As Contact Centers Embrace Remote Work, Supervisor's Role Gets Redefined, Refocused

It should come as no surprise that the physical contact center - a room of agents fielding incoming customer service calls, conducting outbound sales or facilitating appointments - would be impacted by the Coronavirus pandemic.

The side-by-side workstations of a contact center were never designed to facilitate social distancing. Instead, they were designed so that supervisors could monitor interactions between agents and customers, keep agents motivated and interject when necessary.

Like other industries, contact centers had to embark on a rapid-fire execution of getting agents set-up and connected from their homes so they could continue their work remotely - a process that sounds quick and easy but can be challenging when the operation involves thousands of workers in scattered locations. It took wireless carrier T-Mobile (News - Alert), for example, more than two weeks to get 12,000 employees in 17 call centers around the globe set-up with a home workstation, the company told CIO.com.

Businesses around the globe that were able to maintain operations during shelter-in-place orders weren’t really maintaining operations. Instead, they were adapting and adopting, changing the way they workers did their jobs by introducing new tools to maintain connections while minimizing the impact on customers.

For contact center supervisors, the shift to remote work changed the dynamic of the job. In the WFH COVID era, supervisors must orchestrate an atomized group of external contractors into a harmonious customer experience. From here on out, quality service is all the more dependent on technology, coordination, management and training implemented from a distance.

The move from supervising a team of on-site agents to managing a community of remote agents means embracing new roles and new metrics of success. The job becomes part cheerleader, enforcer, coach and therapist. And while customer service remains top priority, the best supervisors are finding ways to tap into the cloud-based tools to set routines and establish new processes that facilitate these new digital communities.

“Walking around” the cloud

In the absence of “management by walking around,” supervisors need a way to track what’s happening so they can motivate, train, and interact with their agents. The power of the cloud opens up new opportunities, whether that’s recording calls to monitor script adherence, harnessing data to track key performance indicators (KPIs) or listening into - or intervening on - a call in real-time.

The right tools help managers coordinate from a distance and maintain a community that rallies around the interactions among management, agents and customers. Dealing with customers in any sort of volume requires a platform with real-time reporting and analytics. In fact, it’s pretty much the only way to make adjustments and improve performance.

At RingCentral (News - Alert), these interactions and engagements have led to the development of tools that facilitate digital workforce management so that customer needs - and employee support - aren’t compromised. Beyond that, supervisors are also finding that the right digital tools also allow them to share their  energy, charisma and personality as a way to help customers and agents.

A supervisor’s many hats

Consider how daily video meetings can bring a remote team together and make them feel more connected, providing a forum for agents to talk about the day ahead, share concerns, best practices, and close out the day with celebrations and team camaraderie. As the team cheerleaders, supervisors are relying on video technology to provide engagements that clearly aren’t the same as an in-person meeting - but can certainly provide an alternative experience that some might perceive as being the next best thing.

Of course, results and performance still matter - and that keeps the role of enforcer alive. Keeping a contact center humming involves a number of elements - tracking KPIs, improving net promoter scores, monitoring calls to ensure that everyone stays on script and facilitating training exercises during downtime.

Whenever there is a problem, a good coach should not only be able to jump into the fray to help out, but also guide agents through those problems so they can learn from their mistakes and keep improving with every customer engagement. Whisper coaching and barge-in tactics are always at the ready, so the training wheels can come off just as easily in this new norm as they did in the old contact center paradigm.

Finally, there’s the supervisor’s therapist role, ensuring that agents take breaks, have a sounding board and recognize that there’s someone there - albeit working from home - that is ready to listen when an agent is having a problem, whether personal, professional or with a customer.

Despite the challenges that businesses face today, the good news is that technology helps bring some of the best management practices from the physical to the virtual world. New tools facilitate managing from a distance at scale, but contact center supervisors - in tandem with a renewed leadership approach - are finally equipped to deliver the best customer service yet.