BusinessWeekOnline – January 23, 2006:
More and more, companies are moving customer service jobs out of high-overhead call centers and into what is possibly the lowest-overhead place in the U.S.: workers’ homes. The savings are about more than just real estate, toilet paper, and coffee supplies. JetBlue Airways is perhaps the most famous practitioner; all of its 1,400 reservation agents work from home. But they are employees. Most of the new homeshoring jobs are independent contractor positions offered by outsourcing companies. The agents are on the hook for their own health care, computer equipment, training — even background checks.
Outsourced homeshoring jobs grew 20% last year, to 112,000 jobs, estimates tech-market researcher IDC, and will hit 330,000 by 2010. “Offshoring’s underestimated sibling, homeshoring, is about to hit a growth spurt,” says IDC analyst Stephen Loynd. Office Depot, McKesson, and J. Crew all use home agents. Homeshoring is less likely to risk the accent fatigue, cultural disconnection, and customer rage that offshoring can inspire. That’s not to mention the mounting security fears (once your private data — credit-card and Social Security numbers, medical and brokerage records — go overseas, they’re beyond the reach of U.S. law).
This is a great idea. I cant stand calling for simple tech support and getting someone who takes a half an hour (literally) to get my information aside from the fact that I cant understand him. It makes the company look as if they are not standing behind their products.
I am actually employed by an outsourcing company. (I won’t say which company or mention any of the contracts we are on, in case I get into any bother)
We are trained with the materials that the companies used to train their staff, so it isn’t as though we aren’t trained to as high a standard as their own staff.
In fact, with the contract I work with, we are constantly getting higher quality scores than the people employed by the company themselves. We are getting roughly in the range of 89-90% whereas the company themselves are getting a rating of only about 82-84%.
So, when done well outsourcing can be more beneficial than people make it out to be. Oh, by the way, our client is based in Britain, we are based in Britain, none of this getting transfered out to India stuff, that helps nobody as brodes18 says.
I would be concerned with outsourcing companies that let their employees work from home, on all of the contracts I have worked with, we frequently need to get help from our team leaders, either because the customer demands it, or because we have forgotten something (it does happen, regardless of your training standards). I just feel that sitting at home is not as good an environment, what I love is the fact that we can chat and have alaugh in between customers calling us up, which helps keep our morale up.
Yeah except most people don’t do outsourcing well, and eventhough you apparently do it well, you’re still ashamed.
When I worked for Washinton Mutual I called the tech support they had for a browser related problem (Surprise surprise I.E) and the first two questions “Herold” gave me were
“Did you try restarting the computer? Are you sure you’re typing in the right password”
Great the things that I did instinctivly way before calling “tech support” were the first two things that came out of his mouth.
I found out later it was a virus scanner program that the office had thanks in part to IE vulnerabilities.
Mad props to the homesourcing. I hope it catches on.
combine minibrothels and home sharing and you have an unbeatable combination
combine minibrothels and homesourcing and you have an unbeatable combination