Who says agents all have to go to a building to do their jobs well?
Jack Heacock doesn't. A longtime advocate of teleworking, Heacock cites federal initiatives to encourage this practice among government employees. He also points to pending Congressional legislation to offer tax credits to companies that employ teleworkers, with additional credits for small businesses and companies with teleworkers covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Still, for most agents, a call center is a place, and that's likely to remain true in the future. But even if teleworking isn't generally widespread among call centers, it's more acceptable to employers and more feasible for agents than ever before.
According to a fall 2001 report by the International Telework Association and Council (ITAC), 28 million Americans, or one fifth of the US workforce that's at least 18 years old, are teleworkers.
Laws alone don't encourage teleworking. The availability of broadband services for consumers, coupled with secure virtual private networks for businesses, make it easier for employees to duplicate the technological resources of their offices when they're at home or on the road.
Heacock acknowledges that the September 11 attacks, with warnings of further attacks this spring, reinforce the need for organizations to spread their workforces away from well-populated locations in large cities. (He works from his home in Parker, CO, a town about 35 miles southeast of Denver.)
To telework, agents have to be able to answer customers' calls from their homes using off-premise extensions (OPXs) to phone switches that reside at the call center. A small percentage of call centers use Centrex services from telcos, which host a certain number of ports of the phone switches at their central offices.
Agents also require access to on-line or hosted implementations of software. That includes software to look up and update information about customers, plus tools that let agents view real-time statistics on how efficiently they handle calls.
For years, a small group of products has enabled teleworking agents to extend the capabilities of the center's phone switch to their homes, provided they use the same type of digital phone sets as their colleagues at the center. We describe these products in our sidebar on page 94.
Customer care lends itself well to off-site evaluation and supervision. That's true whether you use call monitoring systems, reporting software that displays call handling metrics like average talk time, or both. But, cautions Heacock, not everybody is a stellar performer when left on his or her own.
"You have to screen people to see if they will thrive," he advises.
This article points up the most important teleworking issues in call centers. Unlike ITAC's definition of teleworkers, which includes people who work on the road or at branch offices, our emphasis is on agents who answer calls from their homes.
CONTRACTING OUT TELEWORK
One approach that has received attention in recent years is hiring at-home agents as independent contractors. Although unusual nationwide, it is catching on in Florida. And its leading proponent is Willow CSN.
The company has a network of "CyberAgents" throughout South Florida who handle calls from their homes on behalf of the company's clients. These agents pay for their equipment, training and benefits. Willow also maintains a 70-person staff at its headquarters, the site of its recruiting, training, management, telecom, internal support and software development operations.
I visited Willow's headquarters this past May. The company moved two years ago to Miramar, FL, a town midway between Miami and Ft. Lauderdale. Willow's choice of location exemplifies a trend that since the 1990s has helped fuel interest in telecommuting: Metropolitan areas, centered around increasingly congested cities, are expanding outward.
When Asim Saber, the company's CEO, founded Willow in 1997, the headquarters were in downtown Miami. Because of the traffic, those who worked at the previous headquarters often spent a few hours a day commuting, and, says Saber, paid $7 per hour for parking.
By contrast, Miramar is off Interstate 75 and easily accessible by car. It's located in the northern region of Broward County, which has burgeoned since Hurricane Andrew devastated south Florida in 1992. I saw little traffic while I was in Miramar, perhaps because much of the town, including Willow's current building, went up in the last three years.
In light of the two extremes that Willow dealt with in relocating - densely populated downtowns versus distant suburbs - teleworking is all the more appealing.
Willow's network of agents is growing. Since the company started five years ago, the number of active CyberAgents has increased from 20 to more than 1,500.
Becoming a CyberAgent is hardly a sure thing. Applicants complete on-line forms from Willow's Web site. And, according to Kathleen Bocek, Willow's vice president of people resources, the site averages 150 registrations a week.
Only 20% of the on-line applicants make it from the forms to the next phase, where Willow conducts behavioral assessments, tests applicants' computer skills and evaluates how effectively applicants communicate by phone. Of this group, fewer than half reach the final stage, which is an in-person interview at Willow's headquarters.
Willow has a waiting list of 6,500 CyberAgents who don't handle calls for the company's clients but can be available when needed. Saber explains that the waiting list ensures that among active CyberAgents, Willow always has enough work to go around. Yet, Willow strives to maintain a roster of four times the number of CyberAgents so that clients can bring in more people when they have to.
Before they answer calls, new CyberAgents complete 40 hours of instruction, which consists of eight hours on-line and 32 hours of classroom time. CyberAgents then have to receive training to handle calls for a particular client. And they answer calls for only one client at a time. The agents receive between one and four weeks of training for each client, broken into segments of four to six hours a day.
Instruction occurs at local community colleges, CompUSA sites or at the offices of Productivity Point International, a nationwide training firm. Willow contracts out training to a group of 16 people, two thirds of whom are CyberAgents; the remainder are professional educators. Training to become a CyberAgent costs $250, with a $25 application fee. The cost of training per client depends on the number of hours, and ranges between $100 and $300.
The increase in the number of active CyberAgents in the past five years reflects growing demand. In 1999, CyberAgents answered 19 million minutes of calls. By 2001, that number reached 50 million, and Willow currently has more than a dozen clients, including 1-800-FLOWERS, Alamo Rent A Car, Gap Direct, HSN, SkyMall, Staples Direct, and AAA clubs throughout the country.
