There really is no better place than home, and that goes for contact centers, defined as the functions they provide rather than the employer-provided physical spaces they occupy.
Home-based agents are where contact centers are going. They provide a high-quality, very productive, and loyal workforce that is less costly to support than agents working in traditional offices. Home agents dovetail into CRM strategies by handling the more complex calls--the simpler ones had been taken care of by self-service solutions--and by serving your best customers.
With gas prices rising, cutting into incomes, bringing the work to the employees rather than the other way around increases your ability to attract and retain sufficient numbers of staff to maintain and improve service levels, and results.
Home agents are also the greenest way to travel, exerting energy while walking to their desks rather than consuming it and emitting pollutants incurred while driving or riding mass transit.
And when disaster strikes--something to remember as we enter hurricane-and-tornado-season, not to mention the ongoing threat of terrorism--home agents can help keep operations going because they are dispersed rather than concentrated at vulnerable locations.
There are now a range of technologies that support and enable home-based agents. The coming of age of IP telephony have made call handling by them affordable, along with supporting monitoring and recording. E-Learning and audio/web conferencing make remote training doable. New solutions such as West's patent-pending remote security environment where West takes over its West at Home agents' computers when they are working provides data and system protection.
To learn more about home-based agents I invite you to register for and participate in a webinar on this topic that is taking place Wednesday July 16 at 2pm ET that is being sponsored by VoltDelta and Transera.
Listen to the presenters, make notes, and ask questions to help you get the answers that you need to decide whether, and how best, to bring your agents home.
