Workforce Management Featured Article
Zerorez Atlanta Switches to Bright Pattern for Remote Agent Customer Support
All over the country, many companies are turning to remote agents in place of premise-based contact center workers. This was a trend before the COVID-19 pandemic: companies realized they could save on overhead while expanding their agent pool nationwide. Home-based agents tend to be more mature and experienced workers, and companies can be pickier about who they hire. Once COVID arrived, the trend exploded, as companies struggled with meeting the health and safety guidelines of life in a pandemic in crowded call center spaces. Opportunities aside, one of the biggest challenges to using remote agents becomes managing them.
“While all those pretty wallboards collect dust, 1:1 meeting rooms sit empty, and the big breakroom for team celebrations has gone quiet; you still need to train, evaluate, coach, and motivate your teams to deliver outstanding customer experience,” wrote Chris Bauserman for ICMI. “So it is also important to have workforce engagement and optimization tools that were purpose-built for virtual teams and remote work environments. Tools like analytics-powered quality management coaching, collaborative forecasting and scheduling, and performance management and gamification will provide big engagement and productivity benefits when your agents work from home.”
Zerorez Atlanta, a carpet cleaning company based in Norcross, Georgia, offers a good case study for remote workforce management. With its previous cloud contact center solution, the company experienced outages lasting as long as five hours every couple of months, and it lacked remote functionality for its fully remote workforce. The company also experienced problems integrating the contact center platform to its proprietary CRM.
Bright Pattern, which offers AI-powered cloud contact center software, was ultimately deployed by Zerorez Atlanta to all Zerorez franchises to provide a personalized customer experience over inbound and outbound voice, chat, and text message channels. With Bright Pattern's platform, Zerorez Atlanta says it saw a massive decrease in agent frustration, with complaints from agents dropping by 75 percent in the first month alone. Zerorez Atlanta has also seen almost no downtime, allowing the company to provide better customer service without the frequent outages experienced with its prior cloud contact center provider.
"When we implemented Bright Pattern's platform, agent frustration dropped dramatically," exclaimed Brandon Colton, Customer Care Operations Manager at Zerorez Atlanta. "Rather than spending all day fighting the software, agents are now helping customers. Bright Pattern has made being a 100 percent remote workforce easy and reliable. From the moment we partnered with Bright Pattern, the process couldn't have been smoother."
Edited by Maurice Nagle
