Managed Internet Service Case Study
Agents Meet the Toughest Challenges Without Ever Leaving Home
Printable Version [PDF, 457KB]Industry Focus
Contact center services alternative delivery model supporting all channels
Size
76,000 agents nationwide
Networking Solution
Managed secure network provides advanced call center functionality to agents' home-based offices throughout the U.S.
Business Value
Experienced remote agents, innovative technology and veteran process expertise to improve sales, average order values (AOV), first call resolution and customer satisfaction and loyalty
About Our Customer
Since 1996, Working Solutions has operated a virtual contact center, managing home-based agents who handle customer service operations for Fortune 1000® clients. The company helps its clients improve customer sales and service while reducing operating expenses. Agents are recruited nationwide, selected for their experience and aptitude, thoroughly prepared and supported with advanced contact center management tools. These home-based professionals value their flexible schedules; in turn, they meet the highest sales and customer satisfaction standards.
Situation
Site-based customer contact centers have long faced challenges in recruiting, motivating and retaining an effective workforce. In large U.S. cities, they compete with other employers for talent. Moving to smaller cities in search of a more favorable labor market, they still face high attrition and difficulties attracting experienced, educated talent within commuting distance. Moving operations offshore in search of cheaper labor can have mixed results. Working Solutions saw a wealth of available talent that would never commute to any office: workers across the country that preferred to work from home. If home-based workers could be incorporated into the flow of contact center communications, they could help companies solve their attrition and recruiting problems and provide access to a pool of motivated and highly skilled agents.
Solution
The spread of high speed Internet connections to homes across the U.S. opens a broadband path for Working Solutions and its clients to connect to the talented, well-educated home-based workforce. A managed AT&T secure network erases the miles that separate Working Solutions’ clients from its home agents distributed nationwide. Software systems hosted securely at AT&T data centers distribute calls and provide customer relationship management (CRM) support. Rigorously screened and prepared by Working Solutions, agents provide their own computer equipment (mirrored to the clients’ image) and broadband connections. And the service they provide solves real problems by helping client companies reduce costs, enhance customer service, increase sales and provide increased ROI.
Meeting the Demand for Results: Agents OnDemand™
Talent is where you find it, and Working Solutions CEO Tim Houlne has uncovered a rich vein of it not in office buildings or overseas, but in homes across America. For more than a decade Houlne has put that talent to work solving problems for companies in multiple industries.
Well educated (78 percent are college educated), highly motivated and professional (the average agent has more than ten years of customer service experience), the people Houlne focuses on are eager to work as long as work can come to them. For a host of reasons, they prefer not to make the commute to a distant job, yet they would be top-performing agents in any facility-based center.
As one of the Officers who founded the GE Tech Team, Houlne knew the contact center business from the inside, and he understood that companies face serious challenges in recruiting, training and retaining people. A center housed in a brick-and-mortar office building must draw its workforce from the area nearby. Commuting time and expense pose a barrier for prospective employees as they can only travel so far, limiting the potential labor pool. Rival employers compete for the best talent with typical contact center attrition rates reaching 50 percent to 70 percent a year. In an attempt to address turnover, constant hiring and training costs can explode while experience levels plummet.
Another challenge is the need to boost capacity for such events as special sales, seasonal promotions and health insurance open enrollment periods, and then afterward, cut back. Overtime is costly, and contact center agents can only give so much. Adding people compounds training issues, and reducing staff later can hurt morale. But all these challenges could be met, Houlne reasoned, by bringing work-at-home resources into the mix. Working Solutions calls its answer Agents OnDemand™. Agents OnDemand™ is helping to breed a contact center revolution. “We’re changing the way this business is done by taking advantage of technology and a distributed, skilled workforce,” Houlne said. “In some ways, that's a new way of thinking.”
Sales Up, and Customer Satisfaction Too
The availability of Working Solutions' agents gives contact center operators the flexibility to add extra help to handle special promotions and events. Intensively prepared, highly motivated and experienced, Working Solutions agents often take on particularly challenging sales and service assignments.
“We can come in and staff to 15- or 30-minute increments that allow for more precise scheduling,” said Houlne. “We tend to take some of the more challenging hours such as nights, weekends and holidays. It actually improves the clients’ internal employee satisfaction ratings because now they are not requiring their own staff to work less than desirable shifts.” Working Solutions can save clients money and improve performance and internal operations as well.
Contact center managers live by metrics, and Houlne is no exception. Working Solutions benchmarks its performance against its customers’ own contact center operations, and often outperforms them. “We see an average increase in first call resolution of six percent,” he said. “The average per-seat cost for a remote agent is 15 percent to 20 percent less than the cost of the bricks and mortar agent.” Sales and customer satisfaction pick up too. “We consistently increase customer satisfaction ratings and sales conversion rates,” Houlne said. Working Solutions’ sophisticated network and advanced call management systems enable them to monitor individual agent performance down to the individual call level.
Working Solutions seeks out educated and experienced home-based agents who excel in using what Houlne calls ‘dynamic thinking’ to handle complex, unscripted customer interactions. Their independence and flexibility help keep customers satisfied. Those same characteristics are key to keeping the agents happy as well. Working Solutions has learned that in managing home agents the secret is not control but empowerment that enables the agent to do the best possible job. Houlne prefers to recruit the most skilled, best fit individual, and then manage the results.
“We did an economic preference study of our agent community,” Houlne said. “What was most important was not the income; it was the flexibility — working out of their homes, choosing the projects and the hours that they work. Now we manage our workforce to provide even more flexibility. If somebody is scheduled for a specific shift that is not convenient for them, they can log onto the workforce management site and remove themselves from the assignment. It's our responsibility to fill that schedule with alternates that we prepare at our own expense.” That arrangement clearly meets the needs of home agents. Houlne said agent turnover at Working Solutions averages 10 percent to 20 percent annually, far less than what is seen in a typical bricks-and-mortar call center.
The Contact Center: Cornerstone of the Enterprise
The focus on quality and customer satisfaction dovetails with what Houlne sees as a fundamental change in how companies view the customer contact function. “The call center is becoming the cornerstone of any organization,” he said. “Five or ten years ago it was seen as an expense and you tried to keep costs down in providing that support. Now call centers are seen as revenue centers that can help build customer loyalty and provide you with feedback to help design the next version of your product.”
Both the contact center and the infrastructure supporting it are now strategic assets, and Working Solutions manages its operations with that in mind. The company has deployed network-based automatic call distribution and interactive voice response systems. Customer relationship management (CRM) applications, hosted at AT&T sites, manage processes, monitor system and agent performance and collect the data Working Solutions uses to manage for peak performance.
Redundancy in both servers and network links keeps the company working when trouble strikes. In fact, providing backup support for customers whose primary contact center operations are knocked out of service is an important line of business. “Taking advantage of the distributed network helps us, especially when it comes to disaster recovery products,” says Houlne. “We have a distributed agent, not tied to any one broadband provider, and we have a network provider that allows us to move traffic to various spots should demand rise or an outage occur somewhere.”
For clients needing only the technology, Working Solutions’ affiliate company, WS iNet, manages a powerful, SaaS (software as a service) platform hosted in AT&T’s data centers. WS iNet hosts a variety of contact center applications, allowing clients access to the latest technology with minimal capital expense. Additionally, affiliate company WS Live operates facility-based contact centers in Iowa with nearly 500 agents serving more than 100 clients nationwide. Following the Working Solutions model, WS Live employees are starting to work more from home. Plans also include taking the home-based agent model outside the U.S. As Houlne points out, AT&T’s global footprint and international experience will greatly simplify the task of networking clients and agents together.
“The remote home agent industry is the hottest initiative in the call center business,” said Houlne. “We see everybody either looking at it, researching it or testing it, whether they do it in internally or with an outsourcer.” Working Solutions is poised to capitalize on this opportunity with its experienced staff and networking infrastructure in place to support its clients’ needs.
Voice of the Customer
"We're changing the way this business is done by taking advantage of technology and a distributed skilled workforce. In some ways, that's a new way of thinking."
– Tim Houlne, CEO, Working Solutions
