Is A DIY Home Agent Program Right for You?

Many companies love the idea of using home-based agents to help support their brick-and-mortar call center operations. They like the cost-savings that come with not having to expand seats at physical locations, for one thing. And they like the promise of being able to flex the home agent workforce to scale for peak needs – itself another link in the lowering costs chain.

But the reality of a do-it-yourself approach to a home-based agent initiative often disappoints businesses and leads them to explore the outsourcing model.

Companies often are lured in by some vendors’ assurances that they’ll be good to go if they just hang some ports off of automatic call distribution (ACD) equipment. So, they pack off their star call center employees to work in their home offices and wait for the returns to roll in. But somewhere along the way, what seemed like an inexpensive way to start up a home-based agent workforce resulted in hidden costs and unforeseen obstacles.

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To realize the full extent of the benefits the model can enable, companies need to have the appropriate infrastructure to staff, manage, secure, and support home agent installations. That’s not just about having the right technology, but also the right processes and resources.

Scrutinizing the Set-Up

Too often, companies set themselves up for diminishing returns on the home agent model. Any company beginning a work-at-home initiative with expectations of scaling it beyond a few dozen top employees needs to rethink a proposition that seems to make sense: Give the best call center agents the opportunity to work from home. They’ve earned the opportunity, the logic goes, and rewarding them in this way will promote your twin goals of retaining talent while lowering costs.

Unfortunately, success isn’t the likely outcome. Your best agents are used to having the best schedules. For a lot of them that doesn’t translate to the split shifts necessary to achieve the cost reductions you’re seeking. If remote agents work back-to-back hours just like employees at brick-and-mortar sites, you won’t be able to break away from full-scale staffing to staggered scheduling for peak demand needs that often fall outside coveted 8am to 5pm work-shifts. Bye-bye labor cost savings.

Or you’ll wind up alienating your best workers by forcing them to schedules they don’t want. Bye-bye talent.

Another option, of course, is to start fresh, doing ground-up hiring of home-based agents. This approach puts you a step ahead with a staff that knows your expectations around flex-work schedules. You could run into applicant pool limitations recruiting only from your local area. Alternately, if you think about expanding to access home-agent talent from around the country, you’ll need to make a significant investment in the HR staff and hiring systems to review the volume of applications. You also should plan to develop and deploy virtual training solutions to keep a remote staff up-to-date with new processes, software and other requirements.

Managing a Different World

The next step is to re-envision everything you know about managing a brick-and-mortar call center force, adapting your practices so that they more appropriately apply to a virtual contingent.

Take security processes, for example. It’s easy and cheap enough to get calls and data into somebody’s house, but managing remote agents’ access to applications and information in a secure way is different than securing on-site call center installations. Desktops need to be locked down so that home-based agents’ access is restricted to what they need when they are scheduled to need it, but without imposing barriers that might compromise their productivity. Researching and developing solutions to support that takes a significant commitment of time, money and resources.

It’s also important to have tools for managing home agents and tools that let them manage themselves. On the first point, a company needs to ensure that it has the technology in place to incent workers by routing calls based on agent performance by call type, as well as the monitoring tools to identify and correct problems that might arise. On the second, companies need to remember that the most effective home-based agents are self-starters. They want to be self-sufficient for everything from scheduling their hours to understanding their performance across client metrics, such as first call resolution.

Better Returns Can Be Realized Through Outsourcing

There’s no denying that some companies have had great success in deploying an in-house home-based agent model. Among some of the factors behind those success stories are the facts that the virtual workers are likely running a single-threaded application, and that the company has made heavy investments in the technology to run the model the right way.

However, many businesses are not able to bear similar start-up costs under today’s difficult economic circumstances. Indeed, when one considers the investments in tools and infrastructure required to support an internal home-based agent model, and the cost-savings and flexibility that may not be fully realized because of limitations in flex scheduling or talent access, the results are returns that fall short of original expectations.

With outsourcing, it is possible to get the returns you want in a less costly and more efficient way. Outsourcing your home-based agent initiatives to experts who have highly-qualified virtual workforces – and the infrastructure and resources to support them – will help you save money, achieve greater flexibility and drive better results. West at Home was one of the first companies to evangelize the remote agent model, and over the years we’ve been perfecting it, including investing resources in hiring, training and management tools for home-based workers, wherever they’re located.

Instead of diminishing returns, the right outsourcing partner will set the stage for your company to realize continuing returns.