Work-at-Home Agents

inContact: Your Direct Path Home

The real motivation for deploying and managing the at-home agent is based on one simple principle: improved agent satisfaction leads to increased customer satisfaction, resulting in improved customer loyalty.  While there is a high level of interest in at-home workforces, especially for companies with call centers, for many the path to deploying a work-at-home model is not clear. inContact® is the answer.

Happier Agents = Happier Customers

Part of delivering outstanding customer service is empowering the agents who deliver that customer service to not just do their job well, but to enjoy the job they are doing. Agent satisfaction is dramatically improved when an agent experiences the benefits delivered through the at-home model: flexibility, improved work/life balance, a more comfortable working environment, and a crucial decrease in expenses related to commute time and costs.

Call center analyst firm Frost & Sullivan reports the typical median age of an at-home worker is 38, while the average age of an on-premise call center agent is 23. Additionally, more than 80% of home agents have some college-level education; this is only true of 35% of agents in brick-and-mortar centers. Many companies have reported a sharp increase in retention rates — above 80% or more with their at-home agents — while traditional call center agent retention is dramatically lower, less than 25% (from BusinessWeek, Dec 2007).

Cost-Effective and Easy to Implement

inContact removes the barriers preventing your organization from adopting an at-home model. Because inContact is delivered via an on-demand, or web-based model, there is no hardware for you (or alternatively, your current hardware vendor) to configure. An agent can be "turned up" on the inContact platform quickly and simply. The inContact platform is unique because it is combined with a powerful telecommunications backbone, allowing you to connect your agents to the system using various options including VoIP, TDM, or hybrid models.

Trending Towards Home

If current economic trends continue, Frost & Sullivan believes that the work-at-home agent model could become the industry norm in the coming years. Remote and at-home agents provide numerous benefits for call centers, including reduced seat costs, a considerable rise in employee morale and an accompanying elevation in employee retention rates. Additional benefits include disaster recovery (or more appropriately, avoidance), reduced absence due to sick days, increased flexibility to scale up and down to handle call-volume fluctuations, and a wider and more experienced pool of potential agents from which to hire.

Green is the new...well, Green

Everybody is "going green". In the call center marketplace even the large hardware vendors are claiming their solutions will help their customers go green. But to be successful they must sell more hardware, and more hardware consumes more energy, which does not support green initiatives. A Software-as-a-Service model, while it does require hardware somewhere (just not at your location), provides a more efficient energy consumption model by sharing hardware resources between consumers. And, it allows your employees to work from home or any location, reducing your company's overall carbon footprint.