When we were welcoming in 2020 with our New Year celebrations, the thought of enforced home working would never have crossed our minds. Why would it? Back then, only around 13% of contact centre agents globally worked remotely on a permanent basis. There were lots of reasons, lack of employer/employee trust being one of them.

Six months on, with remote models up-and-running and demand spikes easing it’s time to look beyond simple business continuity. The challenge now is to create a borderless contact centre where managers and agents don’t just get by – they positively flourish.

So, how can CX leaders dial forward, and what does that roadmap look like?

Changing-up from functioning to thriving

The first step is recognising home workers will require different skills, tools, and behaviours. Times of adversity bring out our emotions. Customer stresses and demands multiply to the point where sterile interactions, with agents forced to read from one-size-fits-all scripts, no longer cut it.

In future, customer experience and, ultimately, brand reputation will be judged heavily on empathy. We are already seeing empathy trainers help natural-language processors and language translators make fewer errors. At the other end, they teach artificial intelligence algorithms how to mimic human compassion and behaviour.

Similarly, agents must be empowered; freed to be sensitive to customer feelings in intensely personal situations. And they may well need specially designed support to help step up to that level.

Getting all the right pieces in place

So, how do you put together a high-performing remote workforce? A Customer Contact Association survey of 800-plus senior customer service executives, managers and advisors points the way. It identified four focus areas for future training and development plans:

  • Catering for an ageing population and changing expectations
  • Building trust in a technology-driven world
  • Managing career progression and reward
  • Introducing flexible working and the evolving role of frontline agents

Going forward, 83% of respondents feel problem-solving skills will be the most important attribute. Meanwhile 68% said agents need to be better equipped to show empathy and emotional intelligence.

Intelligently managing remote teams

The good news is that staff absence is down. According to ContactBabel only 1 in 10 contact centres surveyed were seeing absence rates of over 25% suggesting that absence due to illness or lack of childcare doesn’t seem to be the problem it might have seemed. The survey also reported response time improvements ranging from 40% to 50%. Learn more from the Inner Circle Guide.

A better area to focus attention is workforce management – having the right people with the right skills, in the right place, at the right time. Making sure your system accurately captures agent training and skills assessments. It should also provide easy-to-use tools that allow agents to request time off and view schedules on their mobile devices. So, they can bid on shifts and stay engaged while working at home.

The key is intelligent fusion between workforce management systems, contact center platforms, routing engines, and specifically adapted soft clients and mobile apps for home workers. Those integrations will mean:

  • Customers get better, faster outcomes: tasks are assigned to the most skilled home workers and never to those who have scheduled leave or are not expected to work on a specific activity.
  • Schedule adherence is guaranteed across all channels: employees are doing what they are supposed to be doing, when they are supposed to be doing it.
  • Costs reduce because you’re able to automate and more accurately plan, forecast and schedule resources.
  • Agent satisfaction increases: preventing misrouted interactions and providing task variety has been shown to relieve stress, improve motivation and boost productivity.

 Genesys and Orange Business Services can provide advice and solutions for all these remote contact centre requirements and more.