From Offshoring to Homeshoring
FROM CAR INSURANCE GIANTS with thousands of customer service agents to small companies with tech support requirements, businesses are sending their call center workers home or to remote offices in droves.
Call center requirements are driven by three things: competitive differentiation through customer service, revenue generation through upsell and cross-sell activity, and opex reduction.
One way to achieve the latter is to connect remote workers with virtual call centers that tie together and manage people regardless of location. Such systems enable companies to recruit from far beyond their geographic areas or usual demographics, and for partners, it means that sales are no longer confined. Often a company will have a small outpost in a rural or suburban area, or smaller town, in order to reduce real estate costs or capitalize on cheaper labor than is available in large cities. These applications can be anywhere, and they require a different network and architecture than centralized solutions, says Paul Cunningham, vice president of distributor Westcon Group Inc.s Technology Solutions Group. Work is becoming an activity rather than a place. It means partners can potentially find a sale anywhere.
CosmoCom Inc., for one, offers an IP solution, CosmoCall, for virtual call centers. All an agent needs is a PC and the Internet, and they can get calls, e-mails and chat, says Steve Kowarsky, executive vice president at CosmoCom. This is the hottest thing in the market today. Companies want to manage agents in logical groups, offer applications like routing by skills and priorities and segment the call workers by department, if necessary, regardless of where they are.
A subset to this trend is a movement to homeshoring, or sending people home to work. The idea is to reduce real estate costs, improve productivity, cut down on sick days, improve retention rates and bolster employees quality of life. The airline Jet Blue, for instance, is entirely homeshored, as are large portions of IBM, 1-800-Flowers and other enterprises.
These applications can be anywhere,and they require a different network and architecture than centralizedsolutions. Work is becoming anactivity rather than a place.Itmeans partners can potentiallyfind a sale anywhere. Westcons Paul Cunningham |
NICE Systems has begun targeting this market, allowing companies to use their existing VoIP technologies to monitor the performance of off-site employees as if they were in the office. We now have the technology where talent that may be off site and vital to a company can be totally integrated as a virtual extension of the office, says Eyal Danon, marketing director for NICE Systems.
UCN Inc. also tackles the teleworker market with a similar product. MyAgent is a remote desktop that allows call reps to log on via a broadband Web connection and work from anywhere while giving the manager a comprehensive view of the workforce. This allows companies to track employees regardless of where they are, says UCNs Kevin Childs, executive vice president of sales, support and marketing. It costs 60 percent less to field someone from home than in an office, and they are 15 percent more productive, on average.
Often the partner will lead with network services to tie the remote workers together, then roll in the contact center. UCN has thus taken functions like outbound dialing, quality recording, voice mail, multimedia and routing, so agents can offer a hosted group of advanced applications. UCN also offers management features for the supervisor, such as inTouch, a monitoring, reporting and historical information modeling tool. Its a console that can show the entire workforce, its status and overall productivity. inControl is a toolbar with a blank development page that allows users to craft hold messages and define routing decisions in a drag-and-drop fashion.
Links |
CosmoCom Inc. www.cosmocom.com NICE Systems www.nice.com UCN Inc. www.ucn.net Westcon Group Inc. www.westcongroup.com |