The home agent model, for the past several years, was the call center equivalent of the “video phone.” It was always the next “up and coming thing,” not quite ready yet for its close-up, and many privately doubted that it ever would be, except for a few small niche companies and a couple of notable and oft-repeated case studies, most notably in the travel industry.
As it turns out, as with many somewhat revolutionary ideas, all it needed was the right circumstances. Couple a need for better customer service in order to compete with perceptions of declining service quality supplied by offshore call centers. Throw in the continued need to cut costs. Mix in some depletion of popular regional call center worker pools. Sprinkle in the declining value of the U.S. dollar, making even nearshore destinations like Canada less attractive. Add the escalating cost of health care benefits, traffic congestion and the price of gasoline.
Fold in the fact that technologies such as IP-delivered call center solutions are standard fare in enterprises today and no longer perceived as part science fiction. Shake it and bake it, and you’ve got an extremely fertile environment for the use of home agents.
Home agents, as we know, are hired, professional contact center representatives who can reside (and work from) anywhere there is a phone and Internet connection. The benefits are multi-pronged. Cost savings begin, but certainly do not end, with lower facilities-related overhead. In a 2006 “Telework Benchmarking Study” by The Telework Coalition, organizations reported cost savings associated with reduced real estate requirements of $3,000 to $10,000 per employee.
The next major cost savings comes from the quality of the home agent pool. Home agents tend to be older, more mature, with more experience, and therefore less likely to churn and more likely to provide…