Remote Contact Centers with Ryan Brogan // Cornerstone Hot Takes

Away from the technology side of things is the ongoing debate, and it’s in the much wider world of work, on remote versus in-person.

On the face of things, the contact center is a perfect place for remote work, right? Highly measurable, individualized.

Yeah.

So there are a lot of ways that you would say it should work really well. It’s interesting, in some of the data, and this is a small sample, it’s anecdotal, that we see there is actually a drop-off in efficiency for all-remote contact center teams.

Interesting.

And look, correlation versus causation, right? All of the footnotes. But if that were true, I think the hypothesis that I would have is that’s more about management breakdowns than it is about the agent not wanting to work.

Right.

So have we pivoted appropriately in terms of how we support and train agents? It’ll be an interesting space to watch. Do contact centers make adjustments? Do they bring people back in for part or all of the time?

Sure.

Or, at the very least, is that a way to staff off-hours that you would historically not have any luck hiring for?

Right.

So you’re paying a third-party vendor to provide “service,” and I’m going to use air quotes on purpose, right? Because they have limited capabilities and things.

But if you could have, right, JetBlue’s been doing this for, what, 10 or 15 years, where it’s moms and folks that work from home, you know, do it while the kids are at school kind of thing. So it can work.

I imagine it’s much more tenuous when you’re talking about people’s financial records in someone’s random house than, you know, booking a flight, I guess.

Yeah. Well, I think you make a good point. It can work. How do we put the structure around training folks, making them feel supported, giving that sense of community with their coworkers? Because it’s a hard job.

Yeah.

Absolutely.