A recent white paper by Subspace reported that 44% of all contact center employees are now working remotely at least five days a week, an increase from 17% before the start of the pandemic. The shift is causing companies to think in terms of the remote contact center and look for ways to improve it.

With 90% of consumers saying that the quality of customer service is central to their loyalty to brands, businesses are under pressure to ensure that their remote call centers are ready to handle requests satisfactorily. But they are running into challenges: between February 2020 and the same month in 2021, there was a 30% increase in support tickets.

Here are three ways that your remote contact center can be better supported to meet customer expectations:

Exchange QoS for QoE: Call centers historically measured progress in terms of quality of service (QoS), a set of metrics that’s centered on telephony technology. As long as agents met an industry minimum, interactions with customers were considered satisfactory.

The problem is that customer experience has become so competitive. Meeting the bare minimum for quality of interactions is no longer enough; customers know they can find better experiences elsewhere. Companies are shifting to quality of experience (QoE), a set of metrics that measure customer frustration.

Upgrade the Network: One key aspect to maintaining a high level of QoE is ensuring that communications happen in real time. This means no dropped packets or congestion on network lines so that conversations are never interrupted, whether that’s over a voice call or video conferencing.

Cloud-based communications tools that are powering the remote contact center require high volumes of bandwidth, and it’s easy for traditional network infrastructure to become congested with transmissions as they are backhauled to the data center before going out to the cloud solution.

Businesses prioritizing QoE for heightened customer experiences must prioritize network performance and speed as a minimal requirement for supporting their remote call center. A virtualized network solution can help with traffic prioritization that finds the fastest route for your most time-sensitive applications.

Prioritize Security: Along with focusing on the customer experience and ensuring that experience isn’t compromised by an overtaxed network, companies also need to secure their networks and remote contact center solutions. This is particularly important as the workforce becomes more distributed and solving any security challenges can be more complex for your team.

When upgrading your network, you can best support your remote call center with a virtualized networking solution that has security built in to protect against malware, distributed denial of service (DDoS), or data theft.

Along with these three technical improvements to your remote contact center, you can also improve the customer experience by improving agent satisfaction. Empowering your agents with decision-making responsibilities as well as a stipend for headsets and ergonomic chairs that they find most comfortable is a strategic move for improving retention and satisfaction rates among agents.

If you’re looking for a network infrastructure upgrade to support your remote contact center, contact us at Access Tech. We can help you leverage the right solutions to create the ideal customer experience.

[Source: Whitepaper by Subspace]