Work At-Home Call Center Agents Webinar Additional Q&A
Posted by Kerry Engle on Fri, Feb 19, 2010 @ 11:57 AM
Michele Rowan, CEO of Customer Contact Strategies, specializes in helping call centers move customer contacts home. (See http://www.gohome.us.com/ for more information). Michele was a guest speaker on our recent webinar and provided answers to these questions on implementing and managing work at-home call center agent programs.
1. Do at-home call center agents typically get paid more or less per hour than in-house agents?
The market place is completely mixed when it comes to compensation; it is really based on an organization's objectives and required agent competencies. Many companies have one consistent compensation program across both in-house and at-home populations while other organizations (i.e. Hilton Hotels) pay their at-home call center agents a reduced starting wage in exchange for the benefit of working at home. The work at-home professional business population recognizes the fact that their auto insurance premiums drop, their cost of commute drops to zero, and they are given back approximately 2.5 hours per week in time they had previously invested in readying and commuting to work. Time is an incredibly valuable commodity, as we all know, and organizations that can couple that with a flexible scheduling model will be successful reducing their starting wages by 10-20%, as many companies have.
2. How can/should social networking be used to keep at home call center agents connected?
Social networking, in my opinion, is a baseline requirement for any organization today and particularly for home-based employees that don't have the benefit of face-to-face interactions.
Contact centers are highly fluid environments. Change is continuous, fast-paced and sometimes unpredictable in terms of scope, timing and required response. The ability to effectively reach agents with updates in real time is critical. Equally as important is the capacity for agents to search, data mine, cross-reference and troubleshoot real time to leverage every customer experience. Virtual tools are best, whether agents are in-house or at home.
A high-powered, centralized help desk is key for an at-home work force with both voice and chat utilities. I recommend the help desk integrate both product support and first line technical support to enable ‘one stop shopping' for at-home agents (who have more frequent technical issues than in-house agents, particularly in the early days of employment). Scouring the inquiries into the help desk and continuously updating on line reference tools (knowledge banks) and training goes in tandem with providing guidance. Wikis and bookmarks are also great for continuous improvement of on-line knowledge banks and training materials.
E-mail, intranet-based messaging to the desktop (for urgent messages), chat, virtual team meetings (via chat or voice) all have their place and value. Structuring communication vehicles along with established discipline around how and when to use them is very important, in my opinion, so that your agents reach for the time sensitive information first, based on the structure that you have designed. In the absence of this organized approach, employees self-select the priority of pushed information, which will unlikely match the priority that was intended and ultimately may leave your customers in a lurch.
On-line vehicles such as LinkedIn and Twitter are great tools for internal promotion as well as external, and you can now buy off-the shelf Facebook-type software for a low cost. Social networking clubs like book clubs and Scrabble tournaments are engaging and low maintenance.
Image by Margaret Anne Clarke