It’s 5 am, and Tina is soothing her six-year-old daughter, who’s suffering from a moderate fever and other flu-like symptoms. She starts her remote work job at 8 am and is thinking through how to care for her daughter before her day starts. Go to the emergency room, visit urgent care, or give her daughter a fever-reducing med and hope the illness passes?

She gets on a virtual call with her healthcare insurance provider to understand her options and speaks to a remote-working customer service representative. The rep recommends starting by calling a telehealth service, where she speaks to a nurse practitioner working at her home and gets quick advice on caring options.

Hire and retain top customer support agents with remote work options

The resounding theme in this story is how Tina gets the assistance she needs from two remote-working customer support agents. Tina lives in a rural area, so visiting a hospital or urgent care facility would have forced her to miss a work day. She’s thrilled to get the support she needs at a critical hour.

The insurance company and healthcare provider aim to improve their customers’ experiences but also must consider how to run efficient call centers while hiring and retaining top professionals. They know that 86% of consumers prefer humans over chatbots, and supporting remote call center agents is part of their strategy to improve both customer and employee experiences.

Providing hybrid and remote-work options for agents has been an important success factor for companies where customer service is key for delivering breakthrough customer experiences and high customer satisfaction (CSat) scores. One study shows that 90% of administrative and customer support managers face challenges finding skilled talent, so expanding where people can work has significant benefits. CIOs and general managers can increase talent pools and improve customer support by enabling people to work remotely effectively and efficiently.

Excelling at remote work is a digital transformation force multiplier

CIOs, CDOs, and heads of innovation are overwhelmed with digital transformation priorities. In companies with large-scale customer-facing operations, including inside sales and customer support functions, prioritizing innovation and transformation initiatives often requires tradeoffs. But that doesn’t have to be the case when Digital Trailblazers identify investments targeting multiple strategic drivers.

Upgrading remote work solutions and excelling at hybrid work practices is a digital transformation force multiplying initiative. Here’s how:

• Improve the customer experience by delivering high-performance and reliable virtual conference calling when customers interact with remote-working sales and customer support agents.
• Simplify employee experiences by providing easy-to-use technologies for employees to be happy, productive, and efficient when working remotely.
• Expand operations by supporting a distributed workforce and making hiring and retaining top talent easier for managers.
• Drive customer centricity by enabling collaboration between sales, customer support, marketing, IT, and operations on delivering product and service innovations.
• Reduce costs and risks by standardizing remote work technologies and configurations, making it easier for IT to resolve connectivity issues and for infosec to manage security configurations.

The return on investment for remote work solutions has operational benefits today, and the longer-term benefits stem from expanding access to talent and leveraging 5G networking capabilities.

Professional service industries excel with remote work

Tina’s ability to virtually call her insurance agent and a healthcare professional off-hours illustrates one example of organizations building a competitive advantage with remote work solutions. Consider the following scenarios in different professional service industries.

• Banks can deliver more personalized financial solutions to SMBs, consumers, and institutional investors by enabling more one-to-one relationships to be developed during off-hours between customers and their financial advisors.
• B2C insurance providers can grow a more diverse talent pool by recruiting people from different backgrounds, language skills, and preferred working hours across the country.
• Retailers can excel at customer service by hiring customer support agents with deep product-category knowledge and are willing to work part-time when remote work options are available.
• Manufacturers with large service operations can reduce the time to resolve customer issues by enabling their expert support staff to connect remotely during off-work hours.
• Professional service organizations, including management consultants, IT service providers, and marketing agencies, can more easily connect multidisciplinary remote teams to work on customer projects and resolve issues.

Healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and finance are several industries that will benefit from 5G and should turn network connectivity into a competitive advantage. Standardizing remote work and enabling hybrid work impacts several digital transformation strategies, especially in improving both customer and employee experiences. When evaluating which digital transformation initiatives to prioritize, professional service organizations can improve customer satisfaction, reduce costs, and grow top talent by investing in remote work solutions that enable hybrid and remote work.

This post is brought to you by Verizon 

The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Verizon.