REMOTE / HOME BASED AGENTS

THE BENEFITS OF DEPLOYING HOME-BASED AGENTS
At a time when outsourcing to offshore agents has led to a variety of customer satisfaction challenges, deploying low-cost, home-based agents inside the country (also known as insourcing) has become more attractive. Deploying home-based agents with remote supervision can dramatically reduce facility-related overhead, provide recruiting and retention benefits, and give contact centers access to more-qualified, less-expensive agents from less-populated regions. Using home-based agents also gives companies increased access to specialized skills (such as multilingual agents) and allows them to seamlessly outsource certain kinds of calls to other companies. Remote agent capabilities can also reduce or eliminate the traditional overtime expenses associated with around-the-clock service provided from a single time zone. Regional air quality district mandates, such as some in California, may also provide additional financial incentives for remote agent deployment.

Deploying home-based agents with remote supervision can dramatically reduce facility-related overhead and provide both recruiting and retention benefits.

THE BENEFITS OF REMOTE SUPERVISION
A comprehensive quality assurance strategy—including both call monitoring and quality recording—is crucial for ensuring that quality is maintained across any pool of agents.

Deploying remote supervisors offers special value to brick and mortar call centers. Many traditional call centers that use onsite supervisors to monitor the effectiveness of their customer service agents find that their internal performance ratings are out of sync with customer evaluations. Supervisors sometimes find it hard to be objective when they evaluate a person they know and see every day—perhaps someone they hired or trained. In such cases, they may even feel that a low rating reflects poorly on their coaching skills. Supervisors may also fail to understand the customer’s perspective, and may even see the customer’s issue as a fact of life rather than a problem requiring resolution.

Many traditional call centers that use onsite supervisors to monitor the effectiveness of their customer service representatives find that their internal performance ratings are out of sync with customer evaluations.

Companies that outsource their agent monitoring, on the other hand, report that outsourced ratings correlate highly with customer experiences. But even with the superior service ratings from outsourcing, many companies are not comfortable with outsourcing their quality control efforts. A virtual contact center environment such as Oracle Contact Center Anywhere eliminates this problem.

EXTENDING CONTACT CENTER CAPABILITIES TO REMOTE AGENTS
To effectively deploy a distributed workforce, organizations must offer a seamless extension of all contact center capabilities to home-based agents, giving them the same synchronized screen pops, visual call control, Web interaction controls, customer interaction histories, and CRM screens as agents who are in the physical call center. There are common requirements that all virtual contact centers must meet to succeed.

Oracle Contact Center Anywhere supports these requirements with the following features:
A unified Web-based interface. The best way to extend call center capabilities to remote agents is to make them accessible through the Web. For example, using Oracle Contact Center Anywhere, remote agents can manage every communication (including voice calls, e-mails, voice mail, chat sessions, faxes, and Web callbacks) using a Web-based interface. Calls are answered, sent to voice mail, transferred to other agents or groups (accompanied by all relevant data about the call), and totally controlled as if the agents were located in the same building.

With Oracle Contact Center Anywhere, any agent can handle any type of media transaction from any computer with a standard Web interface, without worrying about software downloads, PC configuration, or installation procedures. In addition, the agent client software can be distributed and updated instantly, enabling contact centers that deploy remote agents to go live with little or no advance technology preparation. This is a particularly important consideration for companies concerned with rapid growth or disaster recovery.

Another obstacle to remote agent deployment was the confusing mess of dialog boxes that resulted from the integration of many different systems, and the associated need for extensive onsite training. Oracle Contact Center Anywhere addresses this problem by providing agents with a single, integrated, intuitive interface that encompasses communication, quality assurance, and real-time reporting.

Support for both circuit - and packet-switched calls. An effective Web-based solution must support both circuit- and packet-switched telephone calls and Web communications. Oracle Contact Center Anywhere fulfills this requirement, acting as a complete, multimedia interaction control dashboard that simultaneously provides

• Support for VoIP softphone communications
• Support for analog agent extensions in a physical contact center
• A software-based private branch exchange (PBX) extender that synchronizes call control and data flow over the internet; forwards calls to home-based agents over the public switched telephone network (PSTN) or the IP network (whichever has been defined for a particular agent); and synchronizes PSTN calls with screen pops and call control over the internet, ensuring universal agent capabilities across locations. The ability to synchronize PSTN calls with screen controls over the internet is important for contact centers that want to deploy home-based agents but have insufficient bandwidth to support toll-quality VoIP communication. All configurations are supported in a blended environment that supports both onsite and remote agents simultaneously. Packet-switched internet-based calls can even be conferenced with traditional PSTN calls.
• Completely unified multichannel interaction controls that encompass voice fax and web communications

A fully blended seat. To maximize efficiency, an effective solution must allow remote agents to manage all forms of communication from a fully blended seat, rather than being dedicated to specific communications media. Agents dedicated to one media channel no longer have to sit idle while other media channels experience agent shortages that frustrate customers. Oracle Contact Center Anywhere encompasses all communications channels (phone, fax, voice mail, e-mail, chat, Web collaboration, and Web callbacks) from a single user interface and delivers those communications with world-class automatic call distribution (ACD) discipline that includes weighted skills-based routing, a unified queue, and consistent customer priority business rules across all media channels. It also replaces or integrates with legacy PBXs or IP-PBXs and delivers interactive voice response (IVR) support, screen pops, e-mail management, and comprehensive quality assurance. The system is also flexible enough to allow agents to be assigned to specific media channels when appropriate.

Oracle Contact Center Anywhere’s unified interface allows agents to go beyond simple text chatting, empowering an increased level of interaction via Web collaboration. Agents can direct customers to different Web pages or co-browse Web pages in a Web collaboration session to help fill out forms or offer explanations. Agents can also transfer chat sessions to other agents or workgroups, with all chat session text transferred along with the customer. Since agents may be working remotely with more limited access to help, the solution provides content analysis and suggested responses to customer issues, helping to reduce typing times and ensure consistent responses.

Oracle Contact Center Anywhere also provides Web-callback capabilities, which allow customers or prospects to use the company’s Web site to request a call from an agent immediately or at a specified time in the future (for example, just prior to the expiration of a vehicle lease). The system is sensitive to every customer’s time zone, ensuring that calls will be returned at the correct time. It also applies skills-based routing technology to call a qualified agent at the specified time. After instructing the agent to hold for a Web-callback connection, the system makes an outbound call to the customer who made the callback request and connects him or her to the agent, making it appear as though an agent has called the customer. The remote agent is equipped with the same information he or she would have in the physical contact center, including a context-sensitive script and any customer data submitted when the callback request was made.

A unified queue. An effective solution must queue, route, and distribute chat sessions, Web-callback calls, e-mails, voice mails, and faxes to agents in a unified queue, using the same skills-based routing discipline and customer priority routing rules used to handle telephone calls.

A real-time “readerboard.” Oracle Contact Center Anywhere’s effective agent interface provides a complete display of all multimedia queues for an agent’s workgroup. Agents can quickly see the number of agents logged on, which agents are available, and how many pending chats, phone calls, e-mails, voice mails, and faxes are in queue. This stream of information is updated in real time and appears in a dedicated section of the interface, so that it’s always accessible but doesn’t get in the way of customer data or call and media handling.

Localization of time zones. If companies operate in multiple time zones and multiple countries, segmenting real-time data, displays, and reports can be problematic with traditional solutions originally designed for single-site deployments. Oracle Contact Center Anywhere is designed for geographically distributed organizations. Agents, supervisors, and administrators in multiple time zones and countries can log on and use the unified system while seeing information in their own time zone, language, and date format. Because reports and real-time data are presented in the context most familiar to each remote user, geographically distributed agents, supervisors, and administrators can more-effectively leverage a shared IP contact center infrastructure.

Shared customer data. A customer should be asked for his or her name only once during a support call. But when a communications infrastructure is built with products purchased from multiple vendors, customer data often becomes trapped in multiple databases as the customer moves between IVR, ACD, call-transfer, and Web-based technologies. Callers are then forced to repeat themselves to each agent, resulting in a negative customer experience. The problem often gets worse as Web technologies are integrated into the contact center, because customers can’t understand why the details of their Web transactions are not available to the call center’s customer service representatives. How long customers spend in queue, how many times they’ve called about the same issue, and what institutional promises were broken are all important pieces of data that should drive agent behaviors and sensitivities.

To increase both efficiency and customer satisfaction, call centers must be able to share data across the organization. Oracle Contact Center Anywhere meets this challenge with an integration-by-design approach, which allows required information to move along with customers as they are transferred through the contact center’s array of technologies.

Another key element of this approach is an integrated, cross-media customer interaction history that’s displayed automatically with incoming communications. This history is searchable by client name or ID and includes all recorded calls (such as consents to transactions), copies of all incoming and outgoing e-mails (including attachments), faxes sent from or to the customer, and chat transcripts. With this information, agents can address customer problems effectively with sensitivity to the customer’s issues and frustrations.

Unified messaging technology. Oracle Contact Center Anywhere provides a unified messaging system that combines all message types (e-mail, voice mail, and fax) into a single network that agents can access from anywhere in the world using any e-mail client.

With traditional messaging technologies, voice messages are managed from touch-tone phones, e-mail is managed by computer, and fax messages require senders and recipients to leave their desks and wait by the fax machine. Even companies with more sophisticated fax technologies, such as local area network (LAN)-based fax servers, usually require employees to manage those faxes from yet another client interface. Because each type of message has to be handled differently, agents spend more time managing messages than they do helping customers. This problem becomes even more complex with remote agents because faxes must often be handled and forwarded to the remote worker.

Unified messaging, on the other hand, provides universal access and control of all message types from a single user interface. It increases agent productivity by making message management easier and more efficient.

Skills-based message routing. Most standalone messaging systems are ill-equipped to route messages based on agent skills—particularly if the goal is to manage a unified queue with blended agents without deploying dedicated seats for e-mail or other communications media.

With Oracle Contact Center Anywhere, agents receive ACD workgroup e-mails one at a time. Copies of all incoming and outgoing workgroup e-mails are stored in the integrated interaction history for each individual client. E-mail routed to agents can include suggested template responses based on an automated analysis of the e-mail’s content. Alarms can alert supervisors when e-mails are not responded to in a timely manner, or the e-mails can be automatically redistributed to another agent after a preset time interval.

With Oracle Contact Center Anywhere, call centers can maximize productivity by sharing human resources instead of segmenting them according to media type. The result is a much more efficient use of agent time.

Automated triage system. With Oracle Contact Center Anywhere, organizations with limited resources and budgets can triage incoming e-mails using an automated system that determines whether the inquiry should be handled automatically with a standard response template, or by a human agent armed with suggested responses that can be modified as needed. E-mails that require human intervention are routed to local or remote agents using the same skills-based routing discipline that is applied to all other mediums of interaction.

QUALITY ASSURANCE FOR GEOGRAPHICALLY DISTRIBUTED AGENTS
Supervisors must have comprehensive monitoring, coaching, and quality control capabilities to manage agents in a geographically distributed environment. With Oracle Contact Center Anywhere, remote supervisors can view real-time performance statistics and agent status, listen in on any call regardless of the agent’s physical location, and send broadcast messages to all agents to advise them of changing conditions. They can also coach an agent by chatting, sending agent-specific messages, or “whisper coaching” (where the agent can hear the supervisor but the caller cannot). Supervisors can also disconnect agents and take over calls as needed, as well as log out or lock out agents.

Oracle Contact Center Anywhere also enables supervisors to customize alarms for each media type to flag unusual interactions (such as lengthy calls) and get access to real-time reports to better manage service levels.

Call recording is another important tool in the Oracle Contact Center Anywhere quality assurance arsenal. Supervisors can schedule regular recordings or can initiate call recordings on the fly. A percentage of calls can be recorded on a call flow or agent-by-agent basis, enabling a higher percentage of calls to be recorded for newer agents than for agents with strong track records. This centralized recording feature eliminates the need for additional systems at individual sites. Recordings are compressed and stored on a file server, dramatically decreasing storage requirements and providing on-demand streaming of recordings to supervisors via the Web.