Home Agents
Introduction
One of the biggest trends in the contact centre industry is the move from centralised sites to one which enables agents to work from home. The advantages of homeworkers are many:
Benefits of Home Agents
- Workforce flexibility: agents can be added to meet surges in demand without requiring additional office space and PBX capacity - they just need a PC, an internet connection and a phone. Most people have these already.
- use permanent call centre staff to handle the daily 'base load', and use homeworkers to handle overloads during peak periods. It makes the whole contact centre operation very efficient - and increases caller satisfaction at minimum marginal cost.
- Agent motivation: parents can work around sick children, school hours and a host of factors. Working as part of a virtual team is not the same as working alone, if managed correctly
- many travel agents and insurance companies use homeworkers operating on a minimum wage+commission scheme so the marginal cost of adding a new agent is quickly recovered
- Allows access to a new pool of labour...
- physically or visually disabled people
- a carer looking after a sick relative, otherwise housebound but desperate to earn money and 'have a life'
- people that can not drive (or have lost license for a period)
- people living in remote areas
- people who want to work, but perhaps only part-time or irregular hours
- where travel into 'the office' not cost effective
- Agent security: it may be safer for agents not to travel by public transport after an evening shift
- Inherent disaster recovery planning comes with distributed network of agents: no one event can stop the operation, even if headquarters is disabled.
Studies show that homeworkers are highly motivated, and the networked-based solution from NewVoiceMedia is an ideal enabler.
Homeworking and NewVoicemedia ContactWorld
Multisite operations and homeworkers are just a natural extension of a network-based hosted solution! You can have as many agents in as many sites as you wish - including homeworkers. After that, it's just a matter of running everyone as if they were sitting in the same room: wallboards will show SLAs, availability of the agent, status, even business levels they have achieved that day...
You'll be able to add functionality to extend your operations at any time. With NewVoiceMedia ContactWorld, you empower homeworking and disaster recovery capability; pre-agent IVR messages can be the same for every agent - they can also be modified to reflect different agents skill sets if you wish; add network-based monitoring and recording to enhance security; become PCI compliant for your debit & credit card transactions; move up to Individual Caller Treatment...
The best thing of all? It's all so quick and easy to do and there's no Capex or on-going maintenance costs to worry about because you 'Pay-on-Demand'.
Features
- No practical limit to the number of sites or agents, all that is needed is a PC with good internet connection and a phone (or SIP phone)
- Network-based IVR, ACD and CTI means all agents can use the same scripts, messages, CRM databases and so on.
- Network queueing, recording and monitoring worldwide
- Individual Caller Treatment
- Individual IVR/Lite Touch IVR
- Routing to customer’s own agent/Account Management group
- Personalised Phone Ads and Pre-Agent Messaging
- Secure Credit Card Transactions (PCI DSS compliant)
- IVR Data Collection
- Emergency ACD and Homeworking working during disasters or excess load.
- Call recording and Interactive Messaging
- Network-based routing, queueing and monitoring across multiple sites worldwide
- End-user configurable over the web
...and much more!
Benefits
- Enhance the operation of your call centre with new functionality on demand and no capex
- Incorporate extra capacity with new IVRs, new CTI call treatments and new agents in minutes
- Switch to homeworking or other sites in minutes in case of disaster (fire, flood, civil disturbance...)
- No need to wait for Systems Integrators, all features fully configurable via the web.
- No hardware, no software, no capex – payment is simply ‘on-usage’ (Telephony-as-a-Service)
- Optimise usage of skills across multiple sites
- Save 20 seconds per call by preparing the caller to get credit card ready, or routing to the right agent
- Better security, reduced fraud, and PCI DSS compliance.
An example of a multisite wallboard
...you can monitor a wide choice of key performance indicators from all sites (including homeworkers) live.
