Customer Service Training Tools: Home-Based Call Centers Are Growing

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Customer Service Advice

Home-Based Call Centers Are Growing

Fielding calls with home agents "gives you the ability to staff with local people who speak the language well, that have the same culture, the same trends, that basically live in the same place," said Gartner's Esteban Kolsky. "That's very appealing to most customers."

TIBCO provides an industry leading solution for enterprise-scale Business Process Management that is capable of solving the challenges of automating routine tasks and exception handling, as well as the challenges of orchestrating sophisticated and long-lived activities and transactions that involve people and systems across organizational boundaries.

"Hello, is Jennifer there? Jennifer at extension 43?"

Nancy Allor tilts back from the workstation Latest News about Workstations at the foot of her king-size bed, momentarily puzzling the voice on her headset. A soap opera flickers silently on the TV behind her. Inside the otherwise hushed suburban townhouse, Allor's parakeet chirps.

Whoever Jennifer is, she's not here.

"I'm sorry," Allor says, grinning. "I'm in a call center Latest News about call center and we can't transfer. But I'd be happy to help you."

Americans dialing for customer serviceRelevant Products/Services from eGain are increasingly being connected to workers like Allor -- call center agents without call centers. The move to home-based agents, working from bedrooms and kitchen tables across the country, started as a trickle in the late 1990s. But it is picking up speed as a low-cost alternative to normal call centers.

It's not as cheap as offshoring, the shift of operations to countries with pools of low-paid but well-educated workers. But companies bent on cutting costs also see home agents as a way to avoid some of the consumer complaints common to overseas call centers.

More than 100,000 U.S. workers now field customer service calls from home, according to a recent report by consulting firm IDC. Over the next two years, one of every 10 U.S. call centers is likely to shift at least partly to home-based agents, according to another report by consultant Gartner Inc.

Some dub it "homeshoring."

Call in an order to 1-800-Flowers.com Inc Latest News about 1-800-Flowers.com. and there's a good chance it will be handled by a home-based agent. The same is true for consumers calling The Vermont Teddy Bear Co. or to book a room at a Wyndham International Inc. hotel.

Retailer Office Depot Inc Latest News about Office Depot. is closing 10 of its 12 U.S. call centers this year, replacing 900 full-time agents with home-based agents. They include Allor, an agent for Plano, Texas-based Working Solutions Inc., one of several virtual call center firms.

Cutting costs is not the only selling point of virtual call centers, but it's a large part of the appeal.

Getting rid of call center buildings saves money on real estate. Most of the home-based agents work part-time or as independent contractors, so employers don't pay for healthinsurance Latest News about insurance and benefits.

Unions, which represent workers at some large call centers, will be hard-pressed to reach workers spread across thousands of homes, analysts say.

In addition, home-based agents for most companies pay for their own equipment. And companies say the workers are better qualified and more content than those at regular call centers, saving on recruitment and training.

"We are actually realizing some pretty good double-digit savings from this," says Julian Carter, the Office Depot executive in charge of the call center switch. The company expects savings of $15 million a year.

It's not just the cost savings, though.

Fielding calls with home agents "gives you the ability to staff with local people who speak the language well, that have the same culture, the same trends, that basically live in the same place," said Esteban Kolsky, a Gartner analyst. "That's very appealing to most customers."

Some of the biggest advocates of virtual call centers are home-based agents, who say the arrangement provides flexibility unavailable in office jobs. Customers of 1-800-Flowers .com, for example, have no way of knowing that when agent Barbara Leeper-Zilk picks up their call at her home in Littleton, Colo., she often is doing a load of laundry between calls.

"I get up at 10 to 6, let the dogs out, grab a bottle of water, go upstairs and turn on the computer and I'm at work," says Leeper-Zilk, one of nearly 4,000 agents working for Alpine Access Inc., a Golden, Colo.-based virtual call center firm.

Leeper-Zilk first signed on for extra spending money. Many other home agents are mothers of young children who work during school hours, and older people who want to work limited hours or pick up supplemental income.

"If I was to have a desk job and was required to sit seven out of eight hours, that would be too much for me," said Pam Brackett, who takes calls from her home in Bellingham, Mass., and whose daily routine is limited by severe rheumatoid arthritis. "If it wasn't for doing this, I wouldn't be doing anything."

The virtual call center concept has been around since the 1990s, but companies were reluctant to give up the managerial control and supervision of a brick-and-mortar call center.

One of the earliest adopters was JetBlue Airways Inc., in 2000. The airline now has a 900-agent network of work-at-home reservation agents, all in the Salt Lake City area.

"We have this pretty much down to a science of where our peak demand is and how many hours we need on the phones," said Steve Mayne, JetBlue's manager of business processes. Agents "can bid for an ideal schedule, but it's awarded on seniority. We tell them they need to be flexible."

Not everybody -- or every home -- is suited to call center work. Companies make that clear, and frequently listen in on calls to ensure agents follow the rules.

"This is not alternative childcare. This is a special work environment -- no kids, no pets, zero tolerance," said Tim Houlne, CEO of Working Solutions. "We can't afford for the dog to start barking when the FedEx man comes to the door."

Still, Houlne says, compared to a regular call center the work-at-home arrangement requires a level of trust that has strong appeal to many people.

"Instead of bringing people in to work, we would bring the work out to them," said Jim Ball, co-founder of Alpine Access. "We basically have an unlimited pool available to us."