Home bodies: cut contact center operating costs, reduce churn rates, and up flexibility--a serious look at the at-home agent model: if your company is anything like mine, at one time or another you've traded in your business casual attire for a pair of jeans and a T-shirt to work from home.(AGENTS--IN THE HOUSE)

Every member of our CRM magazine editorial staff has conducted interviews, filed stories, and edited copy from home for various reasons, from recovery from surgery to having plumbing repaired. CRM's editors typically rely on telecommuting for these kinds of sporadic personal events. But when New York City's transit union members spent three days on the picket lines in December 2005 during the transit strike, we had to telecommute. Working from home went from being an occasional choice to being the core of our contingency strategy for maintaining normalcy (which means, in our case, the controlled chaos of hitting lots of deadlines).

CRM's staff represents a tiny fraction of the millions of U.S. employees who work from home either occasionally or regularly, part- or full-time. Within the broad scope of telecommuting, however, lies an increasingly popular subgroup of home workers: at-home customer service representatives. It's not hard to understand why. Reduced operating costs, improved productivity, more flexibility for meeting customer demands, better qualified and highly motivated agents, and lowered attrition are just handful of reasons why companies use home-based CSRs. Some companies turn to third parties like Alpine Access, Convergys, ICT Group, LiveOps, Sitel, VIPdesk, West, WillowCSN, and Working Solutions for at-home agents, while others hire at-home agents directly and let some of their on-the-premises reps transition to home-based CSRs.

The industry is taking note: IDC forecasts that the number of U.S. at-home agents--a slim but rising subsegment of the millions of CSRs in the United States--will burgeon from an estimated 112,000 in 2005 to more than 300,000 by 2010. "The companies themselves are looking for an alternative to the way they provide customer service, which drives more profitable revenue, but drives it at a much lower cost," says Angie Selden, CEO at WillowCSN.

VIRTUAL REALITY

The at-home agent method certainly isn't a new concept, but over the past few years several trends have emerged to stimulate the model's penetration into companies' customer service practices. One driving force boils down to the demand placed on contact centers to keep costs as low as possible without letting service suffer. Three additional factors driving the at-home agent trend are consumer backlash against offshoring, negative press coverage …