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How call centres caught the teleworking bug
Flexible working par excellence?

By Anthony Plewes

Published: Wednesday 29 October 2003

Virtual call centres emerged in the nineties with a promise to offer a better service for customers and more flexible working practices for staff. Anthony Plewes wonders whether they have lived up to early promise...

The call centre industry is notorious for its obsession with measurement. Agents' performance is rigorously analysed to determine factors such as time to answer and average call length.

These metrics are not just used for producing customer care statistics – they're often cross-referenced against human resources data so that management can assess the productivity of agents against their salary. This obsession with numbers, at its most extreme, can lead to 'murder by metrics'.

It's no surprise that call centres have been the breeding ground for the first large-scale planned experiments in flexible working. Call centres are always looking for ways to reduce overheads and flexible working promises to cut operational and capital costs.

These are drivers behind the emergence of the virtual call centre, allowing companies to integrate together disparate call centre locations along with home workers into a single unified whole. Virtual call centres even made national news when they were first introduced in the UK.

The AA was one of pioneers of flexible working in UK call centres. In 1997 it began a pilot programme to would allow 10 agents to work from home using ISDN and a system provided by BT's Syncordia. This trial was expanded to 125 agents and the AA managed to realise a number of tangible business benefits: a 34 per cent increase in productivity; staff attrition cut to a third of its previous level; and absenteeism down by a half. The project also enabled the AA to recruit a new range of staff, such as those with family commitments or unable to travel. In a highly competitive industry, extending the potential workforce pool can be extremely important.

The AA trial was highly publicised, fuelling a growing interest among the UK call centre community towards these new ways of working. Many firms began to realise their large centralised call centres were beginning to resemble battery farms. The industry's biggest challenge - staff churn - couldn't be reduced unless the industry could find better - though still cost-efficient - working practices.

A report from the Telework Association in 2001 found that although only four per cent of surveyed call centres employed home workers, 42 per cent of call centre managers expected to do so in the future.

While resistance to change in the workplace seemed to be coming to an end, many early deployments of virtual call centres were also found to be lacking. Martin Hill-Wilson, strategy and marketing director for call centre integrator, Datapoint, said: "Call centre software was designed for a single site. It was difficult to run single site applications over multiple sites." Call centres were forced to route calls at the site level which threw up all sorts of problems, such as CTI data not being passed to the agents."

However, new technology developments have emerged to overcome these problems. "This is where IP comes into it," says Hill-Wilson. "Management of the calls is not done at the site level but in the cloud. Rather than duplicating technology in all the call centres, you can now have a single infrastructure supporting them."

For example the pre-routing of the call can be handled in the IP cloud and passed directly to the appropriate agent rather than having to be dealt with in a one call centre and then transferred to another location.

Recently Cable & Wireless set up a virtual call centre for Marks & Spencer for the launch of its new credit card. With new sites in Preston and Mumbai, India and agents from an existing site in Chester, a 750-seat virtual call centre was created, with all of the skills-based routing and IVR hosted in the network.

The other key technology development helping call centres realise flexible working and virtual call centre projects is broadband. Mark Hughes, general manager of BT Workstyle consultancy, said: "Broadband and IP are essential technology elements that are needed to set up remote contact centres. To allow for full contact centre functionality, broadband is pretty much a pre-requisite. It's critical that agents can have access to customer databases. If caller information cannot be interrogated quickly at the time of the call then agents will be able to offer little value. Broadband enables remote agents to have access to central databases in real time."

Many call centres are realising that flexible working is a way of improving staff loyalty and employing people who would often be unable to work in the centre. Staff attrition is already a major operational headache for call centres in the UK. This has partly happened because regional development agencies pushed certain areas very hard for call centres. This has resulted in too many call centres chasing too few workers.

"Flexible working solves the problem of under-resourced call centres in crowded areas," says Hill-Wilson. It essentially allows call centres to 'relocate' without the massive cost of moving to a new location.

"The general trend is to smaller units," says Hill-Wilson. There is also potential for local broadband enabled centres to support small groups of workers who can hotdesk in that location. A call centre could also keep a larger presence in an area, to support team building and training, with agents visiting it for one week a month, for example. Productivity by home-based agents is also higher, claims BT. It found that its home-based agents handle up to 20 per cent more calls than office-based colleagues.

Contact centres are also using home-based workers to cover short peaks in demand. Bosch UK, for example, has a call peak on Monday mornings to deal with all the washing machine mishaps over the weekend. "The organisation needs to be able to alert workers to the peak and then hook up the connection at home and get going," says Doug Stukey, head of software systems integration at ERA technology. "This needs load prediction monitoring which looks at current call activity, compares this to previous experience and forecasts the likely load in the next few hours. If this predicted load goes over current capacity then management are told and if they select to do so then the home workers are triggered."

Agents working from home will also be able to work for more than one company. "Rather than relying on one workforce to handle calls for one organisation, some companies are starting to offer pools of agents who can work remotely for many different companies," says Hughes from BT Workstyle. "Broadband and VoIP will be the drivers behind this new model, allowing agents to work as efficiently out of the contact centre environment as they could in it."

Because the call routing can be done in the cloud it will also be possible to push contact centre technology out to more people in an organisation. For example, technical experts for second-line support could be integrated into the system on mobile phones, so that their advice would be available to the front-line agents at all time. The Newcastle Building Society uses its virtual call centre to integrate its branches into the main call centre to support them in the mid-morning call peak, when the branches are generally quiet. All of its staff are now empowered to deal with customer sales and service enquiries over the phone.

Flexible working looks set change the face of call centres in the UK. It is also popular with the workforce, says the Telework Association, with 55 per cent of those it questioned saying that they would like to work from home, and an additional 32 per cent expressing an interest in working at home part of the time. The days of the huge call warehouses have gone and they will be replaced by distributed, virtual call centres comprised of tele-cottages, home workers and smaller call centres focused on supporting and training agents.