Want to make sure that your remote agents work effectively? Want to make sure your virtual call center setup is efficient and productive? Read on.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, similar to many other businesses, call centers are also moving remote. More and more call centers have started adopting virtual call center solutions to let their agents work remotely.
Modern virtual call center software provides added versatility than before, particularly while it is about agents working from home or any other remote locations. However, as remote agents operate from locations other than headquarter or office, many managers are concerned about making sure that team members are working responsibly and productively. Call center managers like to have ways to monitor the activities of remote agents.
With advanced virtual call center software, it is easy. This blog post will give you the best call center management tips to make sure that each manager can monitor and direct agents to be productive, regardless of the locations of the agents.
Choose remote agents and documents ideal agent profile for their reference
While conveying to your call center agents that they need to work from, they should have a clear picture of an ideal agent work responsibility profile. If you are going to run call center operations with reduced staff, select high performers to start with.
Create a thorough document that mentions:
- Remote work policies
- Detailed job roles and responsibilities
- Clear requirements as well as terms and conditions to work from home
- Clear policies while working from home
- Precise expectations from agents working remotely
Provide the required training
When you adopt a virtual call center setup, this change many things. The call center agents who will work from home may need to follow certain policies and use additional tools along with the virtual call center software.
There can be agents who are extremely skilled for client care or telesales campaigns, but find it difficult to perform while working remotely. To remove all these possible hurdles, follow the below-mentioned tips:
- Arrange group training of the tools that they need to use.
- Give training on how to be productive while working from home.
- If some agents are facing issues, arrange one-to-one meetings, and training.
- Be patient on initial mistakes and coach agents for the solutions.
Provide communication and collaboration tools:
While working remotely, agents may feel left out or alone. They may also go through some mental ups and downs. Thus, keeping communications channels to support them is necessary. Here are some tips you can follow:
- To evade emotions of loneliness, plan regular team meetings. At least once a week.
- Arrange one to one meetings to discuss issues or get feedback from agents. The manager can have meetings with his team members on alternate days or once a week.
- Conquer emotions of aloofness, let the agents be part of the unified work culture. Allow agents to use available communication channels to share their feelings, get help, and receive genuine yet polite feedback.
Use Tools Available in your call center software
One of the most prominent approaches to handle remote workforce is by using tools for quality assurance. Keep eyes on the performance of individual agents and key performance indicators. The call center solutions offer amazing tools to make sure agents work prominently. Some of the features of this software managers can use for agent performance assurance are as below:
- Live call statistics
- Live dashboards
- Barge-in
- Voice logging
- Call monitoring
- Reports
These and many more features of a powerful virtual call center software let call center managers efficiently monitor remote teams. Managers can further review call detail logs and reports to supervise the agents’ work.
Reward agents with exceptional performance
To further encourage and delight your remote agents, think about rewarding agents with acknowledgment or prize to those who provide exceptional performance. Below are some examples of rewards:
- Leisure perk
- Incentives
- Name on the leaderboard
- Personalized gift
This will foster work culture and perform excellently in keeping agents motivated who work remotely and retain employees to give loyalty rewards to the call center.
How Does AC Virtual Call Center Software Aid Call Centers to Assure Remote Team Productivity?
AC Virtual Call Center Software is developed to empower virtual call centers and thus, it has amazing features and add-ons to support higher productivity and better resource utilization. Let me share major offerings of this software to aid your remote agents and managers:
Data Verification
This tool assures the best utilization of agents and resources. Before running and outgoing calling campaign with any chosen auto dialer such as a predictive dialer, the call center verify and validate each phone number one by one. Thus, no fake numbers are dialed and no agent keeps waiting for longer to connect with the next lead or client.
Agent Screen Capture
This would be a great tool for any remote call center. It takes screenshots of the screen of each agent on a predefined time interval and passes it to his manager or admin to assure that the agent works during the working hours and do not waste time on anything else. It also assures the concentration of agents is on the call while he is taking calls and not on anything else.
Keyword Spotting in Call Recordings
Voice logging aka call recording is used for quality assurance in the call centers. However, have you ever imagine hearing all recordings for quality assurance. That is not only tedious, but also resource wasting activity. The keyword spotting tool of AC Virtual Call Center Software lets you run a search in all call recordings to locate if that specific word was used by any agent in any call. This shortens time, reduces efforts, and make the right use of call recording files to assure call quality.
Agent Work Reports
Managers can check various KPIs of agents using various reports available to check agent performance such as:
- Total talk time
- Call wrap-up time
- Break time
- And more
Hope you could discover the answers you were looking for to empower your remote call center teams to work more productively. If you have any further queries or feedback, you can leave a comment or contact us.
