Working from home? Aigent is here to help
The impact from Covid-19 has sent shock waves through the business world. All of us have been forced to adapt entrenched habits in order to navigate new realities. This shock has been particularly felt in contact centers, where the Work From Home (WFH) culture has never really taken off. Industry bosses have long resisted WFH for a range of security and technical reasons. High employee turnover rates mean that setting up WFH teams isn’t always practical. Moreover, the amount of sensitive data agents come across on a daily basis means that a centralized office environment provides companies a necessary security safety-net.
The recent pandemic has changed this overnight. Leaders have been forced to transition large parts of their workforce away from the office and to their own homes. This rapid transition is causing sleepless nights for executives, who first had to make this possible by setting up their new remote workforce and now have the arguably more difficult task of maintaining current service standards.
After speaking to a number of industry experts, from executives to team leads and to agents themselves, we uncovered some of their main concerns. These range from the suitability of the home environment to questions of security and compliance. Aigent’s state-of-the-art speech recognition can alleviate many of the challenges related to both of these concerns.
Security & Compliance
Transitioning to WFH has led to a lot of executives and team leads feeling as though they’ve lost the oversight of their agents which they normally had in the office. Without colleagues and supervisors in earshot, agents may be more willing to go off-script, cut corners in the verification process or even worse, ask the customer for sensitive information which they do not need.
Aigent analyses calls in real-time and immediately detects when an agent goes off-script. For instance, if an agent asks for a customer’s card expiry date, Aigent will send a warning message to the agent. This call will also be flagged in our Client Dashboard for team leads to quickly monitor and take necessary action.
This in-call guidance also helps with less critical, but more common compliance issues, such as agents leaving customers on hold for too long or failing to offer a client survey at the end of the call. Many of these problems existed previously but have proliferated since agents have begun WFH. In these cases, Aigent will send agents reminder messages if they fail to follow the program’s policy.
These compliance features compliment Aigent’s guidance features, which provide agents with tips on how to solve a customer’s concern in real time. For example, if a caller is requesting for a password reset to be done on their account, Aigent will send the agent a message with step-by-step by instructions on how to do this. This improves call-handle time and first-call-resolution metrics, therefore helping to address a range of customer challenges in a more timely manner.
By combining these two methods, Aigent can address the root cause of many compliance problems and maintain a safety net for edge cases.
Suitable Working Environment
While working from home serves convenience, many contact center agents are worried about this setting, especially those who live with others or in a noisy neighborhood. Can the customer hear the kids in the other room or the dog barking outside? Aigent’s background noise detector uses acoustics to determine the level of background noise stemming from the agent’s line and gives agents tips on how to decrease its impact on the call. When background noise levels creep up, we remind agents to “adjust their headset speaker”, or if the noise gets too disruptive, to “find somewhere quieter”.
Junior agents also expressed increased concerns about transferring calls to supervisors who they no longer have regular personal interaction with. Aigent’s Regulatory Complaint Prevention feature determines when an agent is in danger of losing control of a conversation and should transfer the customer to their supervisor. Ultimately, we help provide confidence that Aigent is here to help, 24/7.
The switch to remote working is forcing the contact center industry to rethink their operations and take drastic measures to continue providing critical service to their customers. Aigent offers solutions through the lens of change and uncertainty.
Contact us to learn more about building and maintaining a successful work from home environment.
