The resurgence of Covid 19 has led to reinforcing the work from home ethic and, who knows, it may become a permanent feature. Given that work from home is the norm rather than an exception you should look for long-term and all-inclusive solutions rather than look at ad hoc solutions like Zoom. The contact center software can be transplanted to your business. All you need to do is to subscribe to the omnichannel contact center software from a suitable provider and you are good to go in a day or less, with a strong communication collaboration framework.
Why contact center software for work from home?
What possible connection could there be between the two is a question you are likely to ask. A close look at features will convince you that the omnichannel contact center software is tailor made for work from home situations such as the one prevailing now. Work from home will become increasingly common, increasing by 35% by 2023 so you might just as well make it a way of life now.
Work from home means serving customers, contacting prospects
Work from home does not mean work at reduced capacity. Contact Center Software, with its innumerable features, dissolves distances and overcomes hurdles in different ways to enable your employees to serve customers and follow up leads or generate new business.
Set up campaigns: You can do this through the omnichannel contact center software and launch them across social media sites like Facebook and Instagram. You could use the IVR/SMS broadcast combination to set up automated campaigns to run at scheduled times. Or, you can use progressive/predictive dialers for manual campaigns. In all these cases, should a lead appear, your employees, wherever they are, access the common dashboard and can follow up immediately to contact prospects and convert them into customers? Likewise, social media channels are integrated into a unified dashboard accessible to all employees for responding to customer queries or to handle campaigns. Everyone, regardless of location, can access data from the centralized CRM and is never “out of the loop”.
Route calls: Call center solutions incorporate skill-based mapping and automatic call distributors. In addition, you can incorporate mobility extensions or the Whatsapp channel into the software. What this does for you is that incoming calls arrive at one number but, depending on the nature of the call, the system can be set up to route it to the employee in charge or knowledgeable about the matter, even to his mobile phone. You can also bridge calls, put calls on hold, and transfer just as you do when you are in office. It is important to note that all such calls are recorded for later access for quality control or reference.
Use a variety of communication channels: Omnichannel features permit employees to receive and communicate in any of the different channels such as audio, SMS, video, message or even fax over and above access to social media through a unified interface. All such communications are from the official handle, and go into your records, securely and safely.
Intra-office team collaboration
While the contact center software features are just perfect for customer or vendor-facing operations, they can just as well be put to good use for intra-office team collaboration.
Conferencing and collaboration: Remote work does not mean discontinuity or disconnect. Most contact center solutions incorporate WebRTC, which permits audio-video chat and conference in addition to the usual phone-only talk and conference feature. Put this to good use to hold “virtual” meetings at the start of the day, and throughout the day, to let employees stay in touch and interact as they would in the normal course of work. You can put this feature to use to train employees to handle their new work environment and way of working or inform them of new developments. You could even use the conference and chat feature to recruit and onboard new remote workers. It is just as useful when you conduct virtual meetings with customers and vendors during which you would need to share documents and show presentations. Distances dissolve and you have that vital feel of being in the office along with other colleagues.
Monitor: In remote work environments it becomes difficult for managers to monitor everything but not so when you have call center solutions in place. The management monitor dashboard gives you a view of all that is going in at all points and you can even jump into a conversation or whisper or turn a talk into a three-way conference. You could set up a presence feature for each employee and note when they are online and offline but also push notifications across that you need to talk with them.
With a hosted contact center solution that can be up and running in less than a day you need not be overly concerned about work or business disruption by the work from home factor. The software becomes your de-factor virtual work platform.