What Every CX Leader Should Know About Remote Contact Centers?
In the last week of March 2020, when lockdown was announced in India, we received a call from one of the leading banks. They said that they wanted to migrate 1000+ agents of theirs to work from home to continue servicing their customers.
They wanted to do it immediately. We implemented our cloud contact center solution for them and migrated all their data to our platform. We implemented it in 24 hours, and all their agents started to work from home.
The agents needed to have only a functional Internet connection and access to a browser. After this migration, we had requests from multiple prospects to move their on-premise infrastructure to our cloud platform to ensure that their agents continued to work from home/remote. In ten days, we migrated about 30000 agents to work from home.
Most on-premise contact center vendors wanted anywhere between 3 to 4 months to migrate the infrastructure for work-from-home agents. Besides, they needed to have VPN licenses and high bandwidth requirements to connect to the contact center platform at the central office.
This was a no-go for most contact centers.
Since then, businesses have understood the power of cloud contact centers, which allow their agents to work from anywhere.
What began as a necessity soon became a strategic advantage. Remote contact centers have emerged as a powerful way to manage customer interactions while optimizing costs and expanding the talent pool.
What Is a Remote Contact Center?
A remote contact center is a customer support setup where agents work from anywhere in the world rather than a centralized office.
Your agents remotely can handle customer interactions through voice, email, chat, and social media from virtually anywhere.
Why Remote Contact Centers Are Gaining Traction?
The shift towards remote contact centers is driven by many compelling factors:
Cost Advantage
Remote contact centers significantly remove the physical infrastructure and overhead costs.
Many of our customers who moved to remote work during the pandemic continue to operate remotely because of the cost advantage in the form of office space and utilities.
Access to Global Talent
Earlier, there was this restriction on hiring global talents because they are expected to come to the physical office location. With remote contact centers, you have removed that barrier.
One of our customers operate a 24/7 contact center by hiring people from different geographies who work at various hours using our cloud contact center platform.
Scalability
Remote contact centers have the flexibility of adding agents, even temporary ones, to handle increased customer interactions during the holiday seasons.
You don’t have to worry about office space or setting up workstations.
One of our customers in the BNPL space hired 100s of temporary agents to manage increased customer inquiries during a campaign.
Business Continuity
Business continuity planning is usually a major casualty during natural disasters and unforeseen disruptions.
With remote contact centers, you can sail through any disaster with your distributed workforce, and you can continue to service your customers to their satisfaction.
While the advantages far outweigh any cons of remote contact centers, some challenges exist with remote operations.
Common Challenges of Remote Contact Centers and How to Overcome Them
Communication and Collaboration
Agents working remotely may feel isolated or disconnected from the team. This can bring down motivational levels.
Implementing video conferencing tools, virtual check-ins, and digital collaboration can help bridge this gap.
Data Security
Handling sensitive customer data in a remote environment can pose security risks. After all, your security is only as good as its weakest link.
Implement robust security protocols, including data encryption, multi-factor authentication, and access controls.
Ensure compliance with standards like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS to ensure data security.
Performance Monitoring
This is a perceptive issue in my mind. Many organizations feel that maintaining consistent performance levels can be challenging without direct supervision.
However, platforms like ClearTouch Operator provide comprehensive reporting and analytics to monitor agent performance in real-time, ensuring accountability.
How To Choose the Right Contact Center Platform for Remote Operations
Selecting the right contact center platform can make or break your remote operations strategy. Key features to consider include:
Omnichannel Capabilities
As a customer experience function, you have multiple channels through which your customers can reach you.
What if they all remain in silos?
It would be a nightmare for your customers as well as your agents. Every time, the customers will have to repeat themselves, and it will be a frustrating experience for them. The agents would not have the context of customer interactions, which would be frustrating for them.
With omnichannel, you get to have a single view of all your customer interactions across email, voice, SMS, chat, WhatsApp, bots, web, mobile, and social.
This would allow your agents to provide exceptional customer experiences as they get to have access to all customer interactions across channels.
Imagine a customer starting the interaction as a WhatsApp chat, and then moves on to email to continue the conversation and then calls you to get the final resolution. This is seamlessly possible with omnichannel contact center interactions.
Scalability
Businesses don’t run linear operations. So, the platform should allow businesses to scale up and down based on demand, such as seasonal spikes.
Scaling up and down should be done at the click of a button without involving people and processes.
Many of our customers keep adding and removing agents per their business. Besides, they even subscribe to specific features like voice broadcasting and voice analytics as and when there is a need for them.
Data Security
Ensure that your cloud contact center platform is compliant with industry standards and regulations like GDPR, CCPA, TCPA, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, SOC, FDCPA, Reg-F, DoT and TRAI regulations, and ISAE 3402 specifications.
Performance Monitoring
Check if the platform supports advanced analytics and reporting capabilities that measure agent performance, customer satisfaction, and interaction trends.
This is especially valuable in a remote working environment.
Integration Capabilities
See if the platform has pre-built integrations with industry-leading CRM and helpdesk software. Also, check if it supports API integrations with other best-of-breed IT systems.
For instance, our platform, ClearTouch Operator, has pre-built integrations with Salesforce, Zendesk, Zoho, Leadsquared, Freshdesk, Zoho, and ServiceNow, among others. Besides, it supports API integrations with other best-of-breed IT systems.
Remote contact centers are no longer a temporary fix; they’re the future.
A study by Gartner predicts that by 2026, 75% of customer service organizations will be using some form of remote or hybrid model.
It is not about staying afloat during a crisis like the pandemic migration.
Businesses are embracing remote contact centers not just for cost savings but for accessing a global talent pool, increasing agent diversity, and offering 24/7 support across time zones.
We have migrated more than 30000 agents to work remotely during the initial days of the pandemic, and a majority of them continue to be remote.
Our platform, with robust omnichannel capabilities, advanced analytics, and seamless CRM integration, is positioned to address the needs of the remote workforce.
Remote contact centers are a strategic move towards agility, scalability, and enhanced customer service.
And with a platform like ClearTouch, you’re not just keeping up; you’re actually setting the pace.