This week we feature an article from Tanya Bansal, Marketing Executive at Ameyo. She shares best practices supervisors can use for monitoring call center agents in a work-from-home scenario.

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COVID-19 has led us to believe that we need to rethink, amend, and strengthen our contact centers with robust technology to stay ahead of the pandemic. The landscape of contact centers has shifted to the WFH (work-from-home) model overnight, bringing in many challenges and opportunities. However, it becomes much easier for the organization to stay in sync, aiming for clarity, transparency, and better management of the remote contact center agents.

We know that as much as optimizing customer experience is essential, it is also important to provide an exceptional experience to the remote agents. Equipping the agents with the tools and ability to maximize their productivity, the agents will make sure to get the show running.

Now, the real question is, how do we monitor remote agents to ensure maximum efficiency with minimum supervision required. If you are looking for best practices to monitor remote agents’ performance, this blog is for you.

1. Create a High Trust Environment
Remote work has made us appreciate the way the agents could communicate with peers and supervisors without any hesitation in the physical work environment. Now that the agents are working remotely, it is important to create a transparent environment where agents can find all the relevant information in one place. When the agents are given proper guidance, they tend to be more productive.

2. Network & Device Management
In a work-from-home scenario, it has become difficult for managers to keep track of agents’ activities and identify the reasons for low productivity. Sometimes, the agent can report poor connectivity, low internet bandwidth, etc. With 15+ parameters of network & device management reports, the managers can get an in-depth insight into the issues causing low productivity. For instance, if the agents’ device is unsupportive, the manager can fetch a report to track that. This helps the manager to establish trust within the team and support their agents when they need it.

3. Real-time Remote Monitoring
Now, the supervisors can gain full control of the contact center operations even while working remotely. Here’s how!

Supervisors can get a wholesome and unified view of remote agents irrespective of their work location or device. The supervisors can listen to the live calls, monitor the agents’ performance, provide on-call assistance to help the agents have qualified interactions. They can also snoop, barge, and whisper on a live call if required. The supervisors can download the calls to analyze the call quality standards and score each call according to metrics like language proficiency. This kind of regular feedback helps the agents better their performance and deliver unremitting services.

4. Comprehensive Call Center Metrics Report
Before the world was pushed into lockdown, it was easy for supervisors to assess the agents working on the floor. Now, while working remotely, they can’t keep a watchful eye on each agent to check if they are working. But, the supervisors can fetch reports, schedule periodic reports, and share it with the right stakeholders to assess and keep a track of campaign performance along with the business-specific metrics such as CSAT rate, conversion rate, inbound call flow, lead management, etc. The supervisors can also closely monitor and analyze agents’ availability, average handling time, the number of calls handled, break durations, etc. This data helps the supervisors draw meaningful insights and allocate or shift their agents to different queues on the basis of current trends and call traffic. Additionally, supervisors get notified of SLA breaches on both mobile and desktop, keeping an eye on each campaign and queue. With such notifications, the supervisors can make data-driven decisions, ensuring that the customer experience is not compromised.

Monitoring of Agents in real-time can also be done with Virtual Call Center Solution also the solution can allow agents to work from anywhere with any device.

Tanya Bansal is an enthusiastic individual, Marketing Executive at Ameyo, keen to learn customer problems, helping businesses find the right solutions effortlessly. Along with that, always being poised by the words, she finds her solace in reading and imparting her knowledge with students through multiple teaching programs.