Over the last several years we’ve seen a number of companies re-brand themselves as UC vendors. The vendors have focused their products in one of two areas. They are either coming to market as a platform play IE IBM, Microsoft and Cisco,  or as application vendors such as Aspect, Interactive Intelligence and Siemens. But the problem with UC in the contact center is multi-faceted. First, other than Presence there is no new technology delivered as part of UC. Many contact centers have already stitched together existing technologies to provide similar levels of functionality delivered by UC. In the frugal contact center market it is far from perfect but it works…

The UC vendors are pitching Presence as an enabling technology. Presence would allow agents to identify available experts to conceivably close calls quicker. At first blush this looks like it would increase first call resolution. But the issue lies with the business freeing up those expensive resources to help close calls. The cost conscious contact center manager and the business itself are leery of adding this additional cost layer.

So can Presence help in the contact center? Absolutely. More and more contact centers are developing at-home agent programs. These at-home programs provide contact centers with the ability to reduce infrastructure costs and build more flexibility into their workforce management capabilities.  Seasonal demands, product releases, and product issues all cause spikes in the call volumes. These spikes in demand are not always easily forecasted.  What better way to enhance your workforce management capabilities then too utilize Presence to identify agents who are available to work when you need them? Presence provides a flexible method of identifying available agents and scheduling them for a shift. Virtual contact centers require tools that allow them access to their employees in non-traditional ways and Presence could be one of them.

The value of UC in the contact center is getting clearer but the challenge remains as to when and how you swap out existing technologies. Utilizing Presence to help manage your virtual contact center staffing needs is one more step towards providing an ROI for UC.

The success of your virtual agents depends on more than just the skills and aptitude your selection and hiring process confirms. Training them on the tools and content to successfully perform the job for which you hired them is equally critical.

Just as your recruiters will conduct successful recruiting and hiring without any face-to-face interaction with applicants, your instructors will also never meet their students. They will deliver training via virtual classrooms. Training departments can select from among a plethora of distance learning platforms to adapt and extend the in-person training they currently provide in physical facilities to curricula for virtual trainees.
Instructors can easily carry out content delivery, skills assessment, testing, role-plays, test calls, side-by-sides, and even tours of their facilities via tested, proven commercial technologies.

They won’t require physical proximity to recognize excellence, implement a lesson plan, or manage students. They’ll quickly become just as adept at noticing personalities, talents, and varying degrees of comprehension and understanding of new ideas in the virtual learning classroom as they were in the traditional one. They’ll also be perfectly capable of recognizing and dealing with any different personalities and the “water cooler” cliques that appear and evolve during any gathering, whether in person or online.

Key components of your training will include:

• Role-playing – Have your agents work through actual on the job scenarios.
• Problem resolution – Resolving customer issues to their satisfaction
• Business process – What procedures need to be followed during the customer interaction?
• Product/Services – What is the information that needs to be disseminated to the customer?

Once your remote workers successfully complete their training, you’ll transition them to the “live” virtual contact center to use the technical tools, content, and processes they’ve learned.

The human element of staffing plays just as critical a role as that of technology in the success of your virtual contact center. You’ll have to answer another set of questions that define the numbers and types of contact center agents and supervisors you’ll need.

·   Will remote contact center agents perform the same tasks as on-site agents?

·   What functions must your remote workers perform, and how many agents will you need to perform each role?

·   Will you need your remote agents to work full-time or part-time?

·   For what shifts will you require remote agents?

·   Is your current job description for on-site agents suitable for recruiting remote agents?

·   Will you need additional supervisors to support your virtual agents?

The questions illustrate the new, different demands virtual contact centers will place on your organization. Recognizing and accommodating these nuances in recruiting and managing a virtual workforce will increase your likelihood of a successful implementation.

Whether you’re recruiting for a bricks-and-mortar or a virtual contact center, the goals, objectives, content, and components of the recruiting process are identical. All of the steps in the process—application, interviewing, testing, assessing, background checking, drug testing, hiring, and on-boarding—are the same. Are we starting to see a theme here?

But the manner in which the process occurs differs completely from that for an on-site contact center because your recruiters will have absolutely no face-to-face interaction with applicants. Ever….

Just as the physical environment of your virtual workforce will differ significantly from that of a bricks-and-mortar location, your recruiting and hiring process will too, and requires modification as a result. You must design and implement a process that enables efficient and effective remote hiring. Although the process is different at first, your recruiters can easily take advantage of a wide variety of existing and tested tools, techniques, and services that facilitate remote interaction and hiring, resulting in a successful, productive process.

Your recruiters will need to add new hiring criteria for identifying applicants likely to succeed as virtual agents. Virtual contact center software can provide a complete performance audit trail, tracking every computer keystroke and recording every second of every call to assess whether an individual is capable of remote work. But it can’t forecast whether an applicant is suited for remote work.

An effective recruiting and hiring process will consider whether the applicant possesses not only the skills and capabilities contact center agents need, but also the appropriate attitude towards and comfort with working from home. Working in “office of one” contrasts substantially with working in an office of 10-1000.

I know I said we’d talk about training your virtual contact center agents today but this is already too long! We’ll discuss training in our next post.

If it isn’t virtual,

It isn’t real…

So you have decided to create a virtual contact center.... As mentioned in the previous post, like any project there are several areas you need to tackle: Staffing, Training, Mangement and Technology. Let's take a look at the technology piece first.

Organizations setting up virtual contact centers will select infrastructure technologies based on which of two alternatives they choose for the relationship between the contact center and its virtual agents. The alternatives are:

·   Agents work as remote extensions of an existing contact center

·   Agents work in a separate, stand-alone contact center

Remote extensions. If your virtual agents will work as remote extensions of your current contact center, you can simply add them to your Automatic Call Distributor (ACD). They’ll answer calls using the same technology, be captured in the same reports, and be viewed in the same manner as on-site agents. The only difference is that the distance separating agents may be 500 miles rather than two feet across a cubical wall.

Stand-alone contact center. If your virtual agents will work in a separate, stand-alone contact center, you can choose between two technology configurations based on your ability and desire to share agents among contact centers. The first configuration is similar to that of a self-contained physical contact center. The agents in your virtual facility answer calls as usual. If the volume of calls exceeds the forecast for that center, either callers wait in queue or calls go unanswered.

In the second configuration, the virtual contact center functions as an integrated component in a network of contact centers, much as the separate contact centers in a traditional multi-site bricks-and-mortar system appear to operate as one. If the volume of calls exceeds the forecast for any center, the system distributes calls to whichever contact center, on-site or virtual, has agents available to take them.

The CRM/data configurations parallel the voice configurations, with the caller’s voice and data elements integrated seamlessly on the agent’s desktop.

Regardless of which option you choose, you will find a broad array of technologies for implementing your decision. All possess extraordinary functional, reporting, and monitoring capabilities to provide a uniform, transparent, efficient, and cost-effective virtual contact center environment for responding to your callers’ needs and reaching your business goals.

In our next blog we'll start to dig into the staffing and training components. Remember:   

If it isn’t virtual,

It isn’t real…