After the covid-19 terrified countries worldwide, people and business alike had to adapt to new ways. More employees had to work from home while companies had to look for alternative means to deliver services. As a result, remote service teams become even more popular than it was before.
Now, more companies are embracing the trend of hiring remote workers. The reason being, remote service teams, serve a bigger time zone which expands the market reach. Although the new arrangement comes with a lot of benefits, challenges are hindering them. The major one being connectivity.
But thankfully, the emerging of cloud-based communication services has been helpful to such teams. It has enabled remote service teams to respond effectively to duty calls. Below are five ways you can help your team overcome challenges and be productive at the same time.
1. Track their Activities
It’s hard to control the activities of remote agents, but it’s not impossible. With cloud technology, you can support remote agents who might be facing challenges. Likewise, you can monitor work situations and ensure customers receive good service. On the same note, you could use the platform to supervise remote teams using KPIs regardless of location. This means you can check and be sure remote agents are on schedule and delivering on their mandate.
2. Use Cloud-based Communication Tools
Investing in a cloud-based contact center gives the agent’s ability to access customer records. It also offers remote agent morale to boost performance and productivity.
More importantly, contact center managers need to understand. For remote teams to be successful in their work, they must have the right tools. It prevents issues like service agents not accessing customer records or connection problems. These could frustrate both the agents and customers.
3. Keep Your Team Productive
Remote teams enjoy the benefit of being more productive than office-based employees. Nevertheless, you can’t look over the shoulder and see whatever activity they are doing. That’s why you should invest in a phone system that allows you to use apps that support your team and enhance communication. This helps service teams stay focused and supports task management.
Apart from that, you can opt for a dedicated project management app. With which, you manage your remote agent resources and responsibilities. This app is similar to google hangout so that remote agents can share questions and feedback. Also, they can share daily reports and their experiences on the group chat.
4. Let the Team Understand your Expectations
Employees usually learn a lot from context when working in the offices. But remote teams lack that opportunity, which means they might not quite understand your expectations. Therefore, be precise about what you expect from your remote team. This helps them know their ongoing work expectations, making them complete tasks efficiently.
5. Enhance Collaborative Communications
Working from home may seem fantastic to modern workers. But like regular office work, it has challenges. Remote employees tend to feel isolated. Thus, making it harder for them to collaborate or maintain work morale. If not addressed, this could affect operations. Since most of the time, a service agent needs to seek information from internal experts in the course of duty.
To address these and other challenges, encourage collaborative communication amongst your team members. But since they work remotely, they need tools to connect. Hence, a VOIP system from EveryDay Voip allows team messaging across various devices. With it, they can drag-and-drop files, pin documents, and even share from Google Drive or Box. Furthermore, service teams can assign tasks, make updates, and manage projects using the built-in task management feature.
Conclusion
Customer service teams are the image creator for any business. If they don’t perform to the customer’s expectation levels, the company is the one that gets labeled as incompetent, not them. So it would be best if you equipped them with the right tools that portray professionalism. More importantly, give them support and appreciation whenever required, and you will see better productivity.
