Getting the most from contact centre home working – top tips for teams as discussed by Mike Donohue, Sales Director at Magnetic North
Thanks to the advent of the cloud-based contact centre, it is now much easier to connect remote workers to the contact 
centre, whether these are agents, product experts located elsewhere in the business or field service workers who are delivering products and services to consumers’ homes.
We’ve looked at the top benefits of homeworking in a previous post and identified numerous key benefits that include flexibility, cost savings, customer satisfaction improvements and much more.
However, managing a mobile workforce comes with its challenges so it’s important to ensure you’ve got rules and processes and that both frontline customer service staff and remote workers have the information they need to deliver an exceptional customer experience.
Use cloud to unify agent desktops
An agent desktop based in the cloud enables remote agents to work any time, anywhere. Choose a system that allows mobile workers to work remotely, whilst being fully integrated into the company’s existing infrastructure. That means mobile workers are getting the same experience as agents working in the bricks and mortar of the contact centre.
Create a social aspect
Working alone at home or elsewhere can be isolating, and you want your mobile workers to feel as much a part of the team as everyone else.
Implementing a fully integrated, multi channel contact centre and therefore embracing IM chat capabilities between staff as well as with customers creates a social aspect for staff.
Having the same informal and formal communication for both homeworkers and office based agents help to make all staff feel equal.
‘Face to face’ training and engagement
As well as a social aspect, a multichannel cloud contact centre can offer sophisticated training capabilities.
Scheduling ‘face to face’ meetings and training sessions via video will greatly help your agents’ productivity as well as bridge the personal relationship gap with your staff that can sometimes arise as a result of mobile working.
Mobile management
Of course it’s not just the agents who are likely to be mobile – it’s the contact centre managers too. Having a system that gives managers the ability to access the same applications for up to the minute data and information as they would in the centre is important for full visibility across the board.
Real-time analytics
How do you track your agents’ activities and KPIs if they are not physically in the office or dispersed across multiple locations? Implementing a system with real-time analytics tools allows you to track productivity and gives you the ability to ensure that your workforce is meeting KPIs when you may not have the same visibility as you do for agents in-house.
Workforce management
Implementing a workforce management tool gives you the data you need to be able to scale your business up or down depending on seasonal peaks and troughs.
Whether your contact centre needs 25 agents one week, and 100 the next, you can monitor resource and demand and scale your workforce up or down easily and efficiently, supporting your fluctuating workforce with ease.
Quality monitoring/call recording
Call recording is an essential feature of modern contact centres. And it becomes even more important with a mobile workforce, when a manager cannot walk over to an agent’s desk or simply overhear a transaction. Does your call recording solution allow you to capture transactions across every channel and regardless of the location of your agents?
Put call recording in place with a cloud-based system to create a fully integrated system for a mobile workforce, not a system that has been simply ‘stitched together’.
For home working to be successful it is essential that you have the right tools and that means a resilient, secure, cloud based system that gives full visibility and simplifies life for everyone, regardless of whether they are office based, home based or out in the field.
Additional Information
Mike Donohue, Sales Director Magnetic North
Mike joined in Magnetic North 2014 and has held a number of senior sales management positions with over 20 years of experience in software and technology business sales.
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