Remote operations
Marc Prempain
15 April 2024
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Nowadays, organizational structures are much more complex and harder to manage, with companies switching to remote or hybrid operational models, growing internationally, and expanding their business to various external collaborators. In these ever-changing digital working conditions, strong communication is key. One can improve their business’ team communication with the help of relevant remote collaboration tools that promote business organization, development, and cooperation. What are remote collaboration tools, how can they support companies in their everyday operations, and what essential features should such communication tools have? Let us explain.
Remote collaboration tools have recently become an essential part of the everyday workflow for many and are perpetually evolving with technological innovations. In this new digital hybrid reality, the corporate day-to-day operating model has changed drastically and the workforce had to adapt to preserve team collaboration and further promote optimal communication.
Complex teams with office-based employees, remote workers, freelancers, and consultants, who work on separate projects are much harder to supervise as they need to be simultaneously guided while ensuring that their data remains separate and secure. Consequently, teams working on different projects may be spread around the world and operate in different time zones – but despite the distance, they must communicate in real-time to ensure optimal performance. Company executives and managers also need different levels of visibility into the performance and results of varying projects and teams. They may also need to implement time tracking tools for important tasks. Pulse surveys can help remote workers get the most out of their day.
A quick glance at a pulse survey will show you what your employees are feeling and thinking, which might not be accurately communicated by more traditional forms or feedback methods like employee satisfaction interviews.
This is where remote collaboration tools come in – as they offer a variety of different features and services embeded, you will always be able to find the most suitable tool for yourself and your company. Certain remote collaboration tools, like Trello, allow you to keep track of your employees’ short-term and long-term tasks. Some offer features such as file sharing and storage of documents like Google Drive. Other tools like Slack are more focused on internal communication through instant messaging. There are also project management tools like Monday.com and ProofHub that create platforms for effective and seamless collaboration across all remote teams. With the help of these tools, you can visualize the entire work process and build an agile workflow very easily.
The best thing you can do is apply a combination of all these remote collaboration tools, to be the perfect match for your everyday needs. Communication and collaboration will be far more engaging and efficient for everyone in your remote team once they have the right solutions to do their jobs. Don’t just take our word for it, 90% of employees who work from home indicate that remote collaboration tools are extremely useful for remote work. In fact, teams that use these tools to improve their daily remote collaboration have shown an increase in employee productivity up to 30%.
With all those remote collaboration tools available promoting productivity features, which should you seek to implement to improve your team’s communication?
One of the most common, and most efficient remote collaboration tool features is a call or contact center with expertise routing option, through which co-workers can get in contact with any member of any team, anywhere in the world at the click of a button. If you want to go one step further, think about implementing visual features within your contact centers such as augmented reality and screen sharing. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words – hence video will improve communication in instances where it is too hard to explain something via phone call.
For optimal organization and implementation of knowledge management consider using a ticketing solution that will manage all the documents and data flowing through your business – text, pictures, call recordings, data gathered in digital formats, as well as information taken from real-time video assistance. A well-managed ticketing system adds annotated documents, images, or snapshots, as well as comments, and recorded videos all in one place for every team member concerned to access it quickly from anywhere.
It is important that all members of the team have access to data ticketed, no matter if they are experienced or are just starting their adventure in the company – implementing a knowledge management system, ensures information transfer between new recruits and industry veterans, and promotes a much more seamless communication. What’s more, having a well-connected and experienced workforce that is knowledgeable on the industry’s best practices is key to improving operational efficiency and reducing errors.
Here at ViiBE, we offer you the only remote tool sharing app you will need. Why is that? We imagine a world where challenging issues don’t need to cause extra frustration just because collaborators aren’t in the same place to solve them- hence we created a collaboration app with all of the most essential remote collaboration tools gathered in one place. ViiBE can be accessed via smartphone, tablet, and computer, making the support you need available right at your fingertips, anytime, anywhere, with the click of a button.
ViiBE multilaterally uses the most important remote collaboration tools to help your company reach the most seamless team collaboration and a well-organized workflow. With the built-in ticket tagging system, managers can easily sort and search through tickets to maintain a high-level oversight of their teams. The tickets can be filtered by call center, expertise, user, or by call tags. This organizational system helps managers better supervise day-to-day operations by illuminating worksite trends such as the key challenges that their teams face. This system is additionally beneficial to field operators or support agents who want to revisit how they have previously solved incidents in order to boost their competencies and engage in best knowledge management practices.
Sometimes the customer can clearly describe what they are looking for but many times the support agent’s job is to highlight their needs by showing innovative solutions with remote collaboration tools. A good way to provide an effective service as such is to screen share with clients to guide their actions in real-time. This changes how your sales or support teams interact with collaborators, thus saving time in the problem resolution process.
ViiBE offers different features for quality remote guidance through our video assistance tool. During a ViiBE video call, operators can communicate with experts using a set of collaboration and AR tools, a video conferencing feature, and screen-sharing. The experts can use these functionalities to define the problem more effectively and even remotely guide the operators to resolve the issue on their own – which can subsequently lead to better levels of customer satisfaction and increased first call resolution rates.
Today, 92% of remote employees expect to continue working from home at least once a week, whereas 80% expect to work remotely at least three days a week. It is thus important to continue to strive to ameliorate your remote team management on a daily basis with the help of remote collaboration tools tailored to your business needs. ViiBE’s web app will help you navigate complex interactions to improve both your teams’ performances and the quality of your client services through the use of real-time video support, a ticketing system, and knowledge management practices.
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