Outbound Call Center Featured Article

Trends in the Call Center Market: At-Home Agents, Cloud Applications and Social Media

By Mae Kowalke
TMCnet Contributor

If the phrase call center agent conjures up images of college students or recent grads slogging away on a contact center floor filled with gray cubicles, think again. At least for Working Solutions, a provider of outsourced customer service support and sales, that is not an accurate description of the workforce. 

“We have probably the most highly distributed workforce in the country, since all of our agents work at home,” said Marc Cullers, vice president of sales and business development at Working Solutions, in a recent TMCnet video interview.

Cullers continued, “Most of our agents are 38 to 55 years old. Sixty-eight percent have a college degree or some level of college education. Many are bilingual. We can provide a very high caliber agent to provide a better customer service experience. We routinely see improvement in things like first call resolution, up-selling and cross-selling.”

The U.S.-based, at-home agent model works very well, Cullers said, because it allows Working Solutions to be flexible in meeting market needs. The company, which has been in business since 1996, is able to work with its customers, create a profile of the ideal agent, and then recruit agents who match.

Working Solutions is also able to scale its workforce quickly, staffing in as little as 30-minute increments. This means companies with seasonal or even daily fluctuations in their contact center staffing needs can find what they’re looking for.

Because of its business model, Working Solutions is also an innovator in the area of communications solutions that support distributed workforces. Cloud applications and software-as-a-service are definitely not alien concepts for Cullers’ company.

“We’ve invested in hardware and software to run a distributed workforce,” Cullers noted in the interview. “We also have interest in companies looking to leverage that technology for their own operations.”

Lately, Working Solutions has also been making inroads into social media, and what this trend means for contact centers.

“Our view is that social media will eventually end up in the call center, and ultimately become another channel,” Cullers predicted. “The call center is where a lot of processes and rules have been put in place for companies to deal with customer service issues. We have invested in social media monitoring software and how to tie that in with interaction routing capabilities.”

The upshot of all this is that tools are available now to help companies monitor what’s happening in the social media space, and then route appropriate agents to respond. Companies looking to stay on the cutting edge, Cullers said, can do so relatively easily simply by using a monitoring tool for, say, 60 days, to find out what people are saying about them on social media. From that, they can begin to formulate a longer-term plan.

The reason all this matters, Cullers stressed, is that the generation now growing up into customers consists of people who are not all that likely to pick up the phone when they want to find out about companies or get support. Instead, they probably make inquiries to their Facebook friends and do a Google (News - Alert) search. Companies need to be thinking now about how the dynamic is changing.

For more about how companies in the business-to-consumer space can leverage existing technologies to develop successful support and sales strategies, watch the full video interview.

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