Working from home is not easy. As in many jobs, with the current situation of COVID19, Contact Centers have also had to transfer their agents to work from home. Surely you have tried to carry out teleworking in the best way, but you may have encountered some obstacles. And like any obstacle, you must do everything possible to overcome it and continue with your day to day.
Among the most common general problems encountered during confinement are:
- Connectivity problems. There are those who do not have Internet at home, only from their mobile, or have a weak signal. And working like this is complicated.
- Child care. With COVID19, parents spend all day with their children, and it is not easy to combine all the tasks, especially if they are young children. In addition, depending on the age of the children, the parents also have to act as teachers to teach them the activities required in the course.
- Get familiar with new technologies. If teleworking has a good thing, it is that people must adapt and be up to date. But as this is an exceptional situation – of alarm – everyone has had to update in a very short time. The good part is that, surely there will be tools that they learn now and that will also serve them later, in their day to day life.
- Support advisers are not that close anymore and must communicate with them digitally. This can complicate some explanations or doubts about technical processes.
- Little motivation due to the current situation. COVID19 causes concerns in many people, either for the health of their loved ones and yours, for the economic issue, for managing with the family, why they feel alone, etc. All these factors can demotivate a person and affect their work.
Next, we are going to detail which are the most common problems of remote working in Contact Centers. And we provide you with a solution, so that there is no barrier and the operation is as desired.
Remote work problems in a contact center
- Regulations and policies. For most agents, teleworking is a new situation. And they may not know how to act. It’s not easy to suddenly organize an entire team. Make sure that the guidelines set by the company and the objectives set are met.
- Solution: Inform your team of everything related to the company and customers, and insist to make sure that everything is clear.
- Implementation of the necessary tools. Does your team have the necessary technology to work remotely? Remember that your agents, like supervisors and coordinators, will need the right technology to continue offering optimal service. From quality headphones to good connectivity.
- Solution: Try to offer intuitive software for all your agents. That it is easy to use, like ICR Evolution, and with which they can maintain productivity levels as if they were in the office.
- Team coordination. With confinement, coordinating the team teleworking can be challenging.
- Solution: Supervisors must take measures to ensure a correct work process. Whenever possible, operations should be simplified. The team can be divided into subgroups to manage certain tasks.
- Access to customers database. The agent must continue to have access to information related to customers such as the last interactions and how their tickets have been solved or in what state they are.
- Solution: Having a software that allows you to see the history of omnichannel contact, regardless of who the agent is who has dealt with previous interactions, is essential to offer excellent service and that the customer experience is more than satisfactory.
- Do fun activities to keep agents motivated. An agent may feel demotivated by teleworking for the reasons discussed above. We must make him/her want to work.
- Solution: We can organize different actions, such as meeting the workers for a virtual coffee, doing an activity with photos of the team generating interaction, etc.
- Visible performance. It is important that you can get to know the performance of your agents, either telecommuting or going to the office.
- Solution: We must define the key metrics of agent performance. To do this, with an agile contact center tool, you can customize the control panels and bring together the information that you consider most relevant in a single view. It is very useful to keep supervisors informed and to establish the fulfillment of objectives. Plus, this will keep the entire team engaged and connected.
- Incorporate an action plan for emergencies such as COVID19. In current times, the agent may have a difficult situation in his/her telework.
- Solution: make schedules more flexible, create additional time so that agents can attend to family or personal matters necessary in a state of alarm. In a scenario like the current one, it is advisable that managers can send absence requests without requiring validation.
- Ensure security and offer IT support. Make no mistake, while the confinement lasts, cybercriminals will take advantage of it to launch phishing attacks.
- Solution: To maintain security, many companies use a virtual private network (VPN). But with telecommuting, agents must ensure that their broadband provider allows them to connect to a VPN. When in doubt, an agent should always be able to request IT help and support from the company, so we must make it happen.
We must be aware that these problems may exist. But luckily, all of these have a solution. Many of them, having quality software like ICR Evolution, which modernizes and personalizes your customer service, is enough to avoid worries. If you need advice, we will be happy to talk with you.
