How Call Center Agents can Work from Home with their Smartphone?

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COVID-19 pandemic has changed the game and led to working from home becoming the new normal. Businesses that were earlier skeptical of working remotely are now finding ways to enable their workforce to effectively do so. Contact center agents are the frontline executives who handle customer support and service queries. For them, working in a call center aka workplace environment where they have access to laptops/desktops, stable internet connection with highspeed, etc is a comfortable situation to be in.

However, the dynamics change when the same agents are no longer in the workplace setting. As we are already aware many countries across the globe are in complete lockdown due to the COVID-19 spread, the call center agents or the customer service executives are also being forced to work from home.

This poses a major challenge for businesses that are customer-facing or come under the essential services category. They need to find ways to serve the customers while ensuring the safety of their employees. So, having your call center agents work remotely is the way to go. Having said that, this comes with its own set of challenges. One of the most important being the infrastructure readiness of the agents. As already mentioned, the office premise offers its own benefits which are not available at home.

What Happens When Your Agents Do not Have Laptops/ Desktops?
This is more common than one might perceive at first. Many of the agents working remotely do not have access to a laptop or a desktop. On top of that, some even struggle with a high-speed stable internet connection too. Thus, they cannot operate – or is it so?

How do you tackle this obstacle?

You Convert their Smartphones into a Full-fledged Contact Center
This might sound unbelievable at first – but it’s true. With a Mobile Call Center Solution, you can allow your agents to enjoy the complete call center features on their smartphones itself without incurring any additional infrastructural cost. Thus, you have zero agent infrastructure with maximum call center benefits. That too in the palm of their hands!

By connecting to their wifi or 4g network, the agents are able to manage the operations from their smartphones only. Additionally, a mobile call center solution provider that offers WebRTC is the one most suitable. As with WebRTC, you get high call quality which improves the overall agent and customer’s experience.

Some of the points to consider while going for a Mobile Agent App are the following:

Inbound and Outbound Calling
What is a call center software without the provision of both making outbound calls and receiving inbound calls? With a call center on mobile, the agents should easily be able to achieve that. This brings me to the next point – dialers

Dialers
Call center dialers are primarily used to automate the outbound calling by eliminating the need for the agent to manually dial out the calls. A mobile call center that supports all the major dialers like predictive, preview and progressive is the one businesses should opt for

CTI Integration
Having a CTI popup displaying customer information like their name, email id, conversation history, etc in the mobile app itself when the agent handles inbound or outbound calls allows them to have contextual and quality conversations.

Monitoring and Reporting
Supervisors need to keep track of the important metrics to ensure no SLAs are breached even when they are working remotely. A mobile agent app combined with supervisor monitoring tools allows the call center managers to live-monitor the agents’ performance and getting hourly or daily reports too.

Security
Make sure that none of the call logs or customer data is stored on the agent’s smartphone. All the data needs to be stored on the server to maintain data privacy while meeting the regulatory and compliance requirements.

Conclusion
The true testament of a Call Center Mobile Agent Application is ints ability to make the lives of both the agents and managers easier, especially in this remote working environment. As a business, it’s your responsibility to ensure that the needs of both your customers and agents are met. So, having a mobile call center solution packed with complete call center features and capabilities is the way to effectively mitigate the situation and come out of it a winner.

Shambhavi Sinha
Shambhavi Sinha is a technical blogger & Product Marketer and has been writing for 3 years. She is into technology and writes tech-based stuff. Her aim is to provide knowledge to users by sharing tips and tricks about new technologies, DIY, and knowledge about Customer Experience.

2 COMMENTS

  1. All very nice and this would be a great Call Centre option. Do you have any real life scenarios or products that can do this?

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