Establishing a remote contact center can yield many benefits if done right. For example, you can hire from a deeper talent pool that’s not location-dependent. Or perhaps you’re thinking about saving costs by reducing physical office space.
“By 2024, 30 percent of organizations will have moved their contact centers’ operations off-premises, with a 60 percent jump in remote-working full-time agents.”
Gartner, Overcome the Top 3 Challenges to Setting Up Contact Center Agents for Remote Working
Published 26 February 2021
Shifting contact center applications to the cloud and decentralizing contact center operations is an important step in a long-term approach to the evolution of the contact center business. A few Gartner recommendations are to:
- Migrate to cloud-based contact center platforms to avoid VPN scalability issues, as cloud platforms do not require VPNs for most contact center operations. Organizations planning to stay on-premises must rebuild their VPN infrastructure to support remote agents.
- Establish a secure workstation environment for remote contact center agents by enabling end-to-end security using virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) tools and WebRTC technology, where appropriate.”
This can help lower datacenter infrastructure costs, as well.
“By 2024, cloud contact center agents will outnumber on-premises contact center agents.”
Gartner, Overcome the Top 3 Challenges to Setting Up Contact Center Agents for Remote Working
Published 26 February 2021
Prevalent use of legacy VDI and VPN technologies can lead to difficulties maintaining security and don’t scale for the larger workforce. What’s more, SaaS performance with a VPN is going to suffer. Since many enterprise customers maintain at least some infrastructure on premises, they need a better alternative to traditional VPNs and legacy infrastructure. Additionally, legacy VDI customers may be struggling with connection issues at the endpoint.
But reliance on home Wi-Fi with variable internet connection speeds makes solving remote agents’ application performance challenges difficult for IT, especially without visibility into the home network. Security is also a top concern. Without enterprise-grade security at home networks, data and application protection should be provided as a service to ensure threat defense for remote agents.
Negative Customer Experience Lowers Productivity and Satisfaction
Collaboration tools are critical in a remote environment to ensure teams remain connected. Onboarding agents quickly and training them without a good plan on how to maintain a consistent experience can put additional strain on IT and the business.
The farther away agents are from the apps they use, the worse the quality will be due to latency. Inefficient routing using traditional backhauling to a datacenter to reach the cloud further aggravates the performance.
Difficulty Securing and Protecting Customer Data Privacy
Contact center agents deal with customer’s sensitive, personally identifiable information day in and day out. As a result, data protection legislation has grown, and data breaches pose a significant threat to the business. Maintaining compliance in a world where many agents are working from home and leveraging their home broadband and the internet means protection must extend to the agents and their endpoints.
Protection of customer’s PII data should be handled with built-in encryption of data over the WAN, centralized security policies, and seamless integration with a cloud-delivered security service that aligns with a SASE framework approach that includes zero trust network access (ZTNA).
Disruption and Downtime Drive Up Cost and Slow the Business
Your contact center relies on live communications with customers to stay competitive. Downtime not only results in lost sales but can also worsen brand perception and NPS scores as well as decreasing agent retention. Resiliency helps your businesses overcome disruption with less effort while also ensuring interactions with customers don’t suffer. By focusing on employee and customer engagement, remote access, onboarding and communication strategies, your business will be able to adapt faster and improve the customer experience.
Lack of Visibility Impairs IT
Lack of visibility impairs IT’s ability to solve agent’s application issues, which can lower productivity. To further complicate matters, agents and IT staff are now working remotely on personal and corporate devices connected to their home networks. And when you have disparate apps including web, SaaS and traditional enterprise apps, it’s more difficult to determine where an issue is without visibility. For example, how do you determine if an issue is due to network connectivity, latency, or a problem with a server or cloud?
Since connectivity and performance issues can be network related, a centralized monitoring and management tool for the network will help provide visibility into health, usage, quality, and performance of the entire network and can provide the ability to drill down into individual sites and associated connections.
Future-Proof Your Remote Contact Center
Having a trusted partner that understands the contact center’s unique needs and has expertise in solving remote work challenges, can make your transformation seamless. A unified solution that brings together SD-WAN, digital workspace, zero trust network access, and cloud security can help you stay competitive.
Read our solution brief to learn about solutions that can help your contact center weather any challenge.
Gartner, Overcome the Top 3 Challenges to Setting Up Contact Center Agents for Remote Working, Pankil Sheth, Steve Blood, Stuart Downes, 26 February 2021
