Home agents provide better performance than offshore outsourcing and low costs
Work from home agents provide better performance, lower recruiting and training costs, lower attrition, higher first call resolutions, and higher customer satisfaction scores than call center offshore outsourcing. Home agents provide an expanded geographic recruiting area, which results in a larger recruitment pool to find better quality agents. The Home agent's desire for flexible work schedules also allows you to manage your occupancy more efficiently.
Higher Educated Agents than Offshore Outsourcing
Eliminating geographic barriers to hiring allows nationwide recruiting that provides better language skills and more qualified and higher educated agents then those available through offshore outsourcing or traditional contact centers. About 75% of home agents have some college education.
Better Performance than Offshore Outsourcing
A larger recruiting pool allows for an easier match of agent abilities to call needs than available with offshore outsourcing. This results is an overall improvement in key performance indicators by an average of 20% over premise based agents, and even more over offshore outsourcing.
Reduced Training Costs than Offshore Outsourcing
Agents being trained on their own time, combined with elearning reduces training costs and attrition than offshore outsourcing or domestic call centers. Home Agents that live within drive time of a company's physical location can train on premises and then shift to work at home.
Increased Agent Occupancy Rates
With home agents you will no longer waste money by over staffing and having agents sitting around because of low call volumes or giving bad customer service by not having enough agents available to handle spikes in calls. Additional home agents are only a text or email message away. |
Lower Turnover than Offshore Outsourcing
Hiring individuals who are more mature and better suited for the job combined with a higher level of job satisfaction results in an average yearly attrition rate as lows as 10% versus 100% or more with offshore outsourcing or traditional call centers.
Reduced Supervision Costs
Higher quality agents and performance based compensation allows a supervisor ratio of one supervisor to monitor and manage 25 Home Agents instead of 8 to 12 with premise based agents. This is much better than available with offshore outsourcing.
Higher Customer Satisfaction than Offshore
Home Agents feel their job is more valuable and harder to replace. Combining the feeling of job importance with a company philosophy that encourages keeping customers happy results with higher levels of customer satisfaction than available with offshore outsourcing.
Bringing Jobs Back To America
When you replace offshore outsourcing jobs with home agents you are increasing employment in America. Every person you replace with a work at home job saves about 7,000 pounds per year of carbon emissions from your employees' cars commuting to and from work each day.
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Reduce Operating Costs From $21 to $14 an Hour
 Frost and Sullivan reports that the average cost to operate an in-house, premise based call center including; real estate, management, IT, equipment, telephony, data processing, recruiting, training, payroll and payroll taxes, benefits and everything else is in excess of $21 an hour.
Converting to the virtual Home Agent call center model will reduce the average hourly rate to only $14 per hour. This compares favorably to off-shore rates while taking advantage of better skilled U.S. agents.
Better Performance
People who want to work from home are often more qualified and higher educated than agents attracted to traditional contact centers. About 75% have some college education. Home Agents value flexible scheduling and are willing to work the unpopular shift times making it easier to staff during the most productive hours. This leads to increased occupancy rates to better handle spikes in call volume or to reduce staffing during the slow times. These factors create higher job satisfaction resulting in only an average of 10% attrition versus 100% or more in a traditional call center.
Eliminating the geographic barriers to hiring allows you to expand your search nationwide to find the very best and most experienced Home Agents. The result is an overall improvement in key performance indicators by an average of 20% over premise based agents for such things as; average talk time, average handle time, hold time, after call work time, first call resolution and quality scores. Sales is another area where Home Agents excel since only the Agents that have a real desire to make sales on the phone apply for those projects.
Reduced Training Costs
Home Agents use eL earning and self-paced online training systems, reducing training time by 20% or more. Service skills, system and most project training is completed by the Agent on their own time eliminating most of the costs associated with new Agent training and attrition. Companies that do not want to use eL earning can adopt a hub-and-spoke model where home agents live within drive time of a company's physical location and can be trained on premises and then shifted to work at home.
Increased Agent Occupancy Rates
Since Home Agents have the freedom to select the schedule that's right for them, schedule adherence is one of the most important attributes to a Home Agent workforce. You will no longer waste money by over staffing and having Agents sitting around because of low call volumes or giving bad customer service by not having enough Agents available to handle spikes in calls. Additional Agents are only a text or email message away to handle call spikes on demand. This results in higher contacts per hour which translates into lower operating costs.
Reduced Turnover
Hiring individuals who are more mature and better suited for the job will result in lower turnover and better performance. Studies have shown that the turnover with Home Agents can be over 70% less when compared to in-house premise based agents.
Reduced Supervision Costs
Compensation packages based on maintaining specific behavior and performance criteria allows the supervisors to support a larger team. Rather than maintaining a ratio of one supervisor for every 12-15 agents, it is not unusual for one supervisor to be able to monitor and manage the efforts of 25 Home Agents. Less personal face to face interactions between the supervisors and the Agent produces a more objective assessment of the Agents' performance.
Improved Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction scores are normally improved through the use of Home Agents. This often occurs because Home Agents feel their job is more valuable and harder to replace. Combining the feeling of job importance with a company philosophy that encourages keeping customers happy results with higher levels of customer satisfaction.
Reduce Your Company's Carbon Footprint
Using Home Agents helps reduce your carbon footprint by eliminating harmful greenhouses gases emitted from your employee's cars commuting to and from work each day. Every person you replace with a work at home job saves about 7,000 pounds of carbon emissions per year, according to U.S. Department of Transportation statistics. This could add up to some serious carbon credits.
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