October 2002

By Tim Houlne, Working Solutions

What are the biggest challenges you face in your call center today? If you started a list, do your challenges include recruiting, training, scheduling or attrition? Do loaded agent costs, FMLA, new technology budgets, HR issues, service levels or seasonal and event call spikes concern you? Call center managers today have a solution to these problems ' remote agents are the answer.

Running today's competitive call centers demands juggling a multitude of challenges simultaneously, while still searching for ways to reduce costs and improve the customer experience. At a minimum, staffing must be flexible enough to allow for the addition of extra agents during peak volumes, special promotions, new product launches and holiday or seasonal spikes.

Companies looking for alternative options to traditional call center challenges need look no further. The remote agent is the viable force to help win the call center revolution. It is not new ' this tried-and-true method currently supports call centers throughout the nation, from leading recognizable name brands to local operations. 

While reviewing call center concerns, keep one thing in mind...call centers should be all about the customer. With an increasingly shrinking world, call centers must operate 24/7, with agents ready to take calls at any hour of the day or night. At the end of the day, ask yourself, 'Did the customer have a pleasurable experience?' Allow a virtual call center to deliver that experience to your customers.

Call Center? Expense Center? Contact Center?
Call centers are often viewed as the 'poor stepchild' of the organization. Executive management considers them an expense center ' essentially the call center Cinderella story. If that's the perception a call center manager is fighting, take heart, there is hope, but you need to take action.

If you are willing to challenge the status quo, start off by showing your organization's executive powers that a 'call center' is a misnomer. A call center more accurately serves as a contact center for the company. In most cases, a call center is the company's only line of communication with customers.

Consider the function of the call center in the overall scheme of the organization. Call center agents probably speak with 100 times as many customers as a highly praised sales team. Use your call center as a customer contact point and watch it play a critical role in determining the strategic future of an organization.

Call centers have experienced a revolutionary growth period in recent years and are viewed more and more as cornerstones for many organizations. The question for call center executives today is ' Is your call center the cornerstone for your company?

Rank-And-File Agents
More companies are turning to remote agent outsourcing as a long-term solution or alternative to their staffing needs. A Jupiter Media Metrix report titled 'Broadband Audience: Maximizing Revenue from the New Mainstream' (Jan. 2002) found that nearly one-third of call centers are evaluating the implementation of a remote agent workforce. Nearly 39 percent of the 512 call center executives surveyed said their companies plan to use remote agents within the next two years; 65 percent said their companies will use them 'at some point.'

Call centers create opportunities for growth, so how are companies addressing the challenges associated with a call center operation? The call center industry has always been plagued with high turnover and difficulty finding qualified workers. Attaining remote workers has become a reality and a fix for productive staffing solutions.

When comparing remote call center agents to traditional agents, the Jupiter survey found 42 percent of remote workers have a college degree or higher, compared with 17 percent of traditional agents. Twenty-seven percent of remote agents have more than five years' experience, compared to 12 percent of their in-house counterparts.

Call center managers employing a remote workforce have noted a 12 percent increase in productivity. The main reason for this increase in productivity may be that there are fewer interruptions in the home office as opposed to the traditional call center environment. The fact that telecommuters are more comfortable in their own environment and are avoiding the stress of commuting on busy freeways and city streets may also contribute to their increased productivity, proving that productive agents make for productive call centers.

Perhaps hand-in-hand with increased productivity is a marked increase in employee job satisfaction and employee retention. Staffing is one of the most pressing issues facing call center managers today. A recent ITAC (International Telework Association and Council) survey showed that 25 percent of employees would change companies if the new company offered a telecommuting alternative, some even accepting a lower wage for no commute.

In today's mobile world, it's not uncommon for families to move from one geographic region to another in pursuit of better schools, better property values or spousal relocation. Companies that employ a remote agent solution can retain their workforce, no matter where they stake their headquarters.

Many companies that use remote agents are reporting lower than average annual turnover rates of 8 percent or lower. Retaining your workforce, as call center managers know, can directly reduce recruiting and training costs. The International Telework Association & Council forecasts that telecommuters will number some 30 million by 2004.

In review, the benefits of a remote agents program include: improved retention of key employees and as a result, reduced hiring and training costs, flexible schedules to meet customers' needs, greater opportunity to employ handicapped and homebound workers, reduced employee salaries, reduction in required office space, and the ability to mitigate weather-related disasters by using agents in other geographic areas.

Once a call center manager makes the decision to engage a remote agents solution, an entirely new set of issues to address is suddenly in place ' namely, technology issues.

The Technology Of Remote Agents 
Since companies are now adding network-based call centers and IP-enabled CRM applications, technology is no longer an issue. What if the remote office is a home? No problem ' the technology works and remote agents can be managed using the same IP-based systems in place for managing the existing workforce. The proliferation of broadband in homes delivers bandwidth equal to company networks. Virtual private networks (VPNs) can guarantee secure access to information, company applications and customer data.

Although technology is only an enabler in the remote agent model, three specific areas of concern always surface in a discussion involving the use of remote agents.
' Training,
' Voice and data distribution, and
' Quality monitoring.

Training. The key to training is real-time interaction between trainer and trainee, regardless of whether it is in a training room, real-time role-playing, an online chat room, instant chat, telephone, interactive document sharing or data collaboration.
In this day and age it's quite common for multiple training sessions to take place in different locations via video telephone or closed-circuit live broadcast. Gone are the days when companies relied on groups of people all sitting in the same standard-issue training room at the same time with an instructor speaking from behind a podium with the requisite overheads. Training programs across the board have been moving toward interactive, goal-oriented sessions that require active participation from the trainee. In part, advances in training over the last decade have substantially eased the way to train remote agents.

Voice and data distribution. To a layperson, the notion of routing thousands of calls originating from one number to hundreds of locations may be mind-boggling. In reality, delivering voice, data and e-mail capabilities directly to the homes of thousands of virtual remote agents can be as simple as signing on to your favorite Web page. With automatic call distributors (ACDs), limitless communication platforms can be delivered directly to a home office via a single channel or over PSTN (public switched telephone network). This ensures a high-quality voice delivery system with interactive, real-time communication via the Internet. 

These systems are not limited to premise- based hardware solutions. A new wave of application service providers (ASPs) has emerged that provides hosted solutions for managing a distributed workforce with voice and data platforms. These network-based solutions all include the critical aspects of essential telephony and data applications needed to operate a call center ' infrastructure solutions that you can rent, lease or pay by the minute. Such ASPs include Ineto, White Pajama, MCI Web Center, My ACD and Echopass.

Quality monitoring. The same technology that delivers and routes information to remote agents at their home offices also allows supervisors to view real-time and historic data relative to all agent and customer activity. This capability provides managers and supervisors a clear view of their call center performance, regardless of where the agent is sitting. Digital recording capabilities can be set to record calls and screen keystroke information so managers have a complete snapshot of the transaction, even in a remote environment.

Employees Versus Virtual Contractors
Any business-savvy person knows the cost savings associated with contractors versus employees: lowered payroll costs, insurance-free labor, a flexible workforce that allows for radical adjustments in size and hours of coverage.

So you want the benefit of a remote call center and the cost savings of contract agents? Seek a legal opinion. There are clear rules laid out by the IRS that differentiate an employee versus an independent contractor. Make sure you are compliant with the IRS rules before you decide how you will deploy remote agents for your call center.

Companies Putting Virtual Call Centers To Work
Rapid developments in technology in the last few years have resulted in a new call center business service provider sector: virtual remote agent service providers. These companies specializing in providing trained, remote agents for a variety of call center solutions, from outbound calls to inbound reservations, offer call center managers the best of both worlds ' outsourced, remote agents.

Perhaps most useful to call center managers is the ultimate flexibility of these service providers. Because these providers run an entirely remote operation of multiple agents trained in multiple areas, they have the ability to quickly scale up or down to meet spikes, seasonal fluctuations, overflow calls or step in to assist in emergency situations.

So successful are the virtual agent service providers that some companies have all but gotten rid of their in-house call centers in lieu of virtual agent contractors. Other companies employ virtual agent service providers to cope with seasonal call spikes or promotional planned spikes.

Augmenting existing support operations, scalability, flexibility and seamless integration are all part of the value proposition these providers offer the call center manager. Easily overlaying an existing in-house call center, many managers report equal, and sometimes-higher, service levels from remote contract agents compared to their in-house agent staff. 

The Last Word
The playing field of the call center environment is changing dramatically. Many companies recognize the benefits of incorporating the use of remote agents as a viable and often preferable option to staffing requirements. New customer-focused models are evolving that challenge the basic fundamentals of operating brick and mortar call centers and question the realities of managing the workforce and infrastructure.

CRM strategies must include call centers and require scalable, flexible, economical solutions for satisfying and delighting customers to create long-term company loyalty. Traditional customer interaction centers come with a host of expenses that can strap an already tight sales or support budget. Remote agents can offer call center executives and managers an option that can reduce overhead while improving performance metrics.

Want to build a business case for remote agents? Be sure to explore the benefits of leveraging a remote agent workforce while demonstrating the positive impact to the balance sheet and the bottom line. Talk about reducing turnover, reducing salaries, hiring educated agents, reducing facilities costs, increasing service levels and having the ability to service peak call arrival patterns. If you are a call center manager or executive, the argument is here.

Are remote agents worth exploring in your call center? The call center revolution has begun; look at which companies are using remote agents and you can see who is winning the war. 

Tim Houlne has more than 14 years' experience in the teleservices, technical support and warranty management industries. In his position as CEO of Working Solutions, Houlne has been one of the driving forces behind the consistent, structured growth of the virtual service company of more than 16,000 remote agents.

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