Any organisation with a contact centre will know just how tricky it is to balance the cost of providing the contact service with the quality of service itself. Customers want a fast and well-informed service whenever it’s convenient for them, but providing that service can be very costly. In order to cut those costs – about 70% of which are for call centre staff – many businesses have offshored their contact centres to regions where workers are available more cheaply.

For a growing number of organisations, however, this cost reduction strategy is failing. To start with, wage bills have not remained static in popular call centre locations such as India, where costs are rising at about 15% per year for skilled operators. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to recruit and retain staff with the right skills and experience at a cost that’s sustainable. As a result, businesses are forced to rely on less experienced workers.

What’s more, even if an organisation is prepared to pay for the experience they need in the call centre, increasingly they find that the people with the right skills and experience aren’t the sort of people who would consider working in a call centre. This is where a new strategy, ‘homeshoring’, is emerging as a successful alternative to the traditional call centre model.

What is homeshoring?
Homeshoring is similar to homeworking, in that you have an employee working from home. However, it differs in two crucial ways. Firstly, a ‘homeshored’ worker – sometimes known as a ‘home advisor’ – is an employee that acts as an integrated part of an organisation’s contact centre strategy. As far as a customer is concerned, their location is transparent - they’re just somebody who can answer their questions or solve their problems.

Secondly, the type of person involved in homeshoring is different. While there are many employees that work from home from time to time, the point of homeshoring is to enable expert staff who wouldn’t normally work in a call centre, to provide their expertise in a call centre capacity. This includes people who simply don’t live near a central call centre or who wouldn’t see themselves in that role; older workers and the semi-retired; people who want to fit work around family life; and people with disabilities. The homeshored contact centre seat is available to anyone with the expertise to fill it.

This more flexible, inclusive approach to the service advisor position is enabled by increasingly cost-effective, high-performance broadband connectivity, and the emergence of new standards for converged voice, video and data communication such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). This provides the framework and vital functionality (such as presence awareness) to bring distributed advisors together into a seamless response team, transparent to customers.

Homeshoring at Broxtowe
One innovative example of the combined social and business benefit of homeshoring is at the Broxtowe estate in Nottingham, UK. Broxtowe is an area of relative economic deprivation, with high unemployment and low mobility in the local population. The local regional development agency, Connected Nottingham, has worked with BT (using donated broadband lines) as well as Cisco and UKVCC to develop a new homeshoring trial. It enables local people to work as contact centre agents for a well-known national retailer without leaving their community.

The Benefits
There are numerous benefits to the homeshoring approach. It gives organisations a way to make the expertise their customers need available to customers when they want it. Expert advice can be made available beyond normal working hours, and this doesn’t have to mean an increase in wage bills across the board. Some organisations have staff on standby, paying them a retainer rate, with a higher rate paid only when they are needed for active work.

There are equal benefits from a corporate and social responsibility viewpoint, too. As well as enabling a business to provide jobs for people who would otherwise have to look elsewhere for employment, homeshoring can help reduce the environmental impact of the traditional monolithic call centre. A 2007 study by Exony (Virtual Contact Centres and Homeshoring: Driving the Benefits Home) estimates that the four million contact centre agents currently working in the UK, US and Canada produce more than six million tonnes of CO2 each year. When you factor in the impact of commuting as well as running the contact centre itself, homeshoring can offer a more environmentally sustainable solution.

Staff costs and retention can also benefit. By working from home an expert advisor has much greater opportunity to improve their work/life balance, working convenient shifts or even ‘microshifts’ of as little as 15 minutes, as part of the integrated contact centre strategy. Homeshoring has been shown to improve retention rates and reduce absenteeism as a result.