|
Contact centres are embracing the concept of having remote agents in their workforce with the recruitment and financial advantages tied to this growing trend and the availability of technological solutions to make it work and run smoothly. Working from home may be the future of contact centres and this concept has caught on nowadays with the emergence of business process outsourcing (BPO) firms that are devoted to a purely home-based agent set-up. Most likely, the weighty reason behind this move is the cost-effectiveness of this model. BPOs can save on office space and operating costs as well as capital outlay because hosted solutions can be utilized to roll out the needed infrastructure and software for at-home agents. Hiring qualified talents and keeping them satisfied are equally important to contact centres as they realize people are their top resource. The traditional model taps into the local talent pool but as the business grows they need to fill more seats which can be challenging as they are confined to prospects who reside within the area. Moreover, some employees have to keep odd times. The attrition rate in this set up is usually high. By employing at-home agents contact centres go beyond geographical boundaries as the world is their talent pool. They even get to benefit from hiring people in different time zones ensuring they have agents manning the lines 24/7. They have access to highly skilled and more mature talents as they can attract work-at-home mums, retired professionals, and people who reside in the rural areas. Furthermore, the flexible working hours increase productivity as home-based agents choose to work at the time most suited to them. This even translates to work satisfaction and motivation that positively impacts employee retention. Some contact centre solutions providers are reaping the benefits of this revolutionary model with the help of purpose built cloud based applications that provide key contact centre tools on demand. A cloud-based technical solution provides greater scalability and enables a pay per use model. With the help of this technology, outsource companies are able to provide telephone sales, customer service, fundraising, research fieldwork, and disaster recovery, with their staff being located either in a traditional office environment, or working from home. While other outsource contact centres find the lack of face-to-face interaction and limited employee supervision as obstacles to a remote agent set-up, new cloud based systems allow real-time monitoring, voice and text chat. It promotes total transparency as clients have live access to online reporting and to all call recordings, enabling a 100% auditable history of events tracking all agent and non-agent activities. Unity4 provide contact centre outsourcing in the UK and Australia. You can learn more at www.unity4.com. Max Thomas is a freelance writer covering the topics of call centre technology and cloud computing.
Related Articles -
Cloud computing, call centre technology, contact centre software uk, call centre software uk, call centre outsourcing uk,
| 
