During the course of the past decade, work at home for contact centers has evolved from an alternative staffing strategy to what is now a mature, proven, high returning core business model. Eighty percent (80%) of contact center organizations in the United States utilize home working today. Why? Results are compelling and consistent.
Customer Contact Strategies has collected data from 500+ companies over the past 36 months. Below are some key established trends when comparing in-house to work at home performance in the contact center environment.
- 100-200% increase in qualified applicant flow
- 25% improvement in employee retention
- 20%-40% improvement in employee satisfaction
- 20% improvement in attendance
- 10% increase in productivity
The interest in remote working policies and practices is reaching broadly across enterprise functions, largely due to employee requests, attractive real estate benefits, and technology that easily supports a work-from-anywhere approach.
But unlike the contact center work-at-home environment, effective management, output and engagement are often not as transparent or measurable in other functions where work is less transactional.
That’s what makes the case so compelling for work at home in contact centers. Companies have exactly the same visibility of work output regardless of where representatives do the work (through CMS, Centerview tools, etc.). Enterprise social networks and chat enable broad knowledge and experience sharing for all employees, much more effectively than in person one-to-one exchanges. Video maintains the value of face-to-face interactions, and frequent polling invites connectivity and measurement of engagement.
If your organization is considering a serious embracement of a remote-working strategy, the contact center is an excellent place to start. Highly transactional work, transparent outputs, and superb technology have accelerated returns and marginalized the risk.
To learn more about work-at-home for contact centers, attend the 2017 Remote Working Summit, Dallas, March 8-9, 2017.
