How customer support agents are learning the ropes of work from home

With most institutions shut for about two months now and only opening partially in recent days, calls for help have peaked. As a corollary, contact centres and support agents have had to ramp up their game to meet the new reality of working from home while handling more and more distress calls. According to a recent report by Accenture, “Covid-19: Responsive customer service in times of change”, 57 per cent of the customers surveyed ranked call support as their initial channel preference for flexible communication. All that would be good news for support services during normal times, but with a majority of the call centre agents across sectors themselves working from home with limited technology, how does a firm ensure that its agents are able to do more with less? And how are agents ensuring that amid all the distraction, they remain compassionate towards customers, a key performance indicator for them? Above all, how can the companies assure data security, a key consideration in building long-term trust?

First, the challenges. “During the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a huge surge of calls and on top of that, the employees are required to work from home, which disrupted their performance,” says Ravi Saraogi, co-founder and president (APAC), Uniphore. He adds traditionally, contact centres evaluate agents’ performance by the average call handling times, their efficiency and by measuring customer experience with direct feedback.

According to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the average call hold time for bank customer service has increased from 41 seconds to over 20 minutes in the last couple of weeks and each delayed response adds to customer trust deficit.

 

The second issue is lack of proper infrastructure — a device and robust support network. Rajdipkumar Gupta, MD and group CEO of Route Mobile, a cloud communication platform provider, says in some cases, companies were also caught between mobility curbs and client protocol that disallowed work from home, banking in particular.

Once the problems were identified, solutions began falling in place.

Anantha Radhakrishnan, CEO and MD of Infosys BPM, sees in this disruption an opportunity to digitise the entire value chain. “The new reality of work will need enterprises to build a stronger digital infrastructure, advanced cloud capabilities, more reliable data and robust cyber security practices.”

Ankush Gangwani, global director of product management, business collaboration at Tata Communications, says since the sales process is happening digitally in some sectors, such as retail and banking, they now need more call handlers. “So we have deployed conversation bots or virtual contact centre agents — basically a mix of voice recognition, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence (AI).” Simple questions like account balance can be answered by a bot. Thirty per cent of calls come for such queries in banking process. “Human agents can be deployed more effectively to handle complex processes,” he says.

 

Agrees Saraogi of Uniphore, a global player in the conversational AI space. He says mundane tasks such as answering routine questions and putting together after-call summaries can be largely automated. This means that agents can be deployed more effectively for problem-solving, so they can keep the conversation personalised. “Technology can simplify conversations for the human agents by knowing the intent and sentiment of the customers with the help of applied intelligence,” says Saraogi, whose firm counts PnbMetLife, Bajaj Allianz, Genpact and FECredit among its clients.

But what about agents who do not have computers at home? There is technology to divert customer calls to their mobile phones though the agent and the target person won't be able to see each other's numbers. Also, there are mobile applications with the help of which the agents can log onto the company's network as if he was using a desktop. As the Covid pandemic began to unravel, the first thing FIS, for instance, did was to mass procure laptops and other devices for agents and provide them with portable internet hotspots.

That said, how does a firm ensure customer data security? Under normal circumstances, a call centre would not allow its agents to carry their personal phones or digital notebooks to the workplace. And vice-versa. Accops Systems, which provides secure work-from-home solutions, says under the new normal client-infrastructure firm agreements have gained in importance. Says Nandan Bhatkal, vice-president, enterprise, Accops, “In a way the only major concern is secure access to corporate applications and business process from home with strong device and user identification, including biometrics.” Technology is there for that; so are apps like Ameyo’s that prevent call/screen recording.

 

Digital support apart, a major task is to keep the agents motivated.

Radhakrishnan says a big priority area for Infosys BPM has been the safety and well-being of employees, while ensuring business continuity for clients.

Front-line managers have been trained to leverage technology and also to support at-home agents. According to Uniphore, emotional support is important and that includes financial counselling as an uncertain future looms for many. Route Mobile CEO Gupta says looking ahead corporate leaders should start preparing for prolonged or permanent work-from-home arrangements. “Future investments in advanced technologies like chatbots, AI, etc will help the call centres to work at their maximum capacities with minimum resources,” he sums up.