Supporting and Engaging Remote Agents
In the past year, businesses across the world have seen significant disruptions to their daily operations. For many industries, this has meant, changing the way they operate, enabling staff to work from home and trying to keep staff engaged regardless of where they are working from. Below are some of the tools and strategies that we’ve seen implemented:
1.Improved Communication With Remote Agents
Communication with your team is a crucial part of your daily business processes, whether they are in the office or not. Communication should be more frequent when your agents are working from home. Without daily touchpoints, it’s difficult to know how your staff are coping.
Frequent daily communication with your remote staff has several benefits. Primarily, it’s a great opportunity to understand the workload of your team and how they are accomplishing their goals. Secondly, it is a great way to let your employees know that you haven’t forgotten about them and helps build better relationships and engagement. Customer service is not an easy job, and feeling like you are on your own can make it even harder. Schedule multiple touchpoints throughout the day to ensure that your team is feeling connected to your business goals. Video conferencing tools such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom have been invaluable as they enable you to see everyone and not just hear their voice.
2.Virtual Team-Building Exercises
Team-building exercises and social opportunities are a crucial part of building a healthier company culture. While it can be really hard to establish a company culture when your team is working from home, it isn’t impossible. Company culture isn’t about whether your snack room is stocked. By establishing sessions for team-building exercises you can improve engagement and productivity across the board. When your team isn’t in the office, you can leverage gamification practices to create a little friendly competition while driving engagement for your staff.
Virtual lunches and team quizzes are great ways to connect with your team while working remotely. It’s not the same as sitting across the table from your team, but it’s another way for your team to connect and build rapport.
3.Equip Your Remote Team With Everything They Need
Remote staff have an entirely new set of challenges that they would not typically face if they were in the office. Productivity and engagement can plummet when your team isn’t able to easily collaborate and meet face to face. When your agents are working remotely, it’s important they have the right tools to help them operate successfully. Workforce Optimisation software equips your staff with the tools they need to see how they are performing, apply for leave, swap shifts and see what they are working from their mobile phones or the web. Other tools such as real time automation can monitor the queues and add coaching or training to schedules at suitable times or message team leaders if it looks like someone needs help.
About Call Design
Call Design is a leading provider of workforce optimisation software solutions, providing contact centres with the insight they need to improve their operations. With our consultative approach, we develop a deeper understanding of your business goals and challenges. Our tools can empower your staff to provide your customers with better service and a better experience. We work with you to integrate a solution that meets the needs of your business. Contact Call Design today to learn how we can help you.
Engage Your Workforce and Improve the Bottom Line
Managing a business in the current times, with online sales booming and working from home a reality, has never been more challenging. Rapid changes to operating models and sales channels have seen many companies build out their contact centres with new staff, while others have moved some of their retail staff to phone, chat, or messaging channels.
What Agent Satisfaction Says About Customer Satisfaction
Contact centre agents are on the front line of your customer service efforts, fielding customer questions, and requests while upholding your organisation's values and standards. Because of the job challenges, agent retention is a significant difficulty for contact centres worldwide. The biggest obstacle with high agent turnover is that it directly affects the satisfaction of your customers. When you work on engaging your contact centre agents, you are more likely to see higher customer satisfaction rates. But how exactly can we improve the satisfaction of our agents?
3 Contact Centre Trends for 2021
Is your contact centre prepared for success in 2021? Now is the time to shake ourselves free of the challenges from 2020 and embrace new trends and technologies for the new year. Equip your agents and staff with the tools and technology they need to focus on what matters most: your customers.
How to Coach Your Contact Centre Agents
If you want to facilitate an environment for your contact centre agents to succeed, you need to start coaching. Coaching is a great way to encourage, enable, and empower your agents to not only want to be better at their jobs but perform better. Coaching is also a great opportunity for your agents to learn new skills, get feedback on the work they are doing, and resolve the problems they might be having with calls.
Optimising a Remote Workforce
Many employees in multiple industries are equipped with the right tools to work from home without hesitation. While it’s an easy shift for those companies, not everyone has the same luxury. Contact centres are facing a huge obstacle as they continue to struggle to provide effective WFH solutions for their remote agents. Providing your employees with the tools they need to work from home requires flexibility, resources and a fair bit of trust.
4 Ways to Help Your Team Resolve Customer Service Complaints Quickly
Today, the general public doesn't wait for things to happen. When consumers are experiencing a problem, they expect a solution on the same day. Since the customer is king, contact centres need to double their efforts to resolve customer service calls more efficiently and quickly. Whether you are implementing new training, new technology or more communication channels, it's essential to be prepared to solve a customer problem quickly. Below, we have four ways to help your customer service team resolve complaints promptly and efficiently.
The Benefits of Implementing a Flex Schedule
After the initial surge of COVID-19, contact centres everywhere had to scramble to keep momentum going. Now, many companies are faced with the potential of either not returning to a traditional office space or having to stagger agents to maintain a socially distant work environment. Now more than ever is the time to provide an ideal, flexible working schedule for your contact centre. By implementing a flex-schedule, you can ensure that your team is working the hours they need to work while improving the quality of their and the overall morale of your team.
How Contact Centres Can Leverage Gamificaton
Contact centres are always looking for new ways to ensure employee engagement and productivity, especially now that many agents work, at least some of the time, from home. For remote agents especially, it can be more difficult to plug into the culture of the office and stay engaged with the brand without the face to face interaction they would usually have in the contact centre. This is where gamification can help. Contact centres can introduce gaming elements to motivate and engage staff while helping upskill and cross skill staff. It is an invaluable approach to increasing productivity for your workforce, whether they are working from home or in a contact centre.Read more
4 Ways to Reduce Agent Turnover in Your Contact Centre
One of the most significant challenges that contact centres face is an incredibly high rate of agent turnover, creating a cyclical problem where the Learning and Development team is continuously training new agents for them only to stay with the company for a couple of months. This can be expensive. In this blog, we have four strategies for contact centres that are hoping to retain their agents and reduce turnover.