Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Enabling Home Agents: Michele Rowan Offers Advice

October 19, 2010

Hiring and having contact center agents work from home is gaining momentum as an alternative to traditional, costly, less flexible and environment-damaging (via requiring commuting) employer-premises contact centers both domestically and offshore. The Telework Coalition estimates home-working benefits through reduced expenses and added productivity add up to as much as $20,000 per agent, per year. The calculation doesn’t take into account lowered healthcare outlays from limiting employees’ exposure to diseases and fewer injuries from driving to/from work—all of which shrink agent availability and performance.


The question then becomes how best to provide home-based agents either internally, through traditional business process outsourcers (BPOs) with home agent offerings or via independent contractor services firms that operate much like limousine, town car and trucking firms that put out work to owners/operators. Both BPO and contractor methods are commonly referred to as “homesourcing.”

Michele Rowan is president and CEO of Customer Contact Strategies. She conducts workshops, trainings and customized consulting for the design and implementation of the at-home model; her next session is Oct. 26, in Dallas, Texas. She has “walked the walk” on home working; she deployed 1,000-plus home-based agents for Hilton Hotels, where she had served as vice president of performance management. ContactCenterSolutions.com recently interviewed Michele to find out the best options for enabling home-based agents.

ContactCenterSolutions: If firms are considering going to a home agent model, what are the benefits and challenges of having this outsourced versus setting it up in-house?

MR: Some prudent analyses can help companies make the best decisions about internal or external deployment:

1. What are their organization’s objectives for including the home agent model? What are the critical success factors? How do we measure success?

If deployment through a slow, steady build is an objective, then learning from a top rated outsourcer with experience in homesourcing may be beneficial. If fast cost reduction is as important as hiring the best talent and markedly changing customer engagement, then a company might want to cost out managing the at-model themselves against outsourcing.

2. How does the company rate its current contact center abilities? For companies with confidence in their current operating abilities, I recommend a definite look at deploying on their own. For companies that do not have current contact center operations or are not confident in their current abilities, learning from a capable home-based outsourcer makes a lot of sense.

3. Is their human capital available to dedicate to this key initiative? Shifting some resource away from B & M (bricks and mortar) to support at-home is a tactic that works quite well, but it is a question that must be answered. Going thin in internal leadership and support will result in thin performance differences: from in-house.

ContactCenterSolutions: There are three outsourced home-based agent options:

  • Those provided by BPO firms also with/predominantly with bricks-and-mortar centers
  • Pure-play employee home agent
  • Independent contractor 

ContactCenterSolutions: What are the benefits and challenges of each option and what are your overall recommendations and advice?

MR: First and foremost, it is really important that a firm fleshes out its objectives and critical success factors of the at-home model before considering any sort of homesourcing. Once this piece of work is done, timing is right to review the alternative methods of including home agents in the customer contact strategy.

Like any other business, most providers have a couple of strengths along with one or two areas that may not be their fortes. Once an organization has established its own set of critical success factors and measurements for success, it can evaluate providers against those requirements. An example may be successfully handling a complex call that starts as support and has an up-sell or save component. In this case, I recommend looking at outsourcers’ training techniques (well formatted asynchronous learning in addition to webcast training for agents), as it is demonstrated that well formatted e-learning improves retention and performance, while reducing overall training time. 

Some input and observations I can share about the various models are as follows:

B&M BPOs with home agents: Technology upgrades are often required to deploy home agents at scale, which means that these platforms are often current best of breed.  BPOs are learning (as we are) to optimize the home agent experience and have a lot of learnings to share. Generally, pricing is similar to brick and mortar but that can vary materially by supplier.

2. Pure play home agent outsourcers: There are a couple of large organizations in the U.S. that only hire and deploy agents remotely (no brick and mortar operations: which lends itself to competitive pricing low overheads.)

Technology platforms are developed (not revised) for home agent deployment exclusively, which can add benefits. A couple of these groups have gotten quite good at development and deployment of self-paced training which is the most effective form of adult learning in terms of cost and ramp-up. But some don't do this well at all -- prudent reviews here are warranted.

Independent contracting: This model offers extreme flexibility and often lowest cost given your organization does not carry any “employment related” costs. And with the right provider, can often scale to extremes in short periods of time. Contractors are just that -- it might be more challenging to create a strong sense of loyalty or brand engagement given contractors often work for several organizations simultaneously.It is important to note here that this is not a cost exercise. It is a customer loyalty and revenue exercise. Regardless of what we choose, we get what we pay for -- let's not lose sight of that.

I think it is also important to call out here -- for those companies considering outsourcing -- that there are generally menus of services available that we can buy up or down on with our external partners. I have found that some of my clients invest internally to a much higher degree that they require with their providers, and then wonder why they get different results (the outsourcer falls short of in-house results). We get what we pay for – we have learned that lesson well from off-shore and other strategies.

Lastly, by moving beyond the bricks, we have the opportunity (for the first time) to hire people that would never dream of working in our brick and mortar centers because of the stigma associated with them. That said, we should expect heightened customer engagement/loyalty, improved retention (and reduced costs) whether we manage the program internally or externally. Otherwise, there’s really no point in going through the transition.


Brendan B. Read is ContactCenterSolutions’s Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Tammy Wolf



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