Is Your CX Strategy Ready for Permanent WFH?

Ever since Covid 19 has been declared a pandemic, businesses of all sizes and from all industries had to quickly adapt to meet the needs of the transforming customer behavior. The aim was to capitalize on the opportunities to show responsiveness to their customers on all platforms especially digital. Since digital customers need active digital engagement, most leading companies collaborated rapidly with trusted partners to replace and enhance traditional customer engagement models.

The next challenge was for enabling agents and employees to work from remote locations. Not only did Work From Home comply with WHO and government policies of social distancing but it also gave companies the opportunity to run their business and maintain proper customer support during the lockdown phase.

In a recent step that will definitely enhance and give more flexibility to the BPO sector, the government has eased the compliance requirements for companies that enabled work from home for its employees amid COVID 19 -lockdown. This has helped such companies to function beyond the traditional office premises and work from anywhere under the DoT guidelines. As per these new guidelines by the DoT, this move is bound to create an employee-friendly culture that suits the BPO industry and call center employees working from home (WFH) or working from anywhere ( WFN).

Though the removal of these stringent obligations will help India become one of the most desirable and competitive outsourcing destinations, establishing a WFH culture definitely needs certain key aspects in place to be successful.

The Work From Home Revolution Is Here To Stay

The pandemic has shifted the attitudes towards the work from home culture. While this was initially prescribed to prevent the spread of the Coronavirus and for the safety of the employees, companies as well as employees now see the benefits of working remotely. Policy reforms along with changing attitudes towards remote working will support in making India a flourishing tech hub. Yet the only thing that separates successful companies from any other business struggling to get their WFH model right is the lack of effective digital tools.

As Work From home becomes the long term alternative, Organizations must opt for resilient and secure software solutions that will make the WFH model effortless and result-oriented. It is equally crucial to monitor employee performance virtually to boost their performance levels.

This solution must also ensure business continuity and support seamless customer experience despite the call agents working remotely.

A New Approach to Managing your Remote Workforce

An optimal customer experience involves your call agents going the extra mile by focusing on solutions and customer well being during this pandemic phase. To ensure this, it is important that these call agents are given a platform that supports seamless communication with your customers. Interaction with Manager/Team Leads and coworkers is also crucial to ensure that no employee feels left out and has proper guidance to do his job. Actively monitoring the performance of your agents is also a critical factor. Further, it is essential to provide these agents with regular feedback and insights on their performance.

An effective work from home solution also helps managers and team leaders to help agents on complex customer queries or help new joinees during their training. Network health checks and monitoring agent’s battery status can prevent any disruption during important customer interactions. Instilling accountability while keeping the focus on ROI and employee performance is now possible with advanced reporting and analytics.

Another critical factor is data security that can be addressed by work from home solutions. While active supervision can help in monitoring employee behavior, data can be further safeguarded by using features such as:

• AI based two-factor user authentication
• Website whitelisting for complete data security
• Disabling copy-paste of data by restricting certain key combinations
• Customized mode to prevent agent access of certain resources that may hamper data security
• Screengrabs and agent activity captured at frequent intervals
• System lockdown in case of suspicious activity on the user device

Preparing for the Future

In order to improve the customer experience today and also to meet long-term remote working challenges, Kochartech group offers LEAP: a work from home solution that caters to enterprises as well as call centers. It focuses on employee productivity, data security, and efficient management of a remote workforce from one integrated platform.

Moreover, Leap is designed to recreate a BPO like environment within an Internet enabled setup to enable and enhance seamless customer support.

Would like to know about your experience transitioning to permanent WFH challenges.