Sympathy Matters: Be sensitive to the fact that this is an emotional time for many, and agents could be experiencing challenges in their personal lives. Many may be working-from-home for the very first time and juggling children, responsibilities to relatives, or be on their own and feeling isolated.
Prioritize Frequent Communications: Putting the emphasis on productivity and performance can be perceived as insensitive and tone deaf, so it’s important to consider how contact centre leaders should be coaching teams and “keeping things moving” during a pandemic. Engage with agents and teams by asking how they’re tracking toward goals and encouraging them to speak up about things that they need help with or if they’re struggling.
Offer an online training component: whilst staff training is typically done in-house, but naturally that’s not always an option with remote agents. Designing an online training component geared toward remote agents and ensuring agents have all they need to get set up remotely – including making a supervisor available to answer any questions – will help to empower your employees and get them off to a strong start.
Leverage Workforce Optimization: the right workforce optimisation software (like the complete suite available with NICE inContact's CXone platform)can help to take the pressure off those assigned to manage remote agents, whilst ensuring an organisation is maintaining the highest levels of customer service. The tools usually included with this type of software include call quality monitoring, call recording, performance management, coaching and more – all of which can help managers to feel more confident with tracking employee performance.
Take Advantage of the Right Infrastructure: moving your contact centre to the cloud can ensure your whole staff - whether in-house or at a remote call centre – have a unified experience and can access the same tools and information irrespective of where they’re based. By removing the need for hardware, switching your contact centre to the cloud can deliver significant operational savings.
For contact centres looking to rapidly move to a remote workforce, NICE inContact developed a cloud-native offering designed to enable contact centres to continue delivering great customer service while transitioning their workforces to work from home in 48 hours or less. Demonstrating the speed and agility that the cloud offers, Route 101 were recently able to implement the CXone platform for a leading UK healthcare provider in just days.