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Are you wondering how to manage your remote call center workforce in this new year?
Spoiler alert!
This article gives you exactly what you want.
Here we will talk about how a call center organization can actually handle and systemize its workforce remotely to stay active amid the pandemic crisis. Definitely, the workforce management systems solution will have a great role to play.
Since COVID19 has reshaped its form as in the Omicron variant, companies have again started operating remotely. Even the call center agencies that hesitate to have remote work arrangements look for smart technologies to continue with their productivity maintaining call quality.
Before we move on to how to manage remote call center agents, let us explore what Gartner states about this.
Gartner’s Overview on managing a remote workforce
As of 2021 Gartner’s poll, 90% of HR managers had agreed to allow remote work scenarios for their employees. Most of them have turned this setup permanently, while many are still there who are yet to understand the remote work benefits, hence are making arrangements temporarily.
This is the reason why the hybrid workplace concept is getting more in demand.
According to Gartner, you have 9 essential tips which you can follow to manage your remote workforce effectively. You can go through them below!
- Check out the signs of distress.
- Provide them with the right technology.
- Have trust in your employees.
- Clear out the organizational values.
- Pay attention to outputs, not processes.
- Improve recognition if not rewards.
- Say yes to innovation.
How to systemize the remote call center workforce in 2022?
There is a great difference between managing a remote call center and managing a corporate workforce. At once, it is easier to manage the latter. But when it comes to handling the call center agents remotely, HR managers find a good headache. With workforce management systems solutions, you can actually find this job easier and simultaneously appreciate the remote work environment, especially amid the pandemic. Here’s having a look.
- Create a strong company culture: Many of you believe that maintaining strong company culture is only possible when you are working from an office. Working remotely can deteriorate the work culture as it hampers the daily work routine and employee work style. Big myth, indeed!
Even in a remote work environment, you can maintain a good work-life balance and have a robust company culture. Disconnecting from the office environment doesn’t imply disconnecting from the company. You can definitely build your core values and share them with your members.
Start with outlining your expectations from call center operations, emphasize more on the core values, make them understand how the remote agents add value to the business, and so on. These are enough to develop a strong company culture all around.
- Build strong team collaboration: Next immediate need is building strong team collaboration. Even if your employees are not working under one roof, you can keep them engaged and attached to each other so as to deliver high productivity.
Team collaboration is certainly essential when you are expecting your team to offer top-notch performance. To collaborate and coordinate with your team members, you can use different online tools. The technologically-advanced tools are designed to chat with your people, share documents and media files, conduct team meetings, go for a conference call or video call, and so on.
When you are talking about the workforce management systems solution, probably, you are emphasizing these tools to excellent performance.
- Gamifying customer service: When you are looking forward to soaring engagement and staying ahead of the competition in the call center industry, gamifying customer service is the best option. This even improves the agent’s productivity, promoting the chance of employee recognition and rewards.
Employees delivering high-quality results are often appreciated with impressive rewards like gift cards, paid time off, special privileges, company swag, etc. By gamifying customer service, you can encourage more of your members for work engagement. Even if they are working remotely, they will ensure to have quality customer interactions so that no customer has a poor experience. It is a wise concept to invest time and money in a gamification program. Just go for it!
- Run an advanced training program: Training and development programs do not need a specific infrastructure to aid the employees in the workplace. You can even run these programs if you have sophisticated tools rich with quality features.
Learning programs are too essential to improve the skillsets and knowledge base of the work individuals. Even if they are lacking from expert guidance due to remote workspace, they get the flexibility to build their knowledge otherwise.
An effective training program will always keep your employees hooked up. Not just this improves their work efficiency but even boosts the business growth and drive in higher ROI. Amazing agents can bring amazing outputs and to gain such experience training and development programs are a must.
- Monitor customer service quality: While you want your customer service to be unflawed, you need to ensure the agents are well-trained and well-experienced. Besides offering quality coaching, you should also determine the quality of the service offered to the individuals. This is when call center quality monitoring software comes into existence.
The call center QA software solutions are designed to measure the quality of the agent’s performance based on certain parameters. It figures out the areas where the agents need to be stronger in order to improve first call resolution rates and customer satisfaction rates. Make sure you are using these tools to audit calls and offer quality customer experiences.
The Bottom Line
Workforce management systems solution is no longer a luxurious tool used by large successful brands. Instead, it has become an everyday partner of both small and medium-sized businesses. This is the reason why the call centers have now started feeling relief while onboarding their employees remotely.
Remote work arrangements for call centers won’t disrupt the continuous workflow. Rather if you use call center quality monitoring software, you can certainly experience the best customer-agent relationship even after going remote. That’s the beauty of technologically-driven solutions.
Don’t miss out on them!
