‘Work-from-home’ plan for call center agents

MANILA, Philippines – Call center agents working the graveyard shift are no strangers to crime.

A police report last June revealed that authorities arrested two suspects who allegedly held up a call center agent and took her mobile phones while she was on her way to work at around 11 p.m.

While police were able to arrest the suspects, they were unable to retrieve the mobile phones of the victim.

Another report said that a call center agent was mauled while robbers carted her valuables in Bacolod.

Aware of the risks call center agents face when they leave their homes at odd hours, a software firm is pushing for them to simply work from home, giving them the much-needed safety that they need from theft and other crimes.

“Let’s face it: if I have a daughter who will work the graveyard shift who will have to commute alone…there’s too much risk. And I think their concern is valid. The thing is, there’s still this pool of agents that we do not know about who has the aptitude, the skills, the knowledge, to be contact center agents but we cannot tap them because of these concerns,” said Edgar Doctolero, Avaya’s Country Director.

Doctolero said Avaya’s new one-X Agent was hoping to help the contact center industry tap into a talented pool of agents hesitant to enter the industry because of safety concerns.

The one-X Agent is an all-in-one desktop application designed for dynamic contact centers. It has several features that allow a contact center company as well as contact center agents to work easily in any location.

“It can be for an agent working in the headquarters, it can be for an agent working in a branch, and importantly it can be for agents working from home. So it is really a simply desktop application…it has the functionality of the common phone that the agent uses commonly in a contact center environment,” Doctolero said.

The one-X Agent, he said, was in tune with the Filipino culture of keeping family’s close. The software also boasts of being environment-friendly, as it will allow agents to contribute to the environment by commuting less, thereby resulting to less gas emissions from public or private vehicles.

The one-X Agent also seeks to boost the retention and recruitment rate of the contact center industry.

Citing data from the Contact Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP), Doctolero said that the hire rate in the contact center industry was “very low,” with only about five to 10 getting hired from 100 applicants.

The Avaya one-X Agent seeks to tap into the pool of Filipinos hesitant to work in a contact center because of the risks of working on the graveyard shift.

“Agent turnover is so high, so they’re really looking at alternative source, a pool of agent that they can bring,” Doctolero said.

He said he would be giving the proposal of work-from-home agents in an upcoming meeting with call center companies soon.

For agents working from home, the one-X Agent boasts of providing easy access to both the agent and the contact center company.

It runs on Microsoft Windows and has several features including a pop-up information screen that provides the agent the basic information needed on a caller. It also allows the agent to pre-record a greeting message that will welcome callers.

“What the one-X Agent can do is that the agent can record a greeting so that every time there is a call, you will hear a very pleasant voice. Even if the agent is already working like eight hours a day, the greeting’s still fresh,” Doctolero said.

The one-X Agent also boasts of being “intuitive,” with a wizard and tutorials that allow agents working from home to easily run the software without much hassle or technical jargon.

It also has a re-designed user interface that lets customer service associates better manage multiple interactions simultaneously. The user interface also features new capabilities such as integrated contact lists with “click-to-dial” and “drag and drop” features for conferencing and transfers, giving customer service associates more effective means to reach the right expert and include them in customer interactions.

Despite all these features, Doctolero said the one-X Agent was very affordable compared to other software designed for the contact center industry.

The one-X Agent was released in local markets last June. –Abigail Kwok, INQUIRER.net