How iCarol Facilitates Remote Work
Technology has made it easier than ever to turn any setting into a contact center, including your workers’ homes. Because iCarol is a web-based solution, it can be used anywhere with an internet connection. iCarol Software empowers employers to not only make remote work possible, but do so without sacrificing service delivery or quality. Now more than ever, especially given the continuity of operations needs during the COVID-19 pandemic and other emergencies we can be sure to experience in the future, it’s time to consider remote work for your agency.
Controlling Access
There are a number of tools in iCarol that help you exercise control over what your users can see or do when working outside of the office. For instance, while any device can sign in to iCarol, you can make it so that only certain devices can access sensitive information such as Client Profiles or Contact Records. Using the Restriction/Certification tool, individual devices can be certified either directly by an iCarol Admin level user, or you can give permissions to a user to download and install a certification tool on the device themselves. iCarol’s Support Team can also authorize specific IP addresses, if you have a particular static IP address that should be allowed to access sensitive areas of the software.
iCarol Admin users can also restrict an individual volunteer or staff member’s movements throughout the solution on a very granular level using Advanced Security Settings found within each individual user Volunteer/Staff Profile. There are five high level security settings, plus numerous advanced security settings that enable or disable even more specific controls over what areas of iCarol a user can access, and what types of tasks they can complete. This way, you can restrict users’ movements in the system which is especially helpful when you aren’t able to supervise a worker in person or wish them to have more limited iCarol capabilities if they are working away from the office.
Connect Your Workforce with Your Mission and Each Other
One objection often heard about remote work, particularly from those who enjoy the socialization that comes with an office setting, is that it can make one feel lonely and isolated. It is very important that remote workers are given opportunities to connect with one another, their supervisor or manager, and the mission or “big picture” of the organization for which they work. Being separated from one’s coworkers physically doesn’t have to lead to separation anxiety for workers who crave or need human connectivity to perform their work.
When logging in to iCarol, all users see a home page that provides a snapshot at what’s going on at their agency. The News section can be used to share the latest information they might need to know, perhaps a new service provider was added to your resource database, or a local TV station is airing a story that will share your helpline number which could lead to a bump in volume. No matter the news, you can put it front and center and be sure your iCarol users are in the know.
Sharing important information with your workers is important, but so is getting your workers to interact with each other and feel like a team. In the Chatboard, volunteers and staff can add to discussions on topics and in forums set up by managers, giving everyone a chance to share ideas, input, and add to conversations. iCarol also provides an Internal Chat feature that allows logged in users to securely chat with one another. This helps iCarol users communicate with their peers or supervisors instantaneously, to ask for advice about a call, get help finding a resource record, or ask their supervisor to silent monitor a difficult chat they just answered.
It’s important to have connectivity not just between your own staff members, but among peers and colleagues across your industry, especially when your industry may be addressing a common challenge like in the case with COVID-19. The iCarol Community is a place where Admin level users of iCarol, typically leaders and managers at the organization, can post messages seen by their peers at similar services worldwide. Networking with these peers can be a great way to learn best practices from one another, share resources, policies, templates, or just receive support from others who are right where you are and can relate to the challenges you are addressing. This feature was recently expanded with a version now available to all iCarol users within the iCarol Help Center.
Provide Supervision and Coaching
Most employees want to be good at what they do, and serve their clients well. That can’t happen without supervision and feedback from one’s manager. You can still provide supervision and effectively coach your workers even if you are in separate places.
There are multiple ways this is accomplished in iCarol. One can be found in your Messaging (Live Chat and SMS/Texting) area of iCarol. All conversations can be silently monitored by managers with the correct permissions in iCarol. This means they can watch and read the conversation as it happens. If the worker appears to be stuck or is going in the wrong direction with the interaction, the supervisor could use Internal Chat to send them a note and get them back on the right track. People with permissions to silent monitor can also join or take over a Live Chat or SMS/Texting conversation entirely if the situation calls for it. Coaching can occur after other interactions, too. Contact Records have an area for authorized users to give both private or public feedback for the specialist to read and learn from. You can always supplement these iCarol tools with an occasional phone meeting as needed to provide supervision and coaching can also help employees feel guided and supported.
Sometimes supervision is a matter of quickly checking to see that your workers are doing their assigned task, or setting in place reminders for these employees. Admin users have access to comprehensive sign on logs so they can check that remote workers are signed into the system when they are supposed to be. You can also set up a number of notifications for your workers – reminding them when the shift calendar is open for signup, when they have a shift coming up, or when a follow-up task is assigned to them. Volunteers and Staff handling incoming Live Chats or SMS/Text messages from your community can be alerted when a new conversation comes through to the queue. This is especially helpful for remote workers who are multi-tasking and cannot be tethered to their workstation, for example if they are doing field work.
Ensure Quality
Ensuring the people who contact your organization receive excellent service and come away feeling helped is a top priority. There are plenty of ways to evaluate remote workers just as you might if they were in the office. Contact Records, logging any type of interaction, can be read to review the content of the documentation. Managers can also ensure the data collection elements are correctly marked, either by reading individual Contact Records, or running reports in iCarol’s Statistics section. The Statistics area also allows you to filter reports by worker, making it simpler to evaluate the documentation of a single volunteer or staff member.
The Random Sampling Surveys feature in iCarol reminds your workers to schedule satisfaction surveys and other follow-up interactions. The results of these surveys can be evaluated to find any gaps in service quality. It’s also easy to check the quality of data curation done by your Resource Manager. iCarol’s Resource Advanced Search and Bulk Editing Tool provides an in-app, table-style way of finding missing data, or information that is not correctly formatted to your style guide.
Quality assurance is a top priority for most managers, and there are many ways in iCarol to check quality and ensure your community is receiving a high level of service, even when that service delivery is happening away from the office.
Invite Community Interaction
The people in your community appreciate and need your services, but how they want to access them is evolving. More people are opting for self-service options when they are made available, such as exploring available services online, or filling out an intake form or screening rather than making a phone call. When your community has self-service options available to them, they get the benefit or your services while reducing direct staff time needed to serve them, and this can be especially helpful for remote work.
The iCarol Public Resource Directory enables use of an embedded resource database/service provider directory on your website where it can be searched or browsed by your web visitors. Since these resource records are pulled directly from iCarol, your community can rest easy knowing the information is thoroughly vetted and well-curated by your resource managers, and is much more reliable than the results they may get by conducting a generic web search. A Public Resource Directory is especially useful during emergencies or disaster response – when your community has the ability for self-service like this, it will decrease the volume of direct contacts on your staff which reduces wait times or abandoned calls, and lessens stress for your staff members.
Public Web Forms, another self-service option, allows community members to visit your website and complete a customized form that, once submitted, appears in iCarol as a completed Contact Record so you can run reports on the collected data, and disposition and follow-up according to your internal processes. It’s a versatile option that is especially useful in emergencies or disasters when your remote work plan may be activated. If your program needs to screen people for program fund disbursement eligibility, for example, you might expect an overwhelming number of calls about the subject. A Public Web Form would be a suitable replacement to speaking with a staff member. Using the form’s built-in screening tools you can assess and communicate eligibility, then forms submitted by eligible recipients are placed in iCarol for easy assignment and follow-up tasks for your staff.
Summary
If your organization is not already offering remote work options, now is the time to consider it. Having the option for your volunteers and staff to work remotely, either on a temporary basis due to continuity of operations planning during an emergency, or on a more permanent basis, offers many benefits to your workers and your organization. And as you can see from reading through this blog, when you use iCarol, you don’t have to sacrifice service quality, proper supervision, or strong communication and connectivity to build a professional workforce that works away from the office setting.
Given the current situation with COVID-19, we can rapidly deploy and offer low-cost, short term options to help with your community response. Contact us for more information and to get started.
Tags: COVID-19, remote work
