Using the Cloud to Strengthen the Contact Centre Team

RingCentral’s Daniel Yin offers his insight into the modern workforce in respect to day-to-day applications, along with how contact centres can retain and build strong and collaborative teams.

With UK unemployment almost at its lowest levels since the turn of the millennium; recruiting and retaining the best and brightest staff is a challenging endeavour for contact centres. Alongside pay and promotion prospects, candidates are increasingly concerned about working environments.

From homeworking to mobile devices, organisations are recognising that employees have widely different expectations when it comes to how they communicate.

For contact centres faced with the challenge of recruiting and retaining skilled workers, salaries are perceived as the biggest factor. Yet a survey conducted online by Harris Poll among 4,000 adults found that for around 50% of the responders, a good location and flexible hours were the second and third ranking requirements when considering an employer.

Another survey commissioned by RingCentral in 2015 supported this position and found web meetings were overtaking the traditional face-to-face sessions. This shift in the outlook of modern workers is forcing organisations to examine more closely some of the fundamental business norms, especially for collaborative endeavours where knowledge workers need to communicate, often and in real time, to deliver a beneficial outcome.

Many of these modern unified communication platforms instead use the cloud as a way of bridging disparate applications, data repositories and dissimilar devices.

Products like RingCentral’s Glip provide a unified virtual workspace for this modern workforce – bringing together a full set of tools, from telephony, through to virtual teams, collaborative video meeting rooms and file sharing, to users in a single interface.

This workspace can be instantly available to users via browsers and WebRTC technologies – meaning that users don’t even have to download additional apps. And those same technologies allow users to have the same consistent experience on any device, wherever they are.

The fear for some is that with this switch comes challenges around management oversight and security. Yet, by and large, these are not technical hurdles, But are often in the realm of defining and implementing new human resource and workplace polices that are designed around the modern internet-enabled workplace.

For example, banning the use of less secure file-sharing platforms like Dropbox is a poor policy for workers that routinely need to share documents.

Instead, setting up a secure file-sharing system within a collaborative working space with proper login credentials and IT security oversight is relatively easy to do and leads to higher productivity.

Tools like RingCentral’s Glip provide enterprise-grade security and IT admin controls to allow these tools to be properly rolled out in even the most demanding enterprise environments.