What is a Remote Contact Center?

Cost savings, flexible scheduling of agent activity, a wider talent pool when recruiting agents, and future-proofing of business for better coping in times of natural calamities are a few advantages of a VoIP contact center.

Improved Future-Proofing of Business Operations

Your customer service contact center can be impacted by building collapses, natural disasters, and calamities that can occur anytime. Even in a crisis, the only way to ensure complete customer support is via a remote contact center that enables agents to work from different locations. Remote teams can also help in different time zones, providing round-the-clock customer service.

Increased Cost-Savings

Remote contact centers vs. call centers enable considerable cost savings by cutting down costs such as office space rentals, office equipment, furniture, commute costs, and additional hiring costs spent on recruiting agents for multilingual customer support. This model allows companies to hire efficient staff from any geography and save on transition costs.

Wider Recruitment Pool

A packed and busy working environment acts as an obstacle during agent recruitment. On the contrary, a remote contact center environment provides a flexible option for a blend of onsite and remote agents. This enables the business to recruit from a wider talent pool inclusive of people with just the right skills but family obligations or other constraints preventing them from working onsite. 

Enhanced Agent Productivity

Reportedly, remote contact center agents are more motivated and productive than those working onsite due to an improved work-life balance and lower stress levels. Employees feel less stressed with benefits such as no time or money spent on commuting and invested in hobbies and other interests instead, fewer interruptions, more working space, and a relaxing environment. This positively impacts employee retention and productivity of an enterprise, making it an advantage of contact center workforce optimization.

Improved Customer Service

With lesser interruptions and a more focused and comfortable working environment, remote contact center agents can concentrate better and provide their full attention to customers. This leads to better customer service and retention. 

More Flexible Schedules

Some remote contact centers may experience seasonal fluctuations requiring them to upsize or downsize their contact center resources. With the facility of the ‘remote’ part of the term, scheduling staff duties is flexible and makes it easy to manage these fluctuations. Flexibility is one of the best contact center features and benefits.

Increased Insight and Ownership

Cloud-based, remote contact center systems provide equal, if not more, visibility and insight into agent activity as managers would have onsite and develop a sense of ownership among the workforce. Anomalies are automatically identified and flagged, making it easy to implement rectification steps immediately.

Comparing enterprise contact center solutions is an optimal method for choosing the best features, tools, and pricing for your company.

The growing acceptance and popularity of remote contact centers are backed by several practical features such as:

• Real-Time KPI Tracking
• Remote Surveillance and Management 
• Cloud-Based, Secure VPN
• Power Dialer and Predictive Dialer
• Omnichannel-Enabled Communications

Real-Time KPI Tracking

A remote contact center features a real-time KPI tracking dashboard providing information regarding all performance metrics at a glance. These KPIs include the number of ongoing calls, average waiting times, handling times, queue lengths, and conversions. A tremendous remote contact center software has a dashboard that thoroughly tracks individuals’ or teams’ performance and allows users to add more KPIs. 

Remote Surveillance and Management

There are pros and cons to contact center systems, but any good remote contact center software lets users track agents' activity and coordinate seamlessly. Assigning tasks and transferring agents to a different project is simple and only requires a few clicks. Combining remote surveillance with internal live chat capability adds the much-needed human connection factor, providing the best of both worlds. Furthermore, frequent training, constructive agent assessments, and regular video calls enable the streamlined functioning of the remote contact center.

Cloud-Based, Secure VPN

Concerns regarding information and data security are the most significant risk often associated with a remote contact center since these centers handle massive amounts of sensitive data remotely. However, this risk is mitigated using a cloud-based, virtual private network (VPN), allowing agents to send and receive encrypted data securely.

Power Dialer and Predictive Dialer

Automated dialers in a remote contact center can reduce call waiting times and enable your agents to work efficiently. These include the power dialer and the predictive dialer, which perform different functions. The power dialer is best when your remote contact center agents need to reach the end of the calling contact list quickly. However, with the power dialer, agents will likely need to wait longer for active calls. On the contrary, the predictive dialer prioritizes busy talk time and uses algorithms to create a balance between remote contact center agents' availability and call volumes.

Omnichannel-Enabled Communications

Omnichannel-enabled communications enable agents at remote contact centers to quickly switch between customer channels, such as voice calls, live chat, email, etc. This allows a seamless flow of communication between remote hosted contact center agents and customers.  

A contact center hosts a team of customer experience experts who cover several digital service channels and cater to customer needs via inbound and outbound voice calls, emails, live chats, text messaging, social media, and more. A contact center is designed to facilitate customer interactions in their preferred manner so that service agents are more accessible and solutions can be found faster. 

It is important to note that it can make or break your business, as easy and glamorous as it may sound, to have agents from diverse backgrounds serving your remote contact center from different time zones. The best remote contact center software for your business is the one that checks all the boxes in your list of crucial business requirements, prevents background noise issues, and enables you to track agent activity at all times. The core functionalities to look out for in your search for the best remote contact center software are:

• Cloud-based or VoIP calling enables calling from anywhere with access to a stable internet connection.
• CRM Integrations to ensure that your agents have access to all the relevant data to get them up to speed on previous customer interactions and enable them to find the best solution.
• Scripting enables agents to say the right thing at the right time. 
• Post-call surveys to measure customer satisfaction with your agent’s support. 
• Call Recording and Monitoring to record and monitor calls for quality assurance and agent training. 
• Call Barging to allow managers to join a call if needed, and speak to both the agent and the caller. This helps when an agent is not sufficiently experienced, or a call could go south without intervention. 

Forward-thinking organizations know what can be achieved by unlocking the benefits and best features of cloud contact centers and seeing the trend of their consistent growth and popularity; these remote contact centers have become a need and not just a temporary hype.