Drive Outstanding Experiences—No Matter Where Employees Work
If your business relies on a contact center, you’re likely running it remotely—Nemertes says 91% of contact centers now support a work-from-home model. So remotely, you need to vigilantly watch employee performance and customer delight. But with the right capabilities for remote agents and supervisors, you can easily keep delivering and improving employee and customer experiences. Plus, your remote people may improve their work/life balance, your business can gain higher employee engagement, and ultimately you may even lower infrastructure costs.
Keep Driving Performance
Continue monitoring and measuring employee activities and customer interactions—and communicate modifications as needed.
- Capture desktop activity to get visibility into employee off-phone activities, application usage, processes, and schedule adherence.
- Automate the entire quality management process from scoring evaluations to assigning coaching.
- Enable supervisors to promote consistent customer experiences by listening to customer calls.
Make Connecting Effortless
Make the work-from-home experience the same as in-office, including ready access to information and resources.
- Enable employees to easily reach into the organization to access subject matter experts when needed.
- Simplify forecasting and staff scheduling.
- Increase employee collaboration by providing mobile-enabled employees with anytime-anywhere access to important schedule information, along with capabilities for requesting schedule changes.
- Use game mechanics to build and sustain employee engagement.
Tap Your Knowledge Base
Empower remote agents with the right knowledge and insights to drive better customer experiences.
- Increase first contact resolution by delivering relevant, contextual knowledge content to employees and customers.
- Use powerful, AI-driven voice-to-text-transcriptions to increase employee performance in real time by delivering prompts and guidance based on words or phrases spoken by customers.
Solution Capabilities
Artificial Intelligence
Analyze customer interactions in real time—monitor customer intent and sentiment to drive better outcomes.
Measure Performance
Increase supervisor capacity, drive employee performance and consistency in customer interactions by automating the entire quality monitoring process.
Monitor Desktop Usage
Monitor remote desktop usage to understand how employees are spending their time. Acquire visibility into day-to-day operations, identify process bottlenecks and best practices.
Knowledge Management
Equip customers with better self-help tools and serve contextual knowledge documents to employees while they are speaking with customers to increase customer satisfaction and first call resolution.
Simplify Staffing
Reduce costs by accurately forecasting and producing employee schedules across voice and non-interactions. Empower employees to use mobile devices to see KPIs and request schedule changes.
Gamification
Tie employee and team goals to incentives. Apply game mechanics to engage staff, communicate goals, measure and acknowledge achievements, inspire collaboration, and motivate teams.
Subject Matter Experts
Boost customer experience and increase first contact resolution by bringing experts from outside the contact center into customer interactions.
Live Monitoring
Help supervisors continually promote a more consistent and reliable customer experience by listening to customer calls and, when needed, join the customer conversation.
Speech Analytics
Automatically surface intelligence from recorded calls. Sophisticated analytics identifies, groups, and organizes spoken words and phrases into themes to help reveal trends and areas of opportunity or concern.
Six Best Practices for Remote Contact Center Agents
Document Remote Work Policies and Procedures
A written policy should govern remote contact center agents with clear and uniform rules. The manager and agent should review the policies and procedures together. Focus on job responsibilities, organizational and departmental goals and objectives, customer impact, and employee’s work performance.
Select the Right People for the Job
Some employees are terrific people and good workers but may not be best suited to work at home. Most remote contact center agents will have access to customer-sensitive information, such as credit card numbers. For those reasons and more, make it a part of your selection process to do background checks.
Ensure a Good Working Environment
Work environment guidelines should be carefully discussed with every remote contact center agent. Almost any room can serve as an office but selecting the right work area is essential to success. A dedicated office maximizes the contact center agent’s efficiency and comfort.
Equip Remote Contact Center Agents to Succeed
Hardware
Remote contact center agents generally need a hard phone or headset (noise canceling headset is best) and a computer.
Applications
Remote contact center agents need the same access to applications, tools, supervisors and peers as they do when in the office; likewise, supervisors working remotely need access to their contact center management tools.
Connectivity
Using a second analog phone, or a cellular phone line, provides consistent quality without network engineering. There is, however, an up-front activation cost and ongoing monthly expense.
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) eliminates those costs — as well as toll charges for remote agents but may require either Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) voice connectivity via the Internet or virtual-private network (VPN) support.
VoIP depends on a solid internet connection which may not always be available. Ensure your IT department can evaluate each remote contact center agent’s internet performance before deploying your remote agent program. Provide easy-to-use documentation and job aids regarding how to log into remote network services like VPN, telephone services, etc., including password procedures.
Hardware
Remote contact center agents generally need a hard phone or headset (noise canceling headset is best) and a computer.
Applications
Remote contact center agents need the same access to applications, tools, supervisors and peers as they do when in the office; likewise, supervisors working remotely need access to their contact center management...
Make Experts Readily Available
Remote contact center agents need access to the same subject matter experts as those who have supervisors and expert resources in the office. “Presence” is a technology that is familiar to users of instant messaging, where a list of names is accompanied by icons indicating whether each person is logged in. When presence is incorporated into a contact center, finding an expert is just as easy for the remote contact center agent as for the in-office agent.
Remote contact center agents need access to the same subject matter experts as those who have supervisors and expert resources in the office. “Presence” is a technology that is familiar to users of instant messaging, where a list of names is accompanied by icons indicating whether each person is logged in. When presence is incorporated into a contact center, finding an expert is...
Monitor and Manage
Remote contact center agents need to meet the same continuous improvement goals that apply to all agents. Predictable management check-in times are reassuring to remote contact center agents. Remote contact center agents need to be included in team meetings so they can stay connected socially and culturally. Remember to keep training and mentoring remote contact center agents and to reward good performance.
Remote contact center agents need to meet the same continuous improvement goals that apply to all agents. Predictable management check-in times are reassuring to remote contact center agents. Remote contact center agents need to be included in team meetings so they can stay connected socially and culturally. Remember to keep training and mentoring remote contact center agents and to reward...
A Day in the Life of Your Contact Center
See how you can create better experiences for both customers and staff. Read the stories of different businesses solving their customer service challenges using Avaya OneCloud CCaaS. We explore AI-powered solutions for integrated desktops and virtual assistants, in-the-moment data retrieval, real-time reporting, and an empowered workforce.
Your Guide to Better Experiences
Ventana Research Names Avaya a Top CCaaS Provider
In its Contact Center in the Cloud Value Index 2021, Ventana evaluates CCaaS vendors for product and customer experience, capabilities, cost-effectiveness, and more. Ventana classifies Avaya as Innovative, notable for capabilities and usability.
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What Every Business Needs to Consider for Amazing Customer Service
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