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Contact Center Best Practices: What are your 3 tips for managing home-based call center agents?
Please list, in detail, 3 tips that you would like to share with the Focus community on how to effectively manage your at-home call center agents. High quality contributions will be included in an upcoming report on contact center management, and will receive significant promotion in the Focus network.
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3 Answers
1. Encourage them to show up at the office at least once a month and for social occasions, to remind people they exist. Give them some leeway if they have a preferred day for coming in. However, if they prefer not to turn up, or can't, don't make it mandatory. Better to have a good worker at a distance than no worker at all.
2. Evaluate them on how well they do the job, not how well they chat round the water cooler (or don't). You have tickets, call recordings, phone stats, and other methods of evaluation at your disposal. It's more important that they are getting the job done and doing it well than whether everyone at HQ recognise them on sight.
3. Make sure to set clear rules beforehand about the employer's and employee's responsibilities if they are unable to connect to the group to perform their job. Should they phone in to report the problem immediately? Should they attempt to physically come into work right away and work from the office (and how far away do they live?) Are they expected to make up any lost hours, or even lost minutes, even if the outage is unavoidable? In which case, do they get equivalent credit if office-based agents are prevented from coming in to work, and home-based agents have to fill in?
Whatever the terms, make sure that the employees read and agree to the terms before they start working from home, and that they have a local copy of the terms available to them at home to refer to. Note that the terms may need to be flexible, as you may in future have home-based employees working from five minutes away, and from the next state over. It's better to calmly reason out such eventualities beforehand than to try and make policy in the middle of a blizzard or local communications outage.
1 Continuous team interaction: Being a remote agent or home based agent can lead to a feeling of isolation. Most of us have a need or desire for interaction with other people. Be sure there is a format to which everyone can interact, not always just on a work level, provide a medium where everyone can get to know each other on a personal level and have a little ongoing social interaction. This will provide the sense of belonging to a team and satisfy the need for interaction.
2 Access to information: Product training and sales or customer service training are required for any remote agent, though one area is easily overlooked. Training on processes and clearly showing where the information is available for further reference. Every bit of need to know material should be easily available, not just as an email sent out, but an online resource which agents can be pointed to. Spending a little time showing how to access the information and what information is available will help free up management’s time from address the same questions repeatedly.
3 Keep the login process and reporting simple: The system used for the remote agents needs to be simple for logging in then provide a easy to follow report for tracking activity. Using 3-4 different user names and passwords for multiple applications can be frustrating especially when all support is remote. By not being too complicated there is a higher level of confidence and less opportunity for complications. The remote access system must also track agent activity, when did they log in and what did they do while logged in. Be sure to show what the reports track so the agent can now see how they will be accountable for their time.
Most successful @Home Agent deployments have these features in common:
• @Home Agent equipment is provisioned by the employer (who can therefore dictate where the equipment will be located - create requirements & inspect the space where the equipment will be used - and place restrictions on what the equipment will be used for – and what software will be installed on it).
• @Home Agents are drawn from current employees who have worked for at least 6-12 months initially as part of the team in the physical Call Center. Becoming an @Home Agent is viewed as a ‘reward’ for those employees who have a proven track record of meeting or exceeding expectations.
• @Home Agents are drawn from current employees living within a 45-60 minute commuting distance of the physical Call Center – in order to enable the @Home Agents to maintain participation in the corporate culture and to easily attend the office for some meetings.
While almost everyone can use a telephone - not everyone is cut out to work successfully in either a physical or @Home Call Center environment. And while someone may have “The Right Stuff” to be a great Agent as part of a team in a physical Call Center – it doesn’t necessarily follow that the same individual is also cut out for the more demanding & self-motivated requirements of an @Home Agent position.
For both physical and @Home Agent deployments, hiring the Wrong Agent to begin with is the Root Cause of most Performance Issues. It is also a significant drain on Profitability, the Budget & Bottom Line, on Customer Satisfaction Ratings, Sales Results and on overall Agent Team Morale. Every failed hire causes an employer to throw wasted dollars down the drain hiring & retraining recruits for the same position. Not to mention the Lowered Productivity, Poor Morale and Higher Absences associated with hiring a Poor Job Fit.
Top performing Call Centers drive their Revenue & Performance through superior hiring tactics. We help employers gain better insight & more accurate predictions as to which applicants from a pool of Candidates would perform up to, or beyond their established standards– in either a physical Call Center or @Home Agent environment. You can find out about a Free Trial of SPAS Call Center Agent Pre-Employment Screening Software at http://www.telesoftsystems.ca/64201.html.
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