5 Ways To Manage Employees During The WFH Era

It is time to rethink the approach of make-shift remote work operations, not only to support work-from-home in the near-term but to ensure your CX remains strong in the face of future risk.

Technology and data aggregation is changing the nature of agent-to-customer interactions. With omnichannel offerings including voice, email, chat, text, and social media, the challenge is to not just identify the most efficient automation practices, but to find ways to optimize interactions between humans and technology, emphasized by data alignment. Never has such concepts been more imperative in the success of today’s workforce.

As Jeff Gallino, Founder and CTO at CallMiner told me in our latest report, Remote Agents - Managing a WFH Contact Center:

A pandemic will (and already has) created unanticipated issues for everyone. Data-supported insights from contact center interactions can help to identify these ‘hotspots’ along with metrics that enable assignment of importance based on volume, intensity, customer profile and more.

Read More: How-to Guide: How to Improve Your Customer Experience ROI with Better Conversational AI

In the U.S. alone, there has been a 159% increase in people who are working remotely from 2005 to 2017, years before the pandemic shifted the way customer-centric organizations and contact centers now operate. With the exception of unusual circumstances in response to COVID-19 (i.e. violated mandated policies or miss-classifications of “essential workers”), nearly every contact center and customer-centric organization is operating in a digital environment.   

As seen in the report, 90% of employees say more flexible work would increase morale and 80% experience less stress in remote work, exemplifying opportunity for improving productivity and organizational profitability in this new environment.

According to a Qualtrics study provided to our analyst team, 57.2% of workers actually feel more anxious since the outbreak, highlighting the fact that we are not effectively exploring the operational ramifications of remote work, addressed above. In fact, over half feel more emotionally exhausted, more irritable, and have noticed increased feelings of sadness. That’s dictating how they interact with their customers. 

However, 65.8% feel that company communications help them take action for their well-being.

The question remains, how do we do it?

Now with economic pandemonium caused by the novel coronavirus, it’s not merely customer-centric industry titans, such as Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Amazon, or Facebook who are doubling down on work-from-home business continuity plans. Now the vast majority of businesses around the globe have implemented long-term, mandated, remote working policies.

In this report you’ll learn 5 keys to managing employees during the WFH era:

• The remote trends and best practices that are here to stay
• Current CX delivery challenges and how to overcome them
• How to improve brand tone and speech analytics in the remote, digital era
• How to micro-coach employees through real-time data
• How to measure front-line employee and agent effort - from your couch.

For more information on the topic, download the full report here.

In uncharted waters during times of distress and uncertainty, it’s important to stay connected. The CCW Digital community will be here for you, providing you with customer experience, contact center, and digital marketing resources every step of the way. In remote working environments and challenging economic circumstances, remember to lean on your digital community to come out stronger on the other side. 

With over 150,000 global members, join the largest research hub for customer contact and customer experience professionals. Through our complementary offerings, you’ll have access to the latest research, news, blogs, podcasts, webinars, whitepapers, training, and technology insights in customer experience. 

For media coverage, lead gen, and digital marketing inquiries, contact me at matt.wujciak@customermanagementpractice.com.