ZRG International:- Overcoming limitations on delivery of customer services

Imagine a situation where your business has launched new products that are received with an overwhelming response and there is a flood of customer calls with inquiries, orders and service requests.
To maximise your returns, you are required to add more service representatives at your contact center, yet there is no physical space available at your existing contact center to accommodate additional resources. To handle such situation, you might be forced to consider investing time and money to create more space yourself or hand over your valuable customers and confidential information to an outsourcing agency. These are very tough choices and represent a significant amount of delays, uncertainty and risks.
How about situations when your customer service agents cannot reach their place of work due to unplanned or unavoidable situations like traffic closure due to VIP movement, weather, natural disasters, law and order, terrorism, etc? Traditional approaches for handling these situations include asking the present agents to work extra shifts or accepting higher call abandoned rates. Both options have the potential for increased customer wait times, lower agent moral and decreased customer satisfaction - none of which offer any benefit to the contact center.
The solution for the above-mentioned scenarios can be found by using the proven model of a Virtual Contact Center. A virtual contact center is similar to your traditional contact center, except for the fact that your service representatives are geographically dispersed, rather than being situated at work stations at a single location. Virtual contact center employees may be situated in groups in a number of company offices at multiple locations, or they can work from their own homes. Virtual contact center lets you overcome the limitations of space or situations when your staff is unable to reach the contact center.
The road to having remote agents or employing at-home agents has long been a bumpy one. The development and improvement of communication technology have played pivotal role in the contact center's transformation in favour of the virtual model. Now, engaging agents that work from remote locations or home is becoming a contact center industry norm.
Leading customer contact center organisation are not only building up and expanding virtual contact center model, but also engaging remote agents from other office locations and hiring at-home professionals to add to the workforce. Finally, the virtual contact center model is rapidly becoming mainstream.
Two key drivers have emerged as the priorities of the contact center have evolved from a focus on cost management and inbound sales and customer service to building customer loyalty, increasing customer engagement and incremental sales.
1. Location independence
Contact centers get great flexibility with the location independence feature of the virtual model. When there is a situation to engage additional agents for permanent or temporary requirements, a business can utilise the office facilities that are already in place without additional investments and the staff at other office locations can be given the task of taking the calls.
The flexibility of having such remote agent is great for handling call overflows or contingencies such as shutdowns, strikes, weather conditions and disasters. In situations where specialised skilled representatives located at other office locations, are required to handle the customer, the calls can be transparently transferred to these remote specialists. In other words, with a virtual model, your contact center will not have any limitations of adding more representatives due to space issues.
2. At-home workforce
Virtual contact center model also opens up the possibility of tapping into a vast pool of talented workforce that, for various reasons, is not available for work at an office location. These include college graduate mothers with infants at home, physically handicapped persons and people without transportation facility.
This is an attractive arrangement for many workers: the hours are often flexible, and there's no dress code or commute. For the organisation, the virtual contact center model saves housing and equipment costs and can lead to lower employee turnover rates, which tend to be high for physical call centers.
Furthermore, generally speaking, customer satisfaction is generally improved when the customers perceived that they were speaking to an agent that is caring, happy and intelligent. At-home agents are generally more educated and also have a higher rate of understandability. This results in a delightful customer interaction that contributes towards strengthening customer loyalty with your brand.
As the labour costs makes up approximately 80% of a contact center's total cost. The contact centers can more efficiently manage labour costs using the virtual model with at-home agents to trade agent salary for flexibility. In other words, agents can be allowed to work from home in exchange for a decrease in salary relative to their decreased out-of-pocket expenses for commuting, meals, etc.
Could all contact centers be completely or partially at-home in the future? There is no way to know for sure, but when you weigh all of the benefits and the increasingly available technologies, it is a likely scenario.
(The above observations and ideas are compiled by research team at ZRG International. ZRG has deployed several multi-site fully integrated contact centers and is known for many first-of-its-kind solutions in the market. Established in 1994, ZRG is one of the most experienced ICT solutions companies offering a full range of flexible solutions for physical and virtual contact center, CRM, IVR, CTI, Call Recording and Complaint Management needs.)