In recent years, the customer service landscape has experienced a significant transformation with the rise of at-home customer service agents. The ability to work from remote or hybrid locations provided flexibility and convenience for employees and employers. However, this shift also created a sort of contact-center-of-one, where operations and IT teams are supporting agents working from their homes.
Cyara helps businesses regain visibility into every omnichannel journey and eliminate CX defects with automated contact center testing solutions.
While there are clear benefits to remote work, the distance and lack of visibility into the remote environment introduces its own set of challenges to agent productivity, particularly when it comes to serving customers over the phone.
1. Internet Connectivity Issues
Unreliable internet connectivity is one of the primary technical challenges that at-home agents face. Internet outages, slow speeds, and intermittent connectivity can disrupt communication with customers, leading to dropped calls or delayed responses. Stable, high-speed internet connections are necessary for agents to provide quality customer service.
To help keep your agents productive, your contact center team should provide agents with the necessary training and instructions on how to check their internet connections. Alternatively, you can set them up with a solution that can automatically run a system health check throughout their shift. This solution allows you to ensure that your agents are prepared to hold conversations with customers, without the risk of distractions or disruptions.
2. Hardware and Software Compatibility
In many cases, at-home agents handle customer inquiries with their personal computers and other devices. However, using their personal equipment can create several types of issues for your contact center, such as insufficient device maintenance, security, or technical glitches resulting from poorly configured hardware. In other instances, an agent’s device may be incompatible with your contact center’s software, which can greatly impact their ability to help your customers.
Providing your at-home agents with business devices can help ensure that they can access all your contact center’s software and tools. In addition, equipping your agents with devices for work enables you to assure compatibility and visibility. When your agents use the equipment provided, consistency will make it easier for your IT team to troubleshoot issues and keep your agents productive so that they can effectively help your customers.
3. Background Noise and Distractions
Unlike a controlled office environment, at-home agents are more likely to be battling background noises and distractions that can affect their communication with customers, such as barking dogs, street noise, music, or family members. Further complicating the matter, contact center platform-provided monitoring doesn’t usually measure and report on environmental factors like these background noises and distractions, so it’s hard to check, verify, and maintain that agents’ home workspaces are ideally set up to serve customers.
However, with the right cloud contact center monitoring solution, you can gain real-time visibility into the agent environment. Increase agent productivity with automated system health checks, which passively monitor call quality. If your agent experiences an audio issue, you can understand whether your agent’s environment is optimized to handle customer calls and begin resolving issues before your customers are impacted.
4. Security Concerns
Maintaining the security and confidentiality of customer information is paramount. At-home agents must be vigilant about their surroundings to prevent unauthorized access or eavesdropping. And any agent and call quality monitoring that contact centers do must be focused on measuring call telemetry metrics and not any audio or information exchanged between the agent and customer they are serving.
Be sure to train your agents on the importance of mitigating security risks that can threaten your customers’ privacy and safety. Additionally, your monitoring solutions must be compliant with regulatory standards, focused only on gathering data-driven insights for factors such as headset compatibility, network connection, and software updates as opposed to recording the content of the interactions.
5. Equipment Quality
The quality of the equipment used by at-home agents, such as headsets and microphones, directly impacts the clarity of communication. Poor quality equipment can lead to misunderstandings, frustration for both the agent and the customer, and a decline in overall service quality. Yet, when agents are working outside of traditional contact centers, it’s hard to ensure that they aren’t purchasing and using devices that don’t meet your quality standards based on their own preferences.
To verify that your agents’ devices meet your contact center’s needs and quality standards, you can provide your agents with standardized equipment such as laptops, headsets, and mics. By requiring that your agents use the equipment provided, you can ensure quality, boost agent productivity, and eliminate the risk that customer interactions will be impacted by sub-par alternatives.
6. Technical Environment Changes
While at-home agents are often provided with well-configured machines and equipment, training, and instructions on how to operate from home, the rapid advancements in technology and the frequently automatic and unseen workstation, system, platform, and software changes that occur in the background can make what was working perfectly suddenly fail. Things like browser updates, bug fixes, ISP, or telecom carrier changes, for example, can suddenly diminish call quality.
These unexpected changes can leave agents struggling to stay productive and meet important contact center KPIs, like:
- Average Call Handle Time (AHT)
- Call Volume
- Average Call Abandonment Rate (ACAR)
- Average Response Time (ASA)
- Call Transfer Rate (CTR)
- First Call Resolution (FCR)
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
That’s why continuously testing and monitoring your CX pathways is necessary to always assure quality and agent productivity. When you proactively monitor your infrastructure, you can take rapid action to identify the root cause of an issue, and immediately begin troubleshooting and rectifying the defect.
In today’s modern contact center, there’s so much that makes sense about the work-from-home model, from both a business and individual standpoint. It offers a flexible, convenient, and cost-efficient way to serve customers, but it doesn’t come without its challenges.
When things go wrong, internet connectivity issues, hardware and software compatibility, background noise, security concerns, equipment quality, and technical environment changes can all leave your customers feeling frustrated about working with your agents, or worse… abandoning your brand for a competitor. But these challenges aren’t insurmountable, especially if you leverage a solution that gives you real-time visibility and data, empowering you to proactively identify, assess, and address any issues that arise.
