Workforce Management Featured Article
Why Contact Centers Using Remote Agents Need WFM
I’ve been telecommuting for most of my career.
When I lived in Chicago I worked for a publishing company in New York. Eventually, I was recruited by a Phoenix media outlet, which moved me to Arizona. A couple years later, as that company was aiming to lower its real estate costs, I began working at home full time again.
Many years later, that firm began shuttering parts of its business, and I moved on to my current gig. Because my current employer is in Connecticut, I work remotely for them out of my Scottsdale home.
The ability to work at home has been great for me, and I believe it’s been pretty good for my employers too. They don’t have to pay to lease, light, heat, and cool my office space. They supply my IP phone, but I use my own computer. And I have a lot of experience, a good work ethic, and they know they can depend on me.
Contact centers with the processes and technologies in place – or a willingness to implement them – can also benefit from using telecommuters. I use the word benefit from because when businesses open themselves up to using remote workers, they greatly expand their pool of candidates, they then have a much better ability to hire people with more experience and better skills, and they don’t have to pay for office space and as much equipment.
That said, one thing they probably will want to have is a workforce management solution. That’s because, as Monet Software’s (News - Alert) Chuck Ciarlo explains in a recent blog, the key to making telecommuting arrangements work is communication and information.
“With an automated, cloud-based workforce management solution, managers receive the same detailed reports and real-time information on employee performance, agent activities, shift assignments, schedule adherence and other data, regardless of whether the agent is working from home or elsewhere,” says Ciarlo. “Helping work-from-home agents achieve acceptable performance standards also becomes much easier with a quality monitoring solution.”
Edited by Mandi Nowitz