Remote Agents: The
Challenges Of Virtual And Distributed Contact Centers
By John Kim, Five9
With the growing trend of agents working
from home and the consolidation of several disparate locations managed
as one 'virtual' enterprise, the technical challenges of setting up and
maintaining such a contact center model can become overwhelming over
time. Fortunately, many of these potential pitfalls can be avoided with
proper planning and due diligence before the virtual contact center's
launch. Now is the time to become familiar with some of the benefits of
going 'virtual' ' technology and connectivity options for remote contact
centers and agents, elements of PSTN versus VoIP for agent connectivity
and security issues with both technology and agent management.
Benefits Of Going Virtual
Much has been written about the benefits of virtual agents and
distributed contact centers, and the pros and cons of this model are
well reported. To summarize the various findings, there is validation on
many fronts about the real cost benefits of centralized management for
multiple location enterprises, service and productivity levels of the
workforce, as well as reducing overhead operating costs. In addition,
there are other benefits seen with distributed workforces, such as
improved security and reduced agent turnover.
Technology Platform Options
Fortunately for contact centers, there are a variety of options for
those who are migrating to a distributed or virtual way of doing
business. De-pending upon budgetary requirements, one can decide to
subscribe to a hosted service (often called an ASP) or purchase a
premise-based system.
Hosted systems allow annuity-based payments for a contact center
infrastructure and do not require any hardware or software. Maintenance of
hardware is typically conducted by the hosted vendor ASP (application
service provider), and many now provide round-the-clock support, which is
especially critical for inbound and help desk contact centers as well as
outsourcers. There are two types of contact center ASPs emerging: those that
offer their services over the PSTN and those that offer them via VoIP.
While ideal for virtual agents and multi-location centers, the ASP model
does place a contact center's information outside of the firewall and at the
premises of the vendor; therefore, due diligence on the security of the ASP
platform must be done. It is interesting to note, however, that there are
some IT managers who refuse to employ a hosted system out of fear of putting
their sensitive data outside of their premises. Yet many of the largest
financial institutions have been doing it for years, safely and securely,
using services from companies such as ADP. The truth is, a hosted ASP can
offer better security mechanisms than many small and medium-sized businesses
can afford or want to afford ' only if the network planning and set-up is
done correctly.
For premise-based systems, many vendors now
offer a migration path to a VoIP platform on their current PSTN-based
systems. Other vendors have built VoIP systems from the ground up, and these
systems can, like hosted products, offer excellent support for virtual
agents and distributed centers. Although the cost of premise-based IP
contact center systems may be higher than that of traditional TDM-based
systems, numerous studies and articles published in this magazine and
elsewhere have shown that the ROI on premise-based IP systems is
considerably faster than premise- and TDM-based systems. Premise-based IP
systems require the skills of a knowledgeable network engineer prior to the
hardware and software installation. Fortunately, many premise-based vendors
offer professional services divisions that can accommodate such needs.
Connectivity Options And Costs
Once the choice to move to a virtual agent or centralized management model
has been made and the corresponding technology platform atop of which to
ride has been selected, the next technical decision should be whether to
ride atop a PSTN or VoIP network. Depending upon the scenario of a business'
distribution schema, this decision can have a significant impact on the
bottom line.
For a virtual agent workforce that is going to be located within a local
calling area, the PSTN option may be the most cost-effective, as there is
the possibility that the call from the data center (where the call control
servers are located) to the remote agent may be free of per-minute toll
fees. If the agents or other contact center locations are spread out in
areas that are not completely local to the data center, then going VoIP is
the most cost-effective option because it eliminates 'double-leg billing,'
the term used when a contact center in essence incurs double the
long-distance charges ' one from the data center to the virtual agent/remote
contact center and one from the data center itself to the customer.
It has often been said that unless one is passing a significant amount of
voice calls between branches of an enterprise, VoIP does not offer
significant cost savings on long-distance charges. This may be true in a
strictly PBX-reliant enterprise or a single-location contact center model,
but in the virtual or distributed environment, third-party verifications
between agents and locations, double-leg billing between data centers and
virtual agents, and the wholesale buying power of hosted ASPs (application
service providers) can offer significant reductions in long-distance bills '
especially for small to medium-sized enterprises.
What is the wholesale buying power of ASPs? Because some ASPs aggregate many
contact center customers into one bill that they, in turn, pay to their own
carrier, a decent-sized ASP that has many customers can obtain wholesale
long-distance rates that would normally not be accessible to contact centers
with less than 100 agent seats. Some of the larger ASPs pass off the cost of
their wholesale rates to even their smallest customers as part of the
monthly service plan, allowing many of their customers to save anywhere from
10 percent to 60 percent on their long-distance bills. Obviously, the
smaller the contact center, the higher the long-distance rates one would
normally pay to a carrier, magnifying the savings these types of centers get
by moving to such a hosted ASP.
Security
When setting up any distributed workforce, especially over an IP network,
security must be addressed. Agents handling sensitive information, such as
social security numbers, account numbers or credit card information, are all
potential victims of the numerous types of security breaches prevalent in
our digital age. Even remote workforces riding atop PSTN networks face this
issue, for often such sensitive information is not only iterated over the
phone but entered into CRM applications that pass these data over the
Internet. Therefore, whether on PSTN or VoIP, security must be addressed.
Ever wonder about the plethora of 'free' programs to download on the
Internet? Why on earth would someone spend all that time to create a
software program only to give it away? Many do it for benevolent purposes.
But some of these programs secretly install software, commonly called 'spyware,'
that can do anything from install viruses, to record every keystroke entered
on a user's computer. This is not exactly comforting to a business that has
remote agents handling credit card information from their homes. So the
first step in the security process is to run an anti-spyware program on
every agent's computer. A number of low-cost, high-quality products are
available that can detect if someone has secretly installed harmful software
' and then remove it for you.
The next security measure for the distributed or virtual contact center is
the firewall. Although Windows XP does come with some firewall features, it
is always a good idea to invest a little bit of money for a hardware-based
switch/router combination that comes with built-in firewalls. Although not
completely true across the board, hardware-based firewalls tend to be a bit
more robust than software-based ones at the lower end of the price scale. Do
not rely on the small router that is provided to remote agents by their
local ISP! Spend a little bit extra now and avoid a potential disaster
later.
In addition, make sure the latest virus scan software is loaded onto each
remote agent's computer and that it is either a subscription-based service
(in which case it is updated automatically) or one that comes with
consistent updates.
VPNs, or virtual private networks, are an added measure of security. While
they do take up a bit more bandwidth, they can offer an added level of
protection that can keep most ill-intentioned hackers out. There are
numerous low-cost options for VPNs today, and whichever product you choose,
ensure that it has triple DES security.
Finally, it never ceases to amaze that more often than not, security leaks
come not from improper management of technology, but from a contact center
agent who has decided to run off with credit card or Social Security numbers
' surprisingly, more from on-premise contact centers, as opposed to
distributed centers with remote agents. Perhaps this can be attributed to
the fact that there are far more on-premise contact centers, or that those
who employ a remote model have less security threats, due to lower agent
turnover. If the latter is true, it would be yet another benefit of moving
to a distributed model where high-caliber agents who stay in the business
for substantially longer than the industry average provide not only a higher
level of service and cost-effectiveness, but they also provide an added
measure of security as well.
Redundancy
For those centers that have decided to embrace the cost and productivity
benefits of IP, the two different scenarios for distributed contact centers
are, a) when on-premise contact centers in different geographic locations
are managed as one entity, and b) when the agents themselves are working
remotely from home offices. For multiple location centers, it makes sense to
have redundant carriers at each location for fail-over purposes when going
IP. For remote agents working from home offices, this may not be possible
because there may be only one carrier available to a particular home. In
this instance, an analog PSTN line can act as the fail-over voice line;
however, no data connection will be present, so this must be taken into
consideration as a risk factor when moving to a model in which a majority of
a center's agents work remotely from their homes.
Overcoming The Challenges Has Big Pay-Offs
While there certainly are technical hurdles as well as security and
fail-over elements to consider when moving to a distributed model, proper
planning and due diligence before the virtual contact center's launch can
help any 'virtual' enterprise avoid the pitfalls. As many contact centers
have experienced, the benefits in terms of lower costs, higher productivity
and improved security far outweigh the initial investments. As further
evidence of this, it's not uncommon to hear about businesses that have
outsourced offshore and subsequently decided to bring back their contracts
to domestic outsourcers or bring the contact center back in-house. In
contrast, very few businesses that have adopted a virtual or distributed
model abandon this way of doing business in favor of reverting back to a
purely on-premise enterprise.
John Kim is the founder and chief evangelist of Five9 (www.five9.com),
a provider of hosted VoIP contact center systems.
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