Today, new remote working lifestyles have affected millions, and there are a plethora of contact center employees who now work from their homes. They face several new unforeseen hurdles in these environments, too. This doesn't exclude them from spotty Internet because many people rely on a single router to power real-time audio and video calls. The fact of the matter is agents who work from home today were previously tethered to a desk and had a wall of running stats of figures such as wait time on display.
Managers sat an arm's length away from agents and could step in when needed. The bedrock of this foundation was shaken up by the novel Coronavirus. AudioCodes' Sharone Ben-Levi, VP of Business Development, said the virus has impacted those working from home for the first time. When employees were first forced to work from home, at least those who could, there were a lot of temporary solutions introduced, Ben-Levi told me. Adding: "Companies forwarded calls to employee mobile devices, which left quality dependent on the signal and battery strength."
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Sharone Ben-Levi[/caption]
Not only does such a move pose concerns about reliability, but it's more costly to maintain complicated telephony routing, especially since it's unnecessary, Ben-Levi exclaimed! "Some of these calls were even forwarded to landlines." This could mean that if a customer does call an agent and they don't answer, the voicemail would likely sound something like this: "Hi, you've reached the Smith family," not a professional business-focused greeting.
In a matter of days, enterprise leadership across the globe told employees to pack up their IP phones and computers - take them home and to conduct 'business as usual.' This presented another challenge, the need for secure communications, which is usually handled by Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). The problem is, VPNs aren't designed for high volumes of real-time voice traffic.
Some contact centers tried Softphones as well as other UC-based solutions, too. None of which could match the simplicity and capacity of WebRTC. Since it is browser-based and not an app, there's no software to verify, deploy, or update for that matter. Ben-Levi went on to state: