How to Deliver Exceptional Customer Experience When Your Contact Center Agents Are Working Remotely

To put it mildly, the last year has been rough for the business world. Pandemic restrictions forced employers to migrate workers to home office environments almost instantly, and many of them were unprepared for the unprecedented, large-scale change. Thankfully, remote access and cloud computing technologies enabled companies to conduct business as usual.

This trend will continue for the foreseeable future. Recent reports show that 92% of the virtual workforce will work remotely indefinitely. Most companies have “softened” requirements that employees work from corporate offices and have put new policies in place to permit flexible, if not permanent, remote work arrangements. This is a smart move. Flexible work options are desirable for job candidates and are known to influence retention rates since they promote a sense of trust and engender loyalty due to the improved work-life balance.

But, this workforce migration has created unforeseen challenges for corporate technology teams, who have been forced to recalibrate their environments to best support remote staff. While immediate, pandemic-induced IT crises may have already been addressed, a partial or fully remote workforce and the technology failures that occur within unmanaged, remote environments can have longer-term, more damaging implications for the business. Big or small, technology failures can cause major issues for business continuity, operational excellence, and customer experience (CX). They can erode margins and, in contact center environments, can make or break customer relationships. With customer loyalty more fragile than ever, business can’t afford to put customer experience at risk.

So, what should business and contact center leaders do? They should fiercely protect their IT landscape – both corporate-managed and residential home working environments – from technology issues that negatively impact business objectives. A comprehensive, end-to-end test strategy, from data center to remote agent offers a very real and monetizable ROI. This ebook, 12 Tips for Delivering Flawless Customer Experience Across Remote Workforces, provides 12 actionable tips for IT and contact center leaders looking to preserve customer experience, maximize workforce productivity and reduce operational costs incurred from technology disruption.