Most businesses are struggling to navigate the impact of Covid-19, how the pandemic is affecting different departments varies dramatically from one department to another. One of the hardest-hit department is often customer service. No doubt there has been an increase in the level of customer emotion and anxiety in service calls – from unexpected travel cancellations to appeals for bill payment extensions and disputes. This has made the usually hard job for agents far more challenging.
Another common challenge faced by the agents who most of them are working from home for the first time, find themselves without the proper infrastructure and support they once enjoyed in the contact centre. Due to the limitations, some can’t even work from home, businesses have no choice but to split their customer service team into 2 teams, working in shifts. They may be struggling more than usual to help customers.
So, what can managers do to better help agents navigate thru difficult times? Here are 5 little-known factors that could better your remote customer service agent’s performance:
1. Communicate with the team.
Understand your agents, encourage them to bring up about things or challenges they are facing, how they’re working towards their goals, issues they’re struggling with, not just work-related. Just emphasising on performance or productivity often will be perceived as insensitive and tone-deaf. Consider how you should be coaching your team to “keep things going”.
2. Empathy Matters.
Most agents may be experiencing working from home for the first time, that being said like everyone else they may have a lot to juggle with. They might be experiencing challenges in their personal lives especially when this is an emotional time for many. Try to understand, encourage, and motivate them so that they will not be feeling emotionally isolated.
3. Workforce Optimization.
Workforce management has always been a crucial part of each contact centre. Using the right tool can definitely simplify this. Cloud solutions are ideal to provide the data effective for workforce planning including management of staffing, scheduling, leaves, creating shift patterns, forecasting of call volumes.
4. Quality Monitoring.
Call monitoring, call recording, performance management, and more are among some of the software features that can help managers feel more confident in managing and tracking agent’s performance. With the right comprehensive call centre solution(like Nubitel CX), managers can maintain a high level of customer service at the desired efficiency.
5. Leverage on the Right Infrastructure.
Ensure your team are able to access the same tools and information regardless of where they are based at and having a unified experience by moving your contact centre to the cloud. It can also deliver significant operational savings by removing the need for hardware.
For contact centres looking to move to quickly adopt a remote workforce, Nubitel CX is designed to help contact centres continue to deliver optimal customer service while transitioning their workforce to work from home.
