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Transforming Contact Centers for the Contactless World

After the lockdown imposition, everything came to a halt and so did contact centers across the globe. With the pandemic hit, businesses started moving to remote contact centers and be prepared for the contactless world. In our Philippines Webinar, we have uncovered some of the biggest challenges that Ian Madrid and Neil Macalino faced in their businesses and we will try to understand how swiftly they were able to transform their contact centers for the contactless world.

In an insightful discussion with Sir Ian Madrid and Neil Macalino, Sachin Bhatia, Co-Founder and Global Sales & Marketing Head at Ameyo discussed the role that remote contact centers are going to play as they form the last line of business to human interaction. Not limiting it to just customer service, Sachin believes that contact centers are going to be driven by Sales, Collections, and Contactless Onboarding.

How Contact Centers in the Philippines reacted to COVID-19?

“Communication can solve all the problems,” our experts believe that. And with the COVID-19 hit in the middle of March, the contact centers in the Philippines completely relied on the communication.

Sir Ian says that they have seen a surge in call volumes and their customers have been demanding human to human interaction more than ever before. Contact centers in the Philippines instantly chose remote solutions to keep moving forward and build a workforce that they heavily relied on.

What is the future of Remote Contact Centers?

According to our contact center survey in the Philippines, 71.43% of people believe that the Remote Contact Centers are going to disrupt the contact center industry. This tells us that WFH is here to stay and is here for major business disruption.

“WFH can stay if the agents’ productivity is taken care of,” says Sir Neil in the webinar. This brings us to the strategic challenges that remote contact centers will face in the longer run.

IT Governance & Security

In a remote working environment, what do you do when the agents report a network issue or an unsupportive device problem? What would you trust, the agent, the device, the network? This brings a challenge of employee loyalty towards their work.

In the physical workspace, an agent’s device challenges can be addressed by the IT department instantly but in remote locations, this becomes a legit problem.

To overcome this, you can establish remote IT governance and security by monitoring agents’ devices, identify the reason for low productivity, network issues, and many more with 15 monitoring parameters that provide detailed information to the managers, thus helping in creating a high-trust environment.

Virtual Collaboration & Onboarding

When an agent is stuck with a call in a physical workspace, the floor manager, the peers, the supervisors can help resolve the query instantly ensuring an increased first contact resolution rate. But, how do we ensure the same kind of on-call assistance while working in a remote environment? The agents will need the same kind of support from their managers.

To build a workforce that is confident to resolve all customer queries with minimum supervision, you can provide the agents with options like internal chat, call transfer, call confer, in real-time, and provide on-call assistance whenever they feel stuck. Supervisors can monitor the calls in real-time and jump in a call to help the agents have qualified interactions with the customers.

Business Operations

“Anything that can be measured, can be managed,” says Sir Neil. Rightly so, because contact centers run on metrics like average handling time, first contact resolution rate, number of calls handles, win rate, customer satisfaction, etc. And we will constantly need metrics to measure and monitor the metrics that are important for any business.

Providing the agents with the flexibility to log in from any device, any browser, and any location ensures the inclusion of a diverse workforce and their productivity can be measured with a centralized view of contact center irrespective of the devices that they are using. Measure the metrics like agents log in hours, number of queries resolved, average call handling time, adherence to call quality metrics, etc. to ensure that the agents are working efficiently even while working remotely.

What are the Advantages of Remote Contact Centers?

Now that we have established that the Work from Home is here to stay, let’s try to understand what our experts have to say about the advantages of remote contact centers.

Reduced Cost Pressure

The biggest cost in a contact center is the manpower and then comes the cost to manage that manpower. What if you could reduce the cost of managing the agents? In a remote contact center, you do not have to invest in setting up infrastructural facilities in the physical office environment. You can save 12.5% of the total contact center cost which can be invested in scaling your business, alternate channels, tools, and equipment for the remote workforce.

Hiring a Diverse Workforce

Working remotely can be beneficial for businesses to hire a diverse workforce irrespective of their work location. This has manifold benefits:

Businesses working for different time zones can access the global talent pool, ensuring that they provide native experience to each customer
It helps in reaching emerging geographies and providing a local experience to the customers
It helps the businesses to tap into a much broader range of applicants/employees
Working remotely eliminates the need for traveling to reach the office daily and employees like to be given flexibility. With Remote Working Solutions, employees are more likely to accept job offers that do not involve traveling
Working remotely also lifts up the age barrier, people that are approaching a retiring age are also looking for opportunities that give them a sense of purpose and income
Parents staying at home will also get opportunities to take care of their families and work remotely

“People who can crack this soon will be ahead of the game in the market,” Sachin Bhatia adds while enclosing his thoughts on the future of remote contact centers and the need to transform contact centers for the contactless world.

DOT Extends the Relaxation in Work from Home Norms till 31st December 2020

COVID-19 demanded the contact centers to go remote. And to support this, Department of Telecommunications provided relaxation for the WFH norms initially till April 30 when India was under strict lockdown, and then it was extended till 31st July. Initially, it seemed that this was a temporary relaxation for OSPs and most businesses were settling down with WFH norms, making arrangements for remote contact centers to be operational.
But it appears that this is the New Normal. And this reflects in DOT’s extension in work from home norms till 31st December 2020.

DoT has further extended the relaxations in the Terms and Conditions for Other Service Providers (OSPs) upto 31st December 2020 to facilitate work from home in view of the on going concern due to #COVID19.

— DoT India (@DoT_India) July 21, 2020

How will this relaxation help businesses to work from remote locations?

Most businesses are settling in with the WFH model and DOT has only made it easier for them to opt for remote contact center solutions to provide uninterrupted customer service. This relaxation will benefit businesses in many ways:

Reduced Cost Pressure

Remote contact centers will help businesses reduce the cost of operations by 12.5%. Businesses can eliminate the need for setting up physical infrastructure, keeping the costs under check while hiring remote employees.

Calls can be Redirected to Agents’ Location

Department of Telecommunications’ regulation will allow the call redirection to agents’ locations and will connect to agents’ phones with a Virtual Private Network (VPN). During the mentioned period, OSPs are permitted to use secured VPN configured using Static IP, treating agents at home as extended agent positions of the OSP.

Flexibility

The current situation demands the flexibility of work from anywhere and DOT’s regulations will ensure that the contact center agents can work from remote locations. Remote contact centers are here to stay and with extended relaxation, businesses can work remotely for the long term.

Business Scalability

Businesses can run a single site and route the calls to agents in multiple locations as per the new DOT guidelines. For businesses with a surge in call volume, this is the right opportunity to scale their contact center operations as they do not have to worry about the multiple call server deployments to align with earlier DOT regulations.

Remote Hiring will not be a Challenge

Work from home opens up employment opportunities with no location barriers. This works well in favor of a large section of the country where such opportunities are welcomed by the ones in need, helping the country to upskill efficiently and businesses to hire a diverse workforce.

Remote Contact Center Challenges

The radical shift from legacy to remote contact center solutions is aimed at enabling businesses to work from anywhere and provide uninterrupted customer service on all digital platforms in this New Normal of Contactless World.
The following considerations are important challenges for the new age remote contact centers:

Establish IT Governance: With remote teams and uncontrolled infrastructure, problem identification is needed to monitor and diagnose the root cause for resolution. Businesses will need to establish remote governance with 360-degree Application Infrastructure Management (AIM) to run contact centers with confidence.
Centralized View of Contact Center Operations: The remote agent’s performance needs to be monitored irrespective of their work location or the devices being used. With comprehensive remote monitoring tools, agents’ activity can be tracked in real-time to make well-informed decisions about resource allocation.
Onboarding and Collaboration: Virtual engagement amongst teams will need a little extra care for the shared vision of the organization. And since necessity is the mother of invention, organizations can resort to tools that ensure smooth onboarding, team collaboration, peer communication, team broadcasting, and a holistic view of remote monitoring to create a healthy yet conducive remote work environment.

Ameyo’s Remote Contact Center Solutions that help Businesses Curb these Challenges

For most businesses, establishing IT Governance remains a top priority amongst other challenges. Ameyo’s Virtual Call Center Software, after careful observation of these challenges, provides businesses an opportunity to work remotely without compromising on business productivity.

Establish Remote Governance: Businesses can overcome remote IT infrastructure challenges by getting a 360-degree view of all devices and environments. Supervisors and managers can identify the reason for low productivity with 15 monitoring parameters.
Flexible Deployment Options: With multiple deployment options of Cloud, on-premise, and Hybrid Solutions, businesses can choose the solution for their specific needs.
Remote Monitoring: Managers can keep a track of all agents’ activities in a Unified Monitoring interface irrespective of agents’ work location. This allows them to monitor agents’ performance in real-time and helps them make well-informed decisions.
Flexibility to Login from Anywhere: With Ameyo’s Remote Contact Center Solutions, contact center agents can login from any device such as laptops and smartphones; any browser; and any work environment.

(Looking for a Remote Contact Center Solution for your business? Schedule a demo today!)

Muthoot Launches Loan@Home Service using Ameyo’s Video KYC Solution

Muthoot Group, the largest gold loan provider in India as well as around the globe, has launched its new product Loan@Home to provide customers with the comfort of applying for gold loans from their homes. Muthoot has selected Ameyo’s Video KYC Solution to quickly onboard customers and perform their Know Your Customer process online.

The demand for the Gold loan has increased in the post-COVID-19 world from both the MSME and the unorganized sector. To meet this growing demand amid the COVID-19 restrictions, Muthoot has launched its Loan@Home service to provide customers with the gold loan from the comfort of their homes without having to visit the branch in this contactless world.

The Loan@Home inquiry once verified and accepted, is forwarded for Video KYC in real-time which is followed by an appointment for a visit by loan executive. Reducing the dependency on walk-in customers, Muthoot is continuously working on optimizing customer journeys and reducing the time spent in the process.

Sobhit Bhaskaran, Head of Loan@Home service says, “We chose Ameyo’s Video KYC solution over 5 other vendors due to its seamless integration into our customer’s journey. The solution has enabled us to meet our KPI of reducing the time spent at the customer’s place from 1 hour to under 15 mins.”

Sachin Bhatia, Global Sales & Marketing Head at Ameyo mentions, “Ameyo’s Video KYC solution works at low mobile bandwidth and tested with 80+ devices which will enable the Muthoot Group to onboard its customers which are spread across 5,000+ branches across India. We are glad to be part of their digital transformation journey with Loan@Home app-based digital service”

Ameyo’s Video KYC Solution enables Regulated Entities (REs) to reduce onboarding dropoffs by 20% with omnichannel capabilities and reduce the cost of KYC by up to 90%

Instagram Customer Service Platform for E-commerce Industry

Digital is the future! The digital shift from an email only world to the inclusion of Instagram as a messaging channel for customer service is bringing in new ways for businesses to interact with customers.

According to a study by Statista, “More than half of the global Instagram population worldwide is aged 34 years or younger. And among the global Instagram users, the highest concentration of usage is in the US amounting to 116 million users followed by 73 million users in India alone, presenting a huge opportunity for the brands.”

Social media has given the customers a platform to actively engage with their favorite brands and the ball is in customers’ court now. Customers now know which brands they want to do business with and they have gained the power to make or break the deal with their online feedbacks and reviews.

Why E-Commerce is the Saviour?

Even in the pre-COVID era, e-commerce players were emerging with the fascinating ideas of food, apparel, and other products. COVID-19 just made the need for e-commerce obvious for the physically distant world.
Without a doubt, we will see a surge in the e-commerce industry even in the post COVID era and the digital adoption will continue to be in demand. Being present on channels like Instagram gives greater visibility to attract a large number of customers across the globe.

According to Sprout Social, Instagram users spending an average of 53 minutes a day browsing, becoming a strong indicator for brands to engage with their customers on the platforms where they spend most of their time.
Providing prompt customer service on Instagram has just got real with e-commerce brands promoting their new product launch for apparel, jewelry, etc. Not only is it a platform to promote exciting offers on products but customers always turn to social media to find the reference for different products and services.

How to streamline customers’ journey with Instagram for Business?

No Mentions Missed
Mentions matter, with both positive and negative feedback! If a brand’s name is mentioned on any social media platform, it should be acknowledged.

Integrating your omnichannel ticketing software with the Instagram channel will help you keep track of and address all the mentions, feedback, and complaints. Companies can customize alert notifications for these mentions and ensure timely redressal of the complaint. Every time a customer puts a word out for the brand, customer service & support reps will be notified in their agent interface and they can address these mentions.

For instance, when a customer posts a comment about delayed delivery of their apparel on the brand’s Instagram post, a ticket will generate automatically and will be routed to the best-suited agent. The agents can now either create a new customer from the details or attach the ticket query to an existing customer after entering the details in the database.

Ticket Transfer means Context Transfer
It’s important for businesses to have an end-to-end solution that helps them work in sync with all departments across the organization. Let’s look at it with an example of an e-commerce brand. A customer reaching out to your brand using their preferred channel to inquire about the quality of the product delivered and requires great supervision from the managers.
Customer service agents can transfer the ticket in real-time to their managers or fellow agents with complete interaction history to preserve the conversation context flawlessly including previous interactions from multiple channels.

This will help in increasing the First Contact Resolution (FCR) and will increase the customer satisfaction rate significantly.

Analyze Channel Specific Engagement
The constant question for brands is that “which” channel to optimize for better customer engagement. And there isn’t a proven strategy to list the channel effectiveness for the organizations. There has to be a granular analysis for each channel to drive the result-oriented strategy.
Once you have integrated all the channels that are preferred by your audience, the analysis is the only puzzle that needs to be solved. Analyzing channel-specific performance with metrics like SLA, CSAT, turn-around-time for each query, missed interactions, query pattern, etc. helps the organizations to invest in the channels that perform well.

For brands like Boutiqaat, managing each interaction and feedback on a popular channel like Instagram for customer service becomes easy with a well-thought strategy.

Converting Customers into Promoters
Make each interaction count, because according to a report, 71% of consumers who experience positive social customer care are likely to recommend the brand to others.

When the customers have an amazing experience with a brand, they become the promoters in disguise and where do they go for this promotion? Instagram! The customers expect you to be real quick with the service.
When a customer raises a request about the price for a pair of shoes that they checked on Instagram, the contact center agent can check the caption of the IG photo which has been captured in the ticket to instantly reach out to the customer and send a brochure on WhatsApp along with other variations that the customers might like. This way, the brand delivers an exceptional customer experience, going the extra mile, and the customers are likely to recommend the brand to their friends and family.

There you have created a positive experience being a little extra proactive.

Customer Retention
According to a study by HBR, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing customer. Social media engagement, when well-planned, helps businesses save costs, increase revenue, and create brand loyalty. Once your customers start turning into brand promoters, you have excelled at the customer service and customer retention game.

Translating your customers’ loyalty into real business value comes with small gestures like acknowledging your customer’s feedback and providing an experience that they are looking for.

(Also Read: How Instagram is the Customer Engagement Channel you need?)

Why do you need a Dialer Software for Outbound Call Center?

In the world of automation, what if someone told you that you can also automate your dialing strategy and maximize your business productivity? If your agents are still stuck with the age-old manual dialing process, then let me remind you, you have lost a huge potential to gain new customers. While you thought investing in a call center dialer software center will shake your budget, you already have put your agents’ efficiency at stake with manual dialing.

Out of the 100 calls that are made, only 15 reaches the right people and when your business’ productivity depends on making outbound calls, these numbers can be really threatening.

An autodialer can be more than just a time and cost-saving software, it increases the agents’ productivity from 120% to 300% on an average. The right Contact Center Dialer will not only increase business productivity but will also simplify your agents’ life with its flexible dialing algorithm.

How an Auto Dialer can Improve your Business’ ROI?

Call center auto dialer improves connect rates, eliminates the need for manual dialing, and increases the lead conversion rate significantly.

Increased Connect Rate

With an automated outbound call software , you can save your agents’ time. Calls are initiated automatically and outbound call center software’s powerful algorithm of answering machine detection (AMD) intelligently detects if there’s a busy tone, answered by a machine, call disconnected, or call not answered. In such scenarios, the dialer for call center will not patch the call to the agent unless a human voice is detected and it automatically starts dialing the next number in the lead list.

This increases agents’ talk time from an average of 15-20 minutes an hour to 40-45 minutes an hour, thus maximizing their productivity. Your business’s efficiency also increases with more call connections and fewer agents.

Contextual Conversations

An Outbound contact centre software is worth every buck but pairing dialer capabilities with crm integrations is a must.

With a dialer software for call center integrated with your in-house or third-party CRM, allow your customers to preserve the context of each conversation and deliver a personalized experience. Yes, it matters!

Your agents can access the customer’s information prior to the call even if they are working remotely. With a preview dialer in place, you can ensure that your agents get the information required and they deliver the best customer experience for each call.

Customer’s preview prepares the agents for the call and the personalized experience is well appreciated by the customers.

Intelligent Call Assignment to Agents

Predictive dialer solution predicts the average time spent on a call by an agent and it will automate the call assignment on the basis of its prediction.

For instance, Agent A takes 7 minutes to handle a call and Agent B spends an average of 4 minutes on a call, the automated dialer software routes the next call to Agent B on the basis of their availability to ensure maximum utilization of the agents.

Define Pacing Algorithm

Too many calls per agent can become a bottleneck for them. With dialer’s pacing algorithm, you can pre-define the number of calls to be dialed out per agent to reduce the call drop ratio. If there are 10 agents in a queue, the pacing ratio can be set to 1.5 calls per agent ensuring that there are not huge call drops.

The dialer software analyzes the past interaction and the average handling time to adjust the pacing ratio. For instance, if 10 agents handle 60 calls in an hour, it will dial out the calls according to their availability.

Best Time to Call

This world wonder for businesses that are trying to get hold of their agents at the right time. Now, to remind a school teacher for their installments, calling between 9 AM to 3 PM would not be advisable.

Ameyo’s intelligently built dialers detect when to call the customer with its ‘Not Call Before’ feature. It determines the availability of the customers on the basis of previously collected data of past interactions and will initiate a call when the customer is available to answer it.

Retry Time Configuration

Not all calls get connected but you can ensure result driven calling with retry attempts for such calls. The supervisor can set the time duration after which the outbound dialer will dial out the list of numbers that didn’t connect in the first attempt. You can also configure the number of retry attempts.

It can be configured in two ways:

System Disposition: Supervisors can filter out the data for system disposition and set a retry time for calls that require urgency. For instance, when a Customer X has registered for a complaint, the supervisor can set a retry attempt within 24 hours to reach out to the customer for complaint redressal.

User Disposition: Poor network connectivity, call quality, or call hung up may lead to bad customer experience. Filtering out this data on the basis of predefined dispositions, supervisors can define the retry time for such calls according to the business-specific requirements.

Importance of Knowledge Management System in Call Center Platform

The art of running an organization is no less than possession of a superpower in these times. The data to be stored, controlled, channelized, filtered, assembled, and disseminated is a task complicated enough in itself. With more and more at disposal of data analysts to be studied and filtered, chances of achieving high frequency could be comparatively reduced.
The importance of data today is pricier than that of gold. Correct data can make a base repository of any organization sound enough to stand abreast against competition even from unpredictable market sources to a huge extent.
Let us view this through an example:
Organization X deals in contact center outsourcing. The agents hired by them are in bulk and thus knowledge base required by them for purposes of recruitment, training, and on-job performance is huge. The services outsourced cater to a variety of clients ranging from telecoms to health, education, tourism, etc. When an agent receives a call or a ticket, it is not always required that an agent is always ready with the information required by the end-user at the tip of the tongue. The agents too read from a library of articles and FAQs that could educate them about all probable situations and solutions in case of each of them.
Such a repository or a cloud-created and stored library is called the knowledge for the organization. Imagine if you have a call to attend, a query to be solved is already new to you and you are additionally burdened with a huge library to read from, scan, and learn the required. You are then to come back to the caller and solve a query as new to you as to caller themselves. On top of it all, you are also required to maintain great work and time quality and provide resolution in minimum attempts.
If reading this is so tedious, what do all your customer support executives get through?

What is knowledge management software?

One-stop solution for all chaos in your head right now is the adaption and use of a robust Knowledge Management Software (KMS). All knowledge required in terms of leads, information, data, and information is stored centrally. The roles for each designation are defined and can be edited (edited and/or deleted) by admin at any point in time. The content of this knowledge can be created by anyone authorized to do so. This content is then published to be viewed by the admin. Once admin views it, it then goes to super admin and gets final edits. Once done, the content can thus be approved and be published or scheduled as per needs.

Types of knowledge management software

Enterprise-grade knowledge management software: create, curate, organize, and disseminate all data and digital content.
Knowledge Work Softwares (KWS): discover new features and update your knowledge base accordingly and timely.
Intelligent techniques: data mining techniques to extract the best possible solution for each problem in a progressive order.

Features of a knowledge management software

Font editing: add font style of your own choice and make your content not only relevant but crisp and engaging to read as well. Break monotony of eyes by highlighting or changing the font style and size of texts to emphasize the more important snippets. Let thy creativity linger!
Images and videos: Add images to put forward your point of view louder and better. Do not let users lose out interest and keep them rowed-in to the very end. Add links to relevant videos that can add glitters to your content and also make it self-explanatory. Let image streaks be worth 1000s of words.
Hyperlinks and links titles: convert your text to hyperlink of landing pages you want to direct your reading gentry to. You can now also give titles to linked text thus making its visibility and clickability furthermore assured and obvious.
Assign roles and designations: With admins and super admins to hierarch content, they can also assign designations to various users. All users with similar designations can be uploaded to knowledge management software. Also, admins and super admins can decide upon roles for each designation and assign them with the same.
Analysis and feedback: Make all your content open to feedback and receive insights regarding engagement generated by each content. Get fair and transparent results at your own disposal and work them out with a feedback handling mechanism.
Self-service enablement: Enable your end-users to get solutions directly from the direct channels of your organization. Entrust them with smooth and superior service qualities while eliminating the role of a call support agent. Deliver quicker solutions through minimized cost and effort process inputs.

Characteristics of a knowledge management software

Multi-lingual: Create a knowledge base in any language you want. Cater to an audience against a global parameter. Leave no stone unturned in serving them with best, and best shall obviously arrive when you partner with best.
Conversions and conversations: It might not seem logical to read but the reality is that a good conversation leads to multiple conversions. All your competitors present are the same yet different every time. Break the ice by presenting different, personalized, and updated content each time. Keep your own presentation consistent and crisp. Let your product speak.
Suitability: Now alter the functions and appearance of your knowledge management software in accordance with the tonality of your business. Be it a multi-faced organizational unit or a simple stretch of business, knowledge management software is a single stop for all your business management needs.

It did read to be complicated right? But that’s exactly what it isn’t. A knowledge management software has a primary goal to simplify each of the complicated data so that you can easily talk it out to your lead and convert them with minimum efforts.

Benefits of knowledge management software

A knowledge management software is an all support software in true senses for organizations. From data collection to dissemination, the entire cycle is easily carried out with the help of knowledge management tools and modules. Search all relevant information in a few clicks surfaced to your disposal. Assist your customer contact team with a crisp, compact, and updated knowledge base for ease of answering. Get your NPS boosted with an improved agent quality. Deploy self-service to reduce a load of tickets per agent thereby making your customers, solution hub for themselves.
Reduced burden equals a smaller salesforce thus benefiting a company a fortune on finances. Multilingual customer support and robust documentation provide a positive head start. Accuracy of reports, statistics, and analytics helps a business grow by taking feedback and working on them quickly keeping a close watch. Manage workflows, permissions, access, and designations over a single platform facilitated with smooth and bulk uploads of customer call agents.

How can Knowledge Management Help Contact Centers & Remote Teams?

A call center platform helps in connectivity and communication between support teams and customers across various channels such as Voice, Chat, Email, WhatsApp, Social & more. While agents are speaking with customers over these channels, it’s vital that they have the right knowledge in the right format at the right time to assist customers and resolve their queries.
Knowledge sharing between teams and customers within your call center platform can help in delivering promising CX metrics such as NPS & CSAT.

Conclusion

We can thus see evidently large scales of operations that are organized and controlled by knowledge management software. A knowledge management software can use various modules like decision trees, picture guides, AI chatbots, ML programming, and augmented reality backed support. A knowledge management software is responsible and capable of collecting and filtering the data in traditional and conventional modes. The data collected is then analyzed and acted upon.
The call center executives can thus take a sigh of deep relief with reduced AHT and number of tickets per agent; and increased NPS, C-SAT, and CX scores. A properly managed, hosted, and applied knowledge management software allows users to enjoy the perks of the digital transformational journey and better strategy both for planning as well as execution purposes.
Knowmax integrated with Ameyo’s unified call center platform can help in the seamless delivery of knowledge for agents.

Why Remote Call Centers are Here to Stay

We have been living with the effects of a pandemic for a few months now. And what that has taught us or rather reaffirmed is that – life never stops. You just adapt to the changing circumstances. One of the best examples of adapting to this new reality is the contact centers. Before COVID-19 it was hard to imagine that these places where agents were practically working elbow-to-elbow attending calls, handling aggravated customers, and delivering customer satisfaction will ever be able to completely migrate to work from home model.

However, it became a reality and a successful one at that. So much so that now call centers, also known as contact centers are looking to continue working remotely in the near-future – possibly even after the pandemic.

What Brought this Change?

An industry that used to look at contact centres as cost centers are now evolving into for-profit business scenarios. This change has been triggered by a number of factors that we will be discussing in the later sector of the article. Having said that, it is time for us to change gears and accept this new reality with open arms.

#1. Cost-Benefit

One of the most obvious benefits of a remote call center is that you get to significantly cut down your cost of operations. You no longer have to invest in real estate, hardware, and other overheads such as furniture, etc. Additionally, businesses can even save on the salaries of the agents. Since the call center agents will be working from their home and not have to incur the cost of travel, they will not mind taking lesser salaries. Thus, allowing the call center heads to build a cost-effective remote contact center.

#2. Larger Talent Pool

One of the best parts of not having a fixed office location is that you can hire people from anywhere in the world. You get to handpick the best talent without the constraints of geographical locations. Doing this will allow organizations to hire work from home call center agents purely based on their skill-set and level of expertise, without compromising on the quality of candidates just because they are available nearby. Moreover, with a global talent pool, you get to offer localized customer service experience too by hiring agents who can speak the local language.

#3. Building a Culture of Ownership

When the agents are taken out of their comfort zone aka an office space or their workplace, where they can anytime run to their supervisors or colleagues to seek help, only then will you be able to see their true potential. Empower them with the right tools such as a virtual call center software along with offering remote support. However, this sense of distance will help inculcate a sense of accountability and ownership among the agent. This new and improved mindset allows them to innovate and grow which in turn helps the organization get a step closer to their business goals.

#4. Boost Agent Job Satisfaction

Contact centers are notoriously famous for employee attrition rates. The agent turnovers are significantly high in the industry as working in a call center can be quite erratic – working in shifts, commuting to the office at odd hours takes a toll on their personal lives – impacting the time agents get to spend with their families and loved ones. However, with the flexibility to work from home, employees can manage their personal life in a more conducive manner. Thus, increasing their job satisfaction and saving you the time, effort, and money to hire new call center agents.

#5. Improve Customer Satisfaction

Equipping your remote agents with a work from home call center solution, encouraging collaboration, hiring the best agents who are happy with their jobs are the ingredients of successful call center strategy. After all, if your agents are happy, they will be more committed to their work and have a positive working attitude which will eventually lead to better customer relationships, delightful customer service experience, and overall higher customer satisfaction.

The jury is out – call centers should prepare for a long term work from home strategy as the pros outweigh the cons by a huge margin.

If you are also looking to set up a remote contact center, Talk to our Experts to know the best way forward.

How a Traditional Cloud Contact Center is different from a Remote Call Center Software?

With the changing customer behavior, the contact centers have evolved over the years and the growing need for faster deployment, flexibility, and scalability are the important factors for businesses to choose a solution that fits their needs. The contact center software providers, in the post-COVID era, are not limited to providing solutions that help businesses to provide just the support for their customers, but with the advancement of the technology, most companies are inclined towards a contact center software that offers the flexibility to work from home, office or for that matter with no location constraints.

After the pandemic hit the world, the initial step for businesses to deploy a temporary solution that helped them continue serving their customers remotely, but as the situation is not starting to ease, businesses are realizing that WFH will stay and continue to dominate the market with its presence. The comfort that remote work environments bring for the people is reshaping the future gradually where flexible work arrangements are becoming the norm.

To successfully scale your business and take full control of your contact center operations, you need a remote contact center. Businesses often make a mistake of taking a cloud contact center as an equivalent of a remote contact center but in a cloud-based contact center software, remote monitoring is a challenge along with additional challenges of operating with multiple devices. To battle the physically distant new normal, businesses are significantly moving from a traditional cloud contact center to a remote contact center software that is more agile, flexible and has an end-to-end monitoring system, permitting the businesses to completely rely on the software they choose.

While a traditional cloud contact center is limited to providing basic inbound and outbound contact center features, a remote contact center tops all of the enterprise-grade features with the added advantage of work-from-anywhere flexibility.

How Remote Contact Center Software is Different?

Remote contact centers are the future of the world because, in a remote contact center, businesses do not have to rely on laptops only to function remotely and it provides the ability to monitor end-to-end network performance, ensuring that businesses do not lose on the productivity while adopting work from anywhere model.

Choose your own Device

For most businesses, what turned out to be an onslaught challenge of arranging remote infrastructure to their employees has now become the new normal. Your agents can choose to work remotely without any device barrier. They can work using a laptop or smartphone as business as usual with a no-compromise work productivity environment.

With work from anywhere, businesses get the flexibility to work within the mobile agent app and perform all contact center functions with ease.

Device & Network Monitoring

Remote contact center software allows you to monitor the devices remotely and helps you identify the reason for low productivity with a comprehensive device management report. With 15 unique parameters, you can check the unsupportive devices, low internet connectivity, or poor signal as the agents will be using their personal devices, it is important to take necessary security measures.

In case of low talk time, low app bandwidth, and bad call quality reported, managers and supervisors can monitor the productivity of agents and establish a high trust environment in their team.

360 Degree Management View

In a remote working environment, you get full control of your contact center operations and get a unified view of remote agents irrespective of their work location of device usage. Supervisors can monitor agents’ productivity in real-time and get a holistic view of all the activities with a comprehensive monitoring view.

Additionally, managers get access to granular reports of call quality, average handling time, and campaign performance to draw actionable insights and manage resource allocation in real-time in case of a heavy call flow.

On-Call Assistance and Team Collaboration

Working virtually has its own challenges but team collaboration does not have to be one of them. Supervisors can create a remote work environment by being present for their agents whenever they need it. If an agent is stuck with a customer query, to resolve it faster, supervisors can snoop, whisper, and confer to increase first contact resolution.

Furthermore, agents can communicate internally and provide the required information to each other using an internal chat option. Supervisors, if needed, can also broadcast messages to their teams to send out an important communication.

Enhanced User Experience

Remote contact center software is highly flexible and it enhances user productivity by manifolds. Agents can choose to log in from any device, any browser, any environment and they will get all enterprise-grade features in smartphones and laptops alike. Agents get access to a unified interface, allowing them to retrieve all customer information in one place which results in better productivity and reduced call handling time.

With end-to-end monitoring capabilities, remote contact centers are here to stay and will become a major disruption for businesses. As contact centers are the last line of human to human interaction in a physically distant world, it provides a huge opportunity for contact center functions to drive sales, service, and collections along with the customer support remotely.

(Also Read: How to set up a Virtual Contact Center in for Remote Agents in Post-COVID Era?)

Webinar: How To Establish A Contact Center For Remote Agents In The Post-COVID World?

The entire world was taken by surprise when the lockdown was imposed and the first reaction for businesses was to build a business continuity plan along with the contact center operations running smoothly. Managing infrastructure in an uncertain environment like this became the biggest challenge for most contact centers because in a close-knit system as a contact center, moving remote immediately has its own set of challenges that businesses weren’t prepared for.

To address this challenge, Ameyo designed immediate solutions around VPN, getting contact centers up and running, and provided a remote solution for more than 50,000 agents in as less as 10 days’ time.

Our industry experts, Joe Jackson, Director of Business Operations at Dalex Finance, Ikenna Odike, CEO at Outcess, and Sachin Bhatia, Co-founder at Ameyo have explained the challenges for contact centers in West Africa and laid out immediate solutions in the webinar, helping businesses build a contact center for remote agents in the post COVID world.

After a few weeks into the lockdown when the initial chaos settles in and businesses were running their operations remotely, the interesting question pops up for business owners across the globe. Would it be a short stint or WFH is here to stay, changing the landscape of contact centers forever? In continuation of this, there’s another challenge of a human to human interaction. Customers want real engagement across sales, services, and collections.

Automation, being the technology of demand, is successfully addressing the customer service challenges, allowing customers to self-serve but the human touch is missing.

“Studies have shown that the talk time has increased to 2X when compared to the telcos’ data from previous years with almost 100% increment in talk time. This is clearly an answer for businesses to preserve human interaction as consumers are looking for human touch,” says Ikenna Odike.

So, now human to human interaction is irreplaceable and businesses are realizing that it’s important to provide communication that has a human touch. With this being said, there’s another question that Sachin has addresses, “Are remote contact centers here for a short stint or is it going to be a major business disruption?”

Bringing in the advantages of Remote Ready Contact Centers, Ameyo has done a survey with its customer to uncover the major business disruptions that Remote Contact Centers will bring:

Low Operation Cost

In a remote contact center environment, businesses have the potential to save around 25-30% of the cost that is spent on the agents. Assuming that the agents’ cost is 50% of the total cost and you can reduce 25% of that amounting to almost 12.5% cost reduction. This can turn out to be a long term strategic advantage even in the post-COVID era.

Business Continuity

For businesses to continue running their operations, remote contact centers will enable them to function even without agent infrastructure like a laptop. They can continue to run their contact centers using a Mobile or Smartphone with Ameyo’s Mobile Agent App. The only pre-requisite is to have a smartphone and a stable internet connection and you will have a mini contact center in your hands.

Security

As security remains the biggest concern, businesses need to have a strategy that provides a no-compromise environment for their company. Rightly mentioned by Joe Jackson that they are a financial service provider, dealing with sensitive customer data across all departments. To ensure data security during and after the pandemic will still remain the top priority for their business and to combat this challenge, Ameyo has designed the solutions that will fit their business needs.

Business Scalability

Eliminating the need to expand office infrastructure while planning to expand the business, remote contact centers provide yet another opportunity for organizations to scale as they go without worrying about operational overheads or infrastructural development.

Flexible Operations

The flexibility to operate from anywhere in the world has manifold advantages. Agents can provide customer service using any device, any browser, and any environment without any barrier of being physically present in the office. Providing flexibility to agents but not limited to that, it also provides businesses with an opportunity to hire the best of talents across geographies.

Additionally, as remote contact centers are here to disrupt the businesses’ landscape, it will bring in agents very high accountability and ownership with very little supervision required. The future will become the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) with huge advantages of flawless agent engagement across all channels.

Remote Contact Center Challenges

But, as much as of an opportunity this is, there are challenges of setting a remote contact center. Here, Sachin with our speakers Ikenna and Joe will address the top challenges and how Ameyo has designed solutions to overcome these.

IT Governance & Security

As stated earlier, security is the biggest standing concern for any business. There are certain challenges like:

Remote device monitoring: Ameyo’s remote contact center solution is designed to monitor remote devices on 15 parameters that allow the supervisor to identify reasons for low productivity.
Data storage: Agents’ control on call recording and capturing screenshots can be restricted or disabled to ensure no data leakage and the data can be directly stored on the company’s server.
Data Masking: Customer’s data like their personal information can be masked from remote agents, ensuring that agents do not misuse the data or threaten the company’s reputation in any circumstances.

Onboarding & Collaboration

Working in a remote environment brings in challenges like communication between the team which can certainly lead to bad customer experience.

Team Collaboration: Supervisors or managers should be present for agents to provide on-call assistance, helping agents to resolve customer queries faster. Along with that, there should be fluid communication between agents via the internal chat option, thus building a healthy work environment.
Easy Onboarding: The agents’ interface should be intuitive and flexible so that agents don’t find it difficult to operate and they do not have to compromise on their productivity.
Provide Customer Context: If agents are constantly toggling off between tabs to retrieve customer information, the average handling time might increase further leading to a low customer satisfaction rate. Agents should be equipped with the right tools to have access to customer information like previous interactions history to be able to provide effective customer service.

Business Operations

Managing business operations like the user to queue mapping and engagement on multiple channels can be challenging while working remotely.

Agent-Queue Alignment: Supervisors should be able to observe the call flow and align or shift their resources to different queues in real-time. Real-time monitoring of remote agents is essential to maintain the productivity of the business.
Inclusion of Digital Channels: Remote contact centers should not be limited to voice calls as a customer service channel because the customers like to approach businesses through multiple channels. An omnichannel presence on channels like WhatsApp to engage with customers more effectively.

With Ameyo’s well designed remote contact center solution, you can establish governance over IT & Business Operations and do away with all the challenges.

Did you miss our West Africa Webinar? Check out the webinar here.

5 Keys to Setup a successful Virtual Call Center for Remote Agents?

As the world has been challenged with the COVID-19 pandemic, the state of customer engagement has changed. With the changing state of customer service, the businesses are seeing a surge in the call volume during this lockdown enforcement.

And now that the lockdown has started to ease and the companies start to resume their businesses, they are realizing the potential of virtual call center software and the advantages that it has brought in for business growth. Not limited to the growth, businesses are also evaluating a long-term plan for virtual contact centers while also preparing for the unprecedented challenges in the future.

The ‘work from anywhere’ trial phase has resulted in measurable impacts on business growth across the world. There’s no denying that work from home is here to stay and disrupt the way the contact centers function. While the customer service demands are skyrocketing, customer service continuity needs to be addressed with virtual call center agents’ preparedness for the uprooting challenges.

Before you choose a Virtual Call Center Software for your remote agents, you need to evaluate the impact on business productivity and efficiency it might have. To help you through your journey of setting up a virtual call center, we have listed out the possible points for you to check.

Robust Security & Compliance

Once you have evaluated the need for a virtual call center, you need to be sure about the data security and adherence to compliance policies to eliminate the risk of the data breach and data theft. To ensure privacy levels of a closed-door environment, you can set up a corporate VPN for maximum security.

To further enhance security, the system should record all your data on the cloud, barring virtual call center agents from recording calls or taking screenshots.

Customers trust businesses with their sensitive data and it’s a no-compromise customer-business relationship that needs to be built to successfully work remotely.

Infrastructure Preparedness for Virtual Call Center Agents

To equip agents with the required infrastructure, companies need to first understand the nature of work each agent is responsible for. To handle calls, agents would substantially need to have either a Laptop or a Smartphone in order to meet the business standards, depending upon the process followed.

Along with these devices, agents would require a stable internet connection to operate remotely using their laptops and smartphones and the system should be capable to run on low internet bandwidth.

As for inbound calls, the routing algorithm should be smart enough to route the calls via Smart IVR to a virtual agent. Similarly, for outbound calls using a dialer, automatic call distribution should be smart enough to map the calls to agents based on their skill set and business requirements.

360 Degree Monitoring View for Managers

Once your virtual call center starts to function, its paramount for business & operation heads that they have a central view of all contact center operations, be it remote, office, or any interface the Agents log in from. Managers or supervisors should be able to monitor and track each activity across the campaigns, such as:

Ability to monitor remote devices with various parameters like low-internet bandwidth using Application Infrastructure Management (AIM) to create a high-trust environment
Ability to monitor live calls and provide on-call assistance to virtual agents with complete call functionalities like snoop, barge, whisper, confer, and transfer to ensure maximum customer satisfaction and increase first contact resolution rate
To analyze the call flow for each campaign and shifting remote agents to different queues using user to queue mapping in real-time and ensure proper resource allocation while maximizing their productivity
Fetch periodical reports to analyze the call quality and score agents against each call and rate them on the basis of their skills

Supervisors should be able to monitor each activity irrespective of the work location of the agents or the device usage in order to maintain the customer service and support standards.

Easy Access to Customer Information Via CRM Integrations

Agents, while delivering customer service, will need to have a complete understanding of customer requirements along with customer details like previous interaction history, displaying customer profile via automatic screen pop-up, freeing them from switching between multiple applications to retrieve customer information. Remote Agents ought to have this functionality or it will severely impact Customer experience.

This helps the agents to:

Preserve conversation’s context ensuring high first call resolution while increasing agents’ efficiency
The flexibility to link the new call interactions with existing conversations to maintain the call sanity and preserve the context for future actions
Transfer the call context while transferring the call to supervisors or agents, providing them with all relevant information

Inclusion of Digital Channels for Maximum Customer Engagement

Customers opt to do business with brands that cater to the channels of their choice. To set up a virtual call center, it’s important for companies to provide a holistic engagement across Voice & digital channels. Especially channels like Whatsapp and Webchat which have seen a huge adoption among customers.

According to a report by Statista, the worldwide accessibility to the internet has reshaped customer engagement strategies with 3.81 billion global social media users as of April 2020.

And the digital channel inclusion is even more important in the contactless world where customers are seeking instant support from their service providers. Digital channels have a huge impact on:

Preserving human touch with the bot to agent deflection whenever required
Improving customer satisfaction rate with First Contact Resolution

Concluding Thoughts

Taking everything into account, to set up a virtual call center for work from home agents, it’s imperative to evaluate and consider different parameters and choose a virtual call center software that meets the needs of the organization and is in the best interest of the customer’s experience.

Ameyo’s virtual call center solution, with its proven expertise, makes for the best solution for all your remote working environments’ needs, ensuring that you do not compromise on the business productivity.

Need to know more about Virtual Call Center Solutions? Schedule a demo today and hear from our team of experts!