Remote work isn’t going anywhere.
As of 2020, 74% of employees believe remote work will be the new normal in the workplace. A further 42% of employees agree they would leave their job on the spot if they had to go to the office full time again. The good news for businesses is that remote work offers a lot of benefits.
Running a remote contact center can save you a fortune on office expenses, and significantly improve team productivity. However, there are unique challenges to address – like keeping your team engaged and connected when they’re distributed around the world.
If remote agents are at the heart of your customer experience strategy, they need the right tools to thrive. One of the most important investments of all is the contact center dashboard.
The Importance of Analytics for Empowering Agents
Perhaps the biggest concern companies have about remote work, is that agents outside of the office won’t be able to maintain the same levels of productivity and efficiency as their counterparts. In today’s digital environment, your remote agents need to be just as engaged, focused, and productive as the employees you have in-house.
Using analytics and reporting is the best way to ensure your remote strategy continues to work. Analytics give business leaders an insight into whether the transition to hybrid and remote work is delivering a positive ROI or not. At the same time, showing agents and supervisors crucial metrics in real-time paves the way to better motivation, improved engagement, and even greater employee satisfaction.
Here are some of the reasons why your remote agents need a dashboard
1. Dashboards keep remote agents connected to the team
Todays employees are increasingly demanding more options for hybrid and remote work. The remote landscape allows for better work/life balance and reduced stress in many situations. However, it can also be an isolating place without access to the right technology.
Part of minimizing turnover and increasing engagement in the modern contact center is finding ways to keep your staff engaged and invested in your business. With a contact center dashboard, you can give every remote employee a way of instantly evaluating their impact on the business, increasing their sense of responsibility, and making them feel like part of the team.
Contact center dashboards are implemented as part of a center’s wallboard strategy. The dashboards can be designed to show metrics specifically related to the values of the business, to remind your agents what they should be prioritizing in every conversation (such as speed, efficiency, and first-time resolutions).
You can even send motivational messages to teams or congratulate individual employees with an announcement on the dashboard when they achieve something.
2. They’re a crucial source of motivation
Keeping team members motivated is another aspect of keeping your workforce happy. Many mangers struggle with inspiring and engaging their teams in any environment, but it can be particularly difficult to give staff members that boost when they’re working remotely.
There’s no-one to look over an employee’s shoulder and check their work, and no rallying cry from competing team members to reach new targets in a remote environment. The isolated space can make it harder for employees to unlock a deeper level of productivity and creativity.
Fortunately, dashboards can help solve this motivation conundrum. First, supervisors and managers can work together with employees to set specific benchmarks and goals for their performance in the metrics they’re going to track. With real-time dashboards, employees can then keep a close eye on how close they are to their targets. Some dashboard systems even allow you to set alerts when performance metrics drop below a certain level, so managers can be notified.
Dashboards are also a great way to bring a bit of competition into the remote workforce. Leader boards and contests with real rewards for people with the highest NPS score, or the best First Time Resolution ratio will keep teams striving to deliver their best work. Companies should make sure to publicly commend their employees with the help of their dashboard technology to keep morale high.
3. Dashboards improve remote agent management
The great thing about modern contact center dashboards is their flexibility. Many wallboard solutions come with the option to create customized dashboards for different members of staff. For instance, an individual agent could see all of their own statistics, while a supervisor or manager can examine both individual metrics and group performance overall.
Having access to these real-time metrics is a huge boon for remote contact center supervisors. In an environment where agents are distributed around the world, it’s not always possible to know when someone is struggling with a difficult call or having a hard time meeting their targets.
With dashboards as part of the wallboard solution, alerts can be set up to automatically inform a supervisor or manager when something is going wrong. The technology can immediately detect things like drops in customer sentiment or issues with employee efficiency, and let managers know when they may need to reach out and offer assistance.
In some cases, intelligent dashboards will even come paired with contact center software which allows supervisors to “barge in” and take over a call that’s going badly, or whisper advice to the agent without alerting the customer.
4. Improved training opportunities
Just as contact center managers and supervisors can’t see agents struggling in real-time without a little assistance, they’ll also struggle to determine where additional support and training is necessary in the long-term. Agents don’t always recognize which customer service strategies and processes they need help with. Fortunately, with dashboards to capture information about their performance, they can see where their weaknesses lie.
In a remote environment, a dashboard can immediately alert an agent when they’re not reaching company benchmarks or personal goals with their performance. When this happens, the dashboard system can advise the agent to reach out to managers for extra help. At the same time, leaders in the business landscape can see patterns in agent behavior on a wider scale.
Insights into historical and real-time information on agent performance in the contact center could demonstrate new opportunities for businesses to begin implementing additional training measures. With access to these statistics, it should also be easier for managers to earn the buy-in of stakeholders and business leaders for new training initiatives.
5. Happier Customers Mean Happier Agents
As companies continue to move into a somewhat unknown era of remote work, analytics will be the key to maintaining a constant level of amazing service. Home agent wallboards can offer insights into things like transfer queues, so agents can let customers know exactly how long they might need to wait before they’re transferred. Employees are happier when they know they’re doing a great job, and your dashboard technology will help to ensure they can deliver the best experience every time.
Because wallboard solutions are constantly collecting information about the full remote working team, they can also show business leaders and technology teams when employees might need additional tools and technology to perform better in their role. For instance, if you notice that customer satisfaction scores are dwindling, and time spent on calls is also rising, you can look at whether your employees have access to the right CRM and customer data to offer results quickly.
If you see that your customer satisfaction score is dropping, but the number of transfers between agents is going up, you can look at implementing intelligent routing solutions to ensure the right customer always reaches the correct agent.
Empowering Remote Workers with Dashboards
In the new age of remote work, companies will be more reliant on data than ever before. We’ll need to use streams of contact center information not just to analyze the customer journey, but to ensure agents are thriving in their new environment too. Customizable wallboards and dashboards can deliver a host of benefits in this new environment, by connecting data in an easy-to-read environment.
With a dashboard, employees can get a full insight into their performance and how it compares to other colleagues without having to jump between a range of different tabs and screens. You can connect metrics from multiple systems for valuable overviews at a glance, and even create mobile-friendly dashboards for employees on the move.
All the while, as your employees motivation levels increase with the use of dashboard technology, the efficiency of your supervisors and managers will be improving. Better access to information about team performance and agent engagement paves the way for more meaningful decision making for the whole contact center team.
While there are many tools crucial to the success of the future contact center, a wallboard solution that includes agent dashboards is one that no-one should overlook.