Call recording solutions are essential to the proper management of a call center team. Effectively using a call recording utility allows you to hold agents accountable and track their progress over the length of their careers. As heavier reliance on the home based agents becomes the norm in customer service, call recording solution that allows you to monitor multiple diffuse workers has become even more essential. Used in conjunction with desktop monitoring, hosted call recording solutions allow managers to be just as involved in the work of home agents as those they share office space with.

At this year’s Call Center week, CTI (News - Alert) group’s Sid Rao said, “IP telephony was the barrier to get home agents to work from home previously because it required them to make sure they had all the equipment. Now that you have a nice hosted service you can do those home agents type setups without much issue. Before you had to guarantee voice data and phone on top of home agent behaviors, but the technology now really doesn’t have the same problems.” 

As Rao pointed out, technology is no longer an issue, and as such, the need for technology that can monitor decentralized agents is essential. Spectrum (News - Alert) Corp has offered s call center reporting option through a number of distribution methods. The company’s web-based reports offer a unique vantage point for diffuse customer service setups. Spectrum’s web-based reports provides managers with more granular reporting, better reporting and the ability to drill down on information to get to the root cause of the variance (threshold).

Web-based reports can be viewed from any location and permit a manager flexibility and mobility. The reports can pull data from any call center application to provide a true summary report to the managers.

Considering how quickly hosted options have changed the way that customer service centers operate, there’s not doubt that recording and monitoring solutions can manage diffuse workforce are necessary investments. The long term costs savings of home agents will quickly balance and cost for this kind of software.

Chris DiMarco is a Web Editor for TMCnet. He holds a master's degree in journalism from Quinnipiac University. Prior to joining TMC (News - Alert) Chris worked with e-commerce provider Suresource as a contact center representative and development analyst. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page. Follow him on Twitter @cpdimarco.

Edited by Rich Steeves