17 October 2008

What are the benefits of 'homeshoring'?
In the UK, our near-one million contact centre staff generate 1.3 million tonnes of carbon emissions every year. Costs and staff churn are both growing issues. With the opportunity to cut £5 per hour per employee of staff overheads and reduce agent churn I believe it's time contact centres looked at enabling more flexible ways of working. Other sectors offer homeworking for staff in order to attract the best employees and enable them to maintain a healthy work-life balance. The contact centre industry should be no different, although, understandably CEOs want to see a business case for 'homeshoring'. We at Exony have therefore built an economic and environmental benefits model which shows the significant benefits homeshoring brings. Bear in mind that we already trail the US by quite some way. Currently, there are an estimated 112,000 home-based agents in the US, a figure that is predicted to rise to 330,000 by 2010 (source:IDC). What is homeshoring? Homeshoring occurs when contact centres equip staff with appropriate communications facilities to be able to work from home rather than from a central office. British-based contact centres are missing out on some significant benefits by not providing homeshoring; recruiting and retaining skilled staff, improved morale, environmental benefits, reduced overheads and increased opportunities for the disadvantaged in society. Combining technologies such as broadband, which enable employees to both handle calls and connect securely with the corporate network, along with tools to measure and manage agent and call performance in real-time, allows contact centres to reap the benefits of homeshoring. Breaking down these perception barriers is the first step towards more effective contact centre operations. It is time the UK woke up to the benefits and caught up with the US. IDC estimates that staff in US contact centres cost $31 per hour, including training and operational overheads, when based in an office. This falls to just $21 per hour when the employee is home-based. As well as a compelling case to cut costs, there are also benefits for employees: free from a costly commute, home-based agents enjoy flexible working arrangements, and homeshoring also enables disabled or mobility-restricted workers, such as full-time carers, to get back on the job market. As we outlined above, there is also an environmental case to be put forward. At a time when green issues are rising up the corporate agenda, we worked out that, with 460 million commuting journeys taking place each year in the UK to and from contact centres, in an average-sized car this could equate to 1.3 million tonnes of CO². This combined contribution to global warming would require 902,000 acres (1409 square miles) of forest to 'offset' (source: US Environmental Protection Agency). This roughly equates to an area the size of Kent. Next steps Contact centre managers will naturally be concerned that, out of their sight and working from home, employees might be tempted to exploit this new liberal arrangement and not be as productive. We have found the converse to be true - people find that, without the many distractions of the office environment, they get much more done and are generally more contented. We launched a white paper recently to coincide with Work Wise Week - a nationwide event in April each year which intends to raise the profile of working from home - covering the benefits of homeshoring and, critically, a sensible step-by-step plan on how to implement it. The core benefits of homeshoring include: Reduced overheads: Employing home-based workers reduces typical office costs such as space, furniture, heating, lighting and parking. Analysts at Gartner Dataquest estimate that staff costs equate to 70 per cent of contact centre overheads Increased staff morale: Attrition is a real issue in the industry, currently running at 22% per year (source:ContactBabel). This has an exhaustive effect on companies, especially given high training costs Improved opportunity: Disabled workers, older people or new parents, who would find commuting difficult or impossible, are now able to work, bringing their skills and experience to benefit customer service Green benefits: Reduced commuting and energy costs leads to a lower carbon footprint. Exony estimates that the four million contact centre agents currently working in UK, US and Canada produce more than six million tones of CO² each year
www.callcentreclinic.com

15 October 2008

Productivity rises for teleworkers: survey
More than two-thirds - 67 per cent - of employers say that their organization has gotten a boost in productivity from full-time or part-time telecommuting, mainly because workers spend less time getting to and from work, a new survey finds. And 59 per cent of the 212 respondents said that they've also benefited significantly from cost savings through less use of office-related materials and lower vehicle-related expenses, according to the survey by the Computing Technology Industry Association. As well, 39 per cent said it gave them access to more qualified staff, especially people who might not have been otherwise geographically available. Among other benefits, 37 per cent said telecommuting helps to improve employee retention, and 25 per cent said it benefits employee health, mainly by cutting the stress of the commute to work.
www.theglobeandmail.com

13 October 2008

Arise Virtual Launches Homeshoring In UK
Miramar, Florida -- Outsourcing home-based service company Arise Virtual Solutions announced that it has expanded its business to the United Kingdom. Citing beginning of a relationship with a "leading UK retailer," the company screens and certifies independent professionals to answer calls, emails and provide interactive chat services from their home offices. “Arise is thrilled to offer legitimate, home-based work options to individuals in the UK,” stated Angie Selden, CEO of Arise Virtual Solutions. “We have more than 7,500 existing Virtual Services Companies in the United States who have helped to create a reputation of quality and value for our clients, and with the growing global demand for Arise services, UK residents will now be able to experience the advantages of our flexible, home-based work model,” she continued.
www.venturedeal.com

13 October 2008

Ready for the Annual Conference!
Telecommuters are more productive, healthy and loyal. I tend to agree. What really makes telecommuting work, 'though, (in my view) is the technology that enables shared calendars,and collaboration, instant messaging, "follow me" desktops and "presence" information that provides colleagues' availability and preferred communications medium. Hopefully, we are all becoming used to exploiting these on our corporate networks and for remote working "in-house", but the real challenge, now, when we are increasingly working in diverse partnerships, is federating office automation. Working with Socitm for the last six months, the absence of colleagues' calendar information and presence has been my biggest frustration! I attended the Socitm London Committee meeting, hosted by David Wilde on the 18th floor of Westminster City Hall (which, of course, we all love for its fabulous views). We discussed proposals being put to Capital Ambition - London's RIEP - into which London Connects, along with the London Regional Centre of Excellence, is being subsumed. It's proposed that the London Connects Steering Group will become the "London Socitm Efficiency Group" with reporting lines to both the Capital Ambition Board and London Socitm. This mirrors the arrangements being put in-place for other London professional bodies, such as the London Society of Treasurers and, I think, may be a model that could work in the other regions. The existing London Connects work programme and budget will be ring-fenced and managed by the new board. I outlined the package of support for the Government Connect programme and Code of Connection that will be launched at the conference. (There will be a press release on Monday.) We also decided upon the agenda for the next London Branch meeting, which will have a security theme with, hopefully representation from the DWP, DCSF and CESG.
Richard Steel - www.computerworlduk.com

08 October 2008

Remote working improves productivity and cuts costs - survey
This is the finding of a new survey by CompTIA, in which 78 percent of the 212 respondents said that their companies allow at least some telecommuting. More than two-thirds of respondents (67 percent) ranked increased productivity as telecommuting's chief benefit. They said productivity improvements mainly stem from the ability to work during the time employees would otherwise be commuting to the office. Nearly 60 percent of respondents checked off cost savings as another significant benefit of telecommuting. Their answers to how much money their companies have saved by allowing telecommuting varied widely, resulting in an average savings of $696,000 (£399,000). The median and mode amounts saved were $10,000 (£5,700). Cost savings came from not having to pay travel expenses, such as mileage reimbursements, or for office-related materials. Other advantages of telecommuting that respondents cited include: - The ability to hire the most qualified staff, regardless of where they live (noted by 39 percent of respondents) - Higher employee retention rates (37 percent) - Decrease in employee stress (25 percent) - Ability to reduce auto emissions (17 percent) When asked about the most significant challenges telecommuting presents to organisations, more than half of respondents (53 percent) picked securing corporate information systems. Notably, most of the challenges respondents ranked the highest were technical, not managerial. Limiting the use of unauthorised and unsupported devices was the second most significant challenge, cited by 38 percent of respondents, followed by controlling personal use of corporate mobile assets (33 percent); supervising lower-level workers (32 percent); supporting different mobile devices, such as BlackBerrys, iPhones and Treos, (30 percent); and integrating those devices with other enterprise systems (27 percent). Respondents noted that their organisations have taken measures to address these challenges that telecommuting presents: They've upgraded network circuits, VPN equipment and VIP client software. They've also expanded security training and implemented new virtualisation technologies.
Meridith Levinson - computerworlduk.com

01 October 2008

The changing face of customer service
With traditional contact centre attrition rates of 25–35 percent, rising to 40–70 percent for offshored services, attracting and retaining high-quality employees is a growing problem. With home-based workers, churn typically drops to 10 percent, absenteeism by as much as 60 percent, and you’ll find it easier to attract and retain the right people. - Explore the options of staffing your contact centre away from traditional methods - What else can you do? - How can you attract the right people to your operation.....and keep them? - Find out how to enhance your traditional recruitment methods - Is it time to change? Join CCF and BT for an online seminar which will explore alternative methods to recruit into your contact centre and open up your recruitment pool. This FREE online seminar looked at the challenges faced by the industry and suggests some possible solutions. There was also the opportunity to submit questions to the panel of experts during a live Q&A session. Featured speakers Chaired by: Claudia Hathway, Editor, CCF Magazine Claudia Hathway has been editor of CCF magazine for more than two years. She has already built up a wealth of knowledge and has spoken about call centre issues at a number of industry events, as well as on national television and radio. Her main interests include the public perception of the industry, agent empowerment and the use of alternative media to enhance the customer experience. Tony Golding, Head of BT Homeshoring Tony Golding has worked in the Telecommunications industry for 28 years, the last 12 specialising in contact centres and CRM strategies. Implementation of many Contact Centres within the finance sector. He is sponsored by BT board to investigate and develop a Homeshoring strategy for use internally and as a go to market proposition. Tony is currently Implementing internal BT Homeshored solutions and working with many customers to deliver their implementations. Natasha Clough, Senior Global Propositions & Marketing, CRM BT Global Services Natasha Clough is Senior Marketing Manager of Global Propositions & Marketing, CRM for BT Global Services. In her role Natasha is responsible for driving the go-to-market strategy for the company’s CRM business in all of BT’s global markets including the UK, Europe, US and Asia Pacific. BT's capability spans from component parts of technology to managed, hosted and fully outsourced CRM solutions for companies of all sizes in all industry sectors. Natasha joined BT in January 1995 working as a Contact Centre Manager responsible for many operations and Contact Centre Technology. Natasha then moved into Sales and then Head of Business Management before moving into Marketing. Having worked in a contact centre, Natasha believes she has a thorough understanding of life in a Contact Centre and how Technology can enhance it along with the environment. Andy Candlish, Homeshoring Consultant Andrew Candlish has worked in the ICT industry for 20 years, the last 10 with Cisco Systems. While at Cisco, Andrew became a contact centre specialist developing an expertise in all things internet based. The last 5 years has been consumed with issues ranging from virtualisation, off-shoring and home working. Andrew left Cisco to join UKVCC in 2008. UKVCC is the UK's leading Homeshoring specialist and is working in partnership with BT to establish BT's Homeshoring proposition.
www.callcentre.co.uk

18 September 2008

Steep rise in staff working from home
The number of employees working flexibly has risen sharply over the past four years, according to the latest CBI/Pertemps emp-loyment trends survey. The survey of 513 employers found that almost half (46 per cent) now allow their employees to telework, up from 14 per cent two years ago and 11 per cent in 2004. The popularity of term-time working and job sharing has also increased dramatically. “The boundaries of the traditional nine-to-five in the office or on the shopfloor are becoming more and more blurred,” said John Cridland, CBI deputy director-general. “Employers are embracing the benefits of flexible working, even as the economy heads into more uncertain times.” The survey also revealed that businesses were becoming more supportive of employees who took career breaks or sabbaticals. But the TUC said the survey related only to better employers and “therefore looked through rose-tinted glasses at today’s world of work”. While the CBI survey revealed that 95 per cent of flexible working requests from parents were accepted, parents’ rights campaigner Working Families warned there were “two worlds for working parents”. Chief executive Sarah Jackson said one was where employers recognised that it made “strong business sense” to provide them with flexible working, but the other involved companies “that didn’t believe that reorganising the way they had always done things might bring real benefits”. Jackson called for more education to bring the “unthinking employer” on board”. Next year, another 4.5 million UK workers will be given the right to request flexible working when the current legislation extends from parents with children under the age of six up to 16.
Lucy Phillips - People Management Magazine

17 September 2008

Homeworking Special
From a traditional bricks and mortar standpoint, managing homeworkers is all but scary. We all can appreciate that managing a traditional call centre is challenging in itself, so if the workforce is spread out and working entirely from home, wouldn’t this be a recipe for disaster? According to a recent survey by the Professional Planning Forum on homeworking, 50 per cent of respondents think it would be too complex and risky to implement. The reality is in fact very much the opposite. Managing home-based call centre agents (home-agents) can be much easier than in a call centre, albeit if you set up your operation correctly. At Sensée we get asked this all the time when we implement homeworking operations for our clients, how do you manage agent well-being, absenteeism, health & safety, motivation, development and coaching? We also get asked very specific questions, for example, how do I ensure that a home-agent is not smoking while on the phone? What happens if the doorbell rings while on shift? What happens if my employee has an accident while working from home alone? These questions all derive from the perceived lack of visibility and control managers have over home-based staff. These perceptions are especially compounded in the scenario where the homeworkers are employed directly by the organisation rather than by Sensée. Having set up hundreds of homeworkers for the HomeAgent Network and blue chip organisations, we have found that there are two key differentiators in successful homeworker management: Processes and Technology. In terms of processes, we established a homeworker handbook, which details clearly the procedures, protocols, ‘dos and don’ts’ and processes for the homeworkers to adhere to. These are also part of our induction training. From the technology viewpoint we built our own specialist application called TeamTonic, to support these processes. Together, this gives the necessary structure and control mechanisms to manage homeworkers. In the doorbell example, the handbook makes it clear that when on a shift, agents are not to leave their workstations other than for a personal break. Of course, as in the call centre, agents cannot take a break whilst on a call. TeamTonic detects if a customer is put on hold and looks for a follow-up action (escalation call to supervisor or knowledge base lookup). If no follow-up action is detected, this means that the agent has put the customer on hold and left their workstation without authorisation. TeamTonic will then alert the supervisor on duty, who then has the option to investigate by opening a webcam session to see what the agent is doing (or not doing!). While some will denounce this as being Big Brotherly, the reality of its necessity needs to be clear to everyone involved. While recruiting and operating with a culture of trust is also important, to establish processes and technology to protect against abuse by agents is primary. Homeworking is not a risky business if you select and hire the right agents and use the right tools. Homeworking is a win-win operational model only if the rules are strict and agent behaviour (good or bad) easily traceable. Having the ability to automatically detect any abnormal behaviour and patterns gives us the advantage of being able to efficiently manage our homeworkers. Our internal HomeAgent team leader ratio to agents is 30 to 1, and our HomeAgents still outperform their in-house counterparts on all standard call centre metrics. This is due to the discipline of the agents, and low maintenance and demands they make on the team leaders since they are focused on the job without call centre distractions. So why not look again at homeworking and see how it could help your business?
Steve Mosser - www.callcentrehelper.com

15 September 2008

Working from home could relieve a lot of stress
After a summer of bliss, reality has kicked back in with a vengeance. September has ushered in the return of the school run and the UK’s roads have gone back to their natural state of gridlock as droves of parents drop their children off at the school gates. I’m not going to berate the school run as it’s a sad fact of modern life. However, I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling hoodwinked. As each week passed in July and August I could feel myself slowly being lulled into a false sense of security. I’ve been able to hit the snooze button on my alarm more often because I know I could have that all important ten or even 20 extra minutes in bed and I’d still get to work on time. But not anymore. Each morning I look at my fellow commuters as we all inch our way to work and think there’s got to be more to life than spending so much time in traffic. And there is. There has been a raft of studies done by various industry bodies saying that record numbers of firms are adopting flexible working policies, but you only have to look at all those poor souls stuck in congestion each morning to realise the circle isn’t being squared. I don’t think it’s down to a lack of willingness by companies because, on the whole, most of the ones I speak to can see the advantages of home working on a number of fronts. Increased productivity, greater flexibility and more committed employees are just some of the benefits we have noticed within our own business. And as a remote worker myself I can vouch for that from both sides of the fence. From an employee’s perspective the benefits are obvious. They don’t waste so much time commuting which is a massive boost for their work/life balance. And of course they are quids in saving money on petrol especially at a time when rising fuel prices are really hitting the purse strings of most families. Where the blocker may be is technology. Well actually, the adoption of technology to be more precise. It feels like the technology to enable home working has been around since I was a boy but maybe the simple truth is that the HR departments of all these companies have been quick out of the blocks to say they have all these policies in place without actually checking with IT counterparts to see if their systems support remote working. In our experience, we come across companies that have the desire to offer home working but not the IT infrastructure to fully support it. In some cases simple fixes or configuration changes are all that’s required to allow employees to dial in from home or elsewhere. In other cases an investment is required to upgrade the IT. Either way, these changes won’t cost the earth. We have been banging the drum for home working for a long time now and will continue to do so because it underpins the reason we are in business: to help firms make the most of technology so they can work smarter. And, if as a result of more firms working smarter it goes some way to easing the congestion then so much the better. It’ll mean I might be able to hit the snooze button more often and still get to work on time.
Andy Dent - www.birminghampost.net

08 September 2008

Newcastle City Council ramps up home working
Newcastle City Council is planning to increase its home workers to around 250 over the next two years, as part of an organisation-wide transformation programme with IT services supplier Fujitsu. The programme has been running for five years and has already saved £28.5m across different services. The council claims that this has improved its focus on customers and created a better work-life balance for staff. Newcastle has a small number of staff working at home already but has ambitious plans to increase the facility, according to Ray Ward, head of the City Service at the council. "We are about to seriously ramp up our home workers to a target of 250 over the next 18 months to two years, so we'll be revolutionising the way we work," he said. "We will be able to sell buildings and break leases with break points coming up, generating savings in asset management." Newcastle has found that allowing staff to work flexibly has increased productivity, but warned that organisations have a responsibility to make the experience right for employees. The council has replicated the office desktop at employees' homes through functions such as document management. "We have found that people working at home tend to have less absence through illness and are incredibly flexible. They are wrapping their work around their home life," said Ward. "But it is a complete change for the organisation. It is not a case of giving someone a laptop and waving them off. There needs to be a support structure and proper arrangements for making sure remote staff still feel part of the organisation." The council, which previously made most of its own software, saved £500,000 replacing its mainframe with a Fujitsu product, and a consolidated payroll and HR system from software giant SAP cut pay and pensions processing staff by half. The overall programme has helped Newcastle meet efficiency and accessibility targets, improving the delivery of services to citizens and reducing costs by replacing old systems and practices and cutting down on staff and unnecessary premises. "A big benefit of the transformation has been a big improvement in staff. The roles are fewer, but bigger and more varied, and staff are more engaged," said Ward. "And we are now more oriented towards customers, having completely changed the way we allow people to access our services. We have put pay points in local shops, so people can now pay their rent while buying a pint of milk."
Janie Davies - www.computing.co.uk

01 September 2008

BT pilots call centre homeshoring
Call centre workers in north Scotland are set to work from home in a pilot homeshoring project for BT. The pilot will begin with a test for advisers to try out equipment, which replicates working from home while in the contact centre. Fifteen volunteer agents will then operate from their own homes, in a virtual contact centre, using broadband to carry out the same work as in the office. Brendan Dick, director of BT Scotland, said: “Homeshoring is poised to become the next big trend in the industry and Scotland is well placed to create new jobs from it. “It’s also an ideal vehicle for bringing employment back to socially excluded sections of the community. “Home working enables people who have difficulty finding jobs – parents with childcare issues, disabled people and people who care for sick or elderly relatives – to work from home at times which suit themselves and their employers,” added Dick.
www.callcentre.co.uk

28 August 2008

Work at Home agent
Due to the changes that are brought by the day-by-day increase in popularity of the Internet and the changing attitudes of travel agents, travel agencies have started to adopt themselves to earning profits from the Internet business opportunities especially home based travel agents. Since there is an increasing craze of work at home businesses now, more and more people now prefer to work from their homes. The main reason behind popularity of this home business is the level of freedom from hard work that it allows and the opportunity that you would get to spend more time with your friends, relatives and family. If you are interested to start your work at home business of travel agents, then you have to take care of the following things: Easiest Way to Set Up Work at Home Office To start the business of travel agent as work at home business all you need is a telephone, a computer with an Internet connection, and a place to keep supplies. You need just a small room no matter if it is your living or study room and your clients would never know the difference. You also need to have good contacts in travel and tourism industry to get good discounts and deals in air tickets, hotel rooms, etc. The main benefit of work at home agents is to allow you to work in a homely environment and make you earn good money as you can earn with your regular business. Understanding Features, Functions, and Benefits To get success in the work at home agent jobs, first of all, you have to understand the basic difference among its features, functions and benefits. The feature is an aspect of a product that makes it different from other existing products. In the case of work at home agent jobs the features can be the low prices, best services, and many more. The execution of features is known as function. The benefits stand for the positive outcomes or results of your products and services that you offer. This is also aimed at earning of profits from all the features that you offer. All these things are necessary to get success in the work at home agent jobs. In the world of work at home agents you also need to take care of your competitors who are present in the market. You should offer all these things to your customers and this will allow you to get one step ahead from your competitors.
www.the-web-writer.co.uk

28 August 2008

Call Center On Demand: Understanding Promises and Pitfalls of At Home Agent
The controversy over moving call center jobs to offshore locations has died down somewhat. Some of the acceptance among the consumer base is the realization that they either had to live with it or move on to another provider. In other cases, the offending company discovered that the grass wasn’t greener on the other side of the world and decided to move operations back home. While some reverted back to traditional call center environments, others turned to a whole new platform: home-based agents, or the on-demand call center. At present, there are only 100,000 home-based agents working in the U.S. This number is really just considered a starting point as this model is gaining attention in the call center world and growth is expected to explode. In fact, industry assessment reports predict that by 2010, home-based agents will triple and by 2016, 10 percent of all call centers will be using home-based agents in some capacity. There are a number of benefits that a home-based agent model can provide, yet many organizations are not yet ready to make the move to this platform. Right now, home-based agents account for less than 10 percent of the workforce. This gives strong indication that companies may be using this platform as a pilot program as a means to retain or attract key talent. The at-home agent model has proven to increase productivity. According to the latest Five9 research, at-home agents proved to be either as productive as their on-site counterparts in 37 percent of companies, or more so as in 28 percent of companies. For those that were more productive, the gains were as much as 20 percent. Call Center On Demand solutions also include at-home agents that have proven to be more likely to remain in their jobs. Five9 research revealed that 40 percent of home agents were less likely to leave a company than on-site agents. For many companies who have already implemented a home-based model, it provides a tool for retaining top talent irrespective of location. Despite the benefits that the on-demand call center, there are still some organizations that have been leery to make the move toward implementation. Key reasons for this include personnel management issues, productivity concerns and technology constraints. Some companies also worried that they would lose the ability to maintain a quality experience for their customers if they were to implement a home-based model. There was also concern for background noise, such as dogs barking or babies crying. Executives also cited the challenge of maintaining the quality of the work environment for the employee. This research reveals that while the benefits of the home-based model are measurable, it is not a guarantee that it is right for every company, every environment or every customer base. Each company has to evaluate the pros and cons of such a platform before making a move toward implementation.
Susan J. Campbell - www.tmcnet.com

21 August 2008

Virtual call centers could fill big need for at-home jobs
Why does a call center have to be in a call center? After all, we’re talking phone lines or computers here. Does it matter if an agent is sitting cheek by jowl with other agents? Many mothers with young children, workers with disabilities and older workers are clamoring for legitimate work-at-home opportunities. The technology exists to route calls wherever (as we well know from outsourcing to India). It’s just a matter of having the right equipment and installing the right software to set up “virtual” call centers with “remote” agents who work from any location. It’s that, and convincing employers and managers that workers can be out of sight but still take care of business. I recently heard the home-based-workers-are-more-productive gospel from Tim Houlne, chief executive of Working Solutions, a company that supplies computer software, desktop security and voice activation technology for virtual call centers. The company has a web of independent contractors across the country. When they answer calls, they could be in their bedrooms, their breakfast nooks, their home offices. But you won’t know that because Houlne’s corporate clients don’t want you to know that. No matter how efficient and competent home-based agents are, companies worry that their customers might think the agents are less professional if they know cats are underfoot or kids are watching TV in the next room. The setup appears to work well, though. Working Solutions’ revenues grew by 38 percent last year. Houlne’s firm currently has 76,000 home-based agents who sign in online to take calls on behalf of anonymous corporate clients. Competitor businesses are mushrooming, too. Houlne said the system saves corporate clients money in energy and property costs — no physical call centers with utility bills and leases. And, since remote call center workers generally are independent contractors, there are payroll savings in employee benefits not paid — no paid vacation or sick days. Clearly, that kind of job doesn’t appeal to everyone, but Houlne said the remote hookups work for a good reason. “When you’re not limited by a commuting radius of 30 miles or so, you can tap into a broader labor force of educated people who want to work at home,” he said. Houlne’s agents average $10 to $14 an hour. Some earn more based on technical knowledge and other bonuses. One agent in Kansas City, Theresa Caraway, let me visit her “at work” — in a corner of her house, with the aforementioned cats underfoot and kids nearby. Caraway has been a Working Solutions agent since 2004. She signs on for just 15 hours a week, generally between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m., the hours that fit her family’s lifestyle. “I could sign up for any time 24 hours a day,” Caraway said, “but this is what works for me.” Some agents say it’s hard to get the “good” hours they’d like to work, but Caraway said scheduling hasn’t been a problem for her, and there are online bulletin boards and chat rooms where agents can trade work times, if needed. There’s also an online community among the remote agents. She recently participated in an online baby shower. Occasionally, there will be a meeting of agents in a metro area. Caraway said it’s always a surprise when someone’s physical presence doesn’t match the image she had from a voice. Caraway is a happy disciple for the work arrangement. Her husband works for Ford Motor Co., and her family health-care benefits are through his job. She considers her income to be the extra that allows her children to be actively involved in expensive skating sports. Caraway had to provide her own computer and Internet connection, but she emphasized her consumer advice: Never pay a company for the opportunity to work at home. “I have to say, I don’t miss the gossipy office environment at all,” Caraway said. “I just get a lot more done without it. We have a sense of community, but there’s one thing we joke about: We’re glad the technology isn’t to the place where callers can see what we look like. “Sometimes my alarm goes off at 6:55, and I’m on a call at 7 a.m. It doesn’t take much time to ‘go to work.’ ” And the only fuel she needs to go to work is in the coffee pot waiting in her kitchen.
Diane Stafford - The Kansas City Star

19 August 2008

Petrol prices fuel a rise in home working
PRICES at the petrol pumps rather than ecofriendly intentions are leading to a surge in people working from home, according to a West Midlands IT expert. John Dixon, managing director of Coventry-based IT support company Computime, said more and more clients have been looking to offer staff remote working opportunities over the past year. And he added the rise in fuel prices was playing a big part in that. Mr Dixon, who has run the Earlsdon company for more than 20 years, said: "There is no doubt that many company owners and directors do have very good intentions when it comes to the issue of being green. "But that does not always translate into practical steps that will reduce carbon footprint unless the bottom line is being affected. "In the past year or so, the rise in petrol, diesel and other fuel costs has really started to take its toll and it has led to companies looking at ways of taking up the opportunity to have staff work from home. "If you are the director of a company, it's much more sensible to tap into the office network from home rather than to drive several miles to get there if it can be avoided. "When this happened previously, it was just a matter of convenience rather than actually being considered a cost-saving exercise when it comes to fuel. Now, the cost element is definitely an issue. "And with wage demands on the increase because of rising fuel prices, offering this option to some staff makes better financial sense. "This type of requirement is being requested more and more by our customers and, while they are happy that it is good for the environment, the cost is the biggest factor. "Of course, the days of the physical office are by no means numbered but certainly for many companies this type of working is only going to become even more popular."
Andy Hutson - www.coventrytelegraph.net

18 August 2008

Council lets £100,000 executive work from home - in Australia
Council worker emigrates 10,000 miles to Australia... but keeps his job in Cambridgeshire When Mat Taylor heads off with his family for a new life Down Under, he will leave many precious things behind. His £100,000-a-year council job, however, will be travelling with them. Mr Taylor, 44, is to continue working for the local authority as its finance chief despite emigrating 10,000 miles away. Working down under: Council executive Mat Taylor is taking the family to Australia ... and keeping his job in Cambridgeshire Under the extraordinary deal, Fenland District Council in Cambridgeshire is paying Mr Taylor for one day’s work a week – which works out, prorata at £20,000 a year. He will continue to manage the council’s annual £18million budget and help any replacement ease into the role via video link and email, despite being in Adelaide with an eight-and-a-half hour time difference. ‘It seemed more sensible to keep my experience on board, rather than spend a lot of money on someone who had no knowledge of the workings of the council.’ British-born Mr Taylor spent ten years as a senior accountant with Barnet Borough Council in London and two years with Kettering Borough Council in Northamptonshire before joining Fenland as executive director and chief finance officer in 2003. He said he and his wife Kim, 41, had decided to emigrate with their three young children because it ‘seemed like an interesting place to go’. ‘We chose Adelaide because of the Mediterranean climate and there’s a good standard of living,’ he added. He is planning to spend a few months relaxing before looking for a full-time job. Deputy chief executive Sandra Claxton claimed the deal meant avoiding paying an interim manager £800 a day.
Andrew Levy - MailOnline

12 August 2008

Small businesses shift to home working
According to new figures from O2, which surveyed 530 small businesses, 50 per cent of companies it contacted do not work in formal offices. Of that 50 per cent, 24 per cent had offices but worked remotely or from home, while 18 per cent had made the transition in the past eight months. The research found that almost two thirds of companies still working from fixed business premises were considering giving them up within the year. The main reasons behind the shift are the credit crunch, the desire for flexible hours and better technology, according to the survey. Cascade, a London creative design agency, has abandoned its fixed office, saving £4,000 a month. Ben Reid, a partner in Cascade, said: “To our clients, nothing changed – we still had the same e-mail addresses and our landline phone number even remained the same. However, we had in fact completely given up the office. My business partner and I now work from our respective homes.” Related Links The pros and cons of homeworking Best companies see surge in working from home Freya Sykes, 34, has gone full circle. Five years ago, she and her husband, Steven Bletsoe, 33, set up Homefinder UK, a property-finding business, from their home in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. As the company expanded, they moved to offices in Leeds, only to return to Wakefield last year to cut out the commute. While her husband continues to run Homefinder, she is setting up a new company from home selling traditional Yorkshire toffee. Telecoms companies have seen a surge in business subscribers working from home. Graeme Good, head of direct channels for small and medium-sized enterprises for Orange, said: “We’re seeing small business customers moving away from a fixed business environment. With mobile broadband and mobile e-mail, location is becoming less and less important.” Mark Dixon, chief executive of Regus, the serviced office provider, said that businesses want more flexible accommodation and that about two thirds of its 400,000 clients no longer have permanent offices, against about 5 per cent a decade ago. He said: “There is a huge trend towards people working flexibly . . . The main enabler is technology, which has given us the ability to be able to work from anywhere we happen to be. The next driver is the cost of commuting. The credit crunch means companies are doing everything they can to reduce costs, and rents are the highest.”
Lilly Peel - business.timesonline.co.uk

22 July 2008

Government minister "impressed" by homeshoring project
STEPHEN Timms, the Minister of State for Employment and Welfare Reform, has recently visited the North East to meet a delegation of partners led by the North East Employer Coalition at EDF Energy’s Customer Service Centre. THE Minister toured EDF Energy Customer Service Centre and discussed proposals for an innovative Homeshoring project that will result in training and employment opportunities for people currently outside the labour market. Mr Timms said: "I was really impressed with the home and community shoring project. I was particularly pleased to see EDF Energy working in partnership with the North East Employer Coalition and the Expert Partnership Group to develop the proposals even further." Paul Cuskin, Strategic Director of the Employer Coalition said: "We were delighted to welcome the Minister and to showcase our home and community shoring projects here in the region. EDF Energy is the first employer to show a serious interest in adopting homeshoring. The concept is not a new one. Advancement in today’s technology has meant that providing broadband access into people’s homes or community centres is a viable option." EDF Energy Director of HR Bob Marsden added: "We believe that as a leading North Eastern employer we must be committed to supporting the local community. This project offers an accessible platform for many local people who would not normally think about a job with EDF Energy to learn and practice the skills that we look for."
The Journal - www.nebusiness.co.uk

21 July 2008

Hotel Chain Decreases Costs and Increases Staff Flexibility
The challenge for management at Hilton Reservations and Customer Care Group is to provide high-quality customer service to the growing number of travelers inquiring about reservations, as efficiently as possible. The company wanted to increase its quality of customer service while decreasing its call center costs, and realized that a work-at-home program for its call center staff could address both requirements. The flexibility of working at home appeals to more job applicants, including many well educated and skilled people such as stay-at-home mothers and teachers on summer break. Hilton can offer these flex-time workers hours when demand is high and cut back during slow seasons, helping it to match capacity to demand for optimal efficiency and cost savings. In addition, the going rate for a part-time work-at-home agent is approximately $6 an hour less than for a traditional full-time agent, plus the savings in employee benefits. Hilton Reservations also saw a work-at-home program as an opportunity to reduce its number of call center locations. This could result in savings on real estate, power, and other physical support costs.
www.wyse.co.uk

14 July 2008

Is home-working around the corner for call centre agents?
The Call Centre Forum recently conducted a webinar in association with BT on the topic of employing agents who work from home. It was a fast-moving, fascinating session, with BT first discussing their experiences of home-shoring and what they have learnt from various projects, followed by an in-depth question and answer session with the attendees. A poll conducted with the audience at the beginning of the webcast revealed that the biggest perceived barriers to this solution are security concerns, technical issues and remote management of the agents — and indeed much of the live questioning during the session were along these lines. These concerns are obviously serious as 64 per cent of the attendees said they did not have any agents working from home and just 25 per cent stated that they would consider it within the next 12 months. At the end of the discussion it was apparent that, while home-shoring is not necessarily a panacea to solve all recruitment and retention problems, it can certainly help to widen the recruitment pool, as well as make life easier for agents and even boost customer service levels. Is technology advanced enough to put manager’s minds at rest? Or is it the culture change that needs addressing?
Katherine - www.recrion.co.uk

01 June 2008

The home connection
Given its other troubles, it is probably not surprising that the government’s plans to extend flexible working to parents of older children failed to have much of an impact last month. However, the proposals in the draft Queen’s speech to give 4.5 million parents with children up to 16 years old the right to ask for alterations to their working arrangements went further than many expected. Some employers say they fear both a flood of requests and a rise in tribunal claims for those they turn down. One sector that should be fairly relaxed about the news, though, is the call centre industry. Because, according to BT, this year the industry is already set to see a surge in ‘homeshoring’ – perhaps one of the most flexible working arrangements around. An idea developed in the US, it sees staff taken out of their contact centres and offices and set up to do the same work from their homes. Calls to a central number are routed to the telephone line of the next available agent, wherever they happen to be based. In essence the same technology that is used to put calls to a British number through to a worker in Mumbai can instead route that call to a living room in Manchester. In the US, there are already significant numbers of homeshored workers – currently about 112,000 according to IT industry analyst IDC. It reckons this will almost triple by 2010 to 330,000, or about 11 per cent of the country’s agents. In fact, some companies, such as JetBlue Airways, already rely entirely on homeshoring. It has 1,400 reservation agents all working from home. In the UK, meanwhile, adoption has been more modest, but users include the AA, Boots and BT, and it has also been taken up by a number of councils that have begun homeshoring their enquiry lines and some data processing roles. According to BT’s director in Scotland, Brendan Dick, homeshoring is set to be “the next big trend”. Call history Of course, it has been the next big thing for some time. The AA, for instance, was piloting home-based contact agents ten years ago (and now has about 20 per cent of them working this way). “Homeshoring is really just a new name for something that’s been around for quite a while,” says Andy Lake, editor at online journal Flexibility. “Some companies have been doing this for years.” There are a number of reasons it is now ready for greater take-up, however. The first is that it is more technologically feasible – mostly due to more widely available, cheaper and faster broadband connections. Second, it enables companies to access a wider pool of workers, at a time when the industry is struggling to find and retain staff. Since there are no commuting times to worry about, workers can do shifts of as little as half an hour, enabling those with childcare or other responsibilities to work. Such workers have also proved to be more loyal – slashing churn rates. Furthermore, many of these people are the very staff companies are looking for, as there is increasing pressure to find older and more experienced staff, while still keeping costs down. “Offshoring has meant everyone has managed to get costs down now, but the world’s changed; now customers want better service,” explains Nick Gregory, vice president of marketing at virtual contact centre solutions provider Exony. “Companies are looking at how they can get a better experience for customers as well as getting the value they want from a contact centre. That’s the big switch.” By slashing office overheads and providing access to a different type of worker, it is hoped homeshoring is a big part of the answer. IDC reckons that, taking account of overheads and training, homeshoring cuts £5 from the £15.50 hourly cost of every agent. For charities, this should make it an attractive choice, argues Peter James, associate director of the technology for sustainable development research group SustainIT. “For those that are trying to maintain a national presence with a limited resource base, it can make a lot of sense,” he argues. “It allows you to have staff in different regions without the overheads of an office.” This is all the more persuasive if you’re relying on volunteers to run your contact centre, as the other AA, Alcoholics Anonymous, does. In the major cities such as London, it runs offices where volunteers man the helplines. In the regions, though, callers to that same central number are automatically routed to the homes of volunteers covering the local area (BT’s software detects where callers are dialling from, provided they call from a landline). Local groups of volunteers are left to organise how they cover the shifts between them. “It’s about spreading the workload,” explains Ivan Wells, a member of the charity’s Telephone Sub committee. “If people had to come into an office, that would preclude a lot of them from being able to do it.” Despite the attractions, though, charities are lagging behind even the private and public sectors in the UK in adopting homeshoring on a significant scale. As Ian Ashby, managing director at virtual contact centre software provider IRIS, puts it: “I think charities are embracing homeworking, but industry in general is planning for homeshoring.”
Peter Davy - www.charitytimes.com

15 May 2008

Homeshoring Finally Set to Take off in The UK
The concept of a contact centre advisor sitting down to work in their spare bedroom with a comfy pair of slippers on is no longer the stuff of an advisor’s dreams. Homeshoring - literally the ability to work contact centre advisors from home - is by no means a new concept but it is one that the contact centre industry is increasingly embracing. This is being driven by the struggle to recruit and retain high quality, qualified and knowledgeable advisors who have the life skills and expertise to deal with the increasingly complex and diverse needs of the customers ringing in combined with the perceived backlash against the rising costs of offshoring. According to the Office of National Statistics around 7.5 per cent of the UK’s population work from home at least one day a week. However, this is rarely a privilege offered to contact centre advisors, despite the fact that 18 per cent of companies involved in Contact Babel’s survey of the Contact Centre industry this year rated homeworking as very important (up 8 percent from the previous year’s survey). However, in the US and Australia there is evidence of a 20-50 per cent growth in the use of home based advisors and the UK seems set to follow. Homeshoring is a very different and more complex proposition than home working. Homeshoring is not about an employee occasionally checking email and accessing the internet at home. It is about a workforce who requires disciplined scheduling into shift patterns, needs to be effectively integrated into the operation, voice & data, management information systems and workflows of a virtual contact centre. It’s not just about sending people home with a PC, some ergonomic furniture and a broadband connection! The Inverness experiment BT’s relationship with homeshoring pre-dates the internet revolution. In 1992, eleven BT operators volunteered to work from home in what became known as the ‘Inverness Experiment’. The experiment was a success, with operators reporting a better work life balance and BT benefiting from better staff retention and quality of service. However, the key factor that prevented homeshoring from taking off then was the cost of the technology. This included installing an ISDN line to the home, specialised management information systems and a videophone unit to ensure that operators could see and communicate with their colleagues and managers face-to-face. This added up to a bill of around £11,000 per agent position! In the past 15 years things have changed somewhat. The increasing reliability and decreasing cost of delivering broadband to the home and distributing calls as part of a virtual contact centre has meant that the technological cost has reduced considerably. The barriers to adoption today are more cultural than technological. Many contact centre managers have dismissed homeshoring as great in theory but unworkable in practice. One of the primary concerns is the fact that managers can no longer see the people that they manage. However, in reality, it is not actually a problem to see whether people are working or not since (whether they are two feet or two hundred miles away) they are visible on the switch. The fact is that many of the questions that homeshoring raises should be asked in any business - how do you motivate employees, how can you nurture a corporate culture in the individuals you employ, how do you ensure that the knowledge and skills of individuals passes into the collective learning of your organisation? These topics often get obscured in traditional organisations by the rigid silos which everyone takes for granted. Major challenge Homeshoring can also be a challenge to management who must develop new supervisory techniques to ensure not only that quality standards and objectives are met, but that remote advisors remain motivated and feel part of the wider organisation. It can also be a challenge to employees, who must acquire the self-management skills and discipline to deliver great customer experiences without the need for day-to-day supervision and social contact. The debate here is whether it is possible for current contact centre employees to adjust to this or whether it is better to recruit new advisors who won’t miss the buzz of the contact centre. Organisations that have adopted homeshoring have found a number of immediate advantages. They have gained access to a different advisor type than the increasingly young and transient workforce that typically exists in contact centres today - with the over 50s, carers and returning mothers, in particular, benefiting. In addition to the work life advantages that homeshoring can provide advisors, employers can benefit from a highly flexible, more loyal and productive workforce (who actually want to work rather than viewing the job as a stop gap). Case studies have reported an average decrease in staff churn from 26 percent to 10 percent per annum. They also report an up to 60 percent decrease in sickness levels (8.4 days - 3.1 per annum) since it is much easier to report for work when you are not feeling 100 percent when your commute involves crossing the hallway and going into the study. Another advantage of this model is the ability to improve productivity by flexing the shift patterns of homeshored advisors. Many companies who have traditionally suffered call peaks have benefited from the ability to schedule split shifts or have home based advisors on call. They also have a workforce who can be more resilient to both natural and man-made disasters - who don’t have to negotiate the vagaries of the road network, transport strikes, severe weather, natural disasters, disease pandemics or terrorist action. Reduced cost of real estate and associated investment in car parking and infrastructure are also key economic drivers for homeshoring along with the attraction of significantly reducing an organisation’s carbon footprint. These are all benefits for both the employing organisation as well as the employed individual. This win:win situation points to the growth of homeshoring in an industry that seems to have reached a tipping point in terms of managing costs without offshoring, recruitment and retention of advisors with the right skills and delivering high levels of customer satisfaction as a result. Bring out the slippers, the homeshored advisor is here to stay! Community Homeshoring: Putting Communities on the Map One flavour of homeshoring that is becoming increasingly popular is community homeshoring - where advisors are sourced from a specific geographical location. One good current example of community based homeshoring is in Broxtowe estate in Nottingham - a collaboration between UK Virtual Call Centres (UK VCC), Broxtowe Education, Skills and Training centre (BEST), BT, Cisco and the Greater Nottingham Partnership. Being an area of relative economic depravation, low geographic mobility and high unemployment, it is a prime site for job creation. Broxtowe’s other asset is a large population (around 14,000), as UKVCC’s Stuart Bowden explains, "You need a large, sustainable community for community based homeshoring. Inner city populations are simply too transient". The geography of the Broxtowe estate is another of the principal reasons why it was selected since all roads lead to a central area in which resides the BEST centre. This allows them to have a hub for training, community support and face-to-face meetings without the need to travel for miles to get there. Key to the success of the Broxtowe project are the people involved. They are typically returning mothers or carers who have been unable to find a job which is flexible enough to cater for their domestic commitments. However, they actually want to return to work and probably would not have considered contact centre employment as an option before. The current batch of Broxtowe recruits are currently taking calls for Nottingham based high street chemist, Boots. Graham Hardy, Head of Central Customer Care at Boots, explains the rationale behind their pilot: "This project meets a community and a business need head on. It is an exciting pilot to see if it’s possible for people to deliver a great experience for Boots customers, whilst working from their homes. We want to establish the level of support they need and what else needs to be true for this to be a success. It’s important to Boots that their 136 year association with Nottingham continues and this is a creative way of accessing and involving a wider population than just those on the Boots Beeston site". It also helped that many of the advisors were already Boots customers - in other words, they are able to empathise with customers calling in because they are customers themselves. So far the homeshored advisors have delivered extremely high levels of customer satisfaction, and all are meeting Boots’ high standards of performance. The impact on the community cannot be overestimated. Over 100 people have been interviewed, many of whom have gone on to receive pre-employment training, and subsequent employment. The community is proud of the project, and many previously disadvantaged people on the estate can now see their way to fulfilling employment opportunities. The homeshoring project has even literally put Broxtowe on the map -- as a sign directing people to the estate has just been put on the main road!
www.customer-strategy.co.uk

15 May 2008

Travel agent celebrates Work from Home Day
Archana is one of more than 900 travel consultants located throughout the UK and overseas, running her own home-based travel business as part of the award-winning independent travel company, Travel Counsellors. Travel Counsellors was the first company in the UK to enable travel agents like Archana to work from their own home. Archana says that she enjoys the freedom and flexibility of running her own home-based travel business which means she is available outside of normal working hours and at a time convenient to her customers. Archana is able to work from home using Travel Counsellors' award winning technology and can search through hundreds of suppliers in a matter of minutes to find the best options for her customer. She says that she enjoys the many benefits highlighted by ‘National Work from Home Day' including no daily commute, meaning less carbon emissions and more time to focus on tailor making the perfect holidays to suit her clients. Archana says; "I think ‘National Work from Home Day' is a great way to highlight to people in the UK the many benefits of working from home. From the moment I joined Travel Counsellors I have never looked back. Having my own home-based business means that I am not only able to devote more time to my friends and family, but also to my clients. As a professional, full time and independent Travel Counsellor, with access to award winning technology and hundreds of travel suppliers, hotels and airlines, I can tailor make the right holiday for my customers and provide a level of service and professional advice that the internet and traditional agents on the high street cannot match."
businessreporter@newburybusinesstoday.co.uk

29 April 2008

BT Call Centre Home Working Trial At Thurso
BT call centre workers are set to work from home in a trial which could create new jobs and revolutionise the way the offices are run, the telecoms giant has announced. Around 15 volunteers at the centre in Thurso, Caithness, will operate online from their homes, using high speed broadband links in a practice known as "homeshoring". Brendan Dick, director of BT Scotland, said: "The pilot could herald major changes in work practices for BT and the wider contact centre industry." He continued: "Homeshoring is poised to become the next big trend in the industry and Scotland, as a fertile recruiting ground for contact centre operations, is well placed to create new jobs from it. "A skilled and flexible workforce, low staff turnover and even the Scottish accent have been cited as factors in the sector's Scottish success story. "Homeshoring will be an additional plus factor because the skill pool will not be confined to people who live within commuting distances of the contact centre or want to work traditional hours."
www.caithness-business.co.uk

29 April 2008

Caithness Wins Homeshoring Pilot
Local MP, John Thurso, commenting on the announcement today (29th April) that BT is to run a homeshoring pilot in Caithness, said: "The choice of Caithness for this exciting pilot by BT is testament to the quality and skill of the local work force. The pilot not only has the potential to deliver many more jobs in the future but also sends a very positive message to other potential investors in the area. I know how hard Roy Kirk and his team have worked to bring the scheme to Caithness and they are to be congratulated on their success.
www.johnthurso.org

28 February 2008

Vanco on the move to call centres in the home
...All this could have implications for the future of customer call centres, helpdesks and contact centres, he said, although there remain some obstacles to the widespread uptake of 'homeshoring' (the building of virtual call centres of home-based employees as a competitive, locally based alternative to offshore services). “[Homeshoring] does make sense,” he said. “An inhibitor to that would be the ability of DSL to deliver class of service. It would need to be of sufficient quality for call centre work. We've integrated voice and data across standard DSL and the results have been good. The barriers are falling away.” Mark Thompson, CEO of Vanco's Solutions division, added: “Lots of organisations do use our technology for contact centres. The technology can do that. But corporate home users are a big uplift for us. A very big uplift. Most of our 200 global networks have a reasonable degree of home corporate users.” “It won't be long before the traditional call centre ACD will come together with IPT technology. That's maybe five years ahead. The impetus would be both cost and quality of service.”
Chris Middleton - www.mycustomer.com

21 February 2008

'G'day mate, This is your new Virtual Receptionist service'
The death of the nine to five working culture through advances in technology has led a "virtual receptionist" firm into agreeing an unusual new partnership. Telebizz, which operates out-of-hours services for companies including BP, has signed a deal with fellow virtual receptionist firm Essential Business Solutions (EBS) to handle night time calls. Each firm will handle calls for each other taken during the hours of darkness. The reason they can do this? Because EBS is based in Sydney, Australia. Telebizz's managing director, Gillie Scherr, said the move had only been made possible by technological advances made in the last few years. "One of the great opportunities is that we will be able to offer 24/7 back-up for business clients," she said. "We will be bringing a lot of business from Australia to the Westcountry. In Australia they haven't had the technology until very recently - we could not have done this two or three years ago." Sydney is 11 hours ahead of GMT, meaning that EBS is ideally placed to handle night work for the English company and vice-versa. Virtual Receptionist is a personalised message-taking service. When clients ring they are greeted by a virtual receptionist giving your company name, who then informs them that you are not currently available and takes any messages they might want to leave or can transfer the caller, dependant on the client needing, for example, emergency call-outs. Messages are then sent instantly to the client via e-mail and SMS if desired. The message is also stored in a private "web-based office" so they can be accessed remotely. Ms Scherr said the firm had been looking for ways to take its operation 24-hour for some time, but it had been difficult to do so within the United Kingdom. A chance trip "Down Under" changed the situation. "We have not offered our Virtual Receptionist clients a 24/7 solution in the past, as there have been all sort of issues such as the costs of overnight staffing and the difficulties of running overnight home working teams," Ms Scherr said. "We have increasingly had more and more enquiries for 24/7 services, as even the smallest companies can be working in a global market or just want to take an edge on their competitors. "With so many people working from home these days, often in the evenings, people catch up on their e-mails and want to make a few calls. "We had a trip to Australia over Christmas and I found the customer service in the country was so good that I thought that doing this made so much sense. The difference is that they are not so used to virtual receptionist systems as we are." The link-up has seen Telebizz ship its server technology to New South Wales in Australia ahead of a planned March 1 launch for the joint service. Telebizz is based at Langage Business Park outside Plymouth, its home for the last ten years. It was set up by Ms Scherr and her husband Nick Lunn, and employs 20 staff.
Western Morning News

15 February 2008

Virtual call centre pays off for Scottish Power
The utility company, which supplies electricity and gas to more than five million customers in the UK, has linked its six contact centre sites into a single, virtualised network. In the past, there was no integration between contact centres that were focused on either business or home users, and there was no way of moving calls between sites based on demand or call type, said Carl Young, head of major projects at Scottish Power. The Siemens Hipath DX/Genesys integrated contact centre, supplied by Siemens Enterprise Communications, has enabled Scottish Power to expand its base call capacity to 250,000 calls an hour on a pay-as-you-go basis. "The previous capacity was 22,000 local calls an hour, but we did not need that much locally all the time. We were paying for infrastructure we just did not need," said Young. The system has helped Scottish Power increase the accuracy with which it processes calls, cutting the number of calls that need to be re-transferred by 74%. Better matching of calls to agents and more calls being resolved first time has improved service levels by 31%. The Siemens call centre technology also enables customers to access additional services. This has increased the utility company's revenue by improving cash collection by 56% and increasing the number of direct debit customers by 19%, said Young. Young said a common reporting infrastructure had made it easier to compare performance across the contact centre operations, and centralised reporting had made it easier to identify and meet increased call demands.
Warwick Ashford - www.computerweekly.com

14 February 2008

Getting the best from 'Homeshoring'
A skilled and flexible workforce, above average retention rates and even the Scottish accent have been cited as factors in the sector’s success. So Scotland is well placed to capitalise on the next big trend in the industry – homeshoring. A surge in the rise of contact centre advisors based at home is expected in 2008, offering businesses a balance between cost efficiencies and customer expectation. Homeshoring, a new entry in the Macmillan English dictionary, literally brings the call centre home. But it is a much more complex and different proposition from teleworking. It requires a skilled workforce with disciplined shift patterns integrated into the operation of a virtual contact centre, with access to instant communications, allowing specialist advisers to answer customer calls via skills-based routing. Despite around 7.5 per cent of the UK’s workforce working from home at least one day a week (according to the Office of National Statistics), very few “traditional” contact centre advisors are afforded this option. However, research suggests homeshoring could save the industry up to £5 per hour – equal to around £6000 per agent per year – and lead to job creation, reduced carbon footprint and improvement in customer experience. The US is leading the field, and expects to have more than 10 per cent of its call centre workforce based at home by 2010. There are significant benefits in recruitment. The skill pool is not confined to people who live within commuting distances of the contact centre or want to work traditional hours. As more customers go online to carry out simple account-based actions, call centre staff are becoming more specialised. Scotland enjoys widespread broadband connectivity to the home, supported by falling prices and increasing reliability. However, an integrated approach to maximising the economic benefits of this capacity is sadly lacking. The environmental benefits of working from home are increasingly well known. The virtual call centre expert Exony estimates that 6.5 million commuting call centre agents worldwide make 13 million car journeys a day – indicating massive potential benefits of commute-free working. Homeshoring also supports companies committed to corporate responsibility, by offering employment to social groups that might once have been excluded by such circumstances as age, disability and location. The US experience is that while traditional call centre employees are likely to be transient teenagers, a home-based advisor is likely to be older (on average aged 38-41), with around 15 years’ experience and college-educated. Hurdles to be overcome are similar to those involved in adopting flexible working policies. A cultural shift is required, with buy-in at every level. Some managers may have concerns around managing at a distance, and the commitment of off-site staff. Systems and processes can be carefully designed to surmount such challenges. Ways of measuring and monitoring home-based agents range from reports, call recording, webcams, call and keystroke recording and real-time agent monitoring. Each system allows managers to supervise their teams, enhance security measures and manage resource allocation as easily as if the agents were working in an office. In a changing climate – literally and metaphorically – Scotland must adapt to exploit its infrastructure to capitalise on these new employment opportunities. It’s time to take a leaf out of the US book and adopt a can-do approach to workforce transformation.
Brendan Dick - www.hi-techscotland.com

24 January 2008

Councils homeshore to help unemployed
Homeshoring doesn't just battle offshoring to India, it also has the potential to get disenfranchised people back into the work force, according to pilot projects being run by a pair of local authority technology partners. Accelerate Nottingham and Connecting Bristol and- technology programmes supporting their respective councils - are using the idea of home and flexible working to create employment in call centres for disenfranchised members of their communities, they told attendees of the Mobile and Flexible Working in the Public Sector conference in London yesterday. Homeshoring could benefit single parents, disabled people, or others who face challenges getting to the office and into the workforce, such as ethnic minorities or others facing cultural hurdles. The concept is simple: rather than facing the trouble of bringing disenfranchised people into the office, take the work to them - in this case, people work from their own homes or in small teams at a very local community call centre, taking calls for the private or public sector. "It's a good opportunity for some of the heaviest users of council customers," said Peter Goodwin from Accelerate Nottingham. "Technology offers a real opportunity to get people back into work." He said statistics have shown that there are a million call centre employees in the UK. "If we could shift ten per cent of those jobs to homeshoring, that's a lot of people getting engaged in work," Goodwin said. "It's a holistic view to how flexible working can be a part of a wider agenda." It's a simple idea, but not easy to implement. In Nottingham, the Broxtowe Estate is plagued by high unemployment and teenage pregnancy rates, but has a strong sense of community, Goodwin said - the latter of which is key to making the project a success. The pilot easily found 12 call centre workers, but finding a private sector contract wasn't so simple. While there was a lot of private interest in the programme - not least because of lower infrastructure costs and no recruitment charges - Goodwin said "somebody had to jump first." In this case, it was the Boots Advantage programme. A pilot has been running for the past six months, and so far it's been a success, with no employee turnover. "Performance is just as good as in person call centres, in some places, better," said Goodwin. "It's not corporate social responsibility, it has mainstream business value," he stressed. And, the flexibility of the workers lets them respond to peaks in demand. Because they aren't in the office and require little infrastructure - just a thin-client device and standard broadband - employing such workers is cheaper than setting up an in-house call centre, and it works as a fail-over in case some disaster hits the central offices and calls can't be taken there. But because the private sector does have a bottom line to watch, Goodwin said such a programme can not depend on private sector contracts alone. He added: "If it was left to the market, these people would not have got jobs." Now, according to Stephen Hilton from Connecting Bristol, his local council is about to pilot a similar setup. In the Knowle West area, 20 people will either work from home or in a local community centre in a similar way as the Nottingham project. For security reasons, some companies seem to prefer the community centre setup, Hilton said, but noted that there's no real difference in security from a technical standpoint - it's more a cultural issue. "People need to learn to manage output, not people," he added. The Bristol project would not only help disenfranchised local people get back into the workforce, but it will also let the council efficiently expand their contact centre, without needing extra office space. It will also diversify the council's offices, to help boost business continuity in case of problems at the main contact centre. "I'm confident we can make it work," Hilton said. "And if it works here, why can't it work everywhere?" The two technology partnerships are associated with the DC10+ network, which has helped fund the pilots.
Nicole Kobie - www.itpro.co.uk

12 December 2007

Extending the Benefits of Flexible Working
Councils and other public bodies are starting to recognise the benefits of home working for existing employees. Home working can lead to a reduction in peak time travel and if managed well, can bring about efficiency and environmental gains. However, not everyone wants to, or is able to work at home. So Connecting Bristol is also interested in promoting the benefits of working closer to home. Nottingham, Bristol and other DC10 members want to ensure that flexible job opportunities are made available to communities that face digital and social exclusion. At this up and coming Headstar Flexible Working conference on 23rd Jan 2008, Peter Goodwin Accelerate Nottingham and I will talk about our collaborative DC10 project built on the innovative Homeshoring model. The aim is to radically transform the way that business and public sector organisations manage their customer contact centres, creating new ‘virtual employment opportunities’ for people who face difficulties entering the jobs market. Research suggests that more than 1 million people in the UK work in customer contact centres. If just a small percentage of these jobs can be transfered into city neighbourhoods or rural areas, there is significant potential to boost neighbourhood renewal and other regeneration programmes.
Stephen Hilton - www.connectingbristol.org

20 November 2007

Telecommuting found to boost morale, cut stress
Tired of traffic jams, late trains, packed buses? Telecommuting can be a big plus for workers and employers because it boosts morale and job satisfaction and cuts stress, researchers said on Monday. In an analysis of 46 studies on telecommuting, researchers found that working away from the office by using computers, cell phones or other electronic equipment can have more pluses than negatives for people and the companies that employ them. "Our results show that telecommuting has an overall beneficial effect because the arrangement provides employees with more control over how they do their work," said Dr Ravi Gajendran of Pennsylvania State University. "Telecommuting seems to have some mildly positive effects on employee morale, on work-family balance and on stress," he added in an interview. Gajendran and David Harrison, who reported their findings in the journal of Applied Psychology, studied data on 12,833 telecommuters who spend time working away from the office. Telecommuting has been a growing trend in the United States since about 2000. Last year an estimated 45 million Americans telecommuted, an increase of 4 million from 2003, according to the magazine WorldatWork. Gajendran believes the numbers will continue to grow as access to broadband increases. "Over the last couple of years there has been a spike, especially in the number of people who are regularly telecommuting. By regularly I mean people who are telecommuting at least once a month," he said. "There has almost been a 60 percent increase in those numbers." Although some companies and workers feared telecommuting could hamper career prospects or lead to a breakdown in relationships with managers and co-workers, the researchers found no evidence to support it. "Telecommuting by and large does not have any negative relational outcomes as has been commonly believed," said Gajendran. There was also no evidence that telecommuting stymied career development. Telecommuting also has added benefits, according to the researchers, because it cuts commuting costs and relieves congestion on inner city transport systems, as well as traffic on roads. "If you could save a long commute, say two days a week or maybe even one, you will see substantial costs saving as well as substantial reductions in terms of pollution," Gajendran explained.
Patricia Reaney - uk.reuters.com

04 November 2007

Work At Home Telecommuting As A Call Center Agent
If you are looking online for jobs you can do at home, you will undoubtedly have come across many home business opportunities where you get to do work such as affiliate marketing or joining an MLM program. Opportunities and advice on starting your own home business are advertised all over the Internet, however, real jobs you can do at home are nigh on impossible to locate. Why is this? Well, for a start, not all jobs are suitable for home based employment so the opportunities for working at home are reduced. Another reason is that employers have been slow to catch on to the idea of employing staff to work at home. Instead of considering the massive savings they could make in terms of office space, lighting, heating and so on, employers focus on the fact that they will be unable to directly supervise their staff members. If staff are paid by results, they have a better chance of finding jobs where they can work from home than if they were paid a set hourly rate. All these things combine to limit the number of work at home jobs available. Demand for work at home jobs currently far exceeds the supply. There are, however, a couple of areas where real work at home jobs are becoming more plentiful; one area where the number of jobs at home on offer are increasing is in call-center work. Anyone who has needed to contact a company's Customer Service Department and has been routed to a call-center will know that many of them are based overseas but there is a less well-known trend for hiring more local call-center staff. Between 2000 and 2007 the number of home-based call-center employees in the USA tripled. According to research conducted by Yankee Group there are more than 670,000 work at home phone agents employed in the USA and Canada alone. Working at home as a call-center agent has many of the advantages of running your own home business including the obvious ones such as flexible working hours and no commuting. You are, however, an employee just as much as if you were working in your employer's building and your earning potential is dictated by how much work the employer provides. Home-based call-center workers are normally contractors who are paid for the actual number of minutes they spend on the phone to customers. Working hours, although flexible, have to be sanctioned by the employer, so you can't just decide to change your hours without giving any notice. Hourly rates of pay for work at home call-center staff are not particularly high and depend upon the type of work undertaken. For example if your job is to simply take down customer orders over the phone, you will not earn as much as you would providing technical support or in a position requiring sales skills. When considering the rates of pay for a home-based call-center agent job, you need to take into account that by working at home, you will be saving money. For example, you won't have to pay for fares or fuel, you won't have to maintain a working-clothes wardrobe and, if you are a parent (as most people who want to work at home are), you won't have to pay expensive child-care fees. Despite the comparatively low rates of pay, telecommuting as a call-center agent is worth considering if you want a job where you can work at home.
Elaine Currie - Feelgr8.co.uk

07 October 2007

Homeshoring will be the next big trend in the contact centre sector: BT
BT is predicting a surge in the rise of ‘homeshored’ contact centre advisors in 2008, as businesses face up to a growing dilemma between the need for cost reductions and an increasingly demanding customer base. BT warns of a potential recipe for disaster brewing as contact centres fail to deliver either their efficiency targets or their customer promises. Homeshoring, which made its entry into the Macmillan English dictionary this year, is emerging as the most viable solution, according to Dr Nicola Millard, a BT futurologist who has been examining the subject for some time. Dr Nicola Millard, BT Global Services, said: “Bringing the contact centre home – literally – is without doubt the best route for consumer-facing businesses now. Although the ability to ‘telework’ from home has existed for almost 20 years now, homeshoring is a very different and more complex proposition. It requires a skilled workforce with disciplined shift patterns integrated into the operation of a virtual contact centre and the access to real time voice and data to allow specialists to answer customer calls based on skills based routing.” Still in its infancy, the concept of homeshoring is predicted to grow considerably over the next few years. Despite around 7.5 percent of the UK’s workforce working from home at least one day a week (according to the Office of National Statistics), very few ‘traditional’ contact centre advisors are afforded this option. However, according to a report from Exony* , a homeshored strategy could save the UK contact centre industry up to £5 per hour which equates to approximately £6,000 per agent per year; along with the benefits of job creation, reduced carbon footprint and improvement in customer experience. Gartner+ estimates that organisations can save up to 10 percent of their costs through homeshoring. Millard believes there are five main drivers that point towards the growth of the homeshored advisor: 1. The increasing costs of recruiting and retaining staff. In the homeshoring model, recruitment is not confined to people that live within reasonable commuting distances from the contact centre or want to work traditional hours. 2. The changing nature of contact centre interactions – with many customers starting to do the simple stuff themselves, contact centre staff are becoming more specialised. 3. The perceived consumer criticism against offshored call centres coupled with increasing wage bills in popular offshoring areas, making offshored call centres a less attractive prospect. 4. The falling costs and increasing reliability of broadband connectivity to the home. 5. The sustainability agenda. The environmental benefits of working at home are increasingly well known. Exony estimates that the four million contact centre agents currently working in UK, US and Canada produce more than six million tons of CO² each year. Millard added: “Homeshoring needs to support the needs and aims of the organisation and must have buy-in at every level from the CEO to supervisors. It will not be appropriate for everyone and culturally, companies will need to adapt. Many managers will lack confidence in their ability to ‘manage at a distance’ and some will not have faith in their staff's commitment to be as productive as they would be in a contact centre. However, systems and processes can be carefully thought through to counteract this and this is far from an insurmountable challenge.” The potential for homeshoring to take-off in 2008 is something which business continuity managers need to be aware of: to enable preparations to begin where appropriate; and to allow the advantages and disadvantages from a business continuity perspective to be considered in advance of any business decision being taken to go down the homeshoring route.
www.continuitycentral.com

04 September 2007

Call centre in home worker drive
Teletech is looking for 500 home workers across the UK. They are targeting NI because of the concentration of skilled workers and high rates of broadband usage. It said new recruits will start on similar pay to current workers. Prospective staff need a PC, broadband, a landline and a quiet place to work. The company said it wanted to recruit candidates from across Northern Ireland for its existing operations and working from home.
BBC

26 July 2007

VoIP raises call centre customer satisfaction
A report by Aberdeen Group reveals that call centres are increasingly moving away from the single centralised site with rows and rows of telephone agents and are becoming more efficient as a result. While the move to have agents in distributed environments, including home and offshore, is motivated primarily by cost, the best of the companies are finding that VoIP-powered virtual call centres are improving their customer satisfaction. The Aberdeen Group surveyed 150 companies and discovered that 35 per cent of the best in class had experienced more than a ten per cent improvement in customer satisfaction after deploying distributed VoIP enabled agents. Alan Hubbard, Aberdeen's senior vice president of customer service, said: "If you've got the right agents, call durations are going to go down as opposed to shuffling amongst agents." He added: "Not only does call duration go down, but satisfaction goes up."
www.onestopclick.com

18 May 2007

UK Contact Centres missing out on talented home based workforce
The UK contact centre industry is failing to take advantage of a skilled pool of talent by not doing more to enable disabled, older people, parents and other mobility-restricted workers to work from home, according to Exony, supplier of interaction management software to the contact centre industry. Virtual Contact Centres (VCCs) would provide employment for those who cannot move far from their home due to illness or movement-restricting responsibilities, such as home carers, as well as providing contact centres with a new source of skilled workers. These workers are often experienced, have excellent customer service skills and are keen to get back into the workforce. Currently, there are an estimated 112,000 home-based agents in the US, some 3.7 per cent of the contact centre workforce, a figure that is predicted to rise to 330,000 by 2010 (source:IDC). With the UK contact centre workforce nearing one million, the percentage of UK workers operating from a home office is much lower than in the US. In the UK, Exony estimates that only around 2,000 contact centre personnel are permitted to work remotely. “Home-based employees present a potentially massive talent pool that remains largely untapped by UK contact centres,” Exony CEO Ian Ashby said. “Combining technologies such as broadband, enabling employees to both handle calls and connect securely with the corporate network, with tools to measure and manage agent and call performance in real-time, allows contact centres to reap the benefits of homeshoring. Breaking down these perception barriers is the first step towards more effective contact centre operations. It is time the UK woke up to the benefits and caught up with the US so that home-based workers can use their skills beneficially.” According to Ashby, increased working from home could also save the UK contact centre industry up to 5 per employee per hour, along with environmental and human resource benefits To coincide with Work Wise Week (16-22 May, http://www.workwiseuk.org/ and National Work From Home Day on 18 May), Exony has launched a new white paper to enable contact centre managers to benefit from the growing trend of “homeshoring”. Homeshoring occurs when contact centres equip staff with appropriate communications facilities to be able to work from home rather than one central office. Phil Flaxton, chief executive of Work Wise UK, said: “Businesses in the UK will have no option but to introduce smarter working practices, of which home working is one example, if they are going to be able to recruit and retain the staff they need in the future, and increase productivity and competitiveness to be able to meet the challenges emerging from economies such as India and China. “Changing working practices and working smarter will not only increase business productivity and competitiveness, but also reduce transport congestion and pollution, improve health, assist disadvantaged groups, and harmonise our work and family commitments.” In its white paper, available for free download from http://www.exony.com/, Exony outlines the core benefits to contact centres of homeshoring: Improved opportunity: Disabled workers, older people or new parents, who would find commuting difficult or impossible, are now able to do worthwhile work Improved agent quality: US experience suggests that homeshoring enables contact centre operators to tap in to a new, experienced labour pool Reduced overheads: Employing home-based workers reduces typical office costs such as space, furniture, heating, lighting and parking. Analysts at Gartner Dataquest estimate that staff costs equate to 70 per cent of contact centre overheads Increased staff morale: Attrition is a real issue in the industry, currently running at 22 per cent (source:ContactBabel). This has an exhaustive effect on companies, especially given high training costs Green benefits: Reduced commuting and energy costs leads to a lower carbon footprint. Exony estimates that the four million contact centre agents currently working in UK, US and Canada produce more than six million tones of CO2 each year.
http://www.callcentrehelper.com

14 May 2007

UK Contact Centres trail US counterparts on working from home
Newbury, 14 May 2007: Increased working from home could save the UK contact centre industry up to £5 per employee per hour, along with environmental and human resource benefits, according to a new report from Exony. 'Homeshoring' occurs when contact centres equip staff with appropriate communications facilities to be able to work from home rather than one central office. Exony CEO Ian Ashby argues that British-based contact centres are missing out on some significant benefits; recruiting and retaining skilled staff, improved morale, environmental benefits, reduced overheads and increased opportunities for the disadvantaged in society. Currently, there are an estimated 112,000 home-based agents in the US, a figure that is predicted to rise to 330,000 by 2010 (source:IDC). Despite a contact centre workforce pushing one million in the UK, homeshoring is not as prevalent. Ashby argues that Work Wise Week, which runs from 16-22 May and includes National Work From Home Day on May 18, provides the perfect opportunity for contact centres to investigate and experiment with homeshoring. "We're way behind the US in our attitude to enabling contact centre workers to operate from home. It's prevalent in other industry sectors, so why not here?" said Ashby. "Combining technologies such as broadband, enabling employees to both handle calls and connect securely with the corporate network, with tools to measure and manage agent and call performance in real-time, allows contact centres to reap the benefits of homeshoring. Breaking down these perception barriers is the first step towards more effective contact centre operations. It is time the UK woke up to the benefits and caught up with the US." Exony, the leading provider of interaction management software for Virtual Contact Centre (VCC) operations, believes that the barriers to adopting a homeshoring strategy have been overstated and have created a guide to integrating home-based agents into organisations' contact centres. In its white paper, Exony outlines the core benefits to contact centres of homeshoring: - Reduced overheads: Employing home-based workers reduces typical office costs such as space, furniture, heating, lighting and parking. Analysts at Gartner Dataquest estimate that staff costs equate to 70 per cent of contact centre overheads - Increased staff morale: Attrition is a real issue in the industry, currently running at 22 per cent (source:ContactBabel). This has an exhaustive effect on companies, especially given high training costs - Improved opportunity: Disabled workers, older people or new parents, who would find commuting difficult or impossible, are now able to work, bringing their skills and experience to benefit customer service - Green benefits: Reduced commuting and energy costs leads to a lower carbon footprint. Exony estimates that the four million contact centre agents currently working in UK, US and Canada produce more than six million tones of CO² each year. Phil Flaxton, chief executive of Work Wise UK, said: "Businesses in the UK will have no option but to introduce smarter working practices, of which home working is one example, if they are going to be able to recruit and retain the staff they need in the future, and increase productivity and competitiveness to be able to meet the challenges emerging from economies such as India and China. "Changing working practices and working smarter will not only increase business productivity and competitiveness, but also reduce transport congestion and pollution, improve health, assist disadvantaged groups, and harmonise our work and family commitments."
www.e-consultancy.com

12 May 2007

We have the technology
'The only warmth in my life is the heated toilet seat." So goes the ditty entered in a recent poetry competition aimed at giving expression to Japan's downtrodden corporate samurai. Fortunately for the Japanese, salvation may be on its way, thanks to the same aptitude for finding technological solutions to problems (such as a cold bottom) that our forlorn poet finds such comfort in. On behalf of its long-suffering workers, the Japanese government champions telecommuting, hoping a radical change to the nation's work practices will end its notoriously inefficient work culture. Policy-makers even think a little more time at home might lead to an increased birthrate, something Tokyo feels needs to be addressed immediately. The long hours the Japanese put in at the office has stopped them having sex - well, at least with their partners - say some reports. As part of its scheme to double by 2010 the number of telecommuters - estimated at about 6.74 million in 2005, or about 20% of the working population - the government has just completed a project to make Japan's already lightning-speed internet 10 times faster. It will launch this month and make passing data back and forth a matter of nanoseconds. However this next-generation internet may be lost on Japan's older generation of corporate bruisers, some of whom still do not know how to operate a PC, or even type. "That's what my secretaries are for," one senior manager says. Younger employees, whose priorities are more in tune with the west's version of what life is for - family, fun and friends - are wildly embracing the changes. All that prevents more companies offering telework is the cost, says Mariko Fujiwara, research director of Tokyo's Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living. She says that if homes are given access to cheap, fast networks they will become a perfect nexus for work. "Home will be much more than just home, it will become the centre to connect to everywhere. Japan is ready for this as communication prices here are the lowest in the developed world. "Security issues concerning working outside the office are almost solved but the key is making it cheap for companies to enable this technology in their employees' homes and for the road." The Japanese government has just started offering tax breaks to companies who want to start teleworking schemes. The latest big business to take advantage of such government help is Matsushita, the Japanese firm best known for its Panasonic brand, which began a telework programme for nearly half of its 76,000 employees last month. Its workers must have thought the announcement an April fool's joke. Would they really be allowed to forgo their average 90-minute commute in trains at 400% capacity and the calisthenics workout they have to complete each morning en masse? Company spokesman Akira Kadota says the scheme is no jest and expects the company's very own technology to be help ease the transition. "The company will loan out computers and cameras to its workforce for online conferences. We are also fortunate in that Matsushita has done of lot of work in the networked home field and we intend to take full advantage of that expertise." He adds that security issues had held the company back from embracing teleworking before but new technologies such as biometrics and secure networks have at last made telecommuting a reality. Meanwhile, another electronics behemoth with plenty of experience in Japan is experimenting with different technologies to enable teleworking. Numbers vary from department to department, but roughly 30% of IBM Japan workers telecommute one or two days a week in a scheme that started in 2001. With two small children and ageing parents to care for, 39-year-old Masako Shimooka leapt at the chance to spend more time at home and signed up as an IBM teleworker six years ago. Once the children are in bed or at school she whisks out her laptop to catch up with work, or chat to colleagues via instant messaging or video teleconferencing though a fast wireless link and her webcam. "I used to overdo it a bit to prove I wasn't a slacker who was idling away hours at home. But now I'm more relaxed with the system and it feels perfectly natural to use online chat to communicate with the office. I can access documents online and have cable internet access at home, so there are no speed issues. There are times when I must be at the office but often it's so much like being in a 'virtual' office that colleagues don't realise I'm at home when I chat over the net with them."
Michael Fitzpatrick - guardian.co.uk

23 March 2007

Homeshoring Deal Secured with BT
BT has signed a contract with a UK-based organisation that offers a multi-channel counselling solution delivered by counsellors working from home as part of a virtual contact centre. The contract - signed yesterday (Thursday) in Bournemouth with the company 7 Basic Needs - will initially help deliver services from home-based counsellors in the UK. The BT solution – known as homeshoring – is the result of collaboration between BT Global Services, the BT Business corporate team, BT Business indirect channels, the Bournemouth BT local business and John Lavelle, product manager for BT’s multimedia contact centre, who underpinned the technology to make the service available. 7 Basic Needs offers a confidential multi-channel counselling solution on a retail basis to clients and also organisations, for a wide range of issues - including bereavement, cancer, child abuse, depression, disability, drugs and alcohol, relationship issues, stress and sexual issues. BT Business corporate customer solutions business manager Tony Golding said the contract allows the company to offer its services via a network of counsellors, each operating from their own homes. He said: “It means counsellors don’t have to travel long distances to GP surgeries to hire a confidential room to see two or three people - and it saves money”. “It operates in the same way as a virtual contact centre, with people who require counselling simply telephoning for immediate response or booking appointments for sessions online using their name or a pseudonym, as required, and a personal identification number”. “All the customer records are held securely on a BT customer relationship platform. It’s a pay-as-you-go solution and it’s the first time it has been done by BT.” In the UK, the AA and Co-operative Travel already deliver homeshoring contact centre services from advisors operating from their own homes, although not directly involving BT. And in the US, around 200,000 disabled people work from home as advisors. Tony said: “The whole concept of homeshoring is that we can bring employment back to socially excluded sections of the community. It means people who often find it difficult to get employment - such as parents with childcare issues, women returning to work after having a baby, disabled people, the over-50s and people who care for a sick or elderly relative - can work from home at times to suit them and their employers.”
7basicneeds.bttradespace.com

12 March 2007

Homeshoring
Homeshoring is the new offshoring, according to Chris Partridge in The Observer who writes that not only do call centres seem to be coming back from outside the UK, but that calls are now increasingly being taken by homeworkers which he says means that: "it has the potential to provide work for millions of people currently excluded from employment, such as parents, carers and the disabled...Single parents find this particularly liberating - one of the criticisms of conventional call centre work is that the wages barely cover child care and travel costs.Homeshoring has many attractions for employers as well. The high fixed costs of a call centre are eliminated, and many of the new breed of Home workers are extremely well qualified.
www.shedworking.co.uk

31 January 2006

Australian Call Centre 'at home' in United States
Unity4 Teleservices, Managing Director, Dan Turner, has just unveiled plans to open a new international office in San Francisco CA. The opening, slated for second quarter of 2006, is part of Unity4's global expansion strategy, a plan that involves the establishment of three connected offices in the world's key markets of Asia Pacific, the Americas and Europe. "This is a very exciting move for Unity4," says Turner, " Running a virtual call centre always opened the door to global expansion and its great to now be heading in that direction" "We set about re-defining the contact centre industry by providing our clients with exceptionally skilled call centre staff and first class technology" All without the overheads, recruitment limitations and capacity issues of a traditional 'bricks and mortar' call centre. The model is simple, he adds. "Our home agent call centre enables us to attract better quality staff and deliver better quality services than our competitors. Considering we have no geographical limitations on our agents, the US and Europe are logical and low risk markets for us" "Eventually, when Europe is operational in addition to the US we will be in position to offer our global clients call centre services locally in each geographical zone, while maintaining a central service and Executive Management office in Sydney. Unity4 Teleservices Pty Ltd was established in 2000. The remote agent model enables Unity4 to maintain a team of highly skilled operators, including multicultural and medical teams. There are many highly skilled people looking for an opportunity to work from home. The in-house developed Unity4 technology suite enables superior quality control and verification via digital recording and real time remote data and voice monitoring. Unity4's task is clear. Find a group of great people. Give them the ideal working situation - and then provide our clients with the happiest, most highly skilled, most loyal and responsive workforce in the industry. This is a primary reason why Unity4 has developed a reputation among clients as a reliable, cost effective, quality partner for their teleservice requirements.
The Contact - www.callcentres.net

15 October 2005

Phone Home
The outsourcing of call centres to developing countries has become something of a bête noir in the EU and the US, thanks, in part, to jingoistic predictions of apocalyptic domestic unemployment - though the evidence remains less than supportive. Figures published last month by the Office for National Statistics show that the growth in call centre jobs in Britain was almost three times greater than that for overall employment in the past four years. There are now 375,000 call centre and customer service-related jobs, according to the ONS Labour Market Survey. And a report by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions last year found a lack of data to back the prophecies of massive job losses. Still, some companies are looking for a less contentious alternative to call centres in Asia. Known as "home-shoring", workers are based in their own homes, as part of a virtual call centre. Using the same technology that makes outsourcing abroad possible, calls are routed to different destinations - employees' homes. All each worker needs is a computer, a phone line and an internet connection. US research firm IDC estimates there are more than 100,000 home-based agents in the US, a figure dwarfed by the 4m people who work in traditional call centres. But a study last year found increases in productivity, as well as lower costs and attrition rates in companies investing in virtual call centres. Chuck Wilsker, head of the Telework Coalition, a Washington DC-based advocacy group, is adamant that virtual call centres save money. "I know an employer who estimates he has saved $8,000 [£4,500] a year in real estate rent per call agent by switching to home-sourcing," he says. "Productivity has gone up by 20% and annual turnover of agents, which was 65% in the call centres, is now around 5%." Employee turnover has always been high in call centres. Risk management consultancy Hill & Associates puts the attrition rate in Indian call centres at around 40%. The main reason is lack of prospects, rather than low pay or the unsociable hours associated with handling customers in different time zones. Attrition rates are high in Britain, too, often due to a reluctance to be identified as a call centre worker. "It is a very transitional work identity," says Ursula Huws, professor of international labour studies at the Working Lives Research Institute at London Metropolitan University. "A lot of call centre companies set up in university towns to take advantage of a student workforce." All 1,000 reservations agents for US airline JetBlue are home-based. Most are female, in their 30s, and work part-time on a 24-hour, split-shift rota. Just 3.5% of its agents leave each year, and the company receives only one complaint per 300,000 passengers for customer service problems - a third of the rate for the larger airline carriers. "People working from home are generally happier. They don't have to commute, they can be doing something on the domestic front and log on two minutes later without having to travel," says Steve Mayne, JetBlue's operations and business processes manager. "Happier employees make for better customer service, and happier customers make for repeat customers." Companies need to appreciate that "eyeball to eyeball" contact is important for an employee outside the loop of office life, says Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology at Lancaster University. "Most managers do not know how to deal with a remote workforce, as their career history is often rooted in the meeting room." Kevin Horgan, manager of the AA's home-based staff, who make up 20% of its 1,000 call handlers, concedes: "It is not for everyone: to work by yourself, to be fairly insular and still be able provide customer satisfaction." The AA has a manager - many of whom work from home - for every 20 remote staff, who are kept in daily contact via email and telephone. Managers meet each worker in person at least once a month. Remote staff receive the same benefits as office-based colleagues. Brendan Read, author of Home Workplace, dismisses concerns that remote workers cannot be managed effectively. "The technology and functionality of call centres differ little between traditional and virtual," he says. "Email and phone are the main tools, so it doesn't really matter if an employee is two feet or 200 miles away." Virtual call centres have yet to make their mark in Britain. The majority of the 200,000 people who each year start working at home for at least one day a month are male, mid-career and in technical, managerial or professional jobs. However, it will become increasingly difficult to differentiate between what they do and what virtual call centre employees do, as work in general becomes more "telemediated", says Huws. "Increasingly, all kinds of professionals will put what they know into databases in the form of frequently asked questions. Even a highly-skilled person can suddenly find themselves as the last point of call in a process that started with a customer accessing a website."
Matt Keating - The Guardian

11 July 2005

Vital role for safety at sea
Gloria Payge, of Rockbeare, near Exeter, is among 16 specially-trained people who will be employed by a South West company to react to disasters at sea. Gloria works for teleBIZZ, a Plymouth firm which has just won a prestigious contract to ad as an emergency response centre for a global fleet of ships run by leading oil company BP! It will establish a network of home based remote workers using the latest broadband technology to provide immediate response 24 hours a day 365 days a year. The company which is run by husband-and-wife team Nick Lunn and Gillie Scherr, eventually hopes to create 100 jobs. Its project has received a £25,000 award from Broadband4Devon, a multi-million pound public and private sector broadband partnership made up of, among others, BT, Devon County Council and Exeter University. Gloria said: "I can see tremendous job opportunities for home-based workers such as myself. "Not only can we act as a Virtual Receptionist, but I am working with Gillie to develop this one step further and also offer a virtual personal assistant for many of their other business needs." Gillie Scherr said: "The winning of this contract is a fantastic victory, not only for teleBIZZ, but also for the South West and technology. It shows high-speed broadband technology can be used to create highly-skilled jobs in places where such initiatives would have been inconceivable just a few years ago." "The first person to speak to a person reporting an emergency could well be one of our representatives, who will need to act with the highest standards of professionalism." "Very importantly, we will have created an infrastructure to provide 24/7 services for other organisations." "It could be another multinational company of simply a plumber or electrician offering a 24-hour call-out service."
Joanne Cochrane - Express & Echo

01 July 2005

Call centre will be home-based
teleBIZZ, based at Plympton, has won a contract to ad as the emergency response centre for the global fleet of ships run by BP, one of the worlds leading oil companies. The firm, which is owned and run by Gillie Scherr and her husband Nick Lunn, is now planning to establish a network of home-based remote workers. Using the latest broadband technology, they will provide an immediate response service which will operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. When it becomes fully operational later this year, possibly as early as September, the centre is initially expected to employ 16 trained staff for the BP contract alone. However, it is hoped this will be only the start of a home-based service which could ultimately create 100 jobs. The initiative has received the support of Broadband4Devon, the multi-million-pound public and private-sector broadband partnership in which telecoms firm BT is a major partner. Today Broadband4Devon confirmed that it would be making its biggest-ever subsidy award to teleBIZZ. The award - valued at approximately ¦pound;25,000 will aid a rapid expansion of the home scheme. Gillie Scherr said: "the winning of this contract is a fantastic victory not only for teleBIZZ, but also for the South West and technology. "It shows that high-speed broadband technology can be used to create highly-skilled jobs in places where such initiatives would have been inconceivable just a few years ago. The latest computer technology, supported by a sophisticated virtual IP (internet protocol) network, will ensure that our people will have all the facilities they need at their fingertips to ensure they a first-class job. "The competition for this contract was intense. We imagine that most of the companies bidding for contract were much bigger than us, but our use of remote home-based workers to support the activities our Plymouth call centre proved huge advantage. “The client was determined the emergency response should have a back-up for every eventuality. A virtual response centre of the type we're planning is by its very nature resilient, because widely-dispersed team of remote workers can't all be affected by single incident, such as a major power cut in our call centre." teleBIZZ began offering a limited level of support for BP’s emergency calls several years ago. BP moves about 220 million tonnes of crude oil and petroleum products per year, about five per cent seaborne oil movements. It has its own fleet of 73 vessels and at any given time has a further 200 ships on charter. Jim Thornborough, shipping crisis management and emergency response advisor for BP, said: "teleBIZZ is an important response partner to BP, which relies on its professional call centre service to expedite an efficient response of the BP regional response team for Europe, Africa and the Middle East. "They were awarded the contract through a competitive bid process. BP assessed both the commercial and technical aspects of several proposals before awarding the contract to teleBIZZ. "We were very pleased with the quality of their bid and are confident they will meet our expectations." John Horns, project director for Broadband4Devon; said: “We are delighted to be working with teleBIZZ on this very exciting initiative. We will be providing technical advice as well as financial assistance. There can be no better example of how broadband technology is overcoming 'the disadvantages posed by remote locations. "A person sitting in a rose-covered Devon cottage could be playing a vital role in an emergency just as easily as somebody sitting in a control centre in a major city.”
Liz Parks - www.telebizz.co.uk

21 October 2002

Telecommuting
Telecommuting has been technically possible for nearly a decade. The Royal Mail gave its blessing to its first telecommuting PA eight years ago, but few have followed her example. That could change when the new employment act becomes law. There is still some wrangling over the details, but the intention is to include legislation allowing parents some rights to renegotiate their working hours to accommodate family responsibilities. Any parent who would like to work at home for some or all of the time should find it easier to arrange. BT, which for obvious reasons has long been interested in telecommuting, has just published details of research conducted by independent academics into the satisfaction, or otherwise, of BT's own telecommuters. Those who responded to the survey - 90% of those contacted - were happy. Working at home seems to be a matter of temperament, however. Some like to spend breaks sorting the washing. Others miss the interaction of the office and think their achievements are more likely to be overlooked if they are not on the spot to draw attention to them. One respondent listed guilt about illness as a disadvantage: "As you are at home you try to keep going." Participating in family life is the biggest attraction of working at home, according to respondents. In particular, the freedom to organise the day around taking and fetching children from school was welcomed. Some men, however, have opted to work from home to liberate their partners. The arrangement allows such households to enjoy dual incomes. The fathers make up for the time lost in the day by working at night. A few individuals actually missed commuting. One regretted the loss of reading time. Another said his running times had suffered - he had previously run the five miles between home and office, morning and evenings. Cutting out commuting does not always save time. Many found they worked more - albeit happier - hours under the new arrangement. BT is happy, too, because telecommuters appear to have higher morale and lower rates of absenteeism. But could this be because highly motivated workers are more likely to opt for telecommuting?
Bill Saunders - www.guardian.co.uk

25 January 1999

AA sends call centre workers home
The Automobile Association (AA) and BT have heralded the success of a virtual call centre trial that has been running for the past year. The AA said that in order to meet demand, especially during busy periods, it has started letting call centre agents work from home. Staff are supplied with regulation office furniture, a PC, and a voice and data connection to the company's Leeds call centre. Phil Murden, BT account director, Retail & Logistics, said: "We have effectively taken the application out of the call centre and delivered it into the home, enabling remote agents to take calls at any time." The AA employs about 2,000 agents