Broadband has become ubiquitous in the United States. According to Pew (News - Alert) Research this year, the number of adult Americans with broadband internet access jumped 15 percent over the prior year, allowing for growth in work-at-home individuals.

In following this trend, call center software provider, Five9 Inc. announced that the National Telecommuting Institute, Inc., or “NTI,” a non-profit organization that provides work-at-home jobs for Americans with physical disabilities, will be using Five9’s Virtual Call Center technology for its work-at-home call center agents.

In a recent interview with TMCnet, Five9’s Vice President of Product Management, David Van Everen, said that, as a customer of Five9, NTI adds value by bundling Five9’s product with other services, such as call center agents.

And, by selecting Five9’s system for its work-at-home agents, NTI has created a workforce system that that includes highly qualified work-at-home call center agents and virtual call center technology packaged together in an affordable, efficient, easy-to-deploy package specifically targeted at call centers with seasonal or campaign-driven resource requirements.

“By basing their service on Five9, NTI can offer a flexible end-to-end solution to customers from the outset and let them leverage highly skilled call center expertise that NTI brings to the table without the high costs and complexities otherwise involved in deploying a call center software,” Jim Dvorkin, chief technology officer of Five9, said. “Unlike premise based solutions, Five9 has been designed from the ground up to provide our customers a virtual call center with geographical independence, while providing seamless management and administration of this environment.” 

However, the involvement, as Van Everen points out, is not just beneficial for NTI. In fact, the use of Five9’s systems by the institution is a significant move for the company, and for the call center industry.

NTI provides a call center outsourcing function to their customers, using Five9’s product as the core infrastructure for the call center. 

“This application of our on-demand solution within the Outsourced Call Center industry is a traditional strength for Five9, and offers companies greater business agility and lower operational costs by leveraging the services provided by call center outsourcers such as NTI,” Van Everen said.

And, since NTI was already using Five9's platform internally for segments of the institutions own virtual workforce, implementing a system for its work-at-home agents was a no brainer. 

“We had started with Five9 for a special project and found that using on-demand call center software was much easier and more cost-efficient compared to the premise-based solutions we had been using in-house,” M.J. Willard, NTI’s executive director, said.

After suffering through a tough year economically, with the recession taking its toll on many in the industry, Five9’s focus on building strong relationship with companies, providing software systems designs to cater to the current economic recession, the company’s strong customer base continued to prove its systems are at the toehold of the call center industry. 

“From the beginning, our solution facilitated geographically dispersed work-at-home call center agents,” Van Everen said. “By providing greater staffing flexibility for call center operators and more loyal call center agents, call centers can reduce agent turnover, thereby reducing costs and enabling better customer service.”

“The recession actually stimulated demand for our products, as companies looked to cut costs by switching from premise-based call center infrastructure to on-demand virtual call centers,” he added.

With an increasing number of large call centers issuing RFP’s and expecting to see on-demand solutions like Five9 in the responses, the recession has forced companies to take a new approach to business solutions, one that NTI is currently doing by expanding its work-at-home agent capabilities.