Connecting Home Workers to Business Applications
The rush to homeworking in recent weeks has led to a many different UC and phone solutions on offer and you could be forgiven for getting confused. These can be rock-solid and can get home workers up and going in a trice, provided that they have a good internet connection, but they usually, by design, lack the business links that drive interactions in contact centers.
If you need your agents to work from home and want them interfacing with your business applications, then you need to have them plumbed into a contact center system in the cloud.
Here’s how we met one such challenge recently. We were asked to provide a contact center to support home working agents and have it go live – over a weekend!
It wasn’t about headsets and browsers at home, but the creation of applications able to screen pop at home for the agent and also interact with a database backend on a hosted service to maintain all the business data. In normal times we might have quoted a week or more on a job like this, but these times aren’t normal.
We put ourselves to the test:
- We installed our Softdial Contact Center™ platform using the customer’s virtualisation infrastructure
- We helped them connect to their phone carrier
- We showed them how to configure inbound queues and how to route calls to the most appropriate agents
- They deployed a browser environment and headsets so that agents could work at home just as if they were in the contact center
- Jointly, we wrote some scripts for the agents to use
- They integrated our system with their database, enabling scripts to take data in real time from customer records
- They made sure that the script wrote call results back to their database, to keep the back office people happy
- They set up our IVR to play messages to any inbound callers waiting in queue
- We figured out which reports they would need
- We showed them how to use our screen/voice recording product to review agent performance
Monday morning was ‘go live’ time.
Result: one very happy customer.
Normally we don’t talk about our own product in these blogs, but again, these times aren’t normal – and businesses sometimes need to move quickly to survive. If we can help you install new systems quickly, including home workers, just talk to us. Any time, anywhere.
For more information about how our products are designed for the cloud, just talk to us.
