Managing remote teams has suddenly become both an imperative and a challenge for business.
The number of business employees working at home has been steadily growing in recent years but with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic the fact that allowing agents and employees to work remotely reduces office overheads, enhances productivity, and offers a host of new opportunities to business leaders leading to an exponential rise in home working.
All previous reasons for remote working were suddenly overtaken as it became the de-facto means of keeping the lights on in their business in the face of a government-imposed lockdown.
As a consequence, the problems surrounding the management of a remote workforce quickly became an imperative rather than the required necessary afterthought for management.
Yasmin Gray, Product Marketing Manager of Xarios, a company serving this need for robust analytics by delivering cloud-based, as a service solutions, says that today the reach of the remote team is extensive.
“It’s not just the employee working at home; collaborative applications being used mean that there is a web of contacts that fall within remote teams such as contractors, customers and suppliers. In fact, any team member that needs to access cloud technology for managing communication and collaboration from a distance is a remote worker.”
The Xarios Dimensions call analytics portfolio is designed to provide the tools that organisations and their remote teams need to maintain customer service excellence. The same tools are available for both office and remote based staff which means supervisors and management can see at a glance how staff are performing no matter where they are located – even globally.”
Innovative Xarios Fire Stick
Yasmin Gray says that the Xarios Fire Stick innovation means that all the call statistics and key performance indications can be displayed on a wallboard format that updates in real-time on a TV screen rather than a dedicated, expensive monitor as well as a compatible browser.
“This not only reduces the cost for the user but also improves overall business agility as the use of the Firestick means that remote or home-based supervisors and managers have access to all call analytic display information.”
Xarios is also aware of the many ways customers contact their suppliers.
“Today, customer contact is not restricted to the use of telephony; most people appear to have a contact medium of choice which could be the telephone but is increasingly a mixture of phone, email, text or chat”
“Each of these omni-channel mediums needs to be measured and managed both in the office and in remote teams. The number of emails in the in-box is a queue just as a stack of phone calls waiting to be answered is a queue and today they are equally important.”
Gray says that pre-configured reports get users up and running quickly and provide any information required, including complete calls, individual call segments and summarised data about call volumes and service levels.
“For employers, organisations can monitor the performance of staff over time by getting a complete breakdown of the calls they make and receive, the time spent handling them and the time spent in unavailable states (including individual states such as ‘On Lunch’ or ‘On a Break’).
Once again, these features are available to both office and home workers and allow service levels to be tracked over time.”
I asked Yasmin what the benefits of the call management and analytic solutions for resellers were.
“We recognise that every organisation is unique and communicates with their customers in different ways which is why our Dimensions Wallboards and reports are completely customisable for reseller customers”
“For reseller partners, Dimensions applications can be white labelled and branded with their own logos for additional value add and as a cloud-based application can be deployed as a Software as a Service (SaaS) model.
Looking ahead, Xarios has a continuous product development road map which will see the introduction of their Dimensions Dashboard later this year to enable additional controls to the user communications platform, monitor service levels, track and update agent status to meet performance targets.”
