Virtual contact centers have many advantages, but many contact center managers are not convinced that being virtual will work in their situations. And they may be right. But creating a virtual contact center does not need to be an all or nothing proposition. Management can take advantage of the flexible and mission critical nature of contact centers to “kick the tires” of a virtual contact center and take a virtual test drive.
In a modern contact center and with today’s technology not all agents need to be remote for a contact center to be virtual. Virtualness is a continuum between 0% and 100% of agents remote which provides management the opportunity to test and modify virtual contact centers until the appropriate and most effective ratio of on-house and remote agents is achieved. In this article I explore several processes where a virtual contact center can be tested and evaluated. How to create a virtual contact center will be covered in future series of articles.
Special Purpose Contact Centers
Many contact centers are called on to perform a one-off special service. For example, a company installs a new time entry program. Knowing that the call volume to its internal help desk will increase significantly, the company staffs a special help desk with contractors. With no room available in the existing help desk location, the company places the special desk in a branch office in another city (where the cost of contractors is lower than at headquarters). This configuration allows the contact center managers to test a bifurcated (divided) structure for business continuity purposes. If successful, the contact center management may look to distribute their existing agents into branch offices closer to where the agents live. Distributed contact centers also provide a measure of stability and business continuity. If there is an issue in one location, the others can continue to operate.
Rewarding Achievement
Throughout their history, contact centers have been plagued with high turn over. Because of the time sensitive and sometime stressful nature of contact centers, agents tend not to stick around for long. Allowing agents to work from home a couple of days a week or for a length of time is an effective way of rewarding agents that would be hard to replace. Top collectors or those with high quality or survey scores can be encouraged to improve their performance through the reward of working from home. It also provides an attractive incentive for other to work harder. Managers can start with a small number of agents, set a threshold, and expand the program as other consistently reach and exceed the set threshold.
Off Hours and Filling Holes
Call volume is inconsistent, having peaks and valleys. In cases where the peaks come at odd hours or spikes for a short period, creating split shifts where the agents work a couple of hours in-house and then log in from home to handle calls during the spikes is a way managers can test virtual contact center. It does not require all agents to work a split shift, just some. Contact center manager can compare the performance of the split shift agents with the in-house agents, as well as test the technical requirements needed for remote agents and generate a plan for expanding the program if feasible.
In a related scenario, contact centers sometime find it difficult to convince agents to work second and third shifts. Allowing agents to work from home or a branch office close to home will increase the appeal of those shifts, especially of the volume is very small.
Business Continuity
Every business should have a disaster recovery plan. However, contact centers should go further and have a business continuity plan (the capability of continue to work as the world collapses). This plan should be tested at least annually or depending on the business, quarterly. This is a perfect time to test virtualizing the contact center. In cases of inclement weather, natural and man made disasters, flu outbreaks, and a host of other events, contact centers needs to still operate. Sending agents home to work (like a fire drill) a couple of days a quarter allows management not only to test the business continuity plan but also to test the feasibility of permanently virtualizing the contact center. Comparing the center effectiveness during the business continuity drills with random period during the year provide management with data to compare the effectiveness of create a permanently virtual contact center as well as benchmarking center effectiveness during emergencies.
Virtualization has many advantages. But, the reason for virtualinzing a contact center needs to be well thought out. By taking advantage of the variable and shifting nature of contact centers, management can try out (and become comfortable with) virtualizing the center before committing to a complete virtual contact center.
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