Call Center 2.0

Cost Reductions and At-Home Agents

  

 Email Article  

Tweet  

  

 delicious  

  

In March and April of 2009 Knowlagent asked call center managers how they were going to address the cost reductions they have been asked to make due to the recession.  The goal of this research was to determine how, or if, the use of "at-home" or "remote" agents was being considered as part of the cost cutting solution.

What we found was that indeed, the use of "at-home" agents was one of several cost cutting strategies that was being considered by call center management.  The top 3 tactics identified for building their  "at-home" agent programs were:

1. "Hire from with-in" 
2. "Agents must live within a certain radius  of the call center"
3. "Agents will work partly at home and partly in the center."

We also found out that most of the companies surveyed were going to use a separate process for hiring, training and coaching their "at-home" agents rather than follow their traditional processes.  However, the percentages were close enough 55% to 45% respectively that it indicates  to us that none of these participants really had a clear understanding of what does and doesn't work with "at-home" agents.

The conclusions we made regarding how "at-home" agents can impact cost reductions were:

1. Most of the survey participants are still in the early stages of utilizing "at-home" agents. 
2. Being early in the process call centers are still trying to "figure out" how to leverage the "at-home" agent for cost savings.
3. Most of the call centers we talked to were justifying the expense of "at-home" agents through the improvement of quality and performance.  Since most of the implementation models we found were requiring agents who work from home to live within the community being served by the call center, there were currently not much in savings associated with the call center's "brick and mortar" costs. 
4. Finally, the biggest obstacle we found to utilizing "at-home" agents outside of the call center's community was that call centers have not yet figured out how to effectively manage, coach and train their staff remotely.  Once this obstacle is overcome, we should be seeing more centers move into geographic areas where they can utilize lower agent salaries as part of their cost savings model.

If you are interested in this research and other benchmarking studies please visit  http://www.knowlagent.com/resource_center/.