Use a solution requiring a low hardware footprint, thus promoting its accessibility and use remotely.
Finally, thanks to the cloud, and despite geographical distance, the supervisor can, remotely, access the usual indicators allowing them to assess the quality of the agent's work (number of cases processed, response time, customer satisfaction rate, etc.). For this, the implementation of an omnichannel tool for managing customer interactions is essential!
Discover ViaFlow, your omnichannel ally for remote customer relationship management
To respond to this societal challenge represented by remote work, ViaDialog supports its partners in their adaptation to working remotely, by offering them through ViaFlow a unified platform that can be deployed quickly on-site and remotely to easily adapt to their needs and operations.
ViaFlow is a natively omnichannel platform entirely accessible remotely in a completely secure manner, and with a low hardware footprint. Thanks to our solution, equip your remote agents with a software that natively integrates all channels of customer relations and thereby provide your customers with an optimal experience under all circumstances.
If you wish to learn more about what ViaFlow can do to assist you in managing remote work, our experts are available to discuss with you!
