More than ever, companies and employees are enjoying the benefits of more flexible working scenarios. This includes fully remote positions dispersed across the globe, on-site employees working from home, and home-based customer service agents for business continuity scenarios where external factors can limit or eliminate the ability for employees to get to work.
In times of uncertainty, enabling and using remote workforces, including home-based contact center agents, is an option open to all companies today.
Have you considered how remote working and home agents can support your business?
As a reminder, below are just some of the many reasons remote working can make sense for your business and keep operations running smoothly at all times:
Access to a broader, more diverse pool of workers — With more flexibility and geographical reach on where your agents can be located, remote working can open your company up to a new world of diverse talent and employee location scenarios, including home-based agents.
Benefit from happy agents — For the right people or right scenario, home working can be a great alternative to working in a contact center every day. This includes providing more flexible hours, more convenience with no commute, and enabling employees to better support needs at home.
Achieve operational cost savings — By reducing or eliminating the need for large physical locations and related support teams, companies stand to save significant costs on running their customer service operations. This is an easy one!
Manage the ups and downs of call volumes — The ability to leverage remote workers and home agents provides an ‘on-demand’ approach for companies to effectively deal with sudden or unexpected increases in call volumes—with limited or no impact to IT operations and costs.
Better business continuity — Finally, companies that can enable their existing employees to work at home in a virtually seamless and transparent environment. This includes providing the same access to company data, apps, and systems to help enable a rapid response to unforeseen market factors and conditions. Today’s technology can support both back office and front-line employees, including those in the contact center.
Here’s what you can co?
Now that the benefits are clear, below are some tips on how to make remote working work for both your company and your people. Take a look:
Focus on your employees first — It’s no secret that some employees embrace the freedom of working from home, while others are challenged to remain engaged with co-workers. Whatever the reason your company decides to leverage remote working and home agents, it’s critical to ensure that your people remain connected to each other, and are able to work together—as if they were in the office or contact center. To that end, building collaboration best practices into your remote working strategy is a key to success. This includes encouraging more peer-to-per communications with video conferencing and messaging apps, “virtual coffee breaks” with co-workers, and video lunches designed to keep employees and teams more connected and socially engaged with each other—whether remote working is a permanent or temporary way of working for employees.
Put the right technology in place — With the human elements factored in, the technology choices you make also plays a big role in the success of remote working and home-based agents. This includes the right conferencing and communications tools, as well as flexible contact center and customer experience deployments that enable home-based agents. Success requires making the same data, same agent desktop and same experience available to employees and agent, as if they were on-site.
If you’d like to learn more, including how Leap Connect can quickly and cost-effectively support your remote workers and home-based agents, email us at ccaas@leap.tel.