7 Tips to Keep Your Remote Agents Happy and Motivated

Ikechukwu Nnabeze, on behalf of injixo, shares his tips for managing remote agents and keeping them motivated.

Keeping work-from-home employees happy, motivated, and productive is becoming a problem for managers. You’ll find this even more difficult if you manage remote call centre agents.

With contact centre representatives spread across multiple locations, achieving motivation may seem exhausting and almost impossible.

However, on-site call centres are steadily evolving and virtual ones are here to stay.

So how do you manage remote contact centre agents, keep them motivated, and improve customer relations?

1. Provide Access to Relevant Resources

Remote call centre agents will easily become frustrated when they don’t have access to adequate resources for the job.

For agents to be able to help customers, you must give them access to your knowledge management system, operation procedures, CRMs, customer data, etc.

Always ensure that agents are able to navigate between all the tools in your tech stack, and make frequently used resources easily accessible.

Pay attention to the network and system requirements of your tools and make sure all agents are stable.

2. Train Your Remote Call Centre Agents

Providing training resources for remote agents will help boost their confidence and motivation. They’ll feel valued and eager to deliver the best results. Training can be done via virtual meetings or e-learning resources.

Another way to upskill remote agents is by tracking their activities and providing feedback or help where necessary.

Managers can use screen-recording tools to monitor how agents interact with different applications. Reports can be used to identify issues, evaluate performance and train agents.

3. Respect Non-Working Hours

It’s possible to lose track of time when managing remote call centre agents. However, tasking your employees beyond stipulated working hours leaves them unhappy, stressed, and less motivated.

While working from home remote agents may be with their devices all day. However, it doesn’t mean they want to handle customer queries after work hours.

Ensure you adhere to time boundaries and help them maintain a work-life balance.

4. Use Video Conferencing for Meetings

Communication is important in building highly connected and motivated remote teams.

Even though you can’t hold physical meetings with remote agents, virtual communication tools help to build connections between team members.

Video meetings allow agents to become familiar with each other and keep them highly engaged.

Agents get motivated and understand better when they are able to see your expressions as you provide updates, reviews, and feedback.

Video conferencing may not be as personal as physical meetings, but it offers face-to-face communication and makes it easy to build highly involved remote teams.

5. Give Incentives

To keep work-from-home agents highly motivated, you need to get creative with rewards and incentives.

With this culture, contact centre reps will have reasons to put in their best, learn faster and be productive.

Beyond off days and gift cards, you can personalize rewards for agents and make it fun.

You can customize gift items with their names or the company logo to make them feel recognized and a part of the team.

Also, you can attach rewards to their daily tasks to make work feel less tedious.

In all, make sure you understand the team and make work memorable for them. All of this will make agents feel valued and build their loyalty towards the company.

6. Instil Company Culture

Company culture is a must-have for companies, whether they manage on-site or remote teams. This will help remote call agents to be more connected to their work and the company’s goals.

It’s your duty to show agents the role they play in actualizing the goals and aspirations of the brand.

It’s not enough to only say it. Ensure it shows in how you acknowledge and reward their loyalty.

Company culture is highly important and can make a huge difference in engagement, performance, and efficiency.

7. Collect Feedback From Your Remote Agents

Collecting feedback is a way to measure satisfaction and improve redundant processes.

To grow as a company, customer feedback must be as important as feedback from your remote call centre agents.

Always give remote agents the opportunity to discuss policies, processes and every aspect of their daily workload.

The more you make hard conversations easier for your agents, the better for your company. This will help you to improve training styles, meetings, policies, and overall collaboration.

Remote agents are an asset if they can be managed properly. They offer a low-cost option to deliver quality customer service in real-time.

Ensure you pay attention to their needs, suggestions and make work fun.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of injixo – View the Original Article

For more information about injixo - visit the injixo Website

About injixo

injixo is a product of InVision, a market leader in WFM for over 25 years. InVision built on its knowledge and experience to launch injixo as one of the first cloud workforce management (WFM) solutions for contact centers on the market back in 2011. And gaining the accolade of first to market with AI-based forecasting. Since then, the injixo user community has exploded. And will continue to innovate and push the boundaries of WFM.

Find out more about injixo

Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.

Author: injixo