In the near future, when someone calls into a call center to set up a flight or book a room or even lodge a complaint, it's entirely possible that that call could go into someone's home as opposed to a large room full of call center agents. A new study from Ovum suggests that the number of outsourced call center agents, working from home, is likely to exceed 100,000 soon, and by 2017, will increase still further to 160,000.
The Ovum study notes that, currently, there are about 84,000 such agents currently in existence, which means that by 2017 the number will nearly double, complete with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.5 percent through the time frame. That's about twice the rate found in the contact center outsourcing market itself, at last report, and that's opening up some interesting new possibilities.
The mobile workforce has gained a lot of ground, even if there have still been some issues holding it back. Most notably, issues of infrastructure and perception have been some of the biggest hurdles to overcome—data security has been a huge issue, and issues of employee supervision—and this is requiring vendors of outsourcing services to adjust presentations accordingly to help encourage those companies reluctant to make changes.
More specifically, vendors will be called upon to address the different expectations held for virtualized agents. For instance, while many outsourced call center agents are called on to provide customer service functions, providing tech support will also prove to be an option, and that's going to require some very specialized recruiting functions that aren't necessarily seen in such depth today. Indeed, tech support staff may not even be interested by the standard concept of a contact center as its known today, so pulling in these technologically-savvy individuals will require different methods of recruitment.
What's more, completely different alternatives are likely to come around, from healthcare to the financial sector, and that in turn is going to take a whole different breed of hiring. Issues of compliance with applicable laws and regulations will be a significant factor here, which is why growth in the near term is expected to be slim. Home-based agents in financial services will increase to just 13 percent, up from 11 percent, in the period between 2013 and 2017. In healthcare, the number of outsourced home-based agents is set to go from just eight percent to 13 percent of total agents in the same time frame.
While it's difficult to offer up virtualization services in some fields, there's also quite a bit of value to be had. The report notes that using a virtualized model can result in the availability of “higher-value services,” like brokerage support or policy management functions that can offer not only a greater potential for revenue, but also a greater reason for current customers to stay with a firm and bring in new customers via positive word of mouth.
Beyond this, there are also issues of cost containment—the power bill gets scaled back quite a bit when the employees pay it by working from home—and flexibility to consider. An employee who doesn't have to spend an hour driving to work every day may be all right with the idea of handling an email at 10 p.m. That opens up potential business in new time zones. There's a lot of potential benefit in the home-based agent, but it has to be handled correctly. The better it's handled, the better the potential for growth.