Note from Editor - Due to the length of this informative article, it will be presented as a three part series
In today’s tough economic environment, many companies are moving to virtual contact centers, which can be staffed by home-based agents or a combination of home-based and site-based agents. This innovative approach to setting up a contact center – which leverages software delivered using a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model – means that your company is free to find and hire the best agent talent from anywhere in the country.
Because your potential agent pool is so much larger, you can find higher-quality agents who can provide higher-quality service. This is no small thing – particularly when you’re facing increasing commoditization of products and services; customer service can be one of the few ways you can differentiate your offerings. And as many businesses have already discovered, you can also:
• Reduce recruiting and training costs
• Eliminate or significantly reduce capital expenses
• Lower agent attrition with a higher quality of life and greater job satisfaction
In addition, sending your agents home to work is a creative, no-cost way to give them a virtual pay raise while simultaneously boosting productivity and lowering the carbon footprint of your business. Did you know that avoiding the typical 40-minute commute can equal up to eight weeks of regained productivity – and significant cost savings for agents in terms of gasoline and car maintenance? This article overviews essential best practices for sending your agents home so they can work successfully as remote agents. Learn how to enable real-time performance management, optimize training with distance learning (or e-Learning), maximize agent desktop security and align compensation with performance.
Each best practice outlined is based on LiveOps’ years of real-world experience running one of the largest virtual contact centers in the world with over 20,000 independent agents. You’ll understand what it takes to manage agents successfully and how to achieve the 360-degree visibility and control needed to maximize their performance.
Preparing to Send Agents Home
If you are reading this paper, then you’ve either already decided to send your agents home or are seriously considering doing so. You’ll be joining thousands of companies like West Marine, a national marine supply retailer that increased its competitive advantage by deploying remote agents.
Management at West Marine wasn’t even thinking about sending agents home – they just wanted to upgrade their contact center infrastructure. But when the lease for their contact center facility came up for renewal, the economic downturn had hit, and management wanted to focus on reducing costs. They decided that the best way to do this was to not renew the lease on their physical contact center facilities and have their agents work from home. They needed a way to enable this transition without losing visibility and control, so they chose the LiveOps On-Demand Contact Center Platform. By sending their agents home, West Marine has been able to eliminate expensive leasing costs for one of their contact centers – and ultimately improve agent utilization across their regional contact centers. In addition, West Marine has been able to maximize store employee utilization – which is important given the regional nature of the business. With the LiveOps on-demand platform, when business is slow in one region – and sales people are not in a store selling – they can take customer service calls or field questions from stores that are busy.
But deploying remote agents successfully – as demonstrated by West Marine – requires new technologies and best practices that are quite different from those used by a traditional contact center. For example, you need a way to maintain – and even heighten – the level of oversight for remote agents as you do for traditional contact center agents; managers will have to remotely train, oversee, and monitor agents, as they can no longer walk the floor to listen in on calls, answer questions, and mentor agents face-to-face. In addition, to sustain high customer service levels, you will need to use different types of key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor and incent home-based agents to perform at their best. Equally important, you need to continue to provide a secure IT environment that protects customer and company data – even as agents work from their homes.
This article summarizes essential best practices developed by LiveOps, which uses its proprietary, on-demand contact center platform to manage 43 million calls per year and deliver 99.99% availability. In an annual period, the LiveOps virtual contact center securely collected 15 million credit card numbers, over 1 million bank account numbers, and over 100,000 social security numbers.
Our extensive, real-world experience means that we know first-hand the challenges that businesses face when sending agents home and how to overcome them to ensure success.
LiveOps’ best practices for deploying remote, home-based agents fall into the following categories:
• Selecting the right technology platform
• Enabling real-time performance management
• Optimizing training with distanced learning
• Maximizing agent desktop security
• Aligning compensation with performance or talk time
• Creating a sense of community
Select the Right Technology Platform To implement these best practices, you first need an on-demand contact center infrastructure that automatically routes calls to the right agent and enables remote agents to access it using a PC and high-speed Internet. In addition, this infrastructure needs to provide a comprehensive, integrated set of capabilities to support a remote contact center operation. For example, it needs to:
• Enable interactive distanced learning
• Provide agent access to contact center systems from any phone, anywhere
• Support complete visibility and control from a management perspective
• Record and enable easy replay of every call, if desired
• Support 360-degree visibility into agent performance
• Instantly track every agent action
• Ensure tight agent desktop and data security
• Support performance-based compensation plans by tracking relevant metrics for each agent
• Support real time, performance-based and skills-based call routing
• Support diverse multimedia and multimodal communications
One of the fastest ways to implement these and other essential capabilities is to use an on-demand platform designed from the ground up to support the entire virtual contact center lifecycle. These types of platforms offer significant benefits over the "build-your-own" approach to contact center solutions. With the right platform, you can quickly deploy all of the functions needed to support remote agents – and do so in a way that is less costly, lowers risk, is scalable, and ensures a faster return on investment (ROI). In addition, a fully integrated, on-demand platform provides greater visibility into operations; it can capture data in the course of daily business, centralize it, and make it readily available for reporting and analysis – functionality that is essential to effectively managing home-based agents.
Traditionally, the only way to access this kind of integrated contact center solution was to purchase a "contact center in a box." But today, you have more innovative, flexible options. For example, you can use an on-demand contact center solution that’s hosted in "the cloud" (i.e., the Internet) by an application service provider. For instance, the LiveOps offers its on-demand contact center in the cloud, giving our customers benefits such as:
• A pay-per-use model that keeps costs down
• Elimination of nearly all up-front capital investments, such as real estate, furniture, and premise-based equipment
• A fast, hassle-free deployment that requires no hardware installation
• Elimination of ongoing software maintenance and version issues
• Ongoing access to new enhancements without having to perform upgrades
The approach you take to leveraging on-demand contact center software depends in part upon your business and IT needs. If your existing platform is solid, but it doesn’t support some of the best practices for remote agents, you can integrate it with an on-demand solution, such as the LiveOps platform, to complement or enhance your current environment. Alternatively, if your entire contact center environment is at the end of its life, then consider replacing it with a comprehensive, on-demand solution that supports both on-site and remote agents. With an on-demand, SaaS-based solution, you can quickly transform your contact center for greater efficiency and effectiveness while lowering costs.
- End of Part 1
About LiveOps:
LiveOps, Inc., a company focused on virtual contact center technology and services, enables businesses to deliver high performance call centers and high quality customer contact in the most cost-effective means possible. Its on-demand contact center applications provide an enterprise-scale virtual call center infrastructure, while its network of 16,000 agents can represent companies in an effective and professional manner. LiveOps' solutions allow for greater flexibility, quality, scalability, control and cost savings.
Published: Monday, September 21, 2009
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