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Maximize Agent DesktopSecurity
When you send agents home to work, they are no longer working within the secure confines of your corporate building and network. You may have seamless, eight-layer firewalls in place, as well as comprehensive systems and applications security for your brick-and-mortar contact center – protection that agents likely aren’t even aware of. In contrast, when agents work remotely, they leave these controls behind, so you need to re-create them and shift some security burdens to agent shoulders.

Your choice in technology platform greatly impacts the amount of effort required to achieve appropriate levels of agent desktop security. The good news is, when your platform supports the right combination of virtual technologies, you can achieve height­ened security oversight and stronger controls than is possible in traditional contact center settings.

The first step is to educate agents about security common sense and heighten their awareness about the need for security. Set up programs to educate your staff about security and the responsibilities they will have as agents working from home. Review and role play common social engineer­ing strategies designed to trick them into providing callers with sensitive information. And communicate security standards that must complied with as a prerequisite for employment. For example, LiveOps requires that its agents follow the "Six Steps to Protect Your PC":

• Turn on an Internet firewall

• Keep your operating system up to date

• Install and maintain antivirus software

• Install and maintain antispyware software

• Enable strong passwords

• Always lock unattended PCs

The goal is to make security a part of every agent’s thinking before you send them home.

Best Practice #2: Implement tight desktop and data security – and validate it regularly to ensure the integrity of agent systems.
Most likely, the security systems that you use to protect agent PCs internally will not work for agents working from home. So you need to "push" enter­prise security down to home users and constantly monitor that it is in place and working. In addition, you need a way to be sure that you’ve limited each agent’s ability to see, touch, copy, and manipulate data.

By far the easiest and most effective way to implement tight desktop and data security is to deploy a contact center platform with built-in security, data access controls, and monitoring capabilities. For example, LiveOps has developed Secure Desktop, which helps to secure the data that agents handle. The platform provides each agent with a secure, virtual, encrypted workspace (or desktop) that allows them to access data in a secured and highly controlled environment. It also disables cut-and-paste features and prevents agents from printing data or saving it to fixed and removable drives. Secure Desktop also helps to ensure that only agent computers that meet LiveOps’ rigorous security standards are allowed to log on to the LiveOps contact center platform.

Every time an agent’s computer attempts to connect to Secure Desktop, it must complete in-depth antivirus, personal firewall, system integrity, and service pack compliance checks. Secure Desktop can also help detect and block key loggers and screen scraper viruses as they execute in real-time. All agent desktops can be remotely monitored and managed by the LiveOps Secure Desktop Dashboard, which LiveOps customers can access on a 24x7 basis.

The alternative to leveraging security built into a contact center platform is to proactively maintain the security capabilities of each home-based PC via remote software upgrades. This may require that you own all agent PCs and take them back when an agent no longer works for the com­pany. Maintaining security in this way is a far more complicated and costly way to ensure adequate agent desktop security.

Best Practice #3: Manage your distributed perimeter with a "need to know" policy and use tools to control data access.
Generally, the more tasks and func­tions that your agents have to perform, the greater the access they need to your systems and data. The key to maintaining tight security is to limit their access to data and applica­tion types on a "need to know" basis. For instance, if they need access to credit card numbers to handle a customer call, you may choose to only allow them to view the last four digits.

The easiest way to implement this functionality is to leverage a contact center platform with sophisticated data access controls built in. For example, LiveOps uses a feature called Secure Exchange to ensure highly sensitive data never leaves our environment. As customers speak and

record sensitive information, agents can’t listen in. This data is then stored in PCI-compliant vaults, ensuring the tightest security. Alternatively, you can have agents collect the information and enter it into directly into your contact center system. But this isn’t optimal, as it provides a way for remote agents to write the information down, which means you lose control of the data.

Best Practice #4: Provide remote agents with 24x7 support to address security issues.
One of the best investments you can make to improve agent desktop security is to provide agents with 24x7 security support. If agents have to look through manuals when security questions arise, the likelihood of them handling issues correctly decreases considerably; in many cases, they don’t have time to look up the right answer, so they take their best guess. But if you make it seem as if security experts are just a cubicle away and ready to help, LiveOps has found that agents are highly likely to pick up the phone, talk to an expert, and follow through on expert advice on everything from how to handle social engineering strategies to dealing with system errors. Ideally, you want to equip these support resources with remote access tools so they can access agent PCs, if needed.

You can also complement this 24x7 support by establishing of a virtual community that focuses on security; sometimes, agents prefer to reach out to a peer who has greater experience with security issues – for example, though a security forum and chat room.

Best Practice #5: Raise security visibility by proactively measuring and communicating security metrics and maintaining a 360-degree view of agent activities.
In our experience, agent desktop security quality goes down when you’re not able to regularly audit home-based agent PCs. That’s why you need a way to track related metrics in real time, such as how many PCs were infected with viruses and if security is going up or down in real time. Armed with this insight, you can take proac­tive steps to tighten security, as well as communicate your overall security status to the agent community so they can take responsibility for it.

At the same time, you need a way to constantly monitor agent behavior as a way of keeping agents on their toes – just as you do in a traditional contact center. You can re-create this oversight virtually by deploying remote monitor­ing of agent screens, monitoring calls, and more. When agents know that everything they do is always available for auditing, it helps to ensure their best security behavior.

Align Compensation with Performance or Talk Time
As stated previously, in a virtual contact center world, you can’t physically observe agents to make sure they are maximizing their productivity or effectiveness. The way you measure people’s performance ends up driving their behavior. So if you are paying agents by the hour, you could poten­tially be paying agents for unnecessary downtime – or living with sub-par productivity and performance levels.

The best way to address this issue is to pay per minute of talk time or for actual performance (for example, based on number of sales). Once you define the metrics by which people will be measured and compensated, you want to use your contact center platform to measure these metrics in real time and pay agents accordingly.

The business impacts of aligning compensation with performance or talk time can be significant. For example, VForce – a LiveOps customer who uses our platform to support a team of 60 home-based agents – realized a 20% increase in agent productivity by simply changing their compensation structure. They found that agents weren’t calling the next customer as quickly as they could and were taking too many breaks. Moving to a perfor­mance-based pay structure enabled Vforce to align agent behavior with company objectives.

Foster a Sense of Community throughVirtual Communications
Successful virtual contact centers find ways to recreate – and even improve upon – the types of peer-to-peer interactions that agents experience in traditional contact centers. As a best practice, provide remote agents with multiple ways to ask questions of other agents, stay connected to the com­pany, and build a meaningful social network. For example, you can support online chats and establish in-house forums so that agents can talk offline about anything without fear of reper­cussions (barring obscene language and personal attacks on others). Businesses can also implement a peer-to-peer "coaching" process whereby agents can listen in on calls and provide constructive feedback to other agents – feedback that can help improve your customer satisfaction and service level scores.

Establishing multiple, open lines of communication not only increases job satisfaction and retention, but also gives management an inside view into areas of agent frustration. By monitoring these communica­tions, you can proactively identify and address issues in order to reduce turnover and foster community loyalty. Responding to agent needs can go a long way toward making home-based agents feel connected to the community and valued for the services they provide. These communications also empower the community to self regulate. For example, of an agent doesn’t have a great attitude and vents on forums, other agents can respond and turn the situation around without management intervention.

Learn More
Taken together, these best practices are vital to ensuring a smooth and successful transition from a traditional contact center to a virtual contact center staffed with home-based agents. And in nearly all cases, applying them is much easier and less costly when you deploy a state-of-the-art contact center platform designed from the ground up to support virtual work.

For example, the LiveOps On-Demand Contact Center Platform offers a comprehensive, SaaS-based contact center solution that you can deploy in days. The platform supports every process required to manage a virtual call center. Intuitive, fully integrated applications provide unprecedented visibility and control into every call center activity – right down to individual agent performance and calls. Business users are empowered to control the effectiveness of their call centers by centrally managing every call center function in real time. And call center management and agents can log in from anywhere in the world using just a PC and an Internet browser.

About LiveOps:
LiveOps, Inc., a company focused on virtual contact center technology and services, enables businesses to deliver high performance call centers and high quality customer contact in the most cost-effective means possible. Its on-demand contact center applications provide an enterprise-scale virtual call center infrastructure, while its network of 16,000 agents can represent companies in an effective and professional manner. LiveOps'' solutions allow for greater flexibility, quality, scalability, control and cost savings.