Contact centres are now no strangers to remote work. According to a study by Nemertes Research, 59% of contact centres around the world enabled at least some of their staff to work from a home office pre-COVID-19. That figure now rose to 74.1% as pandemic measures forced companies to close offices and transition into virtual contact centres. Once authorities lift these restrictions, 70.7% of businesses are likely to continue allowing agents to work from home (WFH) in some capacity.
As it transpires, empowering agents with the flexibility to influence their working hours and environment translates into lower agent turnover and greater employee loyalty. Frost & Sullivan says that the retention rate for at-home agents is 80% versus 25% for in-house.
A study presented in the Harvard Business Review, for example, showed that remote workers accomplished almost a full additional day’s amount of work per week when compared to on-site employees. Another study found that 45% of remote employees can get more done in less time and 44% are less distracted and more productive than they would be at the office.
Companies with a cloud-based solution are now able to move contact centre agents from the office to home working with ease if they so need or desire. However, some have considered never going back to the office, contact centre agents included.
Contact centres that implement flexible working policies create greater scope for agents to work the hours that suit them. This helps them achieve a better work-life balance, which contributes to higher job satisfaction and feeds directly into employee retention. Every good manager knows happier employees provide better customer service.
Of course, as with any new way of working there are challenges. In the case of remote contact centre agents, the key areas to consider include:
Agents working from home can’t walk the floor physically to their colleagues or supervisor to ask for help. Now that customers are more demanding, uncertainty is high and emotions are taut, working from home agents need support more than ever. With call volumes increasing, along with queries over multiple other channels from customers, companies start to shift interactions from voice to digital while keeping the costs low. Customer engagement now takes place in the digital space. How can contact centres and customer service agents keep up with new technology?
How much of this setup does your remote contact centre already have in place?
Thank you for getting this far. In my next post I’ll talk more about how to manage a remote team, which challenges to expect and what tools are out there to keep remote teams organised. I’ll also look at what contact centre managers can do to keep their agents engaged and productive.
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