Virtual Call Centers and the Future of Call Center Work

The Future of Call Center Work

As companies continue to adjust to social distancing protocols, the future of call center work is set to be virtual in order to facilitate safety while maintaining productivity. For many businesses, 2020 was an incredibly tumultuous year, with call centers being one of the most drastically affected. Many contact centers have seen an increase in call volume of around 20%¹ since mid-February of last year, typifying why enterprise contact center solutions have never been more important.

Shifting an entire workforce from an on-site facility to a remote virtual setup is no small feat, requiring reliable and robust cloud software to keep operations running smoothly from a variety of locations. From managing employee productivity to optimizing customer service, it's vital your call center software is up to scratch. Customer care is a primary concern in a socially distanced business, with customers demanding an omnichannel system² of communication to get in touch with companies.

Managing workers' needs in this scenario takes a well-structured plan, efficient management and appropriate tools and software. Without in-house managers to oversee employee productivity, there's a risk that service levels may deteriorate. By optimizing call center management software, your center will be better able to adapt to the changing face of the industry with a productive and focused team now and into the future.

How Call Center Management Software Can Assist with Data Migration

The productivity of a virtual cloud call center is only as good as its call center software. By employing call center solutions that are flexible and adaptable to your organization, you can track statistical data and metrics to motivate and drive your employees' performance.

With our flexible enterprise cloud contact center⁶ solution, migrating your existing data is a smooth and easy process. Adaptive to your call center's varied needs, it's also possible to have a hybrid of your current tools in tandem with our best-of-breed applications to create an enterprise contact center solution that's tailored to your needs. Offering real-time and historical reporting, a personalized agent UX and APIs to support CRM systems, this cloud-neutral platform is focused on workforce optimization now and as your business scales.

Using Gamification to Support and Motivate Your Virtual Agents

Without the in-person support of managers and coworkers, it's understandable that agent motivation can wane when working from home. Transforming repetitive work tasks into fun and friendly competitions can help motivate and bolster agents to perform optimally in a remote setting. When it comes to boosting drive and competency, studies have found⁹ that gamification makes 83% of employees feel more motivated and is helpful in reducing absenteeism by up to 41%.

Using gamification¹⁰ is an effective way to create social, online challenges that engage your employees and ramps up productivity. Within our workforce management software¹¹, you can create targeted challenges with rules, goals and rewards, with the badging widget serving as a visual showcase of great performance and as a way to highlight leaderboard standings using graphs, KPIs and scorecard widgets.

Automatic Call Distribution System (ACD) to Increase Customer Satisfaction

Preparedness is vital when your staff is remote, and using ACD allows for geographical matching, customer self-selection, account-based ID or automatic number identification (ANI) to reduce call wait times. Addressing these KPIs is vital to achieving customer satisfaction and increasing recommendations.

Creating Strong Customer Connections with Omnichannel Service

One of the main challenges cloud-based call centers face today is effectively engaging with their customers in multiple ways. In our mobile world, it's important to provide a differentiated selection of contact options yet still provide continuity of service. Frustrations caused by repeating the same information multiple times to multiple agents is a complaint 76% of customers¹⁷ have when dealing with call center staff, and customers expect consistency, personalized support and little effort on their part to achieve this.

Agents are Armed with the Information They Need to Assist Customers

Agents have the information they need across all channels to deal with their customer's inquiries using an omnichannel platform. With contextual information at hand, it's easy to understand customer needs and how to resolve their issue best. By matching customers to agents who have the proper subject matter and channel skills, customer frustration is lessened, and satisfaction and call resolution increase.

Train Your Team for Success

Full-service coaching²² is key for achieving success from every level of your team. Working in tandem with Aspect's quality management, your team can achieve better outcomes, whether the training process is manual or automated. By implementing timeframes for training and links to coaching material, your agents can stay on top of the latest development to best serve your customers. Training your staff²³ also helps with employee retention by up to 70%, keeping your team abreast of best practices to serve your customers better.

Digital Communication is the Way Forward

Harnessing the power of social media for customer service is easy with omnichannel software in place, allowing customers to chat about an existing service or inquire about something new. With 72% of adults²⁵ favoring digital communication, you can reach a wider audience with live chat in a timely manner.