Homeworking – how can it help to solve contact centre recruitment challenges?

Agent turnover has always been a major challenge for contact centre operators. Everyone talks about providing a high quality customer service, but it’s difficult to sustain quality levels when agent turnover is so high. In high turnover contact centres, it’s uncommon for trainers to be able to progress training much beyond the core introductory modules, as they’re kept busy focusing on induction courses for their new agents.

This year, the Incomes Data Service reports that UK contact centre staff attrition is still 25.1 per cent – its highest level since it started tracking these numbers. This figure is also potentially conservative. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) has also suggested that call centre labour turnover rates were 50.9 per cent in its June 2004 Recruitment, Retention and Turnover report, with a voluntary turnover level of 33.4 per cent.

Internationally, agent turnover numbers are also high. Mercer Human Resource Consulting in New York in its 2003 Call Center Compensation Survey reported that agent turnover in the US remains high at 33 per cent. In addition, Datamonitor has looked at the Indian market, and has found that labour competition from offshore outsourcers serving the Western market are increasing Indian-based outsourcers’ attrition and salaries, with turnover rates rising 25 to 30 per cent over the last year.

So agent attrition is a worldwide issue, and it’s not difficult to identify some of the key reasons:

Despite the move among many organisations to move contact centre jobs offshore, there’s still an overall growth of agent jobs in the UK, with the DTI reporting that the UK will recruit an extra 200,000 contact centre workers during the next three years
There’s a distinct regional focus in the contact centre market – areas such as South Wales, the Greater Glasgow region, Ireland and the North West of England have all been very successful in attracting major inward investment in contact centre jobs, and this has caused a tightening supply of quality labour – contact centres employing 200 to 500 agent workstations can quickly ‘burn through’ a community’s specialist agent labour pool
Contact centres typically also compete for labour with other high turnover sectors such as hotels and catering (with a CIPD turnover rate of 45 per cent), retail (CIPD 27 per cent) and transport (CIPD 17 per cent). However in some sectors such as healthcare, nursing and housing, more specialist staff requirements result in reduced attrition
Pay – contact centres attract a lot of temporary workers, and as a result they’re inclined to gravitate quickly to employers with better pay rates. Employers need to investigate pay plans that reward staff loyalty and their achievements, and make sure they’re focused on compensating according to agents’ growing skill sets
Training and motivation – when agents leave they typically cite lack of career path, feeling undervalued, poor supervisors and lack of training as reasons for their departure – while often intangible, effectively addressing these issues can make a big difference for frontline agents

To a certain extent, there’s not a lot that organisations can do to protect themselves from the impact of these issues. Of course they can offer improved pay and training, and they can locate to areas where there’s a strong agent labour pool, but these steps won’t address the core fact that retaining skilled agents is difficult. That’s one of the reasons that offshoring proved initially attractive, but as Datamonitor’s Indian research has shown, attrition is also a factor in overseas locations.

Looking at alternative approaches

Instead, organisations have to consider alternative approaches to contact centre staffing to meet their resourcing requirements. One particular concern is that as contact centres evolve, there’s a growing requirement for highly skilled agents that can provide assistance, can solve problems and can identify and close potential sales opportunities. Contact centre operators are now looking for specific skills such as multi-tasking and e-mail handling, and it’s no longer enough just for agents to turn up. With this increased skills focus, contact centres face potential recruitment competition from administrative and IT organisations rather than the traditional retail and hospitality sectors.

Homeworking is increasingly looking like a potential solution to some of these recruitment issues – enabling agents to work remotely at more flexible times -when they are available - and for the benefit of the organisation when demand is high in the contact centre. As an idea, homeworking has been talked about for many years, but a combination of technology, management and service issues have all combined to prevent it from becoming a reality.

An increasingly viable proposition?

Until now. With the recent adoption of factors such as IP and new connectivity technology, homeworking is now becoming a more practical proposition for both contact centres and agents alike.

As a result, homeworking is one area that organisations are now looking at with renewed interest. It can address some of the key issues contact centre operators face – high staff turnover, staffing to meet spikes in contact activity, customer satisfaction levels and traditional productivity concerns such as lateness, staff sickness and office costs. Contact centres with homeworkers can realise significant productivity gains and cost savings. They can attract better quality, more flexible employees – including those who’d never dream of working in a traditional contact centre, and they can broaden their potential workforce catchment area by removing the practical limitation of commuting distance.

Homeworking is a trend that’s already becoming mainstream in the US – according to a 2003 Dieringer Research Group survey, the number of employees working out of their homes has grown 40 per cent since 2001 to approximately 24 million people. In the UK the numbers are growing too. According to the 2003 Labour Force Survey, more than two million, or 7.5 per cent of the working population, are now involved in some form of teleworking. One of the key drivers accelerating this growth is the speed of communications.

The first homeworkers used modems with connection speeds of 9.6 kps, now broadband connections are 50 times faster, allowing homeworkers to connect to corporate networks and deliver the same services as their office-based colleagues.

Removing the technology barriers to homeworking

With the development of IP networks and broadband connectivity, combined with an employment law that increasingly supports flexible working, many of the barriers that have prevented contact centres connecting to homeworkers have now been removed. With hosted contact centre applications running across IP lines, remotely-based agents can in effect be managed exactly as if they were located in the contact centre. The virtual contact centre, as this development is known, opens up many opportunities for flexible management of variable workloads. It can specifically address peaks and troughs in demand on an hourly basis while making use of the remotely located part-time skilled workforce.

With IP, the management of calls is carried out at a network level, so instead of duplicating technology within the contact centre, a single network infrastructure can support all of an organisation’s employees – both in the contact centre and remote workers. Calls are routed through to the most appropriate agent fast and with a guaranteed quality of service – irrespective of location.

Consistent performance is achieved through the use of Dual Connect technology that involves installing an analogue line with ADSL into an agent’s house to handle voice communications and to manage data. This approach ensures a resilient customer service infrastructure, while still enabling organisations to integrate home workers and benefit from real time reporting and quality monitoring.

Homeworking delivers real benefits

For the contact centre industry, already challenged by the shortage of skilled resources, homeworking is an exciting development. It opens up the potential to draw on skills that precisely match the evolving requirements of a contact centre market looking for increased quality as it shifts from traditional outbound cold-calling to more targeted and sophisticated inbound agent roles.

Integrating homeworkers into the contact centre infrastructure provides organisations with access to many more mature, potentially more responsible, often better-educated and more reliable agents than are typically recruited. It also opens up career opportunities for physically and mobility-impaired individuals, who can now develop their careers while still working from home.

Further benefits of homeworking include the greater ability to provide full staff cover during peak times, improved staff retention, potential improvements in productivity and work quality, and greater flexibility. As a side benefit, an integrated network of homeworking agents also provides a very strong back up in the case of any disruption to the central contact centre.

Homeworking – a practical success

For some organisations, initial homeworking initiatives have been extremely successful. When US outsourcer ARO adopted teleworking, agent turnover dropped to seven per cent from 25 per cent, facilities costs fell, and productivity increased by 15 per cent. In the UK, the AA trialled 125 agent homeworkers and found a 34 per cent increase in productivity and staff attrition fell to a third of its previous level. Absenteeism also dropped by a half.

At the 2004 Call Centre Expo exhibition, Sabio highlighted how the technology currently available can easily enable remote workers – quickly, efficiently and without loosing control. At the Sabio-hosted Innovation and Advice Centre, where delegates talked to vendor independent consultants, Sabio featured a live demonstration of homeworking in action.

Two agents from directory enquiries service provider, 118 888 took live calls on the stand over the course of the exhibition. With flexible highly-reliable IP hosted technology, the agents took live calls from the general public and answered queries, demonstrating how the technology can be used in almost any environment. The agents are usually based at the 118 888 HQ in Cardiff. From the customer satisfaction point of view, the customers weren’t aware that their queries were being resolved on a stand in the middle of the UK’s busiest contact centre exhibition. Similarly the customer will not be aware that the agent is working from their own dining room either.

This practical and successful demonstration clearly showed that homeworking can now prove an everyday reality for contact centre operators, and offer a realistic solution to help address the continuing issue of agent attrition. The technology works, the potential homeworking agents are all out there – it’s now just a case of connecting the two and making it work!