Overview

Faced with high turnover rates and a tight labor market for call center labor, some in the call center industry are renewing an idea that seemed all-but-dead just a few years ago: the notion of call center reps working from home.

It didn t die because of feasibility. In fact, for most of the last ten years it s been possible to wire up call center reps to the center from just about anywhere, especially when access to ISDN was available. (You don t need ISDN to make this happen anymore, thanks to the Internet.)

Several major ACDs were open to that kind of link, and the software to remotely manage the agents could be had, albeit for a price.

No, what pushed it aside was the fact that it removed agents from the direct control of their supervisors, and often it was difficult to show quantifiable reasons why you should go out of your way to do that. In any industry, letting people work from home is a giant step for managerial culture. In call centers, it s the equivalent of an earthquake.

And yet, subtly the idea is catching on in the rest of society. One study showed that in 1997 there were 11 million US telecommuters, up substantially from just a few years before.

That same study (by the International Telework Association) suggests that telecommuting s feasibility is enhanced by access to advanced technologies, such as the Internet and personal computers. An estimated 31% of telecommuters used the Internet, more than...