In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, working from home has become essential to maintaining contact centre business continuity. Distributed workforces offer significant business value—even after the pandemic has resided. We’ve outlined key benefits and reasons why home-based contact centre agents represent the future of customer support.
Business continuity
When a crisis hits, geography can be the deciding factor if your business succeeds. Moving work to a work-from-home model reduces geographical risk of an on-premise contact centre. A remote workforce is especially crucial during pandemics like COVID-19, where close contact among large groups of people is discouraged, and in some places banned. Moreover, if unforeseen regional macro challenges occur in offshore contact centres, e.g. ISP failures, remote workforces in more stable regions can offer a viable contingency plan.
Significant cost savings
A home-based model provides much more value to a business (and customers) than traditional contact centres, both in terms of cost savings and the quality of the customer experience. Low operational costs make it an attractive offshore option.
When moving to a home-based model from a complete brick-and-mortar contact centre operation, TTEC clients typically see real estate and equipment costs shrink by 70% and 25%, respectively. At the same time, employee retention increases by 65%, and performance management efficiencies increase by 20%.
A broader (and deeper) talent pool
Recruiting for home-based associates isn’t limited by geography, so the quality and volume of the talent pool automatically rises. Companies can find the best employees for both part- and full-time work from anywhere. And with an average age of 40 and an average work experience of 11 years, work-from-home associates bring professional and life experience to a client program, along with higher educational backgrounds.
Keeping data safe and secure
Information security is the number one concern when it comes to the remote employee model. Often, fear of data breaches prevents companies from implementing home-based associates. TTEC takes data security very seriously, whether our agents work at home or in our brick-and-mortar sites. We have been operating an at-home environment for different industries for almost five years and can rapidly stand up PCI, HIPAA, HITRUST and GDPR complaint work-from-home solutions. Our on-going investment in best practices, into training, and vulnaribiity testing positions our clients for success when they use our at-home platform.
Playing the long game
Forward-looking businesses recognise the benefits of flexible staffing far outweigh sticking with a static, traditional work environment. When it comes to meeting customer expectations and maintaining productivity, the more flexibility companies have in ramping up or down quickly with a variety of dispersed staff; the better organisations will be at meeting service levels and delivering a great customer experience—regardless of what comes next.
