Supporting the Home Team

How miPerform can help you engage your distributed workforce

When it comes to home working for contact centres, the genie isn’t going to go back in the bottle. CCaaS technology came of age during the pandemic – and the benefits in terms of improving agent wellbeing, reducing churn and widening the talent pool are all readily apparent.

The challenges of managing a remote team

While the overwhelming majority of contact centres now offer some form of home working, and have a platform to enable that, there is still much to learn in how we manage these distributed teams.

Challenges range from workflow and workload management, to Quality Assurance, to simply nurturing a team culture when you’re not together. Tools such as wallboards are no longer so useful when half the team can’t see them. And contact centre managers know all too well that excessive “Big Brother” style monitoring is not conducive to agents feeling motivated.

That risk is amplified among the new cohort of home-based agents – who tend to be more mature, more independent and more self-motivated than the average recruit.

Enabling them to manage their own performance

The obvious opportunity, therefore, is to build on this shift in personnel and employee expectations and give them the means to monitor and manage their own performance. That’s where miPerform comes into its own.

miPerform puts essential performance data in the hands of the performers. It allows them to see how they are doing, compared to their targets and their peers. It can also help them see when the team is under pressure – showing call queues, for instance – even when they are not in the same physical contact centre as their colleagues.

Making them feel part of a team

But that’s not the only way it can bring a distributed team together. There are also opportunities for managers to set challenges or ‘gamify’ particular elements, with the whole team seeing the outcome.

Equally importantly, it can give supervisors greater visibility into essential quality metrics and enable highly focused feedback and coaching, all of which helps home workers feel that they are included and supported – rather than alone at the end of the line. Plus that targeted coaching drives continuous improvement at the team level.

miPerform isn’t the whole answer to managing a distributed workforce. But by engaging remote workers and making them feel part of a whole, it goes a long way to supporting the home team. To find out more, contact us today.

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