Answering the Call When Contact Center Agents Go Remote
Consistent monitoring of UC&C and UCaaS needed to ensure agents can do their job remotely.
Connecting with a contact center for much-needed support shouldn’t be a hit-or-miss proposition. Companies depend on customers being able to get the help they need without having to deal with dropped calls, choppy voices, bad connections, or any other quality issues.
The challenge for companies is compounded by the fact that many contact center agents are working remotely. A recent survey found that of the 60 percent of agents who were still working from home, 56 percent indicated they would quit their job if required to return to the call center full-time. This suggests that the remote contact center workforce is here to stay.
This trend has made it all the more important for IT departments to effectively monitor the unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) and unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) experiences of contact center agents who are working remotely. According to NETSCOUT’s latest research, 86 percent of enterprises are managing hybrid or remote contact centers. The same survey found that more than 70 percent of respondents indicated that call quality, dropped calls, delayed connection times, and troubleshooting stand as the greatest challenge due to the remote nature of contact center employees.
When employees are outside of traditional network environments, IT teams frequently find it harder to diagnose and solve technical issues.
IT’s Remote Headache
Regardless of whether they are helping patients answer questions about over-the-counter medicines, helping bank account holders settle fraud claims, or checking on the shipping status of a retail purchase, contact centers serve a vital role in ensuring a seamless and satisfying customer service experience. When communications solutions break down, this customer experience is put in jeopardy, as is the reputation of the business and potentially even its revenue.
The NETSCOUT survey found an extensive level of UC&C and UCaaS challenges associated with the remote work of contact center agents. Of the respondents, 83 percent said troubleshooting can be anywhere between a major and a minor challenge for IT departments. 78 percent pointed to dropped calls as a challenge, while 70 percent said call quality was a concern. 82 percent indicated delayed connection times were an issue, while 65 percent stated call forwarding and more than 56 percent said an inability to make outgoing calls were issues of concern.
Consistent Monitoring of UC&C & UCaaS Is Imperative
Obviously, anything that hinders remote contact center agents from doing their job is bad news for the business. To address issues more readily, IT departments need accurate information from platform vendors or third-party solutions that can easily diagnose common network and performance problems.
NETSCOUT nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solutions offer consistent monitoring of the communications paths used by a hybrid workforce. By monitoring call quality, quality of service (QoS) priority settings, mean opinion score (MOS) analysis, and synthetic testing for end-user experience analysis, IT can assure UC&C and UCaaS performance and user experience for remote contact center agents, as well as for customers.
NETSCOUT leverages packet-based monitoring to readily identify any problems, providing early warning about issues that might cause interruptions or degradations of service. With these invaluable insights, IT can troubleshoot and pinpoint the source of problems wherever they reside throughout the communications ecosystem to help reduce overall time to resolution.
As companies continue to rely on remote contact center agents, it will remain incumbent on IT departments to monitor UC&C and UCaaS services to ensure they are performing at their best.
Learn more in our comprehensive report on UC&C.