Contact Center Software to Enable and Empower At-Home Agents
The word is out. The cost and quality advantages of positioning remote and at-home agents are significant. Virtual contact centers are on the rise. Skeptics' concerns are aptly addressed through innovation. Our technologies are driving this rapid change.
Our contact center software and solutions eliminate the geographical barriers of staffing and managing a traditional contact center. You can build or expand your contact center with talented and experienced agents based anywhere in the world.
On-site, remote, and at-home agents have the technology and tools they need to thrive, as if they were all in a central location.
Through our software's unified Web-based interface, your agents can interact with customers, resolve their issues, manage multi-channel communications, collaborate with one another, and easily access the information and knowledge they need. They are equipped to efficiently deliver high-quality service, and empowered to delight and retain customers.
Managers monitor and assist the entire agent workforce the same way—as if all team members were operating under the same roof. Our virtual contact center solutions offer monitoring and recording tools, performance reports, and collaboration toolsj, each designed for consistency and ease of use.
By leveraging our remote and home-based agent software and solutions, you gain numerous benefits and operational advantages, including:
- Agent satisfaction and morale are elevated
- Productivity dramatically increases
- Your organization responds quickly to spikes in call volume
- Your organization grows while minimizing facility and real
estate costs - Agent turnover and training time sharply decline
- Customer satisfaction and retention is enhanced
- Technology costs and complexity are reduced
- Disaster recovery and disaster avoidance is enhanced
For information on our customer contact center solutions, including details on virtual contact centers, download a brief overview of our ePowerCenter solution or Contact Us today!
Overview
The business case for at-home and remote agents
By now you've heard: The benefits of enabling at-home and remote agents are very real—and quite compelling—including:
- Attracting personnel with more life experience and greater empathy towards customers.
- Increased agent satisfaction as a result of greater flexibility, improved work/life balance, a more comfortable working environment, and less time and expenses related to commuting.
- Increased agent productivity, morale and dedication. In fact, a Gartner study revealed productivity gains for teleworkers of as much as 40 percent.
- Higher customer satisfaction ratings and loyalty resulting from interactions with happier and more experienced agents.
- Lower agent turnover and replacement costs—with an 80 percent retention rate or higher for at-home agents (versus the less than 25 percent for the traditional contact center).
- Extensive annual savings through lower real estate costs, training costs and supervisor-related costs of approximately $25,000 per at–home employee.
While technology is a critical element of a virtual contact center, achieving the above satisfaction—and loyalty—related benefits requires far more than a CRM software application and network connectivity. You need solutions that enable your at-home agents to do their job well, while enjoying what they do.
This is where we come in.
We provide technology and tools for your agents to thrive, regardless of whether they are on-site, remote, or at-home. You gain the flexibility to structure your agent workforce under one operational model, or under any combination of the three.
Through a single, Web-based interface, your agents can interact with customers, resolve their issues, manage multi-channel communications, collaborate with each another, and easily access the information and knowledge they need. Our solutions enable them to efficiently deliver high-quality service, while empowering them to delight and retain customers. The equipment requirements for your agents are minimal: they simply need a phone, PC with a browser and Internet connection.
Our solutions simplify and improve both the supervisory and administration aspects of managing an at-home or remote workforce. Through monitoring and recording tools, performance reports, and collaboration tools; managers assist agents as if the entire team operates under the same roof. Costs and complexity sharply decline.
Capabilities
Highlights of our remote– and at–home agent capabilities include:
ePowerCenter provides your onsite, remote and at-home agents with a single, rich application for managing all customer interactions. Regardless of how a consumer contacts your organization, agents can view, manage and respond in ePowerCenter. They have the same interface for all interactions, and can move seamlessly between handling phone calls, emails, and chat sessions.
Within ePowerCenter's workbench, agents can initiate and search for cases, view customer interaction histories, access relevant customer data from other systems, get answers and help, send letters and compensation, and much more.
Through ePowerCenter's single interface, agents can seamlessly access enterprise-wide information such as reservation, ordering billing, loyalty system, and more. They are not burdened with logging into multiple applications and tabbing around several systems to find what they need.
We provide an all-in-one, software-based communication platform—Customer Interaction Center (CIC). It is specifically designed for the needs of distributed contact centers and work–at–home agent workforces. It provides sophisticated capabilities, including:
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Through CIC, you can migrate some or all of your agents to VoIP as you see fit, reducing or eliminating long-distance toll charges and telephone circuits, while improving scalability.
ePowerCenter Interaction integrates Customer Interaction Center (CIC) with ePowerCenter to give your agents a complete range of on-screen controls—right within the ePowerCenter interface. They can initiate and transfer calls, conference, view directories, listen to voicemail, and change their status for others to see.
You can easily build customized quality monitoring forms for scoring and reporting agent performance through a simple Web interface. Build as many custom forms as you need with an unlimited number of sections and questions/responses.
Whether you have 25 or 5,000 agents, our CIC communications solution can support them. They have fingertip access to a complete range of capabilities such as:
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With ePowerCenter Interaction, agents can see co-worker status information and access workgroup directories. They quickly locate assistance when it is needed.
With a couple of mouse clicks, agents can transfer calls, conference in an expert, place calls on hold, escalate calls to managers, and even record calls for future assistance. And when an agent must transfer or escalate a call, the solution passes along extensive information about the customer and their interaction history.
Our solutions reduce costly call transfers and call handling times through intelligent call routing. Customer Interaction Center (CIC) supports multiple, intelligent call routing processes to send the call to the right agent—wherever they are.
Multimedia ACD and universal queuing capabilities distribute interactions of all types based on skills and activity levels. CIC can perform data lookups to match specific customer issues with the right agent skill sets. It also leverages real-time details about an agent's status and activity levels to balance workload and reduce idle time. Agents can better manage and address emails and chats between phone calls. And your customers are not waiting on hold for an over–burdened agent.
As a result, our solutions eliminate about 30 minutes in idle time per agent, per day. Workloads between agents and across sites are distributed more evenly.
With our solutions, your agents have the precise information needed to answer customer questions, resolve complex issues, and deliver high quality and relevant information to consumers via email, phone, and chat. Finger-tip access to answers and information greatly reduces handling time, transfers and escalations.
ePowerCenter's built-in InfoCenter feature provides context-specific help, screen pops, information, and procedures. Your agents do not lose time playing guessing games or entering irrelevant information.
Agents have direct access to scripted answers, graphic images and multimedia files. You can configure the solution to automatically deliver this information based on the data entered, or to provide access on-demand.
With the addition of RealDialog Agent Assist, your agents gain a "virtual expert" for on-demand help answering questions and resolving issues. They simply input a customer's question in their "natural language" and quickly receive the answer and guidance they need in the form of a direct text response, a paragraph within a document, or a specific file (spreadsheet, image, sound, or video)—all within the ePowerCenter interface.
Your agents are no longer taxed with guessing which keywords to use, or with drilling down through pages of search results for the answer they need. The impact is significant. Productivity increases while average handling time, hold times, ramp-up and training time are decreased.
As a centralized knowledge source for multiple communication channels, RealDialog enables your company to rapidly disseminate updates on product issues or recalls to all service representatives and self-service channels. Your at-home agents will always have the latest information at their fingertips.
Our solutions empower your authorized agents to issue appropriate coupons and compensation during interactions. The system automatically suggests the right coupon, gift card or check for the issue at hand based on specified business rules—not agent guesswork. The approval process and limits are built into the system, so agents are no longer required to track down a supervisor for approval.
ePowerCenter's automated fulfillment capabilities enable your agents to send follow-up email, letters, coupons, and enclosures with minimal effort. Letters are proofed within the system by specified individuals and can be printed in batch and on company branded letterhead at a centralized printing and fulfillment location. They are automatically organized and printed with their specific enclosures, so you send out letters with great efficiency.
These capabilities work together to save thousands in errors and labor costs, while providing you with more control.
Our CIC solution provides supervisors with a single real-time interface for monitoring agents, users and workgroup activities, along with interaction events and queue statistics. It provides a graphical "dashboard" view of a wide variety of statistical information—call abandon rates, queue statistics, etc.
Your supervisors can monitor single or multiple workgroups, activate or deactivate agents in a queue, send alerts to agent desktops, and even respond to agent requests for assistance. And the system notifies supervisors when specific boundaries are exceeded.
Armed with readily available call and queue metrics, your supervisors easily help agents boost productivity. They can evaluate call statistics and call handling in any contact center, for any agent or skill group, to identify problems and initiate corrective action. This could include lowering caller queue lengths, decreasing call handling times and implementing daily agent availability guidelines.
Our solutions reduce the administrative time associated with running reports. Your supervisors are not taxed with locating the right reports, or with configuring data to make reports useful. They can generate the reports they need in a shorter amount of time.
Our built-in reporting tools are designed specifically to help supervisors manage your entire agent population.
Our solutions enable you to enhance every aspect of your customer interactions and improve performance through real-time quality monitoring, multimedia (call and screen) recording, integrated agent scoring, compliance safeguards, and archiving management—all centralized in one intuitive interface for managers and authorized end users.
Our Record IQ solution provides flexible options and configurations for recording voice interactions, capturing on-screen activities, and tracking agent performance.
It provides your supervisors with powerful capabilities to coach and monitor agents, helping them improve at a faster rate. Supervisors can record and evaluate sessions to identify correct handling techniques and flag areas for further development.
When appropriate, specific recordings can be distributed to your managers and business partners, adding greater depth and detail for resolving issues. Managers across the enterprise leverage specific recordings for quality assurance, compliance, risk management and training purposes.
Our ePowerCenter solution provides a single point of administration for all of your agents, issue and interaction types, reporting, and maintenance. There are no separate servers or integration points to maintain or upgrade. Adding and removing agents from the system is as easy as changing their data fields and views.
And having an all-in-one, software-based communications platform—CIC—eliminates the need to deploy and maintain proprietary, siloed, hardware-based technologies. Managing time-consuming, costly, and disruptive upgrades is a thing of the past.
Benefits
Our remote– and at–home agent solutions bring numerous benefits, including:
- Improved agent and customer satisfaction and retention
- Increased revenue
- Increased productivity
- Increased ability to respond to unpredictable call volume peaks with at-home workers who take calls on an as-needed basis
- Reduced call abandonment rates and expand hours across time zones
- Lower telecommunications, facility and real estate costs
- Reduced training time and costs through a single platform and single user interface for managing multi-channel interactions
- Increased productivity through intelligent multi-channel routing
- Reduced cost and complexity of hardware-centric, multi-point solutions
- Enhanced disaster recovery and disaster avoidance by distributing agents in different locations
Next steps:
Download a brief overview of our ePowerCenter solution
Download a brief overview of our RealDialog Agent Assist solution
Download a brief overview of our Customer Interaction Center solution
Download the Aberdeen Group benchmark report: The Intelligent Contact Center: Increasing Multi-Channel Visibility
Download our Customer Interaction Center brochure for a deeper dive into CIC's capabilities and impact
