Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
The Home-based Agent Model Grows in U.S. Call Centers
While many companies have found success with contact center outsourcing to foreign shores to save money, for other companies, it simply hasn’t worked well. Depending on a company’s customer demographic, an offshore contact center might be a great way to provide affordable multichannel customer support, or it may be a great way to confuse and alienate customers. Many organizations that sought contact center support offshore as a way to trim the budget found it necessary to return service to U.S. shores.
This, of course, doesn’t mean these organizations gave up on the idea of saving money. Running a contact center is an expensive prospect with sky-high overhead requirements. For this reason, companies interested in saving money are increasingly turning to home-based agents, a concept sometimes referred to as “home shoring.””
According to IDC (News - Alert), there were more than 300,000 home-based call center agents in the U.S. in 2013, and while figures for 2014 aren’t yet available, most experts agree that the numbers will continue to escalate. Cost is one of the reasons – using cloud-based solutions, companies can home-based agents up and running quickly with little to no upfront investment – but there is also evidence that the home-based model attracts better workers and therefore boosts agent retention and customer satisfaction, according to a recent blog post by Courtenay Thomas of Columbus, Ohio-based cloud contact center solutions provider Bolder Thinking.
“When companies open themselves up to hiring remote agents, they are presented with a much bigger talent pool,” wrote Thomas. “By hiring remote agents, companies can be more selective in who they hire and recruit talented employees. According to Gartner (News - Alert), Inc., 80 percent of remote agents have completed some level of college, whereas only 34 percent of on premise employees had.”
It’s not uncommon for companies running brick-and-mortar call centers to “tap out” suitable agent pools and find out they’re unable to hire more high-quality workers in an existing location. With a remote agent model, this doesn’t happen. Workers are also able to be more flexible with schedules, which benefits the company’s workforce management and scheduling processes. Home-based agents can be brought online during unexpected call volume spikes as quickly as they can sit in front of their computers and log in.
“By allowing agents to work remotely, there are less restrictions to when agents can take calls,” wrote Thomas. “Remote agents are able to work odd shifts to support busy seasons and when there are spikes or drops in call volumes. This thereby increases the amount of agents able to provide service and also decreases call wait times and abandoned calls.”
Many companies investigate the idea of the home agent model based on costs. Often, they find far more benefits than cost. Dramatic improvements in the customer experience and better call center metrics are often a welcome, if unintended, result.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi