Monday, Apr. 05, 2010
Once upon a time, phoning it in signaled failure. Now it's a strategic move. As the U.S. economy slowly rebounds, companies are increasingly relying on a decentralized workforce of domestic, home-based call centers. The old mantra: route service calls overseas to cut costs in half. The new idea: bring call centers back home, but not to bulky, brick-and-mortar phone banks. Use hourly workers sitting in home offices, managed on someone else's payroll. Call it phonesourcing.
Phonesourcing basically means contracting with a private firm to hire, train and manage a small army of local or regional call handlers. That enables companies to ramp up or tamp down their services flexibly, without the political controversies that are associated with outsourced, overseas call centers. Handing off call handling isn't new — people have been grinding their teeth on hold for outsourced help since the dawn of voice mail more than a decade ago. What's new is the growing scope and scale of the U.S. home-based call sector. Datamonitor projections show the number of U.S. home-based call agents growing at an annual clip of 20% between 2009 and 2012, from about 50,000 to more than 80,000. That's much faster than the growth rate for calling centers in India (4%) and the Philippines (9%), though foreign outsourcing remains a more popular and cheaper corporate option.
Home-based call centers in the U.S. handle both routine calls — questions about product prices, bank balances or resetting a password — and more complex ones, for technical questions, debt collection and business sales. They also provide answers by instant message or e-mail. Because call handlers are instructed not to mention that they are working for a third party, most customers of the particular bank, wireless firm or retailer have no idea they are not speaking with a company employee.
The hiring firm drafts the script and dictates what greeting and style the call handlers adopt. Agents are most eagerly sought after in the wireless industry, in which increasingly complex smart phones result in bewildered calls about new features or spotty service.
More:
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1977027,00.html?xid=rss-topstories