Bringing the Workforce Home

Thinking about filling a virtual call center with home-based workers? Here are some steps for getting started

by Mary A. Naylor

By tapping high-caliber workers with industry expertise, and connecting them through a network of home-based agents across the U.S., virtual contact centers have the potential to revolutionize the way businesses interact with customers.

The home-based services market in this country is growing rapidly, and businesses are quickly realizing the benefits of outsourcing at home (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/02/06, "There's No Workforce Like Home").

Several factors have contributed to the homeshoring trend and will continue to fuel growth in the coming years. Among them are technological advances that make it easy to set up and monitor home-based agents. Consider the increased availability of high-speed Internet connections, as well as innovations in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology, which can add a host of features to calling plans, while reducing the price of telecommunications.

Going Virtual

But home-based, customer-facing operations aren't suited for every business, and a thorough evaluation must precede any attempt at homeshoring operations.

A key question you should ask before making any investment in staff or technology is whether your operation fits the virtual call center model. Excellent fits for homeshoring in recent years have been traditional customer service, ordering, travel and restaurant reservations, and financial institutions' customer rewards programs.

Any industry with seasonal spikes in call volume or demand for around-the-clock staffing are also ideal candidates for virtual contact center operations, as are those businesses whose rapid expansion has exceeded the ability for bricks-and-mortar operations to keep pace.

Physically Unfit

Highly brand-conscious companies in the travel, auto, financial-services, and retail sectors have found particular success with homeshoring customer service call center operations, and other industry sectors such as luxury brands and health care are gearing up for the transition from traditional brick and mortar centers to the virtual customer care model.

Less suitable for virtual contact centers are physical operations such as order fulfillment and fax-response driven programs.

After determining that your business model would thrive under the auspices of a virtual contact center, you should analyze the cost involved. Key elements to consider are startup expenses, such as wiring, software licensing and hardware infrastructure, recruiting, training and management programs, and establishing new channels of internal communication.

Bells and Whistles

Once those costs are tallied and weighed against the anticipated savings in increased productivity and efficiency, most executives will find that there's indeed a return on the investment.

Finally, after deciding a virtual contact center will complement a certain business operation, you will determine whether to create the center yourself or hire an outside agency.

The capital costs associated with acquiring hardware and telecom equipment for headset connections and VoIP are substantial, as are the required software licenses for hundreds of agents based in home offices. You will have to develop and customize systems to allow digital recordings of all calls, and real-time quality control. And you'll want to set up data exchanges for seamless sharing of information.

In addition to hardware expenses comes the cost of building expertise within the organization, often through trial and error, and establishing new personnel policies and procedures to govern home-based agents.

Expert Evaluation

As an alternative, outsourcing a virtual call center to a vendor would provide instant access to a network of well-established Web-based services, including: state-of-the-art telephony switching; single queue routing of all media (phone, e-mail, fax); inbound and outbound call recording; and customizable Web-based customer relationship management software and call-listening tools.

Clearly, the future of customer service for many industries is homeshoring through virtual contact centers staffed by highly skilled agents. The challenge for corporations is to evaluate business operations and determine which units would benefit most.

Naylor, a 20-year veteran of the concierge services industry, is founder and CEO of VIPdesk, a provider of virtual contact center services to Fortune 1000 clients.

Naylor, a 20-year veteran of the concierge services industry, is founder and CEO of VIPdesk, a provider of virtual contact center services to Fortune 1000 clients.