With some trepidation, companies around the world have realized that being forced to quickly pivot to a remote work environment has jump-started a workforce revolution as millions of employees globally had to shelter in place. Contact centers have proven to be critical by providing expedient service to concerned consumers who had to change travel plans, couldn’t speak with a medical professional in person, or confer with a sales associate in a retail store.
The traditional contact center setup of large buildings filled with many employees — untenable during a pandemic — presented an opportunity to shift to a new normal. Now, companies are embracing and employing cloud-based contact center solutions more so than ever to move rapidly forward in this new paradigm of remote work.
According to Gartner, 74% of CFOs surveyed plan to shift some employees to a permanent remote capacity, while a general HR survey revealed that 41% of employees are likely to remain remote post-pandemic. This lends to an overall trend in how workforce management will be shifting as companies move forward. A reliance on cloud-based solutions for instance, will be paramount to maintain and manage technology solutions, especially those present in modern contact centers. Organizations are going to have to adapt.
From managing employees remotely, to saving money on physical office space and maintaining business continuity plans with relative ease, moving contact centers to the cloud offers businesses a positive strategy to navigate the new world of remote workforces and customer engagement.
Here are some things businesses should consider:
There are Ways to Manage and Coach Remotely
The shift to working from home is something that the workforce has been waiting on for a couple decades. For the first time, we’ve reached a point where many businesses can operate remotely, particularly for customer service. The technology has been available for decades to allow contact center agents to work from home, especially through the use of cloud based solutions. However, one reluctance from a business standpoint has been around visibility and control.
The first element of shifting to remote autonomy is effective supervision. In the contact center in particular, it’s about learning how to manage remote agents and performance without physically being in the same space. Thankfully, the technology to monitor calls, provide quality assurance and supervisor intervention has been around for a long time. It's just a matter of scaling that technology for a cloud-based environment. While there is some adjustment for companies that rely on premise-based solutions, those in the cloud can adapt quickly.
For example, with desktop analytics and recording tools, supervisors can monitor and record agents' activity on the desktop through workforce engagement management. Companies need to ensure that their technology is able to maintain the quality that today’s customer demand in terms of customer service.