With the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has seen a massive shift toward remote work and the digital transformation of organizations. Schedule flexibility, initiatives to boost employee satisfaction and loyalty, streamlined workspaces… Companies and employees are realizing the benefits of remote work, and while most people are happy to work from home or elsewhere, they still need the necessary tools to make their remote experience a success.

When it comes to customer support teams, there are three fundamental elements that can dramatically improve performance: People, tools, and technology. By leveraging cloud-based tools, taking advantage of artificial intelligence, and really considering the human behind the desk, companies can empower support teams to deliver a quality experience from wherever they are.

Premium Agent’s Remote Experience

Lay the foundations so that your employees can work comfortably from anywhere. Different elements such as physical environment, tools, technologies, means of communication, and efficient management require attention and refinement.

Approaching the employee experience strategically can have a great impact on efficiency, performance, loyalty, and engagement—happier employees make for more satisfied clients.

Productivity

Create a better remote experience and you’ll see your support agents’ productivity increase significantly. This has never been more true than at a time when the whole world is going “remote”.

Being away from their colleagues, employees might find themselves feeling isolated and unmotivated. Working from home might sound exciting at first, but one can easily come to feel lost and bored if all the conditions for success are not there. A better employee remote experience can improve work-life balance, enhance performance, and help you retain employees.

Well-Being

Happy employees are more likely to be productive. It is essential to foster a working environment that promotes employee well-being and makes it easier for them to enjoy both their professional and personal lives.

That’s why in the past few years, many companies have built their own People’s Culture team, focused on not only attracting talent but also keeping it in the long run. Make sure you set up the necessary measures to make it easier for employees to balance their personal life (children's leave, sick leave, part-time work, etc.) with their professional career, and have your remote support agents clearly define their availability both for individual and for team work. Encourage them to really unplug once they are off. They’ll thank you for it.

Engagement

A 2021 McKinsey study on the post-pandemic state of work showed that workers who have a positive work experience are four times more engaged. Create the ideal conditions for your remote support agents so they don’t feel discouraged or unhappy with their day-to-day work routines.

Building a remote experience for (and with) your support agents will encourage them to give their best. Remember to listen. Asking them for their opinion will make them feel understood, and it will also help you identify further improvements and adjustments in your HR practices.

Loyalty

Not only is it difficult to hire the right people, but it has also become increasingly complex to keep them on your team. Adopting rewarding HR policies and providing good working conditions is critical to reducing personnel turnover and improving satisfaction in the workplace.

This requires the support of managerial teams who can combine the needs of the activity and the working conditions. Managers should carry out individual and collective feedback sessions (weekly team meetings, individual meetings with each employee, workload adjustments, etc.).

So, what are the three strategies to boost performance across the fundamental remote support areas of people, tools, and technology? Cloud adoption, unified communications, and human-machine collaboration.

Let’s dig in.

Customer Service in the Cloud

Benefits of Using the Cloud

COVID-19 has made remote work mainstream. Of course, this has brought changes and has accelerated digitalization in every organization.

The adoption of cloud-based solutions has spiked. Cloud applications are essentially software tools that are accessed through the internet, meaning that it is not hosted and/or managed on a given user’s local machine.

This also means that users can access collaborative solutions from any connected device—be it a computer, phone, or an iPad—across the organization, on the road, or virtually anywhere around the world, as long as there’s a good connection.

Some companies have not yet made the move to the cloud, but, with the growing number of remote workers, they will soon be forced to do so.

The good news is that cloud technologies are readily available and immediately deployable. They also include a proven, effective support model that will give your IT department peace of mind. Investing in cloud-based technologies is the best way to facilitate smoother communication and better collaboration, therefore increasing the productivity of your remote support agents.

Cloud-based service desks using SaaS tools are a must-have for any company needing to send its support agents home to work.

Using cloud-based tools means agents no longer need to be physically present in a contact center. Many employees value this kind of freedom, as they don’t need to commute or spend their lunch break killing time until their shift starts again. Remote work increases the satisfaction and motivation of your support agents, and you will see those results in the quality of your customer service.

The cloud-based model also tends to provide more flexibility, allowing you to extend your toolset as you go. All tools are made available to your support agent team seamlessly and quickly without the need for data centers, servers, VPNs, and so on. The cloud provides a complete ecosystem of tools (integrating CRM, billing systems, chatbots, email software, and more) to support the productivity of your collaborators.

Cloud-Based Unified Communications

Have you ever found yourself searching for a piece of information you knew you had, but didn't know if it had been sent to your email, phone, a Slack channel, or even on a chat conversation within a video call? Then you have experienced one of the headaches that siloed communication tools cause.

Time spent searching for information is substantially undervalued, yet there are many statistics that demonstrate the negative impact caused by a poor organizational communication structure. For example, one study showed a given team loses up to 20 hours per month on average due to inefficient collaboration.

More and more companies are adopting Cloud Unified Communications. UCaaS takes the flexibility and scalability offered by the cloud and applies it to the communication dimension of organizations.

Simple, fully hosted communications solutions will help these companies stay on top of the latest trends. Phone calls, webchats, video conferences, emails… All communications are grouped and managed within a single platform. Information is organized and easy to find, communication is simplified, and collaboration becomes much more efficient.

Remote work is no longer a perk or a privilege, nor is it only something for the hugely resourced. Remote work is now a must. Here is a set of tools any modern remote support agent will need to boost their performance:

Business Phone

Your remote support agents need to be able to make local and international calls effortlessly, and the call quality needs to be impeccable to ensure the best customer experience possible.

Having a cloud-based business phone system gives you a competitive advantage, allowing companies to demonstrate the expertise and reliability of their remote support agents through excellent voice quality, whether the agent is in the office or on the road. The advantage of cloud-based unified communications also lies in the analytics capabilities it offers. In today's digital age, leveraging remote support solutions is crucial for ensuring that support agents can effectively assist your team or customers from any location. Because everything is in one place, it's easy to see at a glance how your teams are performing, all on one platform.

Video Call Solutions

Meeting customers face to face is ideal, but not always possible⁠, or cheap, or environmentally friendly!⁠ In such cases, being equipped to bring the human touch using a good video call system can be critical to building good relationships with customers, colleagues, partners, or suppliers.

When most meetings are held remotely, video becomes an essential tool for your remote support agents. It is important to provide a tool that is easy to use and allows for flexibility in their daily collaboration. Beyond the communication aspect and ease of use, best practices require the ability to have meeting history, integration with calendars, customizable meeting space, cloud backups, and more.

However, what really makes the difference between one video conferencing system and another are unified communications features such as group chat, live streaming via YouTube, or IT-Admin analytics tools.

Team Chat

Chat is increasingly preferred to email for internal and external communications. Unlike email, which tends to be much more formal, chat is more accessible and much more instant.

For example, notification systems let you know when a colleague is online or when they have read a message. Chat can allow a given team to get real-time transfers of information, enabling quick problem-solving with instant group feedback. Because the chat message is shorter and less formal than email, people often respond immediately.

Investing in a robust chat system will allow your team to collaborate easily while keeping message history in one place. A unified chat system will also help remote support agents easily access all their conversations and stay connected with colleagues and customers, whether the conversation is taking place via universal team chat or through another chat platform.

Finally, your employees should be able to switch from chat to phone communication (with just a few clicks from the chat) to go deeper into a topic at any time.

Now that you know some of the key features that can empower your remote support agents in their daily work and what a unified communications system can do, check out the potential savings your organization could achieve via Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS) solutions.

Human-Machine Collaborative Intelligence

The future of customer service lies in the collaboration between AI and human agents. The idea is not to replace people but to complement their work.

For example, chatbots allow agents to break free from repetitive tasks or tasks that do not require their expertise. Some basic requests may have already been dealt with and thus have fed the knowledge base of your company. A chatbot will search for answers in this knowledge base and recognize a question for which it already has an answer, allowing it to respond to customer requests more quickly.

Collaboration between chatbots and agents can lighten the team’s workload and mobilize the intelligence and knowledge humans have regarding more specialized or complex areas.

Typically, topics like order tracking, document requests, or redirection to the right website resources can be handled by a chatbot, while more complex requests can be redirected to an agent specialized in the subject.

A chatbot can also start an interaction with a customer: Greet them, collect their information, assign them a ticket, and qualify their request. Depending on its complexity, the request will be forwarded to the right agent or simply answered. This saves time and allows for a more appropriate and efficient response to a request—even if that means putting a customer on hold if the subject is complex.

Your remote support agents will feel relieved by a better resolution rate and enhanced customer experiences.

Further, you can depend on Natural Language Processing technology to recognize the meaning of a sentence—typos, slang, and errors included. For example, if a customer mistakenly types “Hello, I have reqiurement and I wanna now more about the price of solution”, the chatbot with NLP will understand perfectly what is being said despite the plethora of typos in this hasty interrogative.

Remember, that while customers like to be responsive they also appreciate being quickly understood, as they would with a real human being. The goal is to improve the customer experience without making it more complex. It's important to choose a set of tools that allows a smooth transition from one channel to another.

Remote Support Doesn’t Need to be Remotely Second Best

So, there we have it. By adopting the top tech available, while never forgetting the real people involved in your customer support services, you really can deliver top-class support remotely. And that’s great news as, given current workplace trends, you may well have to.

Alexis Zarour is the Vice-President of Marketing at Inbenta, a global leader in chatbots and conversational AI. He is passionate about showing how AI can help organizations achieve a great customer experience through automation.