Today, new remote working lifestyles have affected millions, and there are a plethora of contact center employees who now work from their homes. They face several new unforeseen hurdles in these environments, too. This doesn’t exclude them from spotty Internet because many people rely on a single router to power real-time audio and video calls. The fact of the matter is agents who work from home today were previously tethered to a desk and had a wall of running stats of figures such as wait time on display.
Managers sat an arm’s length away from agents and could step in when needed. The bedrock of this foundation was shaken up by the novel Coronavirus. AudioCodes’ Sharone Ben-Levi, VP of Business Development, said the virus has impacted those working from home for the first time. When employees were first forced to work from home, at least those who could, there were a lot of temporary solutions introduced, Ben-Levi told me. Adding: “Companies forwarded calls to employee mobile devices, which left quality dependent on the signal and battery strength.”
Not only does such a move pose concerns about reliability, but it’s more costly to maintain complicated telephony routing, especially since it’s unnecessary, Ben-Levi exclaimed! “Some of these calls were even forwarded to landlines.” This could mean that if a customer does call an agent and they don’t answer, the voicemail would likely sound something like this: “Hi, you’ve reached the Smith family,” not a professional business-focused greeting.
In a matter of days, enterprise leadership across the globe told employees to pack up their IP phones and computers – take them home and to conduct ‘business as usual.’ This presented another challenge, the need for secure communications, which is usually handled by Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). The problem is, VPNs aren’t designed for high volumes of real-time voice traffic.
Some contact centers tried Softphones as well as other UC-based solutions, too. None of which could match the simplicity and capacity of WebRTC. Since it is browser-based and not an app, there’s no software to verify, deploy, or update for that matter. Ben-Levi went on to state:
“WebRTC is based on a special kind of compression rate algorithm called Opus, the same one Zoom, WhatsApp, and Microsoft Teams use. The Google-developed compression algorithm is capable of dealing with open internet voice impairments”
Safari, Mozilla, Chrome, and Microsoft Edge all support WebRTC technology. Ben-Levi said in the past WebRTC proved complicated to deploy. Today he maintains, not only is it is more accessible and easier to install, but it’s ‘highly secure, too.’ “WebRTC uses the same security mechanisms that websites such as banks and other financial intuitions use on their sites.”
If people want to work from anywhere, Ben-Levi added – WebRTC is what will enable business continuity from the office, home, and on the road. “If there’s another wave of COVID-19, employees can access the browser-based phone to connect with anyone with a few clicks, which is the epitome of continuity and fluidity within a business if you ask me.”
Tools like agent assist and other forms of artificial intelligence and analytics in the contact center environment also depend on high-quality audio on voice calls to ensure speech-to-text engines have low word error rates as the goal is to present accurate data for contact center management to leverage, all the more reason to make the switch to a resilient technology that’s so simple to deploy, anyone can do it.
