10 Tips to Optimize a Remote Agent’s Workforce

While working from home has become increasingly commonplace for employees around the world, no one expected the trend to accelerate so quickly and on such short notice.

Fortunately, there are many innovative workforce optimization capabilities and strategies that can be used to ensure productivity, foster a sense of agent community, and mitigate security and compliance risks.

10 Tips to Optimize a Remote Agent’s Workforce

1) Set a Smart Schedule

Tools that automate schedules by balancing shifts, work patterns, breaks, downtime, and agent skills can be a great way to stay organized and focused when telecommuting. Having a system that can efficiently distribute the schedule with real-time updates and allow shift changes can be great competitive advantages for call centers.

2) Understand Team Performance

It has never been more important for contact center managers to understand the performance of a team, as this can obtain useful data for decision makers and establish relevant metrics beyond the standard KPIs.

3) Provide Online Training

Since the importance of agent satisfaction around development is essential, consider how to deliver optimal training to a remote workforce.

Having the ability to digitally distribute learning materials and recordings of calls and screens, while being tracked, can be an excellent substitute for traditional in-person training methods. 

4) Make Sure Supervisors Are Aware of the Work of Remote Agents

With no supervisors walking through the call center and with many potential distractions, having a robust solution for both call and screen recording can be a great way to keep things under control. In this sense, we must take into account tools that:

• Integrate well with each other and with the current quality management process.
• Offer a full view of the desktop on multiple monitors, not just on the agent dashboard.
• Record 100% of interactions on all channels.

5) Let Expert Agents Lead by Example

Recording 100% of the interactions will give access to a large library of learning resources that are tailored to the needs of the call center. Thus, identifying the interactions of high-performing agents and then distributing their recordings, as training material can be good practice. This can be great for improving performance and helping to cultivate a sense of community in your agents.

6) Facilitate Agents to Find Their Own Path to Improvement

Empowering agents to take some control over their personal development can be an effective way to build trust. In this sense, if a business intelligence tool allows you to create and distribute performance reports for individual agents, it is convenient to use them to allow agents to take advantage of the data and discover their own path to improvement.

7) Think of a Speech Analysis Solution (Speech Analytics)

Having agents working from home can carry performance and compliance risks. Even if you are recording all calls, they may not be able to hear all of them.

Voice analytics tools that allow you to monitor 100% of “spoken” conversations can be an incredibly powerful quality management solution.

The best tools automatically alert you during the day to things like inappropriate language, compliance issues, and whatever keywords you choose.

8) Actively Listen to Customers

Both customer and agent circumstances have changed dramatically, no doubt affecting how the two of you will interact. Having the ability to run Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSATs) after calls or message interactions can be an excellent way to generate concrete information and insights in this area. These surveys give callers the opportunity to rate their interaction and satisfaction levels to help managers better understand and receive feedback on agent performance.

9) Quickly Detect Potential Emerging Risks

When the challenges of managing a remote workforce are numerous, manual quality management processes can be a significant waste of time and resources. With new risks emerging, waiting too long to receive reports that provide information that you need to know in advance is not an option.

Therefore, it is necessary to think about how you can move towards an automated quality management process that covers 100% of the interactions and can classify them all.

This is likely to involve a combination of interaction and screen recording, multi-channel dashboards, and speech analysis.

10) Be Ready to Face Any Situation

With an uncertain future ahead, it must be considered whether a company’s current contact center platform positions it to be able to react quickly to an environment that could change for a business and its customers at any time. Therefore, it is key to implement a complete, integrated and cloud-based solution.