Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

March 26, 2009

Report: Arise Targeting Home-Based Agents in Northwest England

By Brendan B. Read


England’s Northwest: birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, may be seeing a return to home-based businesses that dominated the economy before powered looms and steam engines (Ed. Note: my family is from the region).
 
Only this time, instead of crafted goods, these firms/individuals will provide high quality contact center services.
 
The Liverpool Daily Post reports that Arise Virtual Solutions is expanding in the United Kingdom through its model of contracting out work to self-employed home-based contact center staff. It told the newspaper that it needs 1,000 recruits this year, including 300 in the Northwest. The firm says will have five or six clients in the United Kingdom.
 
The Arise move comes not coincidentally with the planned closure of online and catalogue retailer Shop Direct’s contact center in Crosby, near Liverpool, by the end of April with the loss of 1,000 jobs.
 
Shop Direct, reported the paper, is one of Arise Virtual Solutions’ clients. It said that a team from the company delivered a presentation to more than 100 Crosby staff last week and could return for further presentations depending on demand.
 
“Our business is about home-based businesses, not jobs,” Arise vice president, international, John Riordan, told LDP Business. “It is not for everybody, but we were delighted with the level of interest shown last week.”
 
The Arise model requires their certified staff to pay their own set-up costs but some of the expenses may be waived, Riordan told the paper as the firm was in launch mode. The firm assumes that most people own PCs but they have to have a dedicated phone line and a headset and pay for a background check.
 
“Our business is rapidly changing because the way our customers choose to shop with us is changing,” said Shop Direct customer experience director Nicola Collister. “The Arise model provides us with all this flexibility and more.”
 
The Arise move and the Crosby closure is another economic transformation for a region that has lost the mills and much of its replacement manufacturing industry. Economic development agencies began touting it for contact centers in the mid-to-late 1990s. That included for example a former Philips (News - Alert) factory--where my aunt had worked in before she was laid off.
 
Contact center organizations appear to be accepting the move from bricks-and-mortar sites to agents’ homes.
 
“Increasingly, organizations in the region are looking at Homeshoring (home-based work) as a method of ensuring they have the highest skills available at the times they are required,” Martin Stacey, program manager for industry champion Call North West told the LDP.
 
Don’t forget to check out TMCnet’s White Paper Library, which provides a selection of in-depth information on relevant topics affecting the IP Communications industry. The library offers white papers, case studies and other documents which are free to registered users.

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

Edited by Michael Dinan


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