Virtual Call Center

Home agents are an integral part of any virtual call center. The benefits of utilizing home agents are, in fact, one of the key reasons for creating a virtual call center. Customer-facing organizations—call and contact centers in particular—can reap big benefits from enabling a distributed workforce.

 

There are four main benefits of setting up the virtual call center infrastructure needed to support home agents:

 

1. Enhancing the organization’s ability to recruit and retain experienced, loyal agents.

2. Enabling around-the-clock, flexible customer service.

3. Saving money on the real estate and maintenance costs associated with brick-and-mortar call centers.

4. Improving customer interactions by utilizing an expanded, better-educated labor pool.

 

With a virtual call center in place, agents and supervisors can be located anywhere, and be just as productive as if they were in the same room. Solutions like Contactual’s (News - Alert) OnDemand Contact Center make deployment and management of a virtual call center easy—all that’s required of home agents is a Web browser, Internet connection and any type of phone (wireline, mobile, VoIP).

 

Setting up a virtual call center, and training home agents to use it, need not be a long and involved process. With the right solution, the entire system can be up in a week or less, with intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) resulting in the need for very little agent training.

 

One of the benefits of a virtual call center is that it doesn’t require the purchase and set up of specialized hardware—nor, if the organization picks the right solution, software. Agents using the system need only their home computer and phone; they log into the system and can immediately start making and receiving customer calls.

 

Organizations as a whole also benefit from the ease of setup associated with a virtual call center. By setting up a virtual call center, the cost hassle associated with deploying an infrastructure that is constructed in a piece-meal manner.

 

Perhaps the biggest concern organizations tend to have about running distributed workforces is how easy it is to manage home-based workers. Today’s virtual call center systems, however, can actually make workforce management easier than it would be in a brick-and-mortar call center. That’s because such solutions provide real-time, on-demand reporting, monitoring, service level management, historical reports and other critical call center metrics.

 

To learn more about the benefits of home agents and distributed workforces, please visit the Virtual Call Center channel on TMCnet.com, brought to you by Contactual.