CRM - May 2008 - (Page 40)

OUTSOURCING OPTIONS HAVING A BLENDED OUTSOURCING MODEL MITIGATES THE RISK OF HAVING TOO MANY AGENTS IN A SINGLE GEOGRAPHIC AREA, WHICH IS EXTREMELY DANGEROUS IN CASE OF A NATURAL DISASTER OR PANDEMIC. India’s outsourcing industry will disappear—so where will companies be outsourcing the majority of their contact center operations by 2013? And how? There is no single strategy—but a healthy mix is a safe portfolio geared to dictate the future of the outsourcing industry. HOMESHORING The era of the work-at-home agent (WAHA) force is squarely upon us, DeSalles says. In fact, he calls it the “single hottest topic” in his current research. And yet, he adds, only half a dozen companies offer WAHA-only service or include WAHAs as part of a brick-andmortar solution. “People are really not focused on WAHAs,” he says, though he sees the shift coming. Another reason WAHAs aren’t yet getting top billing? Perhaps because they represent “primarily a U.S.-based trend,” according to Andrew Kokes, vice president of marketing for outsourcing provider Sitel. DeSalles has authored a report identifying several benefits to leveraging home agents, including the ability to tap into a national labor pool instead of being restricted to a specific region around company headquarters, and the fact that there’s a lower agent-attrition rate among home agents (10 percent) than there is in 40 the brick-and-mortar world (50 percent). Other benefits include a higher education level among agents, including those with experience in the fields of sales and customer service. Tim Whipple, vice president of virtual contact centers for Santa Clara, Calif.–based contact center technology provider LiveOps, says agents recruited by his company undergo a full certification process before they ever talk to a customer. “We certify them and give quizzes and tests to ensure that they know what they’re doing before they can go on the call,” he explains. “Once they qualify, they still have to go through certifications at various levels of rigor depending on various levels of the program.” The beauty of the home-agent model, according to Tammy Valdez, vice president of member services for LifeLock, an Arizona-based identity-theft solutions provider, is that you can adjust the number of agents depending on call volume—modifying personnel levels by the minute to suit workload requirements. LifeLock utilizes LiveOps’ home-agent force, and Valdez says that’s been the only way her company could process the recent “hypergrowth” it’s seen. “The reason we’ve been utilizing their agents is because we do a lot of marketing on television and radio, and so when these ads hit, we may get a spike of 400 calls, or sometimes even 1,000 calls, all in a oneminute interval,” she says.“So [the home agent force] gives us that scalability to handle the spikes without literally staffing to a level that would hurt us at other times in-house.” The technology to transfer and log customer phone calls to the home has been in existence with conferencing features since the early 1990s, but being able to create a viable infrastructure to enable home agents did not come onto the scene until the beginning of this century, according to Working Solutions CEO Tim Houlne.“From a call center perspective, the ability to not only route that traffic into the home but to report on it and track it really started to evolve around 2000 and 2001,” he recalls. “Companies really understood either voice well or data well. Few understood bundling the two to deliver that seamless voice and data transaction to the agent in the home.” Houlne credits a couple of advances for the birth of the virtual contact center: first, carrier-grade soft switches, which he says allowed for applications to be developed that were similar to ones integral to typical enterprise-scale contact centers; second, Internet Protocol–enabled systems that allowed access via the Internet to a CRM application. Whipple agrees: “To effectively manage a distributed contact center, you have to have an Internetbased technology people can just log [into] and access the information they need to allow them to handle a call.” While Houlne says the capability to leverage home agents is now a given, there are still security concerns about the data being sent to homes nationwide.“In the beginning [technological capability] was one of those questions,” he recalls. “First, how can you do it; then, how secure can that be? That’s where a lot of the security questions were raised. Most of your questions concerning the capability to perform most call center functions are gone—the security remains.” It’s not from a lack of effort, according to Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting. “A lot of attention over the last two years in particular has been paid to addressing the security concern of these types of solutions,” she explains. “The good news for this market is that the…vendors have been investing significantly and there are some very secure solutions out there.” NEARSHORING Those who like the idea of outsourcing to a brick-and-mortar facility, but not in farflung locations such as India or the Philippines, can also look to nearshore locations (“near” to North America, that is), including Canada and Latin America. “There is increased acceptance and trust in utilizing outsourcers for nearshore outsourcing,” DeSalles says. “The biggest driver is going to be cost. As a general rule, it is much cheaper to deploy a contact center workforce nearshore, or even offshore.” In particular, Latin America has started to be seen as a viable option for nearshoring capabilities, especially “for www.destinationCRM.com CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | MAY 2008 http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - May 2008

CRM - May 2008 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point Is CRM Too Hard for Microsoft Vendors Go Virtual For Feedback Sense-sational Marketing How UGC Can Benefit CRM DestinationCRM Dashboard Price Check, Aisle 5 Required Reading The Moving Target The Excellence Myth Seven Steps to SOA Success And They're Off! Are You Ready to Party? Skin in the Game The Right Numbers Secret of My Success Re: Tooling Connect Pint of View

CRM - May 2008

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