If science fiction movies represent creative musings about the future then we’re in for some pretty bleak times, with technology delivering a good dose of the misery. From Blade Runner to Minority Report, and the entire canon of James Cameron, technology is the enemy.

Yet Ian Pearson who’s job of futurist, formerly for BT and now for his own business Futurizon, thinks that technology will soon become so good at handling dull, repetitive tasks and computers so reliable and intuitive, that all workers will be free to focus on what they do best: empathising and building relationships with other people. This will create what Pearson describes as a ‘care economy’ that will move call centres away from their process-driven legacy. In this utopia, call centre staff will not be treated as entry level staff, but highly respected builders and guardians of business, with video-conferencing turning the idea of call centres being ‘the face’ of a business into a tangible reality.

Yet changing the nature of work is not the only way in which technology will transform call centres, it also offers a choice as to where the agent is located. High-speed networks and virtualisation technologies mean it is no longer essential to come to work at all and the call centre, so often seen as impersonal, factory-style working environments, could be one of biggest benefactors of this movement.

The practice is already going strong in the States, with the 2008 figures from ContactBabel showing that 21 per cent of US call centres use home working. Peter Ryan, lead call centre outsourcing analyst at Ovum, says it is a well-established and respected model in the States, adding that tougher health and safety and taxation rules, and an ingrained notion that work and home should be kept as wholly separate entities in countries such as the UK and Canada, are holding home working back, despite its obvious appeal. “Attrition rates are lower and often service levels are very high with home working because people who would normally dismiss call centre work may be convinced to get involved if they can carry out the work from home.”

 There are technological issues to be overcome for home working to succeed. The good news, according to Rufus Grig, managing director of CallMedia, is they are all surmountable. “A lot of workers now work in a blended way, the technology is available to work virtually and seamlessly,” he offers. Although currently the preserve of knowledge workers, consultants and high earners, the figures involved in making home working cost effective for everyone are tumbling all the time. But there are some fundamental issues to consider says Grig. “Do you trust the PC your staff already have at home? Is it powerful enough? Is it secure enough to trust your corporate data?”

Nick Cavalancia, vice president of Windows management for Scriptlogic says, “the obvious approach is to allow home workers to join the central IT hub on their own PC via a web-browser and VPN (Virtual Private Network) connection.” The problem with the web-browser/VPN approach is that it presents a security risk to the corporate network - a security breach could occur, for example, if the user were to accidently install a virus while using the computer for business or personal use.

 In the States the common solution is to create a virtual desktop which is effectively screened off from the user’s personal desktop. “The virtual desktop only exists on the server of the host business, meaning it is the same as it being located on site. All the functionality, call queues, quality monitoring etc. will be available and the user will be able to switch between the two environments without fear of the messing up the security.”

Finally there is the telephony to consider; VOIP is fine for the odd call, but is it reliable enough to manage what is effectively the core of the proposition (the phone call)? A business grade DSL is therefore the natural choice. However, costs are now mounting. You’ve beefed up the phone line, created a virtual desktop, and this is without considering the other costs of setting up a home office; phone, desk, ergonomic chair etc. Yet with green concerns set to dominate IT over the next few years, the pressure to reduce staff travel will see more businesses investigating home working. Vertex, an outsourcer with call centres located across the globe, is increasingly turning to home working and its consulting director, Philip Mitchell, says you have to take the hit on infrastructure costs wherever the agent works. “We spend as much time thinking about the quality of the desk and chair as we do the technology,” he says.

Maygenta, an outsourced call centre service provider comprised entirely of home-based agents, has overcome the technological and logistical issues. Laurin Mcdonald, the founder of the business with a background of running outsourced call centre service organisations, said she investigated the potential of home working some years ago but, pre-broadband, it wasn’t viable. “Around 18 months ago we looked at it again, and were amazed that it hasn’t caught on yet.” Mcdonald said the rise of what she calls ‘portfolio workers’, those who are happy to work from home, picking up work as and when needed, is the perfect fit for call centre work. “With pricing between offshoring and running operations in-house, and workers who are happy and motivated, home working is very compelling now.” The other advantage, insists Mcdonald, is that unlike bricks and mortar call centres with perhaps a 20-mile radius to recruit from, home working holds no such boundaries. 

Starting from scratch was a huge advantage for Maygenta, and the rise of hosted and often open source software meant that Mcdonald and the team could take the pieces of technology they needed and slot them together. Recruitment is all handled online and the costs of the IT needed is manageable, partly because there is no need for a hardware switch which is traditionally one of the biggest capital costs for call centres. “From a technology point of view, you’d be surprised how easy it is to set up home workers,” says Mcdonald.

Creating a sense of agent belonging is a trickier proposition. Social networking sites and instant messaging offer a glimmer of hope, but Rufus Grig feels they are a poor substitute for the real thing. Vertex uses a combination of old-fashioned methods (regular town hall meetings) mixed with technologies, most notably video-conferencing which in theory puts other call centre workers in the room with you.

The other solution to this problem lies in the recruitment process. “It’s not for everyone, call centre work is quite intensive, especially when carried out at home without the interaction with other staff to break it up, therefore I don’t think it’s suitable for full time work. 20-25 hours per week is ideal,” says Mcdonald. Get the profile right - find people who already have busy lives and want work to fit around their schedules (parents caring for young children, the semi-retired, students etc.), and home working may be the perfect solution.

The biggest problem with call centre home working is not technology or even the logistics of making it work, but rather perception. Research from ContactBabel shows that almost two-thirds of call centre who haven’t tried home working fear the practice will make it difficult to manage staff. Yet just 17 per cent of those who practice some home workinghave found remote staff management difficult. As the benefits enjoyed by businesses such as Maygenta and Vertex become well known and the final technological kinks are ironed out of the practice, home working could easily soar and become the norm for the call centre industry desperate in need of a higher calibre of staff that the changing economy requires.

Interactive Intelligence is a leader in providing homeworking technology. Director of solutions marketing, Tim Passios, and Interactive Intelligence customer, Sally Hurley, president of homeworking outsourcer, VIPdesk, talk about how it could transform your business.

CCF: How affordable is homeworking?

TP: Usually it is less expensive because the remote agents are working from home. There are no health benefits or electricity or heating overheads, or any kind of expensive rent. So it is highly affordable.

SH: In terms of cost, it is a nightmare to run a centralised call centre. All of our agents and most of our management are remote. And in terms of cost Interactive Intelligence was great on two fronts: The pricing allowed us to have a lot of part time people, who generally make up our workforce, while other vendors don’t budget for this model at all. That meant that while it wasn’t necessarily the cheapest on paper, it allowed us to invest as the business grew, rather than be hit with a huge upfront cost. And we didn’t have to commit to a massive programme.

CCF: So is cost the most important factor?

TP: No. It’s definitely the talent pool you can tap into. You can find people anywhere you need them. Rather then try to find someone locally, when sometimes employers can spend months looking for the right people.

SH: I would agree with that. We can choose from many thousands of potential employees, and consequently, the quality of our recruits is much better along with providing much better attrition rates. At the moment our workforce is largely national but our goal is to start recruiting from all over the world.

CCF: Do many of your customers recruit overseas? 

TP: It depends on your needs. As soon as you look overseas you begin to face some cultural barriers. If one of those is a language barrier then it probably isn’t worth it. But if you are looking for specific language skills then home working is probably the best way of achieving that.

Maygenta, the leading provider of homeshored virtual contact centre services, are delighted to announce the formal launch of their flexible shared facility: QFLEX™

Clients buy into the QFLEX™ service because they have unpredictable needs or high peaks and troughs of activity which are difficult to service. Because Maygenta’s workforce is ‘homeshored’ they are both flexible and scaleable.  They can work short shifts, split shifts and less desirable hours of the day.  With reasonable planning you can wrap the QFLEX™

Either way you just pay for what you use! 

Maygenta have a database of carefully screened advisors and select them for their high skills level, attitude and motivation. 

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.

A report released Tuesday from research firm IDC says a number of companies are turning to a new method to meet call center challenges: getting workers to handle calls from their homes.

So-called homeshoring or homesourcing in certain situations can boost productivity while cutting costs, according to researcher IDC. The practice also can avoid a potential pitfall of sending such work overseas, IDC suggested: foreign agents less familiar with U.S. customers.

"There are currently upwards of 100,000 home-based phone representatives in the United States," IDC said. "Compared with traditional outsourcing and offshor(ing), companies utilizing home-based agents can access highly skilled representatives that are closely attuned to the U.S. market at very reasonable cost."

The report may give some comfort to those concerned that the offshore phenomenon is undercutting U.S. workers. Research firm Forrester has predicted that more than 3 million U.S. service jobs will go offshore by 2015. But the scope and impact of offshoring is not certain.

Not all offshore deals are ideal. After receiving customer complaints, Dell stopped sending U.S. technical support calls for two of its corporate computer lines to a Bangalore, India, call center in 2003.

IDC said companies are turning to homeshoring in response to call center challenges such as the need for superior agent quality, frequent turnover and the seasonal nature of the business. Alpine Access, Aspect Communications, IntelliCare, West, WillowCSN and Working Solutions are companies with "home-based sourcing methods and strategies," IDC said.

A number of companies in the technology industry are giving more workers more flexibility in the way they do their jobs, including the option of working from home. There are challenges involved in telecommuting arrangements, including data security risks. Also, home workers can feel alienated. But homeshoring can help both agents and companies, IDC said.

"Accessing high-quality agents is not limited to those within commuting distance, and agents can be contacted when needed instead of occupying call centers during periods of very little call activity," IDC said.

A chief reason technology companies are turning to midsize cities and rural areas in the United States is their lower-wage work force. Employees there can be paid less than in today’s tech hubs, largely because the cost of living is much lower. For instance, a $400,000 home in Boston would cost about $69,000 in Oklahoma City, according to Coldwell Banker Real Estate. The cost of living in Twin Falls is 33 percent lower than in San Jose, Calif.–the heart of Silicon Valley.

Rural Sourcing claims that it can offer services such as application maintenance and Internet development for roughly 40 percent less than what other domestic technology outsourcers charge. Its fees are about the same as the overall cost of using an Indian outsourcer, according to White, if you consider factors such as communication costs, travel expenses and inconvenience.

Maybe CNN’s lou Dobbs, who has been extremely vocal about outsourcing–what he calls corporate greed shipping American jobs overseas (he even wrote a book )–can take a breath…