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Industry report home agent adoption 2010 print version
1. Survey Results
Industry Report:
Home Agent Adoption in the
North American Contact Center
2010
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All Data Copyright 2010 Cloud 10 a Transcom Company – All Rights
2. Table of Contents
Executive Summary 3
Background 3
Process 3
Participant Profile 4
Overview of Findings 4
Home Agent Adoption in the North American Contact Center 6
Sectors Surveyed 6
Percentage of At-Home Launches 6
Success Rate for At-Home Adopters 7
Geographic Benefit for Recruiting Reach in an At-Home Environment 7
Scalability of the At-Home Solution 8
Language Diversity through Recruiting Reach 8
Cost Saving Realized through At-Home Programs 9
Flexibility in Workforce Management 9
Agent Profile and Abilities 10
Impediments to Successful At-Home Programs 10
Adoption Rates of At-Home Agents 11
Impediments to Implementing an At-Home Program 11
Future Adoption Plans 12
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3. Executive Summary
Industry Report:
Home Agent Adoption
in the North American Contact Center
2010
By Daniel Willis B.A. (Hons), C.I.M.
Background Transcom’s survey initiative set out to
discover “What is the real state of
In 2005, consulting firm IDC reported the At-Home phenomenon?”
that there were 100,000 agents
fielding calls in an At-Home We wanted to find out:
environment and consultants at
Gartner Inc. were predicting that by • Is the adoption rate as high as
2007 10% of all call centers would the experts are suggesting?
employ at least some home-based
agents. • Of those that have adopted, is
the program a success and if so,
In 2007, a national poll by inContact what benefits have been
showed that almost 50% of call centers realized to expectations?
were in fact doing so, but ICMI
reported in 2008 that the number was • Of those that had adopted and
more likely 20%. the program was not successful
what factors contributed to this
Cloud 10, a Transcom company failure?
founded a unique At-Home model in
1995 and while the company • Of those that haven’t adopted
experienced initial success with early what factors are stopping them?
adopters, the real explosion in At-
Home as a delivery channel didn’t • Of those who haven’t adopted,
really happen until 2007. Today, our how many are planning on
experience shows that at least 50% of implementing within the next 12
all of our clients that we support from months?
one of our fixed facilities are now
migrating some work to our at-home Process
channel.
Our on-line survey was sent to over
2000 companies in North America
representing 5 key industry sectors in
May of 2010. The survey was available
on-line for 10 days for key executives
of these 2000 organizations to submit
their response. A survey option
included respondent anonymity and
was designed to gather data from
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4. organizations that were not necessarily Directors made up 43% of those polled
Transcom clients thereby providing a followed by Executives (VP and above)
more objective analysis of the true at 29% and Managers at 28%.
state of the at-home phenomenon.
Known vs Anonymous
The following report provides the detail
of each of the key questions along with Our method of reaching out to
a commentary by the authors. In anonymous individuals for polling was
some cases the data is provided as an by way of social media (LinkedIn et al),
overall metric regardless of vertical word of mouth, website notices and
and in other cases where there were email forwards. Additionally, we
significant variances between the reached out by personal invitations to
verticals, the data is provided the subscribers of our quarterly
separately. newsletter. In all, 74% of respondents
came from our subscriber list and 26%
Participant Profile were anonymous.
Overview of Findings
Survey Pool Size
Overwhelmingly, our survey data
We contacted 2594 individuals in 2089 supports that organizations are
companies in order to obtain a relevant embracing at-home agents and are
sample pool. Our focus for the survey realizing benefits far beyond what they
is the North American Call Center had originally planned for.
industry and more specifically there
were 5 business verticals that primarily Of those surveyed:
interested us. They are:
• 46% had adopted an at-home
• Financial Services
delivery channel
• Retail
• Technology
• Of those adopters, an
• Telecommunications
overwhelming 90% found the
• Consumer Goods and Services
program successful
When all was said and done, we had a
response rate of better than 10% with Success factors included:
213 unique company representatives
participating in the survey. • 95% cited value in expanding
the geographic reach of their
agent pool
Job Titles
• 95% realized the advantages of
Responding to our survey were
added capacity in their customer
management as well as executive team
care delivery strategy
members, the bulk of which (75%)
were from the operations side and the
• 88% cited the advantages of
remaining from Sales (2%), Training
adding language capability
(4%) and IT (19%).
• 86% realized the cost savings
they had expected and
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5. • 95% realized the advantage of the experience matched the results
adding flexibility into their expected. Our data indicates that
customer care strategy these two sectors’ experience greatly
exceeded expectations more so than
• 90% realized the benefits of the other sectors.
enhancing the skill set of the
agents
Of those who found the
program unsuccessful:
• Management expertise,
technology and executive
sponsorship where the top 3
reasons for failure
Of those where not adopters to
date:
• Overall 31% are planning on
implementing an at-home
program within the next 12
months. Our hypothesis is that these sectors are
more experienced in outsourcing in
Across the verticals polled for this general and therefore have a clearer
survey, results showed that adopters set of data points from which to
and non adopters were fairly evenly evaluate success factors in an at-home
split at 46% and 54% respectively. environment as compared to a fixed
This statistic is consistent with the facility model.
findings of the 2007 inContact report.
Important for this survey report is that
this provides a statistically valid
number of respondents for us to draw
our conclusions specifically with
respect to what were the successes or
benefits of the program as well as what
were the impediments to success
hence our industry report provides this
data as an overall metric.
At the granular level, there was
one key variance worth
mentioning:
Specifically, the variance between the
technology and telecom sectors as
compared to the others in Financial
Services, Retail and Consumer Goods
and/or Services when asked about how
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