In the face of COVID-19, many organizations have had to shut down their contact centers, and send agents to work from home. This has been accomplished on impossible time tables.

One of the big concerns with at-home agents is whether they have the right environment to effectively handle calls. This includes physical environment – do they have a desk, a room free from background noises from children, roommates, pets, etc? Concerns also include home-based agents’ technological environments. While companies are provisioning employees with laptops and headsets, they must rely on the employee’s Internet service provider and Wi-Fi setup.

The at-home technology setup will impact many aspects of the technology setup the agent has. Slow or dropped Internet will impact the agent in many ways, for example sluggish desktop applications, dropped calls - and of course - voice quality.

Voice quality is one of the biggest concerns that enterprises have when sending agents to work from home.

For enterprises using Cyara Pulse today, you have at your fingertips a means to execute basic quality assurance for the voice quality of those agents.
You can set up a very simple test case that allows an at-home agent to call at the beginning of their shift to execute a basic voice quality diagnostic using voice recognition capabilities within Cyara Pulse. Here's how.

An Example of an At-Home Agent Inbound Test Case with Pulse

1. The Cyara Platform calls the agent at a specified number at the beginning of their shift.
2. The prompt plays, saying: “This is a work-from-home test. Please repeat the following to complete this confidence test: I am a work-from-home agent.”
3. The agent speaks, saying “I am a work-from-home agent” and Cyara evaluates based on speech recognition whether voice quality meets expected thresholds.
4. Cyara instructs the agent to hang up.
5. If the test fails, the associated Pulse Dashboard will provide indication to the contact center manager or production operations team.

Below is an example of that Inbound test case.

And here’s an example an Outbound test case, which follows the same set of prompts, but is triggered by the at-home agent calling into Cyara at a convenient time of their choosing.

At-home agents can repeat this test if they are experiencing any voice quality issues, or if customers have reported any voice quality issues.

While this doesn’t provide ongoing monitoring for voice quality, it does provide a point-in-time validation that an agent’s system meets your requirements for voice quality, which is a valuable data point as part of a holistic quality assurance program.

If you’d like to learn more about Cyara Pulse, contact us. And, if you’re interested in attending some of our short, hands-on webinars focusing on different aspects of CX Assurance, check out Xchange Online.