Humanity as we know it has been forced to adapt to the so-called new normal during the COVID-19 pandemic. Notably, consumers have fundamentally changed how they interact with brands. For example, most purchases now take place online, and have switched permanently to having all their daily products delivered. Among all this change is also how and where employees work– one that according to experts had not been expected to take place for at least another seven years.
Working from home, or remote working, has catapulted businesses, brands, and their workforces several years into the future with many organisations. Some organisations were better prepared for this shift, already having some type of remote or hybrid workforce, but many others had to build infrastructure from scratch to support employees working remotely.
One industry that faced this colossal step, is the contact centre. We’ve heard much talk on how businesses have grappled with getting live agents set up with the right solutions during lockdown, highlighting the importance of the cloud as an example of best practices when it comes to managing a remote workforce. But little has been said about those in the all-important role of holding a team together during this historic period in our lifetime – the work from home supervisor.
In this exclusive interview, CX Today welcomes CallMiner’s Frank Sherlock, VP International, to discuss the best technologies to support the work from home supervisor in their crucial role and help them excel at it within the four walls of their homes – or wherever they choose to work. And as Sherlock points out, the remote contact centre is likely to continue even after the pandemic ends, so organisations must adopt the tools to support supervisors now and in the future.
The WFH Supervisor Role
Sherlock begins: “CallMiner’s recent commissioned study, conducted by Forrester Consulting, found that 67% of organisations will retain some form of remote or hybrid contact centre. This includes investing in future-proofing their contact centres by prioritising empowering customer service representatives and their supervisors to address customer needs.”
“Being a supervisor is already a challenging role, but especially so while doing it remotely,” Sherlock continues. “Supervisors working from home have to keep their eyes across all sorts of customer experience (CX) and performance, objectives and outcomes, and all while keeping the agents engaged and instilling that ethos of team. This is all done alongside trying to monitor people who perhaps have different and more challenging personal circumstances. Agents are no different than other workers – they have communications issues, childcare problems, noisy environments or they could be emotionally challenged through excessive isolation.”
Sherlock’s words are – essentially – a crash course in the role itself of a working from home supervisor. There is an exhausting amount of detail to the position to take in. This, Sherlock adds, is why it’s so vital the demands of the role are known inside and out, so an action plan can be put into place.
“In March last year, one in eight agents were working from home. Now, it's something like one in two. So, let’s think about that from a supervisor’s point of view, who was used to multiple face-to-face interactions with individuals and with a team, and was completely engaged with the team as a result. Now, they’ve had to move to a work from home environment, meaning there’s an immediate change in their leadership and interpersonal skills capabilities.
“They’re left wondering ‘How do I keep my team engaged? How do I assess and manage performance?’ And this is a significant shift in the role.”
Sherlock isn’t wrong here. What many businesses fail to understand is that, as the locations workforces work from change due, so too do their roles. This has been highlighted by a whitepaper published recently by CallMiner called The Work from Home Supervisor: How Speech Analytics Can Improve Remote Agent Management, Coaching and Decision Making.
The report states that the work from home supervisor has a mountain to climb when it comes to managing the workforce, because while remote, agents can be less engaged, productivity can dwindle, and efficiency may be problematic due to distractions surrounding live agents. This means supervisors, who are facing their own set of challenges, are also tasked with managing teams under entirely new circumstances. Add technology challenges to the mix and the role could become a hotbed for low employee satisfaction ratings too. But, as Sherlock explains, CallMiner has some solutions to help.
He says: “Customer expectations haven't changed. At the very early stage of the pandemic there was more sympathy generally, more empathy and more understanding from consumers towards the brands that serve them. But I think that's gone. We’ve now entered into a stage where customers expect the highest-level of service regardless of other circumstances.”
