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Three Challenges for an At-Home Workforce

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor

Mike Perry, Senior Director Product Management, responsible for product development and international expansion for inContact, knows the challenges of at-home workers in a contact center. There are obvious advantages, of course, otherwise smart people wouldn't be using them.

So what are the challenges Perry sees? He mentions three major ones:?

Control. In many ways this is the most important. "The ability to walk the floor and see your agents is certainly a challenge when they are not in the same building, city, state or country as the leadership staff, and admittedly this was a challenge years ago before technology improved in the area of telecommuting, web-based applications, presence information and superior reporting," he says, noting that "this is not so difficult any longer with a hosted contact center software suite." 

Perry notes that with tools such as voice recording, screen recording, quality monitoring, advanced real-time agent monitoring and speech analytics, "supervisors can keep tabs on agents regardless of where they sit. With advanced tools, a supervisor can choose to record voice and screen for every call, every third, fifth, or any other combination of calls, especially with new agents or during an early at-home deployment to get a comfort level with the control that is actually achievable when agents are off site."

Security. Yes, Perry admits, IT groups "are often uncomfortable with the security they are able to achieve when agents don’t punch the clock in the brick-and-mortar center." Security is always one of the first concerns people have when discussing cloud computing at all. But the truth is, he says, "with secure servers, secure FTP, and the level of encryption now available, IT groups can rest assured that company and customer data is secure at rest or in transit.

Coaching and feedback.? "The ability to coach an employee, rate their calls and offer suggestions for improvement can easily be done remotely," Perry says, allaying one of the major concerns about remote call center agents. "Calls, chats, or e-mails can be recorded, scored, evaluated and actions can be taken against that information." For example, he says, "a supervisor can conduct a review of a call recording with an agent via conference call, web conference, Skype (News - Alert) session or other form of collaboration."

Earlier this month TMC's (News - Alert) Madhubanti Rudra wrote that ?A leading provider of cloud-based call center software solutions, inContact launched its newly enhanced corporate website. In a press release, the provider of on-demand call center software and call center agent optimization tools, announced that the new website, rich with relevant case studies, whitepapers, video testimonials and other useful industry tools, is designed to offer its customers additional resource and information about the benefits of cloud technology.