Making Virtual Viable with the Right Agent Education

With decades of experience, Tamara Schroer, vice president of Education and Development at Working Solutions, knows the ins and outs of instructing a remote workforce of contact center agents.

To her, distance is no deterrent to make sure that agents, working from their homes across the United States and Canada, learn a client’s operations to best serve its customers.

“Unlike brick-and-mortar call centers, where agents all work in one place, an on-demand contact center operates in a far-flung, virtual network,” she writes in the Contact Center Pipeline article, “Creating a Collaborative Virtual Team.”

Such a distributed workforce requires leadership to:

1. Create a caring culture, an empathetic workplace that fosters a strong sense of community and belonging.
2. Demonstrate commitment to developing agents once they’re on the job, knowing that their education is ongoing.
3. Provide an operational framework to ensure sound structure, built-in efficiencies and uninterrupted communications essential for great teamwork.

With these things in place and practiced, Schroer knows success will follow.