Remote Customer Service: Contact Center Must-Haves for Serving Customers at Home

What we remember to be the traditional office life will never be the same. With the rise of the hybrid workplace model, it is important to have the right customer service call center tools to conduct your business affairs virtually. Thus, the need for remote work solutions became apparent in customer service call centers. 

When it comes to customer service call center employees, it can be challenging to manage a remote and online workforce. Fortunately, Contact Center software makes remote customer service call centers accessible and easy. It is important to remember that a good customer service call center is paramount to building a relationship with your customers so it is best to go for solutions that would automate your call center call volume and help you achieve a higher rating on customer satisfaction. 

Here are some features you should look for when considering the best cloud-based customer service call center options for your company.

Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) feature offered by many customer service call centers receives incoming calls and distributes them to an available agent as quickly as possible. ACD can route calls to different agents based on their experience and capabilities. This eliminates the risk of inexperienced agents in customer service call centers being handed customers they can’t manage and reduces wait times. This automation can help to keep your customer service call center customers happy, your employees productive, and your call lines moving–all factors pointing to successful remote customer service call center service.

It’s hard enough to keep a workforce connected in a traditional office space, but it is even more so when employees are working remotely in your customer service call center. With the use of video conferencing software and chat platforms, you can help fight that divide in your company’s customer service call center. Furthermore, having coworkers accessible at a moment's notice means that inexperienced agents of your customer service call center can reach out for help if they need it which promotes efficiency and productivity in your customer service call center. It also helps to eliminate some of the loneliness that can come with remote working in a customer service call center which can only improve customer service.

Along the same lines as communication in your company’s customer service call center software such as ClickMeeting, it can be especially hard to focus and work in a home environment if employees are used to a controlled work environment. Workforce Management software for your customer service call center allows managers to create productive schedules for call agents in your customer service call center and help to enforce those schedules so your employees can be as productive as possible, even when working from home. Workforce management software would provide the necessary structure for your employees to stay efficient and achieve their KPIs in your customer service call center. 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software fills in the knowledge gaps that might stop agents from your customer service call center helping customers to the fullest extent of their abilities. Agents can’t be expected to be omniscient; it’s impossible to remember everything about your customer service call center callers and if they are new, there’s nothing to be known. CRM solutions help solve this by collecting intel on customer service call center customers like their demographic, contact information, previous call logs, chat transcripts, and more. This information can be invaluable to your agents when dealing with all sorts of customer service call center customers and can only increase worker productivity and customer satisfaction when you can offer personalized service to customers of your customer service call center with knowledge of their relationship with the company.

When the vast majority of interactions with customer service call center customers happen over the phone, it becomes more important than ever to record those calls that come into your customer service call center. Busy employees might forget to write down important information as they bounce from call to call but having the recording easily accessible means that those little bits of information can’t slip through the cracks. It also means that you have customer service call center examples to share with trainees to help them get tackle similar problems easier as they go. Customer service call center call recordings all your company to strengthen the customer experience strategy and this can help immensely with your customer service call center analytics. 

Remote training is difficult but, in addition to example recordings, features like call monitoring, whisper, and barge mean that managers can assist trainees during calls in your company’s customer service call center. They can help through whisper instructions or even take over entirely if the employee is truly struggling in your customer service call center. All of these features are a necessity when managing a remote customer service call center.

After a customer hangs up the phone after calling your customer service call center, it can be hard to gauge how well the call went based on the call alone. This is where post-call customer surveys come in. Understanding how your client base is feeling as a whole is a good indicator of your business and, on a more individual scale, customer surveys can help you assess how well each agent is performing during calls in your customer service call center. Asking your customers during the call to your customer service call center to provide their valuable input about each interaction or following up later with an automated survey questionnaire would be great ways to collect data about customer satisfaction after using your customer service call center. 

Collecting call and customer information using your customer service call center leave you with massive amounts of data that would take weeks to sort through by hand. Built-in analytics mean that trend information and customer satisfaction are available in seconds. Most popular call center software includes analytics about customer satisfaction, revenue, customer retention, and service level agreement performance among many other features. Most top call center software consolidates all of this customer service call center data into a single dashboard making the information even more accessible. This allows managers to assess worker productivity and effectiveness and make changes to your customer service call center or offer instruction accordingly.

Data about how effective your customer service call center is can be a great resource for improving the relationship between you and the customer. And also, learning more about customer preferences can improve company loyalty and ensure that you will continue to have their business. 

Ultimately, the customer service call center software you choose should be the one that fits your company best. These features are, then, by no means the exact things your remote customer service call center team needs to be successful, but they are some of the more useful and popular features of your customer service call center that could prove helpful. You can browse our guide on the top customer service call center software solutions on the market currently and compare features to select the right customer service call center solution for your company. 

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