Customers across the globe have shifted as far as what support they want to receive. They want to communicate with businesses via phone, in apps, via text messaging, and on live chat. These type of digital channels have allowed customers to get better customer service, whenever they need it. By utilizing multiple communication channels, a contact center shows their customers what they can really do. The best part is – many contact centers around the world are doing it all remotely. How can moving your contact center to remote capabilities benefit your customers? We’re going to take a look at just that.
The “shift” to remote work has become permanent
Large call center offices are a thing of the past. In today’s world, a contact “center” is actually just a bunch of team members distributed across different locations. We’ve seen firsthand how the pandemic has shifted and accelerated the work from home solution. Many businesses are staying remote. According to the consulting firm Gartner, seven in ten contact centers will exclusively employ remote workers once the pandemic ends.
Being able to successfully and easily accommodate to these changes, though, takes a special scenario. Teams need to have the ability to stay connected from anywhere. Management has a big role to play in this as well, by making sure their employees are well equipped. (Check out our blog article on remote management for more info on this). Cloud-based communication and collaboration platforms are crucial in ensuring employees are ready to help customers from a remote environment.
Why a remote contact center yields happier customers
A remote contact center has the ability to directly and positively affect your customers. Remote contact centers that utilize a unified communications platform such as CallHarbor will be ahead of the competition in many ways.
Large Talent Pool
Before, contact centers could only hire people in the area within a commutable range. By utilizing a remote contact center, the talent pool that employers use for hiring opens up so much more. Being able to hire the best talent from across the country means that customers interact with more talented workers. Employees from every level can be selected from the best. Because of this, the base employees will already have the necessary skills to excel. This also means that management is going to be top tier, and give great training and guidance.
Happier Employees
Many studies throughout time have proven the fact that employees are more satisfied when they have the ability to work from anywhere. Workers who work outside of the office, at least some of the time, are happier, feel more trusted, are less stressed, are more inclined to recommend their employer to a friend, and are less likely to leave their current position than their office-bound colleagues. The study asked respondents if they feel happy in their job, to compare employee happiness between workers who have the ability to work outside of the office, as opposed to on-site only workers. They found that workers with the ability to work from anywhere said they were happy with their jobs 29% more than on-site only workers.
Better Data and Reporting
Supervisors and managers can utilize our robust reporting and analytics to look into how their contact center is doing. Reporting and analytics are very important when it comes to the success and productivity of a company. CallHarbor offers detailed reporting and analytics with your platform. Contact center leaders will see where the company is at in terms of call volume and service level. They can view online agents/employees, missed calls, outbound marketing calls, and more. Having the ability to easily and readily get these analytics will help the company to stay on top of things. This allows them to continue to set and meet goals, as well as improve their customer experience overall. Using VoIP’s call analytics and data regularly can help your company boost call quality, customer satisfaction, customer retention, and determine ways for your business to improve over time.
Flexibility in Communications
Being able to work from anywhere mean having flexibility to the max. This means being able to work and operate outside of normal office hours from comfortable locations. Sick days are also reduced, since employees can work from home when not feeling well, or head to the doctor and make up the extra time at home instead of calling off hours. When it comes to work events and traveling, you know longer have to worry about missing important calls or not being connected to your team. Flexibility is very important to employees and employers, also showing a relationship with retention. 30% of employees have left a job due to lack of flexibility.
Money Savings
By switching to a VoIP system as opposing to a traditional phone system, you’re saving big bucks.
Along with these baseline savings simply by switching, employers have also reported saving money on building expenses, after giving employees the benefit of working outside of the office while still staying connected.
As for employees, they save money by not having to commute into work, and by not having to be forced to call off work for inconveniences that can be avoided by being able to work from outside the office.