Alex Coxon investigates the potential of homeworking as a cheap and secure approach approach to flexibility that works for both the business and the employee 

In January Britain officially fell into a recession for the first time in 18 years and, with the UK economy shrinking by 1.5% between October and December 2008, few businesses have remained unaffected.  Contact centres are, of course, no exception. In the past few weeks alone, home shopping company Shop Direct has announced plans to close its Crosby call centre with the loss of 1,000 jobs. German energy group E.On has meanwhile revealed it is to shut its call centre in Tannochside near Glasgow, and betting firm Stan James has said it will be relocating its 74-strong call centre from Grove, Oxfordshire, to VAT-free Gibraltar in a bid to save money.

While moving contact centre facilities abroad does typically deliver some reduction in operational costs, it is a drastic move – and not necessarily one that all businesses will want to consider. So what other options are available to British call centres that want to achieve greater efficiencies while the recession bites?

Interestingly, one of the most practical solutions has been touted by the call centre press for some years. Homeworking received its first column inches back in the early part of the century when it was hyped as a great new way of staffing those call centres that had traditionally been struck by high attrition rates. The idea was that by giving people the option of working from home, the industry would be able to tap into a brand new pool of workers – including mothers with young children and people with disabilities – who would be able to undertake shifts that tallied with periods of high call volumes.

But while the theory was strong, it didn’t work in reality. The biggest problem, explains Andrew Candlish, Director of virtual call centre provider and consultancy UKVCC, was the cost of technology. “Seven or eight years ago, the cost of homeworking was simply too prohibitive,” he says. “Companies would have to pay several thousand pounds to set up an agent working from home. In the early days, this would involve bringing in ISDN lines and mainframe technology, as well as all the hardware – PC, telephone and so on – they would need to do the job. Even when broadband became popular a couple of years later, it was still too expensive for businesses to provide connections in people’s homes, and the connections themselves weren’t fast enough to do the job properly.”

With other barriers including concerns over lack of security and HR – particularly worries about how remote workers could be recruited, trained and managed effectively – homeworking couldn’t live up to the hype that surrounded it. But that was then, and this is now.  “Broadband costs have come down enormously and the speeds are so much quicker than they were even three years ago,” says Dave Vernon, Senior Contact Centre Planning Specialist at the Professional Planning Forum. “In addition to this, there is thin client technology which means that people no longer need ISDN cables to link them to the call centre’s mainframe. They can now access and run all the relevant programmes through a web browser.”

According to Jeff Swanson, UK Manager at virtual call centre technology and agent provider LiveXChange, working in this way is a lot safer than people might think. “Security has always been a concern with homeworking,” he says. “But the same firewalls businesses place around their networks can be applied to the homeworker, making it very difficult for people to access it from the outside.”  Advancements in remote monitoring technology also help counter any worries call centre managers might have about whether their staff are doing the right work at the right time.

“Our technology is robust enough to give us live data which enables us to see who’s working at home, what they’re doing, and whether they’re complying with their schedule,” says Brett Edwards, Head of Operations at Active Health Partners – an absence management firm that works on behalf of large UK organisations, employing predominantly home-based nurses and occupational health therapists to independently assess employee sickness and get staff back to the workplace as quickly as possible.  “We’re fortunate because our staff are highly skilled people who are on good salaries and who have worked in trusted roles previously. Because of that, we don’t come across the same trust and security problems that other homeworking call centres might,” he adds. “However, the monitoring technology gives us that extra layer of visibility and confidence in what we’re doing.”

Unsurprisingly, companies that have embraced homeworking have even found ways of circumventing obstacles such as the recruitment and training of staff.

“The recruitment process we used to find our homeworkers was very different to the one we’d traditionally used for people in the call centre,” says Kevin Beattie, resource planning manager at television shopping channel QVC, which employs 46 home-based call centre agents. “Because our call volumes are so spiky, we were looking for people who would work from home for maybe an hour any time between 9am and 1am. So it was important, once we did an initial telephone interview with prospective homeworkers, to bring them on-site, show them what we do, what technology they’d be using, and – critically – to go through the shift patterns again so they fully understood what we were looking for from them.”

“We do a health and safety check in people’s homes before providing them with the restricted Internet connection and furniture they need to do their work,” adds QVC’s Senior Operations Manager Ingrid Arnold. “After that, we bring people on-site again for training which gives us the opportunity to fully support them while their skills levels grow and to be there for them if they have any problems. For some the time on-site can be as little as eight weeks.”

For both QVC and Active Health Partners, the benefits of homeworking have been considerable – for both agents and the call centre operators alike.  At QVC, attrition among homeworkers is less than within the contact centre itself, with staff highlighting the savings they’re making on travel and childcare as some of the key advantages to this type of working.

The story is the same at Active Health Partners. “On average, each of our homeworkers saves eight hours of travel time a week – equating to 416 hours, or 17 days, a year. They also save approximately 150 car miles each week, or 7800miles a year. That adds up to approximately £16 in petrol every week or £832 a year, and 2808Kg of CO2 emissions per annum,” he says. “When we asked them what they like about homeworking, the drop in travel time and travel savings were two of the key reasons. People like the fact they can work flexibly too. It gives them a better work-life balance: more family time.”

On the operational side, there have been considerable savings for both companies, as well.  “Because of the nature of our business, we would need maybe 40 agents at 9pm, 120 at 10pm, and 70 at 11pm. Traditionally, to ensure we had staff to cover that, we would have to overstaff the call centre by 30-40% for three hours either side of the busy period,” explains QVC’s Kevin Beattie. “Yet by scheduling in home agents for an hour at a time, we achieved a return on investment (ROI) within six months – covering everything from recruitment costs, through to health and safety checks, training and infrastructure.”

Active Health Partners’ Brett Edwards also achieved ROI in just six months. Like QVC, he has managed this by getting people to work shift patterns that actually suit the business. But savings have also been realised because the firm has adopted the homeworking model so fully that it has managed to scale back on the prime office space it was previously paying for in both London and Leeds.  With the recession now in full swing, it is savings like these that could make the difference between success and failure in the British call centre industry. Certainly, it would seem that businesses outside of QVC and Active Health Partners are beginning to wake up to the potential of homeworking.

In 2007, when analyst firm ContactBabel carried out its fifth annual UK Contact Centre Operational Review, it found that just 3% of British call centres were implementing homeworking practices. Amazingly, that had grown four-fold by the time the next Review was published in September 2008.  More recently still, technology company ProtoCall One conducted a survey which revealed – not surprisingly – that the management of costs would be the biggest challenge facing contact centre directors in 2009. To help combat that, a massive 58% of ProtoCall One’s interviewees said they were now actively starting to investigate virtual contact centre technology.

As the Professional Planning Forum’s Dave Vernon puts it: “The savings that can be made with homeworking are compelling. Using this model, contact centres can schedule people to work for the periods they are actually needed – implementing split-shifts, where necessary, without incurring additional costs. They can also help cut attrition by employing people who actually want to work from home rather than the more transient younger employees that tend to populate the UK’s contact centres: people who see their job simply as a stepping stone to something else.

“Cost and security used to be the big issues, but there are tried and tested models out there now – ones we’ll be exploring in more detail in the homeworking workshop we’ll be holding at this year’s Contact Centre Planning conference in April,” he concludes. “If businesses follow the example of these success stories, they can reap sizeable rewards.”