The national shutdown due to the ongoing COVID-19 emergency has forced change on virtually all US businesses, including contact centers. Many have done an amazing job of rapidly transitioning contact center workers home. Now, the challenge for most contact centers is ensuring work from home agents are effective and productive.

Rapid Deployment Despite COVID-19

DVSAnalytics recently helped a longtime Encore® Recording and Quality Management customer that uses an Avaya Aura system shift their contact center to a work from home structure. Because of specific network and security considerations, this large national organization had delayed moving to a centralized VoIP recording configuration. About 60% of their agent phones were TDM and just 40% were using VoIP. Adding to the complexity of the challenge they faced, they have multiple offices across the country, each with its own Encore recorder. With the COVID-19 crisis, this customer needed to quickly move their agents to work from home offices while ensuring their interactions were recorded. Within 72 hours, DVSAnalytics was able to expand the Encore recorder at the main office to record and monitor at-home agents using Encore’s VoIP recording with Avaya DMCC/Service Observer. As an added bonus, this configuration allows the business to easily convert to a centralized model that records all agents from a single location in the future. If you have TDM or legacy systems in your contact center, the Avaya DMCC/Service Observer method may be an opportunity to assist you with urgent requirements or help you prepare to support the increased need for home-based agents, now or in the future.

Interoperability in Contact Center Solutions

The agility and flexibility of solutions that can interoperate and work side-by-side with existing communications and workforce optimization software has never been more important. These capabilities allow contact centers to rapidly scale to meet the demands of increased call volume and manage work from home agents during the COVID-19 national emergency. The accelerating shift to cloud-based contact centers is why DVSAnalytics invests in developing seamless integrations for platforms like RingCentral Office and Avaya Cloud Office. These DVS integrations automatically import RingCentral and Avaya voice recordings, delivering advanced search capabilities to quickly locate, retrieve and review specific recordings. Audio recordings from RingCentral and Avaya are synced with agent desktop recordings for a 360° view of customer interactions.

Boosting Work from Home Agent Performance

Customer interaction recordings, synced audio and screen, can be used to improve work from home agent performance. By evaluating interactions and providing automated coaching and eLearning sessions, agent performance improves while the demand for one-on-one supervisor’s time is reduced. Workforce Management solutions include a multitude of tools to simplify management’s workload and smooth operations for work from home contact centers: from forecasting staffing needs to flexible scheduling, and monitoring real-time adherence. Encore pulls real-time data directly from the contact center’s UC platform and the automatic call distribution solution. From the data gathered, it reports on real-time schedule adherence. This allows for intraday schedule adjustments. Agent Portals and communication tools allow agents to view their individual performance/adherence. Portals and customized dashboards enable agents to easily view their schedule, any intraday changes, and quickly receive notifications. Deploying Speech Analytics further enhances workforce optimization with voice transcription and advanced insight into customer interactions.

Work from Home Contact Center Webinar

US businesses have done an amazing job of rapidly transitioning contact center workers home. Now, the challenge has shifted to ensuring their work from home staff is productive and engaged. Join us for our on-demand webinar, Keep Your At-Home Contact Center Productive and Engaged, at your convenience. We will be sharing real-life experiences from DVSAnalytics customers:

• An interview with contact center managers leading the transition for their company.
• Surprises encountered with the move to work from home and new ways of staying engaged.
• How managers are leveraging technology for training, production and engagement.

View the webinar. We look forward to sharing our experiences with you.