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

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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:

  1. Ability to monitor remote devices with various parameters like low-internet bandwidth using Application Infrastructure Management (AIM) to create a high-trust environment
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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.

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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:

  1. Preserve conversation’s context ensuring high first call resolution while increasing agents’ efficiency
  2. The flexibility to link the new call interactions with existing conversations to maintain the call sanity and preserve the context for future actions
  3. 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:

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

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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!