For Contact Centers, Going Remote Wasn’t Easy, but Opportunities Emerged

COMMUNICATION CONUNDRUM

Lastly, as contact centers had to redefine communication and open avenues that mimic the connectedness employees feel when they're seated next to one another at the office, many turned to applications such as Slack and Discord. With designated channels for discussion topics and direct instant message capabilities, these tools provided a lifeboat in a sea of loneliness.

"We had a lot of employees complaining of isolation," Neblett shares, "so we did our best to over-communicate and share as much information as we had and also facilitate social interactions as much as possible. It’s still not the same as turning to a colleague and talking, but it created a better-connected group of employees."

Though the shift to remote was unexpected, fast-paced, and even bumpy for contact centers, many are realizing that the pandemic provided the push they didn't know they needed. And now they are seeing the benefits of remote work. Frost & Sullivan found that the retention rate for at-home agents is 80 percent, up significantly from the 25 percent for agents who work in an office. More autonomy over their schedules, the absence of a commute, and the ability to work from anywhere were the top reasons cited.

And most of these employee perks benefit employers, too. Not only can companies hire workers from anywhere (assuming they follow the wage laws in their localities), but they can also substantially grow their businesses without additional costs."We were thinking about opening up another center to scale up, but now we’re thinking we might not have to add that real estate," Neblett says.

Plus, there's a global impact too. Support.com, for example, employs agents from all over the world, including the Philippines and India. Employees in the Philippines have to leave their families and travel to contact centers in Manila, where most of them are located. "You have a whole generation of workers moving far away from home and into the city to find work because that's where the jobs are," Rosenzweig explains. Similarly, in India, many employees tend to be men because the commutes to centrally located contact centers are so dangerous that women don't feel comfortable attempting them. "With a remote model, [women] can work without having to leave their homes if they don't want to."

But for remote work to work, enabling employees with technology is absolutely crucial. Not only can artificial intelligence help with quality control by applying natural language processing to transcripts from customer conversations, but it can also add a powerful layer of sentiment analysis to customer or employee surveys when it's built into enterprise feedback management technology. And in a remote environment, where supervisors can't always see for themselves how employees are feeling or how customer interactions are going, AI-based sentiment analysis can provide an important glimpse into employee morale, customer stress levels, and other factors.

What's more, as part of learning management platforms, artificial intelligence can serve as a recommendation engine to serve up learning content tailored to individual employees' needs. This, too, becomes increasingly important when contact centers operate remotely and employees don’t get consistent, face-to-face contact with their managers or mentors. In short, technology, especially when powered by artificial intelligence, can be game-changing as contact centers navigate their future, in and out of a physical office.

THE NEXT NORMAL WILL BLEND OLD AND NEW

If 2020 was a fast plunge into the unknown, then 2021 will be a slow, carefully executed transition into the next normal. For many contact centers, that'll likely be a combination of the old and new. In fact, more than 53 percent report that their workers want a blend of work from home and office, according to consulting firm Red Recruitment.

"We'll likely adopt a hybrid model, where some employees rotate in and out of the office while others continue to work from home," Neblett says."We're still very much figuring out what operations will look like because there's a lot of uncertainty."

What is certain, however, is that it will be impossible to go back entirely, as though remote contact centers never happened. There's just too much opportunity that's been unlocked. "We've definitely seen the potential that's possible with a remote contact center, and we certainly see it being a piece of the future," Neblett says.