The Home-based Agent, Properly Managed, Is a Viable Alternative to Offshore Outsourcing

The home-based contact center agent is a bit of phenomena today. While the call center industry is fairly similar the world over – customers are customers and generally want the same things – the home-based agent model would appear to be a uniquely American thing.

According to a report on business process outsourcing (BPO) trends by analyst group Ovum (News - Alert), the number of home-based contact center agents in the U.S. will rise next year. This is on top of brisk growth in home agents in recent years. Curiously enough, however, this is not the case in other nations. Ovum expects that the U.S. will account for 90 percent of third-party home-based agent deployments in 2014, with home agent deployments remaining the same or even shrinking in Australia, Canada and Western Europe.

Why is this? There are a number of reasons. For many organizations, outsourcing to foreign nations – once the business standard for keeping costs down – doesn’t work so well in the U.S. Whether it’s an intolerance of foreign accents, or a patriotism among customers that says it’s wrong to outsource jobs during a depressed economy, Americans simply don’t like dealing with foreign contact centers. Add to this the fact that rising costs in places such as India and the Philippines have begun to erase the financial advantages of foreign call center outsourcing, and many contact centers are left with a conundrum. How do we keep costs low and quality high without using offshore business process outsourcing firms?

For many companies, the answer has been home-based agents. With just a high-speed Internet connection, a PC and a headset, anyone living nearly anywhere can become a call center agent. It saves companies the cost of maintaining or expanding physical premises, keeps insurance premiums low and means organizations have the entire nation to pick from as a labor pool (as opposed to only workers within a 30-mile radius).

According to experts, the home-based model is beginning to spur the contact center technology marketplace, particularly the third-party outsourcing firms that use home-based agents and the workforce optimization solutions that keep track of home workers.

“The trend toward supporting remote workers has also spawned innovations and new creative ways of working that have improved the industry’s thinking about managing call centers,”  says Felix Serrano, SVP and General Manager of Work@Home Solutions for BPO firm Sitel. “The ways in which you hire, train, and manage are being rewritten with new best practices; the bar for security is being raised and the cost structure required to run a world class operation is being redefined. The proof is in the pudding – the call center industry is seeing an increased adoption of outsourcing from in-house centers that have not kept pace with these innovations and want to leverage company’s expertise and capital investments in the call center of today.”

Using third-party companies that make use of home-based agents can create a happy medium. Companies need not worry about hiring and training their own home-based agents, which can be a daunting prospect. They can trust their customer care to expert organizations that already have the home-based agents in place. The organizations have done the recruiting, hiring and training themselves. Moreover, they have the technologies in place – think workforce optimization solutions – to ensure that home-based agents are, indeed, working, and they have the quality control processes to keep service levels high. Most important, they are able to pass on the savings they are experiencing from using home-based agents to your business.