The Sytel Blog Team (from left):
Ian Turner (Development
Manager)
Michael McKinlay (CEO)
Garry Pearson (CTO)
Home, sweet home-working
Toward a successful
work-at-home strategy
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Dec 2012
One of the fastest growing areas of call center life is
home-working
(a.k.a. homeshoring)
- employing a pool of
customer service
agents who work
from home. Managers
are keen to leverage the advantages of working beyond the
confines of the physical
call center. Of course, the
benefits of doing so – e.g. reduced overheads, increased
labour pool, etc - are well known and well documented
elsewhere. But the technological challenges are less well
known. Getting these right is an important step toward a
successful work-at-home strategy.
And getting it wrong can produce a variety of symptoms.
Given that many call centres already implement some version
of home-working, it might be helpful to look at how some
technological inadequacies might surface in day-to-day
operations.
- Symptom: Agent Joe has a lower than average first call resolution rate
Cause: Agent Joe cannot log into a crucial knowledge base (and hasn’t reported it!)
An agent’s access to the right information is critical, and there should be no difference in access whether working in the
contact center or from home. In the call center, setting up a workstation with access to the right knowledge-bases can be straightforward. With
home-based
agents, IT staff must work remotely with vastly differing systems and things can easily go awry but unnoticed.
- Symptom: Rumours abound of identity
theft
Cause: Agent May has found a way to
breach security and capture personal details e.g. credit
card numbers.
With a lack of supervision comes the temptation to
misbehave. If security for
home-based agents is not
water-tight, agents who succumb, may gain access to, or
capture in some way, secure private information. Agent
screen monitoring by supervisors can be a crucial
deterrent. PCI compliance throughout is critical –
credit card numbers should never be displayed in full
and screen capture of any kind must be disabled.
- Symptom: Agent Sami is depressed
and unmotivated
Cause: Agent Sami has not been able to
rate his performance against his peers or join in with
any of the motivational antics of his team. Despite
being aware of them, he feels excluded.
If there is no active policy to include home-workers in
motivational and team building exercises, agents can
quickly become disengaged. Inclusion may mean access to
online scoring wallboards, or a team chat facility.
From the other direction, the supervisor should be in
constant touch with the
home-based agent, e.g. through a
coaching audio facility, or screen monitoring app. For
an agent to perform well, he must feel part of the team.
- Symptom: Consumers/ respondents are
complaining about the quality of audio.
Cause: There are incompatibilities in
the connections between call center, IP network and
home.
Whereas the IP audio route to and from the call center
can be tightly controlled and therefore proven to work
well for all agents within the center, the audio path to
a home system can be far harder to establish and
maintain high quality. Incompatibilities may be
discovered that degrade call audio quality well below
published QoS levels. Care must be taken to establish
and prove out high quality connections.
Home-working is on the rise. With care and preparation,
technology infrastructure and effective management practices
can be put in place that will feed and maintain a thriving
work-at-home base.
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Related -
IP contact center software,
VoIP call center,
customer service,
work-at-home,
home-working,
homeworker,
home-based agents,
homeshoring,
work from home