The contact center industry has seen significant changes over the past few years. One of the most dominant is that of the offshoring trend that caused tremendous unrest among the customer base of numerous companies’ domestic operations.
For those organizations that have yet to find success in the offshore model, many have turned to homeshoring to cut costs while maintaining higher levels of customer service. Homeshoring has been the focus of certain industry research as it continues to offer significant benefits.
Research firm, IDC (
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Alert) proposed in 2005 that homeshoring – the underestimated sibling of offshoring – could play the role of a certain safe-haven for American workers in a globalized world. Now, the same company indicates that the bursting U.S. housing bubble may actually serve to increase the value of homeshored customer care solutions.
"Housing's headwinds come at a time when American wage earners - a significant portion of which are customer care representatives working at bricks-and-mortar centers - are already facing a score of challenges to their productivity and their wallets," said Stephen Loynd, program manager for Contact Center Services at IDC, in a statement.
"At the same time, service providers need productive, professional, dependable agents like never before. Intriguingly, with regards to the delivery of high-quality customer care, homeshoring therefore becomes even more compelling as a model. In fact, the American home may become increasingly valuable as compared to the American automobile that has long enabled customer care agents to commute to brick-and-mortar centers."
IDC’s most recent homeshoring study found that the current nationwide housing crash could contribute to a new contact center environment that is already in the United States. Creative destruction in the economy may also provide additional momentum toward the development of homeshoring.
The study also found that service providers today need productive, professional, dependable agents to enhance the customer experience. At the same time, wage earners are looking for ways to alleviate the stress of grueling commutes and are now being forced to become more assiduous savers.
According to IDC, the homeshored model may end up becoming increasingly valuable as the American home is becoming an appreciating asset in the form of a new kind of contact center for the future.
The benefits that the homeshoring model can offer to both employees and companies make it worth considering, although it will not work in every situation. Instead, companies must be equipped to not only extend its virtual contact center to the employee’s home, it must also be able to effectively manage the employee and find employees able to be productive at home. A good mix can produce a cost effective model that works for everyone.
The Irony of Homeshoring's Rising Value Amidst a U.S. Housing Bust, updates the market analysis from U.S. Home Based Agent 2005-2010 Forecast and Analysis: Converging Economic Forces to Drive the Expansion of Homeshoring in the United States.
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