Outbound Call Center Featured Article

The Benefit of Home Agents in Your Call Center Strategy

By Chris DiMarco
TMCnet Web Editor

With the advent of easy to deploy, hosted and virtualized contact solutions, call center operators have more options than ever for developing new hiring and workforce strategies. Chief among these are home-based alternatives, which employs a number of geographically dispersed agents to form well trained support for your operation.

Reduction of attrition and the assimilation of skilled workers are just two of the benefits that home based agents an offer your call center. The elimination of commute also keeps your agents happy and has the side benefit of saving them money on transportation. So what’s the best way to get started with your remote agent strategy?

A call center software suite with a home based option is the first step. Contactual’s (News - Alert) OnDemand Contact Center’s flexible architecture makes home-based agents a cost-effectively reality for any business. Agents can be based anywhere without installing any special hardware or software. A work-at-home agent simply logs into the web-based application to begin taking customer calls, emails, or chat sessions. Since remote workers would be using the same utilities at home as in the in the call center managers can freely roll agent into home posts as needed. Agents and supervisors can be just as productive as if they were all working at the same location. 

For those concerned about the limits supervision for remote agents there are a number of option to ensure that everyone is meeting the highest levels of customer satisfaction. The OnDemand product info suggests that “Contactual’s robust monitoring and reporting capabilities provide call center metrics to supervisors and administrators in real-time so you retain complete control over your customer experience. Call recoding provides an added level of quality assurance.” The cost associated with running a call center expands dramatically as the numbers of on premise agent’s increase. With home based representatives call center operations can maintain their best and brightest and reduce the cost associated with accommodating everyone at the premise.

Chris DiMarco is a Web Editor for TMCnet. He holds a master's degree in journalism from Quinnipiac University. Prior to joining TMC (News - Alert) Chris worked with e-commerce provider Suresource as a contact center representative and development analyst. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Janice McDuffee