Call centres are moving to living rooms near you

Call centres are moving to living rooms near you


Forget 'offshoring': now customer services staff can work at home, writes Chris Partridge

Sunday March 11, 2007
The Observer


Despite last week's announcement by Barclays that it is to close its Manchester call centre and move the work to India, call centres are coming home. Instead of phoning India to complain about a faulty toaster, book a holiday or buy car insurance, you are more likely to be put through to a private home somewhere in Britain.
The trend toward using massive call centres overseas was dubbed 'offshoring', so the new system for directing calls to people working in their own homes has inevitably become known as 'homeshoring'. However awkward the name, it has the potential to provide work for millions of people currently excluded from employment, such as parents, carers and the disabled.


Broadband enables home workers to log on to corporate computer systems at the same time as taking phone calls, so part-timers working at the kitchen table can do everything a worker at a call centre can do, but at a time convenient to them. Single parents find this particularly liberating - one of the criticisms of conventional call centre work is that the wages barely cover child care and travel costs.
Homeshoring has many attractions for employers as well. The high fixed costs of a call centre are eliminated, and many of the new breed of home workers are extremely well qualified.

The biggest homeshoring operation in the UK is Future Travel, the virtual offshoot of Co-op Travel, which operates a network of more than 600 home-based travel agents. Future Travel provides the computer infrastructure, the web presence (both on its own Co-op branded sites and at holidayholiday.co.uk), and marketing support. Calls are routed automatically to the home worker specialising in the area concerned, although others may be roped in at busy times.

Alistair Rowland, managing director of Future Travel, emphasises that the work is not the mindless script-reading of the standard call centre. 'Home working is the biggest growth area in travel,' he says. 'Travellers are not yet ready to book complex holidays online, and customers are expecting more and more service. Home workers can be personal travel advisers.'

Many home-based travel agents are experienced operators who worked on the high street before starting families or retiring. Working at home enables them to combine family life and earning a living. Some earn a very good living indeed: 'The top 20 to 30 per cent of our home workers are earning over £100,000 a year, but they are the 14-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week types,' Rowland says.

The company makes efforts to ensure their home workers do not get 'cabin fever' from working alone. Managers visit them, especially in the early days, and many are formed into virtual teams, communicating by conference calls and internet messaging.

The trend to homeshoring will not repatriate all the jobs lost overseas over the last decade, however: the rise of web-based services and automated call handling systems has eliminated the need for human operators to handle simpler inquiries.

Last week Lloyds TSB announced the closure of its Mumbai contact centre, which used to handle overflow calls from the UK. This was not because of any unhappiness with the Indian staff, but because an automated answering service launched last year had resulted in a 26 per cent reduction in calls to the contact centres, when the bank had anticipated only an 8 per cent fall. Sally Jones-Evans, Lloyds' managing director for telephone banking, says: ' 'The number of overflow calls going into Mumbai has been steadily reducing and it has now got the point that all calls are being comfortably handled by our staff in the UK.'

The automation of simple calls is leading call centre operators to look at home workers as a so-far-untapped source of highly qualified staff able to handle more complex inquiries, says Anne Marie Forsyth, chief executive of the Contact Centre Association. 'There is a huge drive to automation,' she says. 'There are very good economic reasons why people are looking at homeshoring, such as reductions in costs and carbon footprint, but mainly it is access to skilled labour.

'The main problem with contact centres is getting qualified staff, so the ability to employ people at home should be a win-win situation.'

There are still barriers to the wholesale adoption of home working, however. 'Homeshoring has been talked about for ages but is only just starting to happen,' Forsyth says. 'There are lots of reasons why companies are cautious, such as data security, control and people's natural desire to work in teams