Call center providers West Corporation reported yesterday that their home agent headcount has now grown above 5,500 over the past month and shown no signs of slowing down. Instead of sending jobs to foreign locales such as India or the Philippines to save money, call center providers are increasingly turning to home-based agents who drink their own coffee, pay for their own electricity and select their own elevator music.
Not that either offshoring or the physical call center is a thing of the past. “During the fourth quarter, we invested $21.6 million in capital expenditures to open a new contact center in Ohio,” notes Paul Mendlik, Chief Financial Officer of West. Also, “During 2004, we added 2,500 workstations, including 1,300 international workstations.”
As well as being a political football, security and quality concerns about offshore outsourcing are driving the homeshoring trend. Mark Frei, senior vice president of West Corporation reports that West began routing calls to home-based agents in the early 1990s (“well before today’s politicized discussion of offshoring,” he notes).
And “while offshoring usually does provide a low-cost alternative to traditional domestic call centers,” Frei says, “many companies are reluctant to migrate offshore due to quality issues and lack of flexibility.” West currently offers a combination offshore-home agent package they call “multishore.”
According to a 2003 Dieringer Research Group survey, the number of employees working out of their homes has grown 40 percent since 2001 to approximately 24 million people. These are typically highly educated, motivated individuals who want increased flexibility in their work schedules without the loss of productivity and expense associated with long commutes.
Other companies heavy into homeshoring report greater success in targeting agents with specific skill sets no matter where they live, better employee performance, less turnover and the ability to roll with seasonal fluctuations.
Homeshoring is becoming popular in other technology fields as well. Chicago-based Decision Design specializes in minimizing the damages incurred through failed offshoring in software. They help repatriate all of a software development task that failed to deliver expected returns while being handled offshore, whether due to simple time zone differences, cultural and communication differences or other reasons. According to Offshoring Digest, Decision Design has been earning money doing this, sometimes called “backsourcing,” for over ten years.
Britain’s Guardian newspaper reports interest in homeshoring there as well. The Corporate Social Responsibility Foundation – imagine if America had one of those – has calculated that the estimated 18,000 jobs lost to offshoring in financial services alone will cost the British economy over $3 billion over the next decade.
Homeshoring advocates in Britain are claiming that domestic employees can be found for the same cost as Indian offshore labor. Large-scale homeshoring has yet to catch on in Britain, however.
In their report “An Alternative to Offshore Outsourcing: The Emergence of the Home-Based Agent,” IDC estimates that there are currently upwards of 100,000 home-based phone reps in the United States. Admitting that much of their information is “anecdotal,” IDC promise a more formal study soon.
David Sims is contributing editor and CRM Alert columnist for TMCnet.
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