Keeping up with the ever-increasing expectations of customers who demand a high level of service when they call a contact center can come at a high cost to enterprises – and also to the agents who answer the calls.
Being an agent can certainly be exhausting. This is mainly due to the often repetitive nature of the work, but also because of the constant pressures to provide a superior customer experience in an extremely competitive marketplace.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the contact center industry is notorious for its high staff turnover rates, running at around 33 percent in 2022. But how can enterprises take effective action to remedy this situation?
Making Every Agent Count
Live agents are the highest cost element in a contact center, so it makes perfect financial sense for enterprises to do all they can to retain them. After all, highly trained, highly skilled and experienced agents are an asset whose value should never be underestimated since they are in many ways the public face of the company.
Thanks to recent developments in AI, chatbots and voicebots are stepping into the breach to handle simple self-service calls, which frees up agents to focus on more interesting, fulfilling and lucrative work.
Yet there is another, often overlooked, way for enterprises to attract and retain the best talent – and that is to tap into the considerable benefits of working from home.
Embracing the Work-from-Home Revolution
Forward-thinking enterprises have been quick to recognize the many advantages of the work-from-home phenomenon, and for contact center agents this new way of doing things is a very attractive proposition.
For agents, working from home means a comfortable and familiar working environment, and is ideal for those with childcare or other family care responsibilities and those who seek part-time or shift work.
Furthermore, agents employed in a work-from-home or hybrid model can make substantial savings on expenses like work clothes, transport and babysitting.
All these factors combine to increase the appeal of working in a contact center. Happier agents are much more likely to remain with their employer, which in turn allows enterprises to concentrate on helping their existing staff reach their full potential instead of wasting time recruiting replacements.
AudioCodes Supports Today’s Contact Centers (and Agents)
To make work-from-home actually work properly in the contact center arena, enterprises need a powerful and reliable voice infrastructure that delivers excellent calling capabilities at all times, so that customers will come away with a positive opinion of their interactions with the business.
With three decades of voice experience, AudioCodes is a global market leader in providing voice connectivity solutions for enterprise contact centers and unified communications. We provide all the necessary services to manage a robust network and voice infrastructure for any contact center, be it on-premises, hybrid or in the cloud.
And for work-from-home agents, AudioCodes has an ace up its sleeve – our WebRTC solution.
WebRTC is a field-proven, widely adopted technology and communications standard that enables real-time voice, video and chat communications capabilities to be natively embedded in web browsers without the need for plug-ins or other downloaded software components.
Agents working from home can then enjoy exactly the same user experience that they would have in a contact center environment.
What Do the Experts Say?
In the exclusive video at the top of this page, Metrigy CEO Robin Gareiss talks about why hiring and retaining skilled agents is one of the major challenges that contact centers face today – and what enterprises can do about it.
If you liked what you heard, check out some real-life work-from-home case studies featuring just two of our satisfied customers here and here.
