What Are The Best Practices To Manage The Productivity Of A Call Center Working Remotely?

Managing call center agents who work remotely means offering additional support and equipping them with the necessary tools to keep them connected with good internal communication, meet productivity goals, and positively motivate them in their daily tasks.

What Are The Best Communication Practices For The Remote Team?

Hearing the voice of the leaders and supervisors in each department offers clear direction and guidance makes a big difference in keeping agents satisfied.

• Holding a brief daily or weekly company and / or team meeting led by a leadership member is an opportunity to communicate essential updates, events, objectives and mentions of the organization through videoconferencing technology (Enreach Meeetings) to connect to the call center team with department heads, managers and among co-workers themselves.
• Instant messaging and chat are also reference tools for individual and small group communication during the working day. For example, chat allows supervisors to send quick messages to the remote team.
• One-on-one meetings give supervisors and employees the opportunity to communicate about their goals, performance, growth, and career progression.
• Email is best for high-level communication, especially as a follow-up to team meetings. Of course, emails are better reserved for communications that are not urgent.
• Having a specific plan for remote work is important to manage call spikes. In this way, agents will know what to do when faced with situations such as when to transfer a call to a supervisor, what happens if the supervisor is not available, how to organize callbacks in peak situations, etc.

What Tools Are Needed To Measure The Performance And Productivity Of Agents Who Are Telecommuting?

The vast majority of agents, during this pandemic, are working from home for health and safety reasons. So the question is: how do you control your time and productivity? This requires tools that provide real-time reports and historical analysis.

1) Real-time Reporting Tools

It requires a system that shows in real time what is happening with the agents working remotely, with a panel to monitor each employee and their status. Who has a call on hold, on pause, how many calls are active and how many agents are available. In addition, it is important to observe in real time the abandonment rates, if calls are being lost or the speed of dialing. A good system will also automatically email production reports at regular intervals to supervisors.

2) Software Quality Assurance Tracking And Scoring

With real-time reports, it is possible to see when remote agents are on a call. What you can’t do is check the quality of the call. How do you ensure that agents follow the script, the contact center compliance rules, and don’t lose patience with customers? New software technologies offer automated quality control on 100% of calls.

3) Dynamic Scripting and Status Filters

When calling different geographic areas, it is essential to have customizable filters to comply with state and even city regulations, since the same company may have a different sales approach in one region than in another and use different scripts to reflect that diversity. .

What Is The Historical Remote Agent Performance Report?

Unlike real-time reports, historical reports are metrics that facilitate analysis of an agent’s performance over a specified period of time.

1) Time Monitoring

Tracking agent uptime becomes particularly critical when operating from a remote call center to ensure employees are working during scheduled hours. By checking daily, managers also see if this happens at breaks and lunch.

2) Pause Time Reports

Virtual call center supervisors must track employee performance. Telecommuting agents should aim for 80% talk time utilization (waiting for a call or speaking on a call) and 20% pause time.

3) Agent Performance Reports

It is a standard report that shows the number of calls received, the number of sales or some conversions such as the percentage of sales to data, among others.

4) List Conversion Report

This combines revenue and billable hours, and provides an overall profit loss for the period of the report run. What key information is available in the list conversion report?

• How many potential clients were served.
• Contact fee.
• Number of sales.
• Call transfer rate.

How To Achieve The Commitment Of The Remote Agents Of The Call Center?

While working from home is different, there are many ways to create positive connections with shared activities that continue to build a relationship between employees.

In addition to the daily meetings mentioned above, meeting tools can be used through video conferencing to encourage playful team interaction with games, virtual happy hours, group activities, birthday celebrations, etc.

A Future Vision For Call Centers

The uncertainty and hardship caused by the COVID-19 outbreak has forced all industries to be creative to remain competitive. Call centers are no exception.

Remote contact center operations are discovering new ways to manage productivity and generate profits. Hiring new agents who telecommute expands your talent pool and geographic options. And working from home offers flexibility and opportunities for modern employees, especially Millennials and Gen Z.