Are Your Systems Ready for the Age of the Distributed Workforce?
1 Nov, 2006
By: Kevin ChildsThe 20th century was an era of centralized workforces, culminating in large portions of a work facility being devoted to “cube farms” where employees shared an essentially open-space facility, separated by five-foot, moveable walls. The 21st century is shaping up as the era of distributed workforces due to such motivators as rising gas prices, high housing costs, weather-related challenges, pandemics, global wage competition and unexpected business interruptions. Organizations everywhere are re-thinking their supporting contact distribution systems and asking themselves if they are ready for this paradigm shift to distributed workforces.
Recent studies have shown this trend to be especially prevalent among customer service departments. In a December 2005 report on “Home-based Agents,” IDC estimated that currently more than four million people work in call centers in the United States. However, more companies are “tuning in to a new sourcing model,” stated IDC, to address such challenges as the need for better agent quality, lower turnover and better methods for responding to seasonal fluctuations in their business cycles. The new model IDC is referring to is home-based agents. Today there are an estimated 112,000 home-based representatives in the United States. IDC estimates that number could approach well over 300,000 by 2010.
When companies define at-home workers as part of their workforce model, they also need to evaluate their underlying contact distribution system. Is your existing contact distribution system able to economically support at-home workers? If the business is dependent upon a traditional premises-based PBX system, you quickly realize the answer is no. You don’t have inherent flexibility to distribute calls and screen-pops to a distributed workforce. Worse, you have a single point of failure should your facility be affected by a business interruption. All customer contact will come to a screeching halt. Sure, you can invest in “disaster recovery” facilities, but that is not a competitive answer. What you need is a highly flexible, cost-effective system for distributing contacts to the home, remote offices and mobile workers.
IP is the Answer! Or is it?
Most companies believe the prudent path is to upgrade their contact distribution system to an IP-based PBX solution. For larger corporations with available capital and the budget to support a technical staff to oversee the implementation and ongoing maintenance requirements, that often works is an effective path. But for smaller operations, if you add up the implementation and maintenance costs, the total cost of ownership can be prohibitive.
Implementing a Remote Workforce
A key element in delivering a successful at-home workforce strategy is the appointment, within the organization, of a high-level executive to champion the program. According to the Tanner Group, a telecommunication consulting organization, this champion “acts more as an ombudsman rather than a line-manager.” He or she must have coordinating authority, and in some cases tasking authority, in the following areas:
- Information technology
- Human resources
- Risk management, insurance and finance
- Facilities
- Operations
- Corporate communications and marketing.
The Tanner Group compares the estimated costs of supporting 100 remote workers against their on-site counterparts and finds a total five-year savings in excess of $10 million through factors such as unneeded office build-out, annual real estate costs, retention advantage, productivity advantage and miscellaneous ongoing costs.
The Telework Coalition did a benchmark report regarding best practices among large-scale implementations of at-home workers. The study found that some organizations provide furniture or a furniture allowance to help equip home offices for employees who give up their office space. However, this is the exception rather than the rule. As for computer equipment, some companies require at-home workers to provide their own computer. But generally, companies do not consider computer purchases an extra cost for equipping an at-home worker, as most all companies provide a computer to each employee, no matter where they sit.
For eCallogy, a Utah-based call center that handled calls during the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, investment in a hosted solution supporting at-home workers proved more reasonable than outfitting a major call center to house employees. Bill Patterson, vice president of operations at eCallogy, said, “To set up 40 at-home agents, eCallogy adopted a hosted call center solution. Using employee-provided PCs and a dedicated phone line, we could route calls and send screen pops to at-home agents and allow them to work in tandem with supervisors stationed in the operations center.”
Managing Those You Can’t See
A big part of the culture change that must take place within any organization moving to at-home workers is getting comfortable with managing those they can’t see. The answer to this challenge is to look for a hosted vendor that provides affordable, robust reporting, monitoring and recording tools and Web-based administration tools. Even though employees are working outside of the office, supervisors can view real-time statistics on the activities of each employee, no matter where they sit.
Managers can see how long calls are in queue, which employees are available, busy, unavailable, on break or at lunch. The manager can see when a specific call was answered, how long that interaction took and how much time passed before the agent went back to “available” status.
Comments William Prince, executive director of operations at MetTel, a New York City-based local exchange provider and user of a hosted contact handling solution: “I’m not so dependent on having my care group right next to me (anymore) since I can monitor, record and track real-time agent activity for remote offices with one unified set of management tools.”
What is even more revealing about this customer experience is the role its hosted solution played when MetTel experienced the transit strike of December 2005. On the day of the strike, 25 employees were able to work from home, using their computers, an Internet connection and a home phone or cell phone. Because MetTel had a highly flexible, hosted, contact distribution system, they did not experience the disruption that many other New York-based businesses faced. An estimated 85 percent of all their incoming calls were answered in 30 seconds or less during the transit strike period.
Business Benefits to a Distributed Workforce Model
Organizations that utilize at-home workers are not restricted to their local labor market when it comes to acquiring workers. Reports also indicate that at-home workers will accept lower salaries than their office-tethered colleagues for the trade-off of being allowed to work from home. Greater flexibility benefits also extend to the business, which can schedule people in small, part-time slots when call volume is higher, rather than hiring regular call center workers who get paid whether or not they are busy.
Companies find they can retain key talent that otherwise might have left the organization, such as parents looking to stay home with their children or employees who desire to relocate. Home-based agents are also generally more experienced and more loyal. Industry-wide, the annual turnover rate of 25 to 30 percent for at-home agents is significantly lower than the 35 to 70 percent for call center workers, according to Gartner. The IDC report states home-based workforces are experiencing a 76 percent retention rate compared to a 15 to 25 percent rate seen among traditional call center environments.
Even more interesting, productivity appears to be higher among home workers. From a BusinessWeek story that appeared in the December 12, 2005, issue: “...companies are finding that allowing workers the flexibility to work remotely contributes to increased productivity.”
Implementing a remote work strategy is about change – and change is hard for some because it affects the very culture of a company. Those businesses able to adapt – both in terms of culture and underlying flexible systems – are more likely to have a competitive edge going forward. This paradigm shift to a distributed workforce, supported by distributed systems, represents new business opportunities for the innovative companies that adapt the fastest, as these companies will win new clients based on their lower price points, their higher service levels and their more educated, committed employee base. With this emerging trend working its way through the business community, each contact center professional needs to ask him or herself: “Are my systems ready to support a distributed workforce?
