Phone Home: The Rise of the Homeshored Contact Centre Advisor

Transcription

1 Phone Home: The Rise of the Homeshored Contact Centre Advisor Dr Nicola Millard Customer Experience Futurologist BT Global Services

2 So What is Homeshoring? home shor ing the transfer of service industry employment from offices to home-based employees with appropriate telephone and Internet facilities * More complex than teleworking not office workers accessing and telephony services from home. An alternative to offshoring. * Macmillan Dictionary.

3 A Blast from the Past: The 1992 BT Inverness Experiment 11 volunteer directory enquiry advisors. Cutting edge technology: Specially designed workstation, Headset, Communications control panel, Videophone, 2x64 Kb/s ISDN digital channels, , Management Information Systems (MIS), Electronic bulletin boards, Storage unit/ desk. Cost per installation - 11,000! Operators enjoyed working at home - more time with family & less stress. Results: Service levels improved Greater flexibility for peaks and troughs, Better resilience, Better skills retention. Need to maintain systems, Effective supervision vital The myth of the lonely and isolated teleworker I ve taken to cooking a lot more and discovered who our neighbours are. BUT too costly to sustain!!!

4 Homeshoring Pioneers 220 advisors in Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester & Birmingham answer approx 65% of their calls. Outsourcer whose 8000 contractors work from home. 600 home-based travel agents, many ABTA certified advisors. All 1500 reservations crewmembers work from home in Salt Lake City area. Multi-national homeshorer in UK, US, South Africa & Australia..

5 A Few Stats Global Stats Outsourced homeshoring jobs in US grew 20% last year - 112,000 jobs rising to 330,000 by In-house homeshored advisors in US - 24% or 672,000 workers2 In Australia numbers have doubled since % to 10% in Anticipated to rise to 19% in IDC, Yankee Group, 2006; Booze Allen Hamilton, Callcentres.net, Office of National Statistics, Contact Babel, Exony, Gartner, UK stats 7.5% of the UK s workforce work from home at least one day a week4. 18% of UK contact centres in 2007 rated homeworking as very important (up 8% from the previous year5) - few cited Voice over IP (VoIP) as driving this strategy. Homeshored strategy could save the UK contact centre industry 5 per hour6. Organisations can save 8-10% of their costs7.

6 15 Years Later Is this the Tipping Point for Homeshoring? Key drivers Technology: Falling costs and increasing reliability of broadband connectivity to the home. Adoption of Internet Protocol (IP), Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and hosted contact centre technologies. Infrastructure and logistics: Cost of real estate - forcing centres to relocate and expand into suburban industrial estates. Travel issues - Traffic congestion, Parking, Petrol prices. Getting the right people: More complex contact centre interactions requires a less transitory, more multiskilled and highly specialised contact centre workforce. Increasing costs of recruiting and retaining appropriate, geographically agnostic contact centre staff. The offshoring disaster. Churn - reduced from 26% -10% p.a.; 60% decrease in sickness level (8.4 days p.a*). * Exony, 2007.

7 15 Years Later Is this the Tipping Point for Homeshoring? Key drivers: Increasing productivity: Ability to flex resources to meet the peaks and troughs of customer demand with appropriately qualified staff % increases in productivity. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): Jobs to traditionally disadvantaged communities & people, Reduced carbon footprint (UK, US and Canadian advisors produce more than 6 million tones of CO² each year = offsetting 6.2 million acres of forest*). Resilience in the face of external disruption e.g. transport strikes, severe weather, natural disasters, disease pandemics or terrorist action. * Exony, 2007.

8 Taking an Holistic Approach The Strategy getting buy in. The Infrastructure basic access e.g. Broadband, IT help resources. The person It s not for everyone! The work task not everything suited to distributed, self managed environment. The place a house, a quiet room. The organisational structure trust & the ability to manage at a distance.

9 Learning from Current Practice: Strategy Cost effectiveness. Improving productivity. Flexible resourcing. Access to skills. As cost effective to homeshore as to offshore. 25% improvement in productivity; reduction in customer complaints. We roster split shifts to meet peaks and troughs. This is where we make massive gains in productivity. We also have standby built into the contracts where we are able to roster people on within 15 minutes of reaching a call peak. We can t do that in an office environment, Kevin Horgan, AA. I m keen to tap into that whole area of talent that is under utilised. How can we can employ really talented women who want to stay at home with their children but who can come online for a few hours and do some work? Also retired people who are a huge glut in the population profile wise we are seeing a societal change there and that needs to be reflected in the call centre population, Customer Experience Strategy Director.

10 Learning from Current Practice: Person Recruitment. Assessment understanding implications for working at home. New recruits vs. established Stuart Bowden, workforce UKVCC. vs. independent contractors. Motivation and mutual trust. You want to get life skills and life experience but these kind of people would never want to work in a contact centre because they tend to be full of 18 year olds!, We have to employ people who can work with limited supervision and are self disciplined. It s the closest thing you can get to being self employed within a contact centre environment, Kevin Horgan, AA. Average 10% churn (JetBlue only 4%) compared to 25-35% p.a. in traditional contact centres (40-70+% p.a. for off shored centres). I can see it would be cheaper to run, but I think the control of the people would be harder. There would be too many distractions, if I am at work I come to work, if I am at home the the draw to do something else would be much harder. I don t know if I could work at home on my own because I need the interaction with other people, Advisor. As a home based agent I feel as if the company trusts me and I appreciate that. I feel that it makes me do a better job. I feel like my own boss but I do feel obligated to do a good job. They trust us and that makes us trust them!, jetblue Advisor.

11 Learning from Current Practice: Place Vacancies for Homeshoring A Quiet Room. Must have A Home. No children under your feet. A self disciplined outlook.

12 Learning from Current Practice: Culture Most managers do not know how to deal with a remote I m not sure I d like my guys to work at home I like to history is often rooted in the be able to see if they are Homeshoring meeting dismissed room, as great in theory but unworkable working in practice. or not, Inability to train, Professor motivate Cary and Cooper, manage advisors remotely are Team the leader. key reasons cited for not adopting Lancaster homeshoring* University. (Gartner). The case against workforce, homeshoring: as their career Belief that it is difficult to instill a sense of company culture and spirit if employees are remote. Obstacles cultural rather than technological don t trust employees. Problem with the education and culture of management - if I can t see them how can I manage them?. Potential tensions between them and us. Motivation to work - A boring It sounds task is good boring at wherever first, but no, you put it. because of the social side of work. My work is an escape from home. The majority of people who can get to work would rather be out of the home I would think, Advisor. * Gartner.

13 Learning from Current Practice: Culture The case for Homeshoring: Functionality and technology of contact centre differs very little between traditional and virtual It doesn't really matter if an employee is two feet or 200 miles away, Brendan Reid. Higher levels of mutual trust involved in this model different model of management. Management discipline required rigorous communication and management mechanisms, e.g. home visits, audios, meetings. Average team leader ratio of around 1:15/20. I can track in real-time the performance and effectiveness of each our agents regardless of their location. In many ways, this provides me with better information agent utilisation than I would normally get if all the agents were operating in the single location, Manager, AA. The key is to keep people involved don t see the numbers on the screen as numbers, see them as people and they will make it work for you, Kevin Horgan, AA.

14 Learning from Current Practice: Infrastructure If you move someone into a home environment it has to be just as simple to get a pen. They may sound basic, simple Robust infrastructure Broadband, virtual ACDs, Voice over IP and remote workforce things but you have to be on top management. of them, All information David they Dunbar, would BT. have in the contact centre including desktop wallboards. Access to: The little things e.g. IT parts, stationery etc. Communities of coping. Training. Secure environment. Effective flexible scheduling systems. Legal, tax, duty of care implications. Just because there s access control to an environment doesn t mean it s secure. The security concerns about homeshoring are often in the head of the risk director, Andrew Candlish, Cisco. If I get sworn at I just phone one of my mates no job s perfect, Homeshored advisor.

15 Community Homeshoring Broxtowe Estate

16 Redefining the market and creating a new opportunity Homeworking virtual office Homeshoring virtual contact centre Definition Management level Largely self managing, light monitored Enabled by technology Production level Outputs monitored, activities tracked Enabled by technology but requiring significant changes to business processes over many functions Infrastructure required Telephony VPN access to / file servers HR / Payroll / Management CRM/Data Capture system Network centric Telephony Recruitment / Training Agent Scheduling / Monitoring Real Time MIS 16

17 Phone Home: The Rise of the Homeshored Contact Centre Advisor Dr Nicola Millard Customer Experience Futurologist BT Global Services