Throughout the years we found that more and more people find this type of flexible job arrangements extremely attractive due to the fact that their work hours can be completely aligned with their own duties and schedules.
Agents Republic is an innovative home-based contact center headquartered in Canada, providing on-demand job opportunities worldwide for people to work at home. The company uses the advantages of cloud-based technologies to recruit, employ and manage workforce remotely.
Working from home for a call center is one of the best alternatives for commuters, freelancers and stay-at-home moms to earn income. Typical tasks include receiving calls for general customer and tech support or making calls to take surveys and following up on reservations. Home-based work offers a balanced lifestyle for work at home agents, especially for the new generation. One can work not only wherever and whenever she or he wants, but also decrease discretionary expenses on eating out, clothing and commute back and forth between the office and work.
Businesses benefits
The model also provides advantages for businesses, as people who can work from home are more productive and usually higher educated, thus can provide a higher quality service compared to their premise-based counterparts. They speak more languages and can be geographically distributed helping seamless business continuity requirements of today’s companies. The on-demand nature of the service supports rapid scalability both up and down as business needs changes. It is also one of the unique solutions which could deal with traffic spikes – just like how Uber is creating incentives for taxi drivers to manage event-based traffic.
There are many positions call centers need agents for and many companies hiring for their own virtual call center operations, including Amazon, JP Morgan, Cisco and American Express.
Labor integration
David L. Papp, Founder and CEO of Agents Republic previously led another virtual contact center, CloudAgents from startup to a multinational company, operating in 38 countries. He states that stay-at-home employment is driven by increased spend in cloud-based technologies that enables efficient remote workforce management and adds to the increasing popularity of home-based work. Work-at-home agents can not only be their own boss, choose their own schedule and receive competitive compensation, but also save time on the commute. These ‘perks’ make many realize the benefits that technology offers fueling the development of home-based working culture. Now call center agents can also enjoy what was previously the privilege of writers, translators and programmers.
Virtual contact centers also have an advantage by home-shoring, he adds. Historically American call center jobs have been outsourced to the Philippines and India due to cost considerations. The tech-enabled call center model however can bring these jobs back as it enables the effective recruitment of local workforce located anywhere within the country. Technology has no boundaries and can easily reach to otherwise isolated rural areas or areas with high unemployment rates. This unrestricted access to talent is just one of the factors that the premise-based calls centers struggle with.
Based on the research of Site Selection Group around 3 million call center agents work in more than 6,800 call centers in the US. The top 3 states based on the number of employees are Texas, Florida and Arizona. EU has comparable number of agents and the growth is expected to continue in the near future.
Good for the Earth
Environment benefits are also part of the equation. Global Workplace Analytics estimates that currently about 50% of Americans hold telecommute-compatible jobs, and if they could work half time from home, the greenhouse gas emissions could be decreased annually by 54 million metric tons. This is about equal to the emissions of 10 million cars or a savings of 640 million barrel of oil.
