Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Overcoming the Challenges of Scheduling and Managing Home-based Agents
In an effort to keep costs lower and the quality of service high, many contact centers are turning to home-based agents. Thanks to cloud-based contact center solutions, workers can be literally anywhere in the world today, and hiring home-based workers saves significantly on overhead. It also expands the availability of labor so companies can draw talent from greater geographic distances, hiring (for example) stay-at-home parents or the disabled. Often, contact centers following the home agent model can hire workers who are more experienced, mature and professional than the individuals available to them in geographic proximity.
This isn’t to say there aren’t challenges with the home agent model. Despite unified communications, phone and Web conferencing, collaboration solutions and other technologies available to connect people at distances, training home-based agents can be more difficult than premise-based agents.
In a recent blog post, Quora’s Chris Abdey recommends regular sessions with home-based agents to help reinforce training.
“I would have them focus on customer orientation more than anything else, as that is the hardest thing to ingrain,” he wrote. “You can have meetings via Skype (News - Alert) for example, and communication is always important. You could also have weekly meetups in a rented space for a more serious training environment.”
Abdey points out that a good call center manager will “need to know what [home-based agents] are up to during work hours.” This is where cloud-based solutions for workforce management and scheduling come in. Home-based agents can be included in these solutions just as premise-based agents are, and managers and supervisors can track their statistics – availability, average handle time, etc. – very readily from supervisors’ desktops. It may require managers to work outside their comfort zones, according to Monet Software CEO Chuck Ciarlo, but it’s worth the effort. Starting small with a home-based program could help.
“Managers used to a more traditional contact center environment make require some adjustment, but most eventually appreciate the benefits of a telecommuting arrangement,” wrote Ciarlo. “One way to ease into the change is to create a pool of back-up agents for times of increased call volume, or for when there are too many unexpected absences. Occasional trips to these agents’ homes for monitoring and coaching are usually enough to keep their performance consistent.”
If this isn’t possible, there are a variety of conferencing and e-learning solutions that can help get these agents trained and keep them involved on a day-to-day basis. Contact centers may find the extra effort is well worth the boost in the quality of customer support.