Can Home-Based Agents Improve Your Operation?
1 Sep, 2007
By: Kim HoulneIt’s a fact that you will reduce turnover, experience greater agent satisfaction and reduce overall operational expenses from home-based agents.
For example, an early adaptor to the home-based agent model was once told by a CEO of another large teleservices company, “But you can’t possibly manage all of those agents; we have trouble managing them in our own centers --- you will never succeed.” Interestingly, after analyzing the cost savings and the competitive advantage, that CEO’s company started its own home-based agent division a few years later. Spanning over the past 10 years, companies using home-based agents realized that the model had significant benefits to the customers they were serving, mostly because the agents are in a different demographic than what is traditionally found in a call center.
These agents communicate on a different level as a result of experience and know-how. Agents that average 15 or more years of work and life experiences than a bricks-and-mortar agent equate to a better customer interaction, providing the ability to stay engaged, calm, cool and collected throughout the customer interaction. These are agents who thrive for independence and don’t care to be micro-managed. If your management culture is one that really can focus on managing processes and not micro-manage the people, you should be in a position to implement a home-based agent program that can significantly improve both the morale and bottom line of your operation.
If you approached a consultant and asked, “How do I improve my operation?” he or she would probably ask you, “Well, where do you think you can stand to gain the most improvement?” In the call center arena, your response is probably one of two things “my operating expenses are out of line with my revenue,” or, “I can’t keep agents in the center, and I don’t think anyone really likes working here.” Did you know that these two scenarios are tightly aligned? You can have both happy people and yet reduce expenses simultaneously.
Increase Productivity
The key to keeping both agents and management happy is to keep the agents productive. As much as we may like to think agents thrive on the downtime and the option to “get off the phone;” in actuality their general opinion is that keeping busy is much better than suffering boredom. No one likes going to a job to just sit around. The same is very true for management. They don’t like seeing people just sit around waiting for calls. However, in the bricks-and-mortar environment, at some point, you will have agents sitting around in down time or off the phone in training time. Call volume fluctuations and training time are two of the biggest culprits in creating unproductive time (non-billable or non-revenue-generating time). For every 2 minutes an agent’s productivity increases, you can realize at least a 5 percent increase in revenue per agent.
Pay for Productivity
Let’s assume the following scenario. Your agents are paid $12.00 per hour and your average cost per call is $7.50. If your agents are utilized for 50 percent of the hour, or 30 minutes per hour, your expense per call can increase as much as 100 percent. On the same note, if you are an outsourcer and your client pays you by the minute, for each additional 2 minutes on the phone, you realize a significant increase in revenue. No matter how your center accounts for the call, your exposure is huge if your agents are not productive. To improve your operation, your goal should always be to work toward increased productivity.
In a home-based model, the entire process (again the focus is on process) is based around productive time. Agents know going into the job that they aren’t paid for washing clothes, making a sandwich, going to the bathroom or walking the dog. However, at the bricks-and-mortar center they are always on your clock. One of the secrets to managing home-based agents is to establish goals for them to adhere to and pay the agents for their true working time. They should be either talking with a customer or waiting to talk to the next customer. If they miss a call, your calling platform should automatically mark the agent unavailable. If the agent is idle for a period of time, your calling platform should ping the agent to assure that they are still engaged at their computer. In addition, you should be able to view a log of each agent’s activity during the working period to see how the time was spent.
A home-based agent completed a study to gain a better understanding of how she was losing time during an hour. So she timed some of her personal activities and this is what she found:
• Getting a drink of water with ice took her 4.5 minutes
• Opening the front door took her 2 minutes
• Going to the bathroom took her 3.5 minutes.
If any of these activities are performed in an hour, agents realize 10 minutes of unproductive time.
Consider these activities in a typical call center:
• Going to the bathroom – 5.5 minutes (or more if the bathroom is further away)
• Filling a water glass – 4 minutes (or more if the break room is further away)
• Talking with a supervisor– 6 minutes (or more if the weekend was really great).
Fifteen minutes of off-the-phone time in the bricks-and-mortar world equates to almost 25 percent loss in productivity that you don’t realize utilizing home-based agents.
Select the Right Tools
Another key element in assuring productivity increase is the telephony platforms that are now available to every call center. The home-based agent model is far more operationally efficient and productive because of technology introduced in the past 10 years. These new platforms are far more sophisticated with detailed reporting and extensive monitoring capabilities, not currently found in legacy telephony platforms. Transitioning to a new platform is certainly an investment; however, in a year’s time, your realized cost savings as a result of operational efficiency is definitely worth it.
Reduce Overhead
Reducing overhead is the key to establishing operational efficiency. Here again, the math is quite simple --- when you use an agent who works from home, you are reducing your fixed costs and are actually helping the environment in many ways, including (from greatest savings to least savings):
General office costs--- Often we are quick to lookover and take for granted the items that must be furnished to satisfy a call center team, such as paper towels, toilet paper, soap, copy paper, water, electricity, furniture, toner and coffee. (Do you know that one person uses two pine trees in paper products each year?) To put some hard costs together, let’s say that the expense for one agent’s consumables is $60 to $80 per month. In a home-based agent setting, the employer is typically not responsible for an agent’s home office consumables. If you initiate a program whereby 50 agents are working from home, you should be able to realize a miscellaneous or general office savings of $3,000 a month.
Improve Agent Satisfaction
Everyone knows it, and there are a lucky few who actually have it – to be considered the best place to work and the envy of all of the other $9.00 an hour employers in your 20 mile area. Did you know there are consultants making a lot of money who specialize in helping you keep your employees so you don’t have to spend thousands each year to recruit new ones? There are so many centers out there that they are in crisis because they don’t have enough people to meet their volume demands. Not only do they have a hard time finding agents who are a good fit for their product or service, they have a very hard time keeping them in the center for more than six months – the average tenure of a new agent. Home-based agent programs have minimal recruiting or turnover concerns.
The evidence is in the attrition rate. For most work-at-home projects, turnover is between 10 percent and 20 percent annually. In a center, true turnover (the total number you hire annually, versus the total number employed) can be as high as 90 percent. Not every agent is suited or wants to work from home. However, those who do, absolutely love it. In their opinion there is nothing better than having a flexible schedule and working for a company that respects them and strives for operational excellence.
If you are considering whether a home-based agent program will help you become more operationally efficient, the answer is an overwhelming, yes! Implementation is a huge undertaking, and you may want to seek the advice or assistance of an outsourcer who has mastered using home-based agents. But once you establish processes that allow you to focus on profitability and operational efficiency, your center should begin seeing a significant decrease in expenses while at the same time start enjoying the luxury of being a preferred employer in the marketplace.
