More customer questions, higher expectations, and a more restricted team. Here are some of the top ways customer experience leaders are managing their customer service teams from home.
Adjusting To The New Norm
Start by taking time to thoroughly assess your call, chat, email volumes, as well as arrival patterns is a great place to start making necessary adjustments. Here are some of the areas to review when looking into workforce and schedule adjustments:
1. Call Volume & Arrival Patterns – daily vs weekly vs. monthly averages, and then perform root-cause analysis.
2. Updated Agent Availability – checking in with agents to see if their schedules have changed do to COVID-19.
3. Agent Equipment Access – if you have a BYOD policy for your Work At Home program, we recommend surveying your agents for device availability.
Equipment Considerations
Based on the above, you may find yourself needing to provide equipment to agents. Below is a checklist of the top considerations for Work At Home Equipment:
1. Bring Your Own Device vs. Deployed Device
2. Headsets
3. Webcam
4. Hot Spot Devices
5. Wired vs. Wireless connections
6. Required Internet Speed
Using Data When Remote Remotely
With a large number of companies moving their teams to work at home, many customer service leaders feel like they are flying blind with their teams being remote. Here are some ways we are seeing brands solve this:
1. Improving Data Transparency – Companies are now capturing, analyzing, and segmenting 100% of their call data for keywords, phrases, and sentiment using technology.
2. Automating Quality Assurance – Filter calls by agent and streamline call scoring. Use AI to immediately identify points of interest on calls, such as openers, closers, and escalations.
3. Simplifying Voice Of Customer Programs – using Voice AI to capture 100% of customer interactions, companies are building VoC programs without surveys.
Virtual Team Management
If your contact centers haven’t been remote previously, virtual team management will play an important part of your team’s success in transitioning. We recommend covering the following areas for your work at home customer service teams:
1. Quality Monitoring
-Use Real-time monitoring tools: Whisper, Listen, Barge, Screen Share
-Have web based scorecard dashboards
2. Team Meetings
-Have a dedicated virtual break-out room
-“Always-on” group chat (Slack, Teams, Skype, WhatsApp)
3. Observing “Floor” Sentiment (how are people doing daily)
-Embrace social networking chat (Facebook, LinkedIn)
-Reviewing analytics on agent performance
4. Personal Coaching
-Using real-time peer to peer support
-Scheduling 1:1’s phone/video
Keeping agents engaged, well-trained, and up-to-date on new developments is incredibly important in today’s environment, especially when many of them are likely working from home. Companies that are keeping employee morale at the top of their priority lists everyday are those who will maintain high satisfaction ratings and be able to manage higher call volumes.
