Q&A from our recent webinar on At Home Agent Programs
Posted by Kerry Engle on Fri, Nov 20, 2009 @ 08:17 AM
Questions and Answers from the webinar, "Long Time No See - How to Keep At Home Agents Connected". Answers provided by guest speaker - Michele Rowan.
1. Did you ever have security issues or concerns with your at home agents? Yes. When you're moving people out of a brick and mortar environment where you can't see them, it raises a lot of questions and anxiety level. We created a list of what those risks were in the at home environment, then came up with plans on how to minimize those risks. For things like private data being imparted - we used a lock down security system that prevented our agents from copying, pasting, printing or going outside of our proprietary software. That was important to us and that was something we felt we had to get right before we could scale the program with confidence.
In terms of credit card data, we used the same encryption techniques in house as we did at home.
In terms of a secure work environment, what's to stop somebody from looking over the shoulder of an agent and stealing data? Nothing, and that's why you have to rely on your selection process to select the right people. But that can happen in an in house environment as easy as at home.
2. Do you really hire people without seeing them? At my last company, we hired people in the neighborhood but there are 3 - 4 large outsourcers who have hired at home agents for ten years without ever seeing them. This allows you to move away from geographical restrictions and hire best talent anywhere in the country. The technology is there.
3. Is your recommendation to clients to hire agents to start at home rather than start in the center and graduate them to work at home? It depends on an organization's objectives. If they just want to relieve themselves of some facilities' costs and they're not really growing, they can move their workforce home. But, if they want to take advantage of higher levels of engagement, incremental revenue, creative compensation and benefits models, and reducing costs in some other areas, then hiring agents at home as your in-house agents attrit, is a great strategy.
4. Do agents really need to come into the office? In a truly virtual environment, we built modules and put them on line and made them available to our agents and scheduled them to go through them in an on line environment so our at home agents and our in house agents could do the same. In a truly virtual environment where agents never come into the office, organizations would use that same sort of product - a knowledge bank on line or an on line learning system - that would load training into an on line vehicle and deliver it to the agents or the agents go get it and take themselves through the training.
Listen to the full webinar on the topic of at home agents.