Home-Based Agents Don't Degrade Quality

Contact centers are not quite as "central" as they used to be. The old cliche of a big room full of representatives handling phone calls is starting to come apart, thanks to technological developments and to the critical need for new sources of labor. Remote agents and virtual centers are a small but growing component of the industry, especially in the more mature markets.

The fundamental platforms in contact centers have turned so quickly to IP that the availability of remote agents has grown faster than the actual adoption of that staffing model. One reason for the delay is the cultural hesitation among contact center managers about assuring the quality of customer interactions, and the ability to actively manage the staff from afar. In practice, it turns out that these fears are largely unfounded: managers see into each transaction and each agent's performance just as well as they could in a traditional brick-and-mortar center. There is not as much tension between adopting a remote staffing model and maintaining quality as many thought there would be.

To a large degree, remote agents depend on the presence of an IP-ACD infrastructure to connect them to the mother organization. A recent research study pegged the portion of IP-enabled seats in contact centers at just short of 50%, and expected to cross that important threshold in the next few years. The research has found at the same time, multi-sourcing, that is creating a mixed environment including multiple outsourcers or a mix of outsourced and in-house agents, will rise as IP adoption makes contact center virtualization easier to accomplish. Such virtualization will lead the growth of remote agents within enterprises, picking up significantly by the end of the year . The population of remote agents - agents who are part of a call center's infrastructure but don't work inside the walls of the center – is currently between 100 and 150 thousand people.

There are three compelling business cases for setting some part of the agent pool off-site, either in small virtual centers or fully remote.

First and foremost is cost control. Evidence shows that agents stay longer in their jobs, and have higher satisfaction levels, when there is flexibility in how they are deployed. In some very large companies, they have built their entire customer contact workforces out of remote agents because agents who work from home are clearly more vested in maintaining their jobs and their employment status. And as you reduce turnover, you can retain your most able and motivated staff and your costs for new-hire training and recruitment go down.

The second business case is continuity. Remote agents aren't affected when your physical center becomes unavailable; this is a benefit that's often discovered after the fact, rather than factored into the initial decision to decentralize the agent pool.

A third benefit, often neglected is the acquired quality improvement from using a single queue irrespective of the many separate call handling locations. Contact center managers can basically administer the setup from any location with a virtual model. Customers have a much more constant interaction than they do on centers are operating semi-independently under different metrics and management.