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Is Taking it Home, Taking it Too Far?TMCnet Voice Solutions Columnist Are at-home agents a reality or are they all hype? Recently, I was speaking with an IT manager at a company that operates a number of distributed contact centers and I asked them whether they had considered using at-home agents instead of regional contact centers. He laughed in my face. “No way” was his response. “Was he a pessimist or realist,” I wondered.
With VoIP and standards-based CTI (News - Alert) software, at-home agents can be a practical technical solution. VoIP puts the voice traffic over the network and makes the contact center software available to anyone on the network, so with as little as a PC, an Internet connection and a phone, agents can work from home and have essentially all the control and capabilities of agents physically sitting in the contact center.
This leads to more consistent service quality. Just as important, since the contact center software is the same across sites and people, the customer service organization can have consistent reporting across the entire network.
None of this would matter, however, unless you were able to efficiently route calls to all of your distributed agents. CTI software ensures that calls and data can be routed to remote agents as seamlessly as they could if the agents were all in the same room. And, the intelligent routing capable through today’s CTI software enables an organization to track the skills of each available agent and leverage information in the CRM system, accounting system, and other enterprise applications to match a caller with the agent best suited to their needs.
This enables organizations to optimally route calls across the entire virtual contact center, including all remote sites and at-home agents. Sounds great. And it is. At-home agents offer many potential benefits for customer service organizations, including:
Despite these benefits, companies should proceed with a clear plan of attack. If you go virtual, your organization must make a corporate commitment to modify hiring and training practices accordingly. Specifically:
With organizations in every industry looking for a competitive edge, the long-term benefits of at-home agent staffing models will surely make at-home agents more commonplace. So why did the IT manager I spoke with laugh at the prospect of using at-home agents? Well, his response indicated that not every organization is culturally ready to manage a virtual team. He said their VoIP infrastructure made it a snap to implement such a staffing model, but “our CEO wants to keep a close eye on the agents.” Apparently, they prefer to manage their folks the old-fashioned way—management by walking around.
John Joseph is vice president of corporate marketing at Envox Worldwide (News - Alert), a voice solutions provider based in Westborough, Mass. |