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by Tanya Bansal, Marketing Executive, Ameyo - October 1, 2020

How to overcome the challenges of the remote contact centers?

COVID-19 brought its own set of challenges. One of them is pushing the contact centers to work remotely. Working in these circumstances means adapting to the new environment, leading to many challenges that no one has ever thought of. To maintain business efficiency and create high value for the customers, companies across the verticals need to understand and accept the challenges and support their workforce with the right technology.

As social distancing has become a new norm, businesses are engaging with their customers remotely. But, the remote teams cannot just walk down to a meeting room and discuss the problems. Tracking team performance can also be challenging for managers as it is challenging to identify the reasons for low productivity while working virtually.

But, every problem is an opportunity to create unique solutions. Here’s how you can grab the chance to overcome the challenges of remote contact centers.

1. Data Security: With most customer service reps depending mainly on their devices, data security remains a constant challenge that can put the entire organization at risk of cyberattacks. Especially in the Finance and Banking Sectors, where securing customer’s private data is a priority. In a remote work scenario, the agents can easily tamper with sensitive data, misuse the information, or even threaten the customers.

The contact center workforce is working in a distributed environment, using their devices while working remotely, and it is challenging to keep a watchful eye on their activities.

There can be certain practices that organizations need to follow:

1. Establish a corporate VPN connection to eliminate the scope of data leakage

2. Use number masking to ensure that the agents are not able to see the data.

1. Low Internet Connectivity: Internet connectivity has been a consistent challenge for employees across different organizations. As I have been talking to one of my clients, poor internet connectivity is the biggest reason for low productivity, as is reported by the workforce.

We can simply eliminate this problem by using the tools that fit perfectly with our requirements. There are solutions well crafted and designed, such as Ameyo’s Remote Contact Center Solution and Mobile Agent Application that helps the agents access the software with a low internet bandwidth as 100-150 KBPS. 

Agents will be highly productive if they are given the right tools.

1. Team Collaboration: No matter what business size, industry, verticals, or location you are operating in, the collaboration and effective communication between teams will remain a challenge. The teams working in silos may lead to poor customer experience, low business productivity, inefficiency in resolving problems, and a highly increased average customer handling time. Without guidance from the supervisors or team, customer service reps might face high customer escalations, more call drops, and less work efficiency.

Customers’ requirements change daily, and especially in a crisis like this, they are most anxious. A siloed team will only multiply their trouble.

To ensure that the teams are working in sync, you as an organization need to:

1. Provide on-call assistance to the agents. The managers and supervisors should be easy to approach, and they can help the agents resolve the queries by jumping in on a live call, whispering to the agents, or taking a conference call.

2. Strengthen internal communication. And how? Well, let the agents communicate with their peers or managers using internal chat to instantly gather the relevant information. Interacting with the team in real-time using an internal chat option increases the first call resolution rate by 20%.

3. Create a knowledge hub. The agents can easily access or share information with the customers using a knowledge hub to minimize the average handling time and increase customer satisfaction.

4. Let the supervisors broadcast. Using a broadcast feature, the supervisor or manager can share an important message with the agents. The supervisors can also set an acknowledgment parameter so that he can track the agents’ responses. 

Now, are you wondering how this helps? A supervisor, Ron, has analyzed that there’s an opportunity to upsell a related course for the customers looking for an education course, and agents can use this opportunity to connect and sell more. Ron can select the agents working in the same queue to broadcast the message and help them customize their script.

1. Remote Monitoring: As much as remote working is a challenge, remote monitoring is a more significant challenge. Supervisors find it challenging to keep track of each agent and identify the reasons for low productivity. Tracking team performance across distributed work locations could become very challenging for the managers.

Now, agents might report poor internet connectivity, unsupportive devices, unreliable networks. The manager can either trust the agent, device, or network. This may lead to distrust between the manager and the agents.

To track and monitor the performance of each agent, the managers can:

1. Fetch Device & Network Management Report. With a comprehensive report including 15+ monitoring parameters, the supervisors can identify the issues such as the unsupportive devices used by the agents, the internet connectivity errors, and more.

2. Real-time Monitoring. It’s essential to track the agents’ performance in real-time. The supervisors can keep a check on agents’ online status, break duration, average call handling time, and listening to the live calls. 

1. Easy to Use Interface: Contact center agents are overwhelmed with calls. The call volume has increased by 20-30% during the pandemic, and agents struggle to resolve customer complaints, resulting in low CSAT rate and high average handling time.

But, you can provide your agents with an easy to use interface that allows them to retrieve customer information easily. 

Reduce average handling time by allowing agents to:

1. Access customer information. Integrating the remote contact center software with in-house or third-party CRM allows the agents to preserve the conversation’s context and help them customize their scripts according to the customer requirements. For instance, if a customer has unresolved complaints about a product, the agent can quickly check the related details in the dashboard and assure the customer that the experts are handling their query.

2. App-plexing. While talking to a customer on a live call, Agents will have to switch between multiple tabs. If the user interface is complicated, the agents will get stuck. Providing agents the flexibility to use their dashboard can increase their productivity significantly.

3. Alternate number dialing. It is often a complaint that we hear from the agents that the customer didn’t pick up the phone. Now imagine if the agent can automatically dial an alternate number mapped in the CRM, the call connectivity rate will increase. The agents won’t have to struggle to reach out to the customers.

Staying Ahead of the Competition

With COVID-19 hitting the world, WFH has become the only viable option for contact centers and BPOs. Immediately responding to the challenges will enable you to achieve remote governance in operations and IT. These solutions have helped companies to overcome the infrastructural dependencies and create a secure remote working environment. 

Companies are using these solutions for new customer acquisition and customer service while reducing customer handling time significantly. Business verticals like Education, Banks, Finance, and Healthcare practice contactless onboarding using digital mediums remotely.

Author’s Bio: Tanya Bansal is an enthusiastic individual, Marketing Executive at Ameyo, keen to learn customer problems, helping businesses find the right solutions effortlessly. Along with that, always being poised by the words, she finds her solace in reading and imparting her knowledge with students through multiple teaching programs.