BT is predicting a surge in the rise of ‘homeshored’ contact centre advisors in 2008, as businesses face up to a growing dilemma between the need for cost reductions and an increasingly demanding customer base. BT warns of a potential recipe for disaster brewing as contact centres fail to deliver either their efficiency targets or their customer promises. Homeshoring, which made its entry into the Macmillan English dictionary this year, is emerging as the most viable solution, according to Dr Nicola Millard, a BT futurologist who has been examining the subject for some time.

Dr Nicola Millard, BT Global Services, said: “Bringing the contact centre home – literally – is without doubt the best route for consumer-facing businesses now. Although the ability to ‘telework’ from home has existed for almost 20 years now, homeshoring is a very different and more complex proposition. It requires a skilled workforce with disciplined shift patterns integrated into the operation of a virtual contact centre and the access to real time voice and data to allow specialists to answer customer calls based on skills based routing.”

Still in its infancy, the concept of homeshoring is predicted to grow considerably over the next few years. Despite around 7.5 percent of the UK’s workforce working from home at least one day a week (according to the Office of National Statistics), very few ‘traditional’ contact centre advisors are afforded this option. However, according to a report from Exony* , a homeshored strategy could save the UK contact centre industry up to £5 per hour which equates to approximately £6,000 per agent per year; along with the benefits of job creation, reduced carbon footprint and improvement in customer experience. Gartner+ estimates that organisations can save up to 10 percent of their costs through homeshoring.

Millard believes there are five main drivers that point towards the growth of the homeshored advisor:

1. The increasing costs of recruiting and retaining staff. In the homeshoring model, recruitment is not confined to people that live within reasonable commuting distances from the contact centre or want to work traditional hours.

2. The changing nature of contact centre interactions – with many customers starting to do the simple stuff themselves, contact centre staff are becoming more specialised.

3. The perceived consumer criticism against offshored call centres coupled with increasing wage bills in popular offshoring areas, making offshored call centres a less attractive prospect.

4. The falling costs and increasing reliability of broadband connectivity to the home.

5. The sustainability agenda. The environmental benefits of working at home are increasingly well known. Exony estimates that the four million contact centre agents currently working in UK, US and Canada produce more than six million tons of CO² each year.

Millard added: “Homeshoring needs to support the needs and aims of the organisation and must have buy-in at every level from the CEO to supervisors. It will not be appropriate for everyone and culturally, companies will need to adapt. Many managers will lack confidence in their ability to ‘manage at a distance’ and some will not have faith in their staff's commitment to be as productive as they would be in a contact centre. However, systems and processes can be carefully thought through to counteract this and this is far from an insurmountable challenge.”

The potential for homeshoring to take-off in 2008 is something which business continuity managers need to be aware of: to enable preparations to begin where appropriate; and to allow the advantages and disadvantages from a business continuity perspective to be considered in advance of any business decision being taken to go down the homeshoring route.

* Exony (2007) Virtual Contact Centres and Homeshoring: Driving the Benefits Home, May.

+ Bona, A. and Kolsky, E. (2005), Focus on the Realities, Not the Myths of the Work-at-Home Contact Centre, Gartner Research, 13th July

Reader comments

Whilst interesting from a perspective of a communications company, as a contact centre business continuity manager, there are other constraints that need to be addressed.

There are only a relatively small number of contact centre environments that would be suited to this.

Anything with financial regulation, credit cards etc, cannot be performed at home due to information security concerns. i.e. the ability to cut and paste credit card numbers along with names and addresses etc leaves the company open to fraud.

Contact centres can have background noise but this can be controlled. At the home it cannot. I don't believe the customer experience is enhanced by next door's dog barking, the doorbell going, screaming kids, the teenager in the bedroom playing rock music.

Rob Osborn, Ventura

Homeshoring has its own challenges in terms of stringent regulations from bodies like FSA in terms of handling the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) which includes credit card numbers, mobile numbers and issues round data privacy governed by the applicable laws in the UK.

Homeshoring implementation costs can get higher due to the replication of the contact centre environment at home while the quality of the call remains a question due to external environment disturbances.

Vigneshkarthic Sakthivel

•Date: 4th October 2007• Region: UK/World •Type: Article •Topic: Telecoms continuity
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UPDATED 12TH OCTOBER