Overcoming the Challenges of Contact Center "Home-Sourcing"
by Inova Solutions
Executive Summary
This paper examines the case for desktop messaging, providing corporate, team, and individual employee information, especially performance metrics. These metrics serve as the key strand that enables successful contact center home working by tying work-at-home staff (WAHS) agents and supervisors to each other and to their organizations. Desktop messaging permits effective and productive corporate-to-staff and supervisor-to-front-line agent communication, including to those supervisors and agents who are mobile and in the field. It facilitates team and agent-to-agent interactions by providing vital information for them to act on. The paper looks at technology methods that answer to the communication challenges in implementing WAHS programs, thereby ensuring corporate cohesion and meeting performance metrics to guarantee productivity goals.
Introduction
You can go home again for contact centers with work-at-home staff (WAHS). More organizations are doing just that, and for good reasons. These include:
- Reduced facilities costs
- Lower turnover
- Decreased recruitment expenses
- Higher productivity, creating up to $20,000 per employee/year in net benefits*
- Avoiding environment-damaging commuting, which for evening and night shift agents and supervisors can also be dangerous
- Business continuity
Together, these reasons add up to a strong call center return on investment (ROI) for WAHS.
Contact centers are strong candidates for telework because their tasks involve using computers and various channels of communication: voice, e-mail, SMS, chat and social media that can be accessed from anywhere thanks to rapid residential broadband network expansion. Contact center agents are thoroughly monitored, benchmarked and scorecarded to ensure compliance, quality and performance via solutions that can be connected to wherever the employees are. Home offices have been made secure, protecting corporate information with methods such as data encryption, staff authentication, remote desktop lockdowns that cut off access to non-work applications during working hours, and screen wipes.
Yet for all these gains, companies are concerned that contact center WAHS will lose corporate cohesion, miss vital information and not be as productive as they would be if they were in traditional employer premises offices. Front-line agents working from home risk missing essential metrics that track and enable organizational, group, team and individual actionable performance. Often, they'll also miss critical announcements such as call spikes and internal information such as awards, new staff and benefit changes. Senior management continues to be worried about security when data is accessed off-premises. These reservations also apply to contact center programs handled by business process outsourcing firms, which limits them from permitting more of their contact center agents to work from their homes.
At the contact center level, managers and supervisors fear having WAHS will add one more burden they have to cope with. Having metrics and alerts transmitted off-site provides a new worry — did the agents receive them and are they acting accordingly? In turn, WAH agents can feel left out of the loop with their employers, supervisors and co-workers.
Employers and supervisors have to ensure and be assured that their employees work well as parts of smoothly-functioning teams. WAHS need to know about what is going on inside their firms and with their group and personal performance. These inputs allow WAHS to maximize their own contributions, thereby benefiting the entire organization.
*Telework Coalition (TelCoa), www.telcoa.org
Or, download the PDF
Download the .epub file for eReaders
Download the .mobi file for eReaders