In light of this recent COVID-19 Pandemic outbreak, several organizations across the globe are now opting to manage their day-to-day works remotely from their residence and homes.
In fact, thousands of businesses across China, USA, India, Korea and many other European nations have recently adopted this measure in order to protect their employees and hence reduce the impact of this deadly Coronavirus that is spreading like a wildfire in most nations across the globe.
Now, in this era of digital mobility, it might bring you some peace to learn that you make your customer care and support teams to work from their homes, attend to incoming support tickets and issues raised by the consumers without much of a hassle, and to do that all that is needed is access to the right easy to use CRM , a trouble-free internet connection along with a handheld or a mobile device to let your support employees manage their most essential support activities from anywhere and at any time across the globe.
How can you convert a support center to a work-from-home model at such a short notice?
Well, even though it might make you seem to be at a loss, nevertheless, the truth is that it is indeed highly possible and easy to convert your customer support operations to the work-from-home model and thereafter get it running in minutes.
We say this as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM tools in the CRM for SMB marketplace since it can be suggested that you can conveniently turn your support centers to a work from the home process if your business uses the necessary tools and route all incoming tickets (chat, emails, calls, and social media communications) to agents through a cloud-based CRM software that can be connected by anyone living anywhere near or far across the globe.
And all these ticket allocations can be done by creating triggers and rules in the CRM that are unique to your businesses.
That implies the support tickets can be easily allocated using an easy to use CRM based on the source of the tickets, type of the query, agent availability and so on.
After which the support agents can use their respective login IDs to log into the CRM software and thereafter attend to the tickets right from their homes and so successfully sustain their efforts in providing world-class support even in these troubled times that we are all are encountering across the world.
Approximately 5.2 percent of workers in the U.S. currently work from home. That works out to be about eight million people, and more folks are joining the work from home workforce each year. Click To TweetGolden Tips For Conducting Remote Customer Support Activities
Primarily to track the agent’s performance the Team Leads can track their agent’s performance and also monitor their agent’s SLAs (Service-Level Agreement) by going through the reports and analytics that can be made available using a CRM platform that includes an hourly ticket dashboard and “ticket aging report”.
The Team Leads can also find an “agent productivity report” and many other forms of reports that can easily be configured in a CRM tool’s dashboard based on hierarchy and departments in their organization.
Now even after reading all these hopeful information if you are still concerned about the implication of this process, we might recommend you to follow these understated five golden suggestions to ensure that your remote customer support teams are working efficiently:
1. Boost the flow of communication
It is really a matter of great concern that this sudden change of workplace can be stressful at times, for your
customer-facing support representatives.
Hence in order to keep their spirits high and motivated and to increase their productivity, you can introduce some simple processes, which can include a morning hurdle online, or announce the “performer of the day” for the best performing support staff of any given day.
2. Provide your staffs the right tool
Make sure that all your support agents are geared up with the right tools and software platforms that are essential to aid them to work remotely.
Now one of the most important tools that are needed for this purpose is an easy to use CRM, along with data management and web-conference software solutions, which can allow your agents to handle their daily workflows even in stressful times in an efficient manner.
3. Create an internal knowledge-base
Once you buy CRM for your organization’s growth you can use it as a centralized knowledge-base that can aid your support staff to access and refer to necessary information and data that are needed for resolving their customer issues.
4. Specify your performance metrics
We found that there is always a way long common but unuttered fear in the minds of the management that the work from home model might bring a sudden stop to the optimum productivity index that is required for their business growth.
Nonetheless, if you are using modern-day business growth technology and tools, you can easily prevent such things from happening in your organization by laying down a clear, well-defined and quantifiable metrics that can include:
• The specific length of hours that an agent has to work
• The specific number of calls they need to attend each day…and more
Additionally, you can even conduct regular review sessions with your support teams which can not only help in improving their productivity but it can even aid the agents to focus better on their work as they can view their goals easily.
5. Ensure rigid data-security policies
Finally, as data-security plays a critical role that all businesses must remain careful of in this CCPA and GDPR era, therefore, ensure that your support teams are attending to their customers without compromising on different aspects that pertain to the security of your customers.
Hence as one of the most popular vendors of CRM for small and medium businesses and startups, we suggest you establish rigid security regulations and guidelines and even double-check to find that all these rules are communicated to everyone in your remote teams.
For this, you can provide your customer-facing staff corporate access to important tools like a VPN, security browsing facilities and so on.
