A few days ago, I participated in a webinar titled ‘Pioneering contact center quality working remotely.’ The title makes it clear what the focus was, but I was pleased to be joined by our Chief Customer Officer Rob van Herpen, and Derek Corcoran, CEO of Scorebuddy.

In the webinar, I explored some of the strategies you can deploy to ensure high-quality service with a team that works from home. 5CA has been managing work from home customer service for over 15 years – you could say we were the original pioneer of work-from-home agents (WFH).

It’s common to watch the quality of customer interactions plummet if you are rushing to build a work from home strategy because of a crisis, such as the coronavirus pandemic. We have the experience and several different approaches to Quality Assurance (QA).

We create a loop between training and QA and the motivation of the agents. We really like identifying the talents of our agents and we focus on this. It is important to connect the various aspects of the agent experience, such as their training and motivation, because if you reduce focus on any one of these areas then you are likely to see quality suffer.

Trust is one of the most important aspects for our team. We trust the agents and they also need to be able to trust us – even when they have never met us. We make all management processes transparent and that improves trust – no office politics means you can build a much better remote relationship.

We have compared the quality of in-office agents and remote agents and we have proven that remote agents work better. Of course, when you hire remotely you can fish in a bigger pool and find exactly the talent you are looking for. Passion is important and if you can hire people from anywhere then you can tap into that passion for a particular domain expertise.

We have great talent and we want to motivate those people. We have a system called ‘kudos’ that means people can earn a kudos point every time they do a great job with a customer or come up with a real out of the box solution. The kudos points are always visible to everyone on the team, so it’s clear who is earning kudos. They also get a $20 bonus for every point as well so it pays to deliver great service.

Each month we host online events and share the kudos scores on Yammer. We have discussions about the kudos events, so agents can teach each other. This is at the heart of how the team improves, learning that they are trusted and learning from each other. A good example is when a client in the gaming industry sent us a description of a problem in the form of a comic strip. One of our agents took the comic and then drew a continuation of the story, with the required answer in the comic. The client was over the moon – they could not believe the way our team responded.

It’s worth remembering that nobody told the agent to do this. It’s just our culture and the way that everyone on the team knows that they just need to do whatever is required to help the customer.

These notes are just a short summary of everything we discussed, but it was recorded so follow the link below and you can hear the entire webinar and all the comments that Rob and Derek also contributed.

Pioneering Contact Center Quality Working Remotely

Click here for the replay: https://bit.ly/3btCxkw

Photo by Clement 127 licensed under Creative Commons.