Home-Based Call Center Agents: Delivering the Ultimate Customer Experience

At every customer-focused company there is a desire to provide the ultimate customer experience, from the CEO on down. What gets lost in translation is the extreme impact that delivering this level of customer service, or failing to do so, has on a company's bottom line.

Consider the impact of a customer's experience when contacting your company: a satisfied customer typically tells one to three people about a good experience, while an unsatisfied customer talks to as many as 10 people about the bad experience. Businesses today are reaching an inflexion point where their customers are demanding more from their interactions with customer service representatives; simply answering a customer contact in a specified timeframe is no longer enough. Your customers want to speak with someone who understands their needs without detailed explanations or constant repetition.

What many companies are learning is that there is an easy way to make sure they have the most qualified and professional team of customer care employees answering calls from their customers each day: through the home-based employee model. The home-based employee model has proven to be the most effective way for companies to address the challenges they face with their existing customer contact solutions. These include customer satisfaction, agent quality, business flexibility and business continuity.

There are substantial benefits to using home-based customer service employees that ultimately result in a win-win-win situation for your company, your customers and the agents. Mirroring Agents to Your Customer Base Provides Increased Satisfaction and Loyalty The reason the home-based employee model can deliver on the promise of providing higher quality agents is straightforward: the larger the pool of candidates from which a company hires its agents, the more selective the company can be in the quality of those agents.

Traditional, bricks and mortar call centers are typically constructed in areas with a population seeking hourly wage jobs. These centers, however, are limited to a recruiting pool that is within a thirty minute commuting radius around a physical center. They suffer stiff competition from the call centers of other companies that build facilities in the same location to take advantage of similar business benefits. In a very short time, the limited recruiting pool has been used up, and these same companies are forced to lower their hiring standards or move elsewhere in an endless search for quality employees.

In the home-based model, the work is delivered to the employee, making commutes and recruiting burnout irrelevant. Further, the allure of working from home enables access to an even broader range of potential applicants - people who wouldn't consider working in a traditional bricks and mortar call center. This includes stay-at-home parents, people with disabilities and retirees. All have exceptional skills and work experience to offer and good reasons why a home-based work environment is ideal.

The percentage of agents with some college education is more than 75 percent among agents working from home, compared to 20 percent or less among agents in traditional contact centers. Similarly, the average age range of agents working in home-based contact centers is 35-40, compared to 18-23 for agents in traditional, physical contact centers. With increased education levels and higher average age comes increased maturity and professionalism. These home-based contact center employees therefore bring a broader range of work and life experience that allows them to be more empathetic and understanding when on the phone with your customers.

"I worked for 10 years as a clinical and education services director for a large, national ambulance company before deciding I wanted something with more flexibility," said Martha Libby, a home-based agent working as a customer service employee and taking calls for 1-800-Flowers. "Throughout my career I've worked with many different personalities and encountered a lot of difficult situations, which definitely makes me a better customer service agent."

In addition to providing more mature, experienced agents, the home-based employee contact center model can also enable your company to match the unique needs and interests of the agents with those of your customers.

"I'm passionate about gardening and have even won some awards for flower arranging in the past," said Libby. "It's a perfect fit - I can explain the difference between a Shasta daisy and a Gerber daisy and help the customer make the best decision. It's easier for me to generate larger sales because my advice is genuine, and the callers are happier because they get great, knowledgeable service and are confident in what they've selected."

Scalability

In addition to allowing companies to tap into geographically dispersed contact center agents, a home-based contact center solution can also enable your company to respond quickly and effectively to sudden increases in call volume, whether expected or unexpected.

By enlisting the help of agents who are trained on a given call type, but not normally scheduled during that time, it is possible to increase staffing significantly - doubling staff or more - to address forecasted volumes such as seasonal peaks. The model works equally well meeting unforecasted volume spikes.

Traditional call center agents are unlikely to drive in to a physical call center in an emergency, and the time required to mobilize and affect any significant increase in staffing would likely be measured in hours instead of minutes. This can be critical; the longer it takes to react to an unforecasted increase in call volume, the more difficult it is to dig out of the resulting queue while frustration builds among your customers waiting on hold. Home-based employees need only walk to their computer to be ready for work.

The home-based employee model provides a further flexibility benefit in that it can more easily expand its capacity to handle forecasted surges in call volume, such as peaks during the holiday season, summer months, or on Mondays, when most call centers experience the heaviest activity.

Redundancy

Another important benefit of home-based contact center outsourcing is the unique opportunity to create a true, fully-redundant service offering. Traditional call centers can implement redundant hardware and software infrastructures to provide high systems availability, but being able to route calls and data to an alternative location in an emergency is not very helpful if the agents all live near the primary (and now non-operational) facility.

Building comparable multi-location redundancy in a home-based employee model, with agents dispersed over wide geographic areas, provides the ultimate redundant infrastructure. Florida-based Office Depot took full advantage of the redundancy offered by its home-based contact center partners during the devastating 2005 hurricane season.

"I was able to continue working uninterrupted and the customers didn't even know that the company's headquarters were located right in the path of a hurricane," said Lisa Seaman, a home-based employee handling customer service and sales calls for Office Depot. "While the company and the region was busy dealing with power outages and natural disaster conditions, I was busy taking care of their customers from my home office in Colorado."

Tangible Business Benefits

While the home-based employee model provides a number of specific operational benefits, the true test of the model's success is demonstrated by the business results reported by companies using home-based agents.

Because of benefits like higher quality agents, scalability and redundancy, companies using the home-based employee model typically see an increase in key customer service indexes and higher customer satisfaction. In addition to customer satisfaction, companies realize improved employee productivity through better one-call resolution rates, higher conversion rates, and higher average order size. It is important to figure in the reduced recruiting burden, increased employee retention rates and reduced training costs, all of which leads, ultimately, to increased profitability and a greater ROI for your contact center operations.

"It really is a win-win-win situation," said Libby. "The company wins because its customers are happy and loyal. The customers win because, when all is said and done, they just get better service, and people like me win because we can balance families, travel and other priorities with a flexible at-home job."

Given the compelling value proposition, people often ask why more companies haven't made the move to home-based agents. The reason? It is more challenging than most companies assume to extend traditional operational models out to the home.

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