Mother Lode: (209) 694-4599
Central Valley: (209) 790-4560

Tag: contact center

  • Building, Onboarding, and Managing Remote Teams

    Is your business implementing a hybrid or fully remote work model for the first time? Wondering how to successfully onboard and manage work-from-home employees without impacting workplace productivity, collaboration, or culture? With the right tools and processes, managing remote teams effectively is possible. Here’s an overview of what companies who are shifting to a hybrid or fully remote work model are doing to build, onboard, and manage remote teams.

    Tips for Building and Onboarding Remote Teams

    When building a remote team, you can focus on hiring based on skills, expertise, and culture fit rather than location. This gives your company a wider pool of applicants to draw from and makes it easier to create a dream team for your company.

    To build and onboard a remote team, you’ll need the right people, processes, and tools to make it work.

    • Designate HR staff to focus on hiring and training remote employees. The work experience is different when you’re working from wherever, so it’s important to have someone who understands how to engage, teach, guide, and provide support for remote workers.
    • Set expectations from the beginning. Establish the rules for work hours, specific times remote employees should make themselves available online, and time tracking from the beginning.
    • Create clear processes around communication – what channels should they use for collaboration, one-on-one meetings, and work questions? Who should they connect with for different types of communication and group work?
    • Empower your remote teams with easy-to-use and full-featured communications solutions that integrate with your business applications. As a lot of work happens through technology, it’s important to use platforms that enable productivity and minimize frustration. The essentials for keeping remote teams connected include unified communications, video conferencing software, and cloud phones.

    Tips for Managing Remote Teams Successfully

    Because your remote employees aren’t in the office, it can feel like you have less insight into how they spend their time, making management difficult. The reality is, working from wherever doesn’t have to impact productivity. With a smart, practical approach, you can still bring the best out of your employees. Here are a few tips to help you manage your remote employees:

    • Set up regular meetings. With remote teams, it’s more important to be proactive about meeting with your staff. Whether you do quick, one-on-one check-ins every morning or a weekly meeting with small groups, making face-to-face interactions part of the routine helps to keep everyone engaged.
    • Be upfront about work goals. Set benchmarks for individuals and groups – what should they be able to get done each day and each week? Also, be open to feedback from your employees. Check in with them to ensure they don’t feel overwhelmed with their workload and make adjustments as necessary.
    • Consider time tracking to gain clarity over time spent on tasks. Time tracking reveals how much time different employees take to do certain types of work and where they are devoting most of their work hours.
    • Provide tips and tools to help your remote employees create an optimal work environment. Talk to them about privacy and quiet when working from home, ways to set up an ideal home office, and what expectations they should set for themselves. Your company may need to provide hardware such as VoIP phones, work supplies, or ergonomically correct home office furniture.
    • Encourage a healthy work-life balance. Working remotely can be a positive experience that increases engagement and job satisfaction. However, employees do need support from management to make this happen. Regular feedback, supportive conversations, and help with the challenges of working from home, such as loneliness or a lack of physical movement, can help your remote teams thrive.

    How Many Businesses Are Relying on Remote Teams in 2021?

    A few short years ago, remote work was the exception, not the norm. In 2012, only 24 percent of employees worked from home 80 percent of the time or more.

    Throughout the pandemic, millions of employees traded their daily commute and nine to five at the office for a work-from-wherever lifestyle. Working remotely provided the adaptability and resilience necessary to ensure business continuity during the global health crisis. And now in 2021, 41 percent of the US workforce is fully remote. More than half work from home at least part-time.

    As a result, more employees and employers have experienced the benefits of remote work – the cost-savings, flexibility, and the potential for increased focus and satisfaction with work. So, it’s no surprise that the American workforce is moving ahead with some level of remote work.

    No matter what stage your business is at right now – whether you have a few remote employees, are developing a hybrid work model, or you’re considering going fully remote, build your foundation for success with cloud communications for remote teams. At NTELogic, we provide essentials such as Elevate, Online Meeting, and Contact Center. We also offer impeccable customer service, a 99.999% uptime service level agreement, and leading-edge cloud security.

    To learn more about how using NTELogic can help your business transform, get in touch with our team – we’d be happy to talk to you about how our tools can help you better manage remote teams.

  • Seven Customer Experience Trends to Have on Your Radar

    Every company strives to deliver exceptional customer experiences. However, customer expectations changed a lot in the last year and are constantly evolving. To meet customers where they are, you’ll want to have these customer experience trends on your radar.

    The pandemic influenced many of these trends, and you can expect many to become permanent fixtures. Let’s look at the trends making an impact and how you can integrate them into your processes and communications.

    1. Honesty, Transparency, and Visibility Are Nonnegotiable

    Getting a customer to trust you is no easy feat. It takes time to build trust, and you must be consistent to maintain it. COVID-19 accelerated this trend, as customers craved transparency and visibility around how businesses responded to the pandemic.

    Customers want to know about safety, hygiene, practices, and actions. No matter what business you’re in, your buyers want reassurance that they can trust you to serve them in the best way. While the health crisis is subsiding, customer feelings about honesty, transparency, and visibility won’t.

    2. Convenient Interactions

    Customers want options when it comes to contacting you. They need convenience in interactions and resolutions. That means omnichannel communication capabilities. They can call, email, or chat with your contact center agents. Thus, it’s imperative that you can integrate all these channels into one solution so that your employees can quickly address customer needs.

    In addition, intelligent routing allows you to ensure that customers talk to the right agent and don’t get passed along or end up waiting in long queues. Having this type of contact center infrastructure enables you to serve customers quickly and more adeptly.

    3. Prioritizing the Employee Experience

    Engaged, happy employees deliver better service. That’s undeniable. If your customer-facing teams don’t feel valued, it will reflect in their interactions. Conversely, those that have support and believe their company cares for them will perform better.

    How do you engage employees? It’s a lot of different things, from ensuring they have the right technology tools to developing a robust onboarding and training program to showing everyday appreciation.

    When you invest in employees, they have more reasons to remain loyal and excel at their job. Considering the cost of turnover, it makes sense to prioritize your team members.

    4. Data-Driven Decision-Making

    Data is the fuel for every business initiative in the modern world. You can gather and analyze lots of data around customer experiences with the right tech stack. For example, contact center software offers insights on queue performance, call volume, team activity, like time on calls and issue resolution, and more KPIs (key performance indicators).

    With this information, you can find themes and patterns that may result in follow-up training, process changes, or new workflows. That improves the customer experience and supports your employees.

    The more data you have, the better your decision-making. You aren’t guessing about what frustrates customers or causes negative experiences. You have the map and can then connect the dots to reduce friction.

    5. Contactless and Self-Service Options Are Here to Say

    Whether on-site or online, customers are okay with doing it themselves. This customer experience trend isn’t new, but the pandemic did boost its adoption. Now that customers changed their buying behaviors, they aren’t likely to fall back into old habits.

    If you want to keep up with customer expectations, then you need to embrace contactless and self-service. However, that doesn’t mean human interaction no longer matters. It’s just that customers may not choose this course unless they need to escalate. Keep this in mind that when self-service goes wrong, your customer service folks need to be responsive.

    6. Personalization Matters

    Customer service once meant that a business knew your name and your story. Of course, it was easier decades ago when there was economic segmentation and localization. Now, it’s a global world, but that doesn’t mean you can’t know your customer.

    One of the best modern examples of this is when customers contact you, and your agents have access to their history. That’s easily achievable when your contact center software integrates with your CRM (customer relationship manager). Agents can quickly get up to speed so that customers don’t have to repeat themselves. Additionally, there are software features that allow customers to connect back with their initial agent.

    7. Relationships Over Transactions

    The last 2021 customer experience trend is one that matters the most. Engineering your customer experience playbook to emphasize relationships over transactions is critical. In some ways, you may look at these interactions as transactions, worrying about the time it takes and the haste in correcting issues. That’s important, but having a strategic approach to relationship-building is imperative to be successful.

    You can build relationships by being responsive, empathetic, consistent, and trustworthy. Every action, initiative, or plan needs to be rooted in these attributes. Cultivate these relationships by delivering convenience, personalization, and options.

    Capitalizing on the Customer Experience Trends: Why Technology Matters

    In most of these trends, technology is a key component. Different platforms can help you capitalize on them. One of the most important is contact center software. Having a flexible, feature-rich solution provides your staff with a vehicle to optimize every customer experience.

    Contact NTELogic today to learn more about how our contact center platform can support your journey to create exceptional customer experiences every day.