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 Lead QA Analyst, Sylvia Mattl, and Derek Corcoran, CEO of Scorebuddy.

In the webinar, I explained parts of the 5CA journey. We started on our work-from-home journey around 20 years ago, but in quite a limited way just using emails. We then really started doing more extensive work from home in Buenos Aires in 2004. From around 2010 we went into cloud-based systems and since about 2015 work from home has been our preferred solution. It’s been a journey and we have learned a lot along the way.

Many people focus on the technology and security, but I believe that the real difference with our approach is empowerment and trust. There are procedures to be followed, but we want smart people that can think for themselves rather than people who just follow a set process. You can’t monitor every single thing people do at home so you need to trust them and that trust makes them deliver a better quality service.

Over all this time we have made mistakes, but the important thing is that we have been doing this for 15-20 years. We didn’t move quickly into work from home because of the coronavirus pandemic. We made mistakes years ago that other companies in this business are now going to make today.

If you are moving from a contact center to work from home agent strategy almost overnight then you can have the technology in place, but you need to completely change the way that you engage with the people. This does complicate matters because you can’t change your corporate culture overnight.

When the world starts functioning more normally I can guarantee that the traditional BPO companies will try moving their people back into contact centers. However, social distancing rules will mean that there are capacity issues – you can’t get so many people in the office now and that will create a problem for their business model.

Our people work using their own devices. We have minimum standards for the devices and we have strict information security standards – people can only access 5CA data in a secure environment. This is an important point to remember because many contact centers are shipping thousands of laptops out – they are becoming logistic companies rather than customer service specialists.

We are kick-starting a new economy and work from home is going to be an important part of this change as we move forward, but it takes trust and a new mindset – not every company will manage in this new environment.

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 Sylvia and Derek also contributed.

Pioneering Contact Center Quality Working Remotely

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

Photo by Gilbert Sopukuwa licensed under Creative Commons.