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Saving Time and Money with Remote Agents

Guest post by: Nicolas DAlleva

Article Overview: If you are running a call center, remote agents can help by allowing you to answer for more customers and answer more effectively for your current customer base by reducing hold times. Hiring remote agents is oftentimes more affordable to managing the same agent within the call center.

Saving Time and Money with Remote Agents

We have found that having remote agent stations has really benefited out company in a great variety of ways. Managers and on call supervisors now have the ability to sign onto out call center from home, or when otherwise out of the office. Then is good when they have to take calls during unexpected times of high caller volume. Now there is not a fear of being unable to communicate with clients calling in, and hang-ups have virtually stopped as less and less of the callers have had to be put on hold. This has had the effect of boosting customer satisfaction because they are able to get to talk to a real person quickly when they call in. It really has been great having remote agents because we now can implement extra staffing quickly in times of higher call volume. This really cuts down on the number of full time agents that we need to staff because now we can simply pay for extra labor just when we need it.

Some other beneficial aspects to having fewer agents in our call center are that our supervisors have less people to manage. There is also less wear and tear on our facility and our equipment. The decrease in background noise at our central call center results in an increased quality in communication to our callers.

Because of remote agent stations, we have been able to hire back one of our former employees who needs to work from home now because of personal reasons. She really is a great worker with a lot of experience and I am very glad we've been able to keep her on the team.

Another one of our employees moved to a different state and had to leave our company because of it. Right after we implemented remote agent stations, we invited him back and he is doing an excellent job even though he is hundreds of miles from our central call center.

Some of our employees have responsibilities at home and rather than have them work less, they now can work remotely. This has boosted employee morale and allowed us to fill shifts during times that were previously hard for us to fill.

We are very selective about the employees we allow to work remotely. Right now, only our managers, supervisors, and trusted customer representatives who have been with us for a while are considered for remote agent stations. We feel that our employees' work must be of a high quality whether it be working from our call center or from elsewhere. We believe that being able to work from home is a privilege reserved for those who have proven themselves good workers in our call center. Indecently, this has boosted work ethic and given our employees a positive incentive to work even better.

With the increase in high speed Internet through cable and DSL Internet access, and a decline in its price, our remote agent station configuration is economical for us in a range of configurations. In addition, supervisors are able to monitor remote agents through our system. They also can answer specific questions our remote agents may have and schedule breaks with as much ease as if they physically were in the call center.

We believe that having remote agents is an important and vital part of our overall staffing solution. It plays an imperative part in solving staffing problems and creating a seamless answering solution for us. Remote staffing is a great addition to our already strong call center.

I have to say, we are very impressed and pleased with how it is working. Our staff is very happy with the new flexibility they now have. We have maintained the same high quality service our customers have come to expect. In addition, we have been able to keep quality employees and employ them just when we need them. Now we require fewer employees to be on the clock to get the job done, and done well.

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Article Tags: answering service, outsourcing, remote agents, save time



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