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Home Agent Contact Center Services Provider Doubles Revenue in 4Q

By Tracey E. Schelmetic
TMCnet Contributor

With the offshore outsourcing model declining in popularity and practicality, many companies with contact center services needs have been welcoming alternatives. One of them, contact centers that employ agents who work from their homes, eliminating a lot of the overhead costs and allowing them to compete with offshore centers in cost and exceed them in quality, has been raising its profile lately. And the numbers are bearing out the success of this “homeshoring” model.

Alpine Access, one of the largest providers of virtual contact center solutions and services, today announced its results for the fourth quarter of 2010 with revenue growth of a whopping 92 percent over the prior year. On a sequential basis, revenue was up 73 percent over the third quarter of 2010. Rapid and continued adoption of the company's “homeshore” solution by Fortune 500 brands resulted in Alpine Access ending the year with more than 40 client programs.

Alpine Access' success in the most recent quarter was a result of continued expansion with existing client partnerships, as well as several multi-year deals with new accounts. The company reports new business from a Fortune 1000 healthcare services company, inbound customer service for one of the world's largest affinity membership organizations and virtual contact center consulting for one of the country's 10 largest cable and broadband providers.

To support the business growth, Alpine Access hired 1,100 new employees, including more than 100 managers and supervisors, this year alone. The company ended the year with more than 4,500 employees in 1,700 communities across the country, and now has operations in 40 U.S. states.

“Alpine Access' impressive fourth quarter results provide further evidence that virtual contact centers offer an extremely compelling business model,” commented Michael DeSalles, principal analyst with Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert). “The overall value provided by an at-home workforce is driving explosive growth in the virtual contact center market. Alpine Access' contribution to job creation is also worth taking note of and makes perfect sense in today's economy.”

Alpine Access' ongoing expansion stands in stark contrast to the prolonged contraction of the onshore brick-and-mortar contact center industry. Based on published financial results from publicly-traded companies in the sector, facility-based providers experienced double-digit revenue declines in the fourth quarter.

“I am extremely proud of our team's accomplishments in the past year, as few companies in the U.S. have been able to demonstrate the type of growth we achieved,” said Christopher M. Carrington, president and CEO of Alpine Access. “While others in the industry remain focused on migrating work to low-cost offshore locations, we have shown the unmatched value of a highly-skilled and professional domestic workforce. Companies in a wide range of industries continue to embrace Alpine Access' onshore work-at-home model due to our ability to cost-effectively improve the quality, efficiency, flexibility, and security of their customer interactions.”