How Poly is Supporting the Home-based Contact Centre Worker

Many customer-facing roles which were traditionally located in large centralised offices are now suddenly being performed at home, and both customer services agents and their managers are having to make rapid adjustments to their daily routines and working conditions.

Businesses are focusing on scaling up the applications needed for continuity, and cloud-enabled teams enjoying the benefits of UCaaS for rapid rollout of familiar software. But if your job involves continual conversations with customers, the peripheral hardware — in particular the right headset — makes all the difference.

Richard Kenny, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Contact Centre, at Poly, explained to me that, assuming factors like physical comfort for all-day wear are a given (for a company with a heritage of designing headsets for pilots), users need to be able to control their calls straightforwardly via buttons on the headset itself:

A headset which supports the way you work

“If you’re working from home on a small laptop screen it’s especially important because you’re probably using 3 or 4 different packages, and the softphone won’t be at the front — you’ll need the CRM on top. So to answer the call quickly, you need to be able to press a button on the lead, not tab through different applications”.

And to ensure a seamless integration with your software packages, using something like the Microsoft-certified Voyager 4245 Office or similar USB connected options, mean you won’t have to worry about any changes or compatibility issues, he continued. “The whole promise of cloud is that it delivers on scalability and flexibility. So we’re seeing a huge amount of updates coming through now, where the packages on your PC get updated on a regular basis. You’ve got to be able to update the headset to keep up with that — if they change the way they do the signalling on it for example about answering a call, you’ve got to have some form of management package like Plantronics ManagerPro that looks after all these different headsets, and make sure that they are up to date with their firmware.” The more these updates can be handled ‘as a service’, even to their headset, then the better for the agent in terms of their continuity and ease of operation.

Looking after our customers

Richard Kenny

We are always out there to look after our customers too, in a way that aligns excellently with supporting a distributed workforce: “Our warranty system has always been geared up to send people replacements to where they are, recognising the benefits of our own smarter working policies as a company, and the commitment to supporting the product through its lifecycle.”

You can discover Poly’s recommended range of equipment to support home-based workers here, as well as learning from their own smart working experiences — helping to keep the world working, one headset at a time.