Five Best Practices for Managing Distributed Contact Centers

Enhance customer experience and increase engagement of hybrid workforce. Lower operational costs and improve business resiliency using distributed contact centres.

Contact centers were traditionally characterised by dedicated physical infrastructure, specialised desk equipment for agents, and ten-to-six timings. Since the pandemic struck, contact centers could no longer be confined to these characteristics. In fact, modern contact centers share nearly nothing with traditional contact centers - except their objective. With virtual work being the norm, contact centers too have dispersed beyond walls and desks. With a distributed workforce connecting from anywhere, contact centers are now, by default, distributed contact centers. Here are five best practices for delivering excellence through a distributed contact center.

1. Invest in the Right Technology

Distributed call centers’ service customers by connecting them to agents spread across multiple locations. As a result, the contact center must bridge the agents and customers with a cloud-based solution that facilitates anywhere, anytime connectivity with minimal device and environment constraints. Moreover, such solutions should also make regular tasks such as accessing the customer's contact history with the business, calling them, and responding to them easy. Tata Tele Business Services' Smartflo is one such solution that is built for the era of virtual work and enables agents to deliver superior service experiences with a smartphone and a laptop, even on the go.

2. Deliver Knowledge to Agents with Precision

When agents are servicing your customers from their home offices, they should be delivering what the customer wants - instantly, in real-time. Today, customers want their agents to remember their past interactions, have answers ready at their fingertips, and address their concerns as fast as possible. This, in turn, is possible only when your contact center solution integrates to your CRM and ERP systems seamlessly. TTBS Smartflo takes this up a notch and, in addition, analyses the sentiment of a caller and empowers the agent to take the conversation in the right direction to maximize success and your end customer's satisfaction levels.

3. Keep Agents up-to-date with Continuous Training

The contact center landscape is evolving rapidly. Upskilling your contact center agents can help improve service levels, enable them to excel through their workday, and help the organisation improve talent retention rates and reduce hiring costs. Leading organisations can connect to their agents via Zoom and other digital workspace tools for delivering such training programs. Lastly, continuous training helps the agents stay up to speed with digital developments in the organisation. Previously, agents could simply ask the next co-worker in the office.

4. Facilitate Regular Employee Engagement

Contact center agents often undergo stressful conversations and busy schedules, which wear them down over time. When physical offices enable employees to unwind and vent with their fellow agents over a cup of tea or lunch, distributed contact centers do not provide room for such interactions. As a result, it is imperative to routinely bring the agents together over a Zoom call to keep team conversations going. Such teamwork has a positive impact on employee experience and customer experience alike. Therefore, facilitating employee engagement via fun activities over a virtual bridge is a key practice in managing distributed call centers with excellence.

5. Reorient Infrastructure for Business Continuity

Almost all businesses have by now understood how events like the recent pandemic can disrupt established work practices in a single turn of events. One lesson to learn from such events is the implicit value of business continuity in any portfolio. Contact centers are a key aspect of successful business across all industries. Therefore, it is imperative to pivot contact center operations on resilient digital infrastructure that empowers secure connectivity from anywhere, is bi-directionally scalable on-demand, and provides near-zero downtime.

What’s next?

Contact centers will be distributed in the foreseeable future, and at the same time, customer expectations will go nowhere but upwards. To orchestrate distributed contact centers and deliver superior experiences, organisations must leverage cloud-based contact center platforms like TTBS Smartflo, enabling and empowering the agent with the right connectivity solutions, precise knowledge, and actionable insights in real-time. In addition to boosting the end customer's experience, such solutions will also simplify the agent experience while bringing unmatched scalability, Capex and Opex savings, and higher CX levels for the underlying business.