Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Working from Home Fuels $6.1 Billion Virtual Call Center Industry

Model Proven to Deliver Significant Financial Benefits When Best Practices are Used

Telecommuting, or working from home, has taken center stage recently due to the leak of a controversial memo from Yahoo’s human resource director. In the memo, published by AllThingsD, Yahoo announced that all employees who work from home must start coming into the office beginning June 1, 2013 because, “speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home.”

Yahoo’s stance on telecommuting seems to stand in stark contrast to the growing popularity and acceptance of a home-based workforce.   According to data from the United States Census Bureau, 9.5 percent or 13.4 million people worked at least one full workday at home in 2010. Even more compelling is that Forrester Research predicts 63 million Americans – 43 percent of US workers – will work from home by 2016.

Although each situation is different, company executives often deny giving employees the option to telecommute because they are afraid of reduced performance. In actuality, allowing people to work from home can deliver very positive financial benefits. Consider the results of an experiment conducted by CTrip, China’s largest travel Agency, which was reviewed in a study by Stanford University:

The turnover rate among CTrip call center representatives had historically hovered around 50 percent per year when company executives decided to conduct a nine-month work-from-home experiment. Selecting a random sampling of the company’s 16,000 employees, the company had a portion of workers work from home and kept a control group in the office. The following astonishing results persuaded executives to conduct an aggressive campaign to convinced employees to take up the home working option:

• Home working led to a 13 percent performance increase over nine months. About nine percent was from working more minutes per shift (fewer breaks and sick-days) and four percent was from more calls per minute (attributed to a quieter working environment).
• Attrition dropped by 50 percent as home workers reported improved work satisfaction.
• An estimated saving of $2,000 per year per work at home employee.
• And, there was no impact on quality.  

Obviously telecommuting can, and does, work for thousands of companies and individuals worldwide. However, there are arguably certain types of people, positions, and industries that are better suited than others for operating in a virtual environment. The call center industry, for one, has been completely transformed by the advent of the home-based business model and is proof that it can work on an extremely large scale.

Proof That Working-from-Home Works

 Sending calls to agents working from home was a new concept nearly 20 years ago. Today, there are extensive networks of small businesses providing customer service through thousands of carefully selected home-based agents. The value and results these home-based resources provide has persuaded many high profile, brand-conscious organizations to outsource to virtual service providers. Benefits of using home-based agents include:

• Higher Quality Talent - Service providers using home-based agents have the unique ability to scour the nation looking for the highest quality agents with skills, experience and other qualifications that match client-defined criteria.
• Lower Costs – A virtual contact center has the obvious advantage of lower operating costs because it eliminates fixed costs such as utilities, facility rental and maintenance, network operations, office suppliers and much more.
• Lower Attrition – Telecommuting provides people with improved work /life balance, allowing them to schedule their work around their lives. Combined with the savings from no commutes, less eating out, gas and parking, home-based agents tend to stay in their positions longer. “There's a lower agent-attrition rate among home agents (10 percent) than there is in the brick-and-mortar world (50 percent),” reported Frost & Sullivan.
• Reduced Environment Impact - Companies increasingly are placing a high priority on the lower environmental impact achieved through telecommuting. According to Kate Lister’s study The State of Telework in the US, “The energy saved annually from telecommuting could exceed the output of all renewable energy sources combined.”
• Improved Service Levels - Customer service programs provided through a virtual business model that utilizes crowdsourcing or, as Arise refers to it, “work-as-a-service” can easily adapt to changing business needs and deliver an exceptional customer experience. To handle unexpected or planned business fluctuations, the number of professionals working from home can be ramped up or down within minutes, helping companies protect their brand by delivering consistent, high-quality customer care.

The overall success of the virtual call center industry shows that a work-from-home model can deliver superior performance, outstanding service and high overall business value.  It is these universal benefits that will continue to convince companies to take a more progressive approach and use talent from within the human cloud to meet tomorrow’s business needs. Slate reporter, Farhad Manjoo, predicts, “I suspect in time, the distinction between working in the office and working at home will fade away. We’ll all be able to work from anywhere, at any time, and our work will be assessed by what we produce, not how much time we spend doing it.” We couldn’t agree more.  

Mr. John Meyer is Co-Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Arise Virtual Solutions Inc., one of the leading virtual solutions company in the world. John joined the company in 2011 to drive the organization’s growth, set the strategic vision and manage the global operations of the business. John has over 28 years of leadership experience building high growth organizations in both the United States and internationally. Before entering the business world, John served as a flight commander and was selected as a captain in the U.S. Air Force. He holds a MBA from the University of Missouri and a BS in management from Pennsylvania State University.