In my last article
written for Call Centre Helper, the third in a series
of five that I have been asked to write on the subject
of disaster recovery / business continuity planning,
I addressed the possibility of call centre operators
establishing a home-working policy which would enable
call centre Agents to work remotely from home in
times of strife – which will become particularly
relevant should we be unfortunate enough to suffer
the much heralded ‘flu pandemic. But why not
consider implementing a home working policy on an “all
day every day” basis – which may also
facilitate the expansion of your business?
In his article entitled “home-working: what
you need to know before you start” featured
in call centre helper’s August 2006 newsletter,
Gene Reynolds provided an excellent high level overview
of the many aspects that have to be carefully considered
before embarking on a homeworking strategy, and as
Gene Reynold’s explains, the technical issues
previously preventing home / remote working have
now been overcome. In this article I will concentrate
on the more technical issues of how call centre operators
can expand their businesses to commercial advantage
by deploying leading edge ACD and enabling technologies
to facilitate more flexible ways of working by incorporating
them into a call centre’s normal day to day
operations – either as a means of providing
in-built resilience to the continued operation of
a call centre following an outage, or a means of
expanding an established call centre’s existing
business by drawing upon a much larger, disparately
located workforce.
With very few exceptions the long established ACD/PBX
manufacturers have resisted change and maintained
their focus on adding additional functionality to
their already expensive legacy solutions. And given
the fact that out of the approximately 5,700 call
centres in the UK, more than 90% now have less than
250 Agents – with 80% having less than 100
Agents and some 60% having less than 20 Agents it
is clear to see that call centre operators are not
focusing their limited budgets on expanding capacity
on their expensive legacy systems but looking for
more powerful, cost effective modern solutions suitable
for smaller call centre operations – and which
should also be capable of facilitating more flexible
ways of working on an all day every day basis.
So how are we going to do this? As touched on in
last month’s article there are now many ways
of achieving this with specialist technology solutions
which focus solely on delivering comprehensive ACD
(Automatic Call Distribution) functionality, including
full skills based routing and comprehensive call
statistics at a fraction of the cost of the old established
legacy systems which were, and still are, designed
to be located within a conventional call centre building – no
longer applicable, I would suggest, in this modern
world of flexible working.
This can be achieved by either overflowing inbound
calls from your existing call centre into a new,
more cost effective, network based, dedicated ACD
solution used to re-direct inbound calls to any number
of remote Agents or, if you are contemplating setting
up a new call centre without incurring the high overheads
of a traditional call centre, by enabling all of
your call centre Agents to work remotely, then it
would be extremely advantageous to consider one of
the network based solution currently available. Many
of these solutions can be procured on a fully managed
service basis by paying an all embracing monthly
charge to include lease purchase costs and all maintenance
and support costs rather than have to incur a high
initial capital purchase cost. After an initial three
year period, operators now own the equipment and
can elect to either relocate it to another carrier’s
network or continue with a lesser monthly charge
simply to cover the annual support and maintenance
charge. With these options call charges are billed
at standard rates. Other solutions charge an initial
set-up cost and then simply roll-up all of the ongoing
costs and charges into a much higher pence-per-minute
charge over a term contract – which can prove
to be expensive if call volumes increase significantly – which
is what you no doubt intend if you are intent on
expanding your business – with no cap or known
maximum cost for the service. It should also be emphasised
at this point that all of these network based solutions
are also capable of providing comprehensive statistical
reporting via downloads into any number of reporting
packages
Another technology which is a “must have” in
the modern call centre environment, is the provision
of trunk side secure voice recording of all inbound
calls to, and outbound calls made by, your Agents
including calls to and from your home / remote working
Agents – and yes, technology is now available
from certain specialised equipment vendors which
facilitates the recording of both inbound calls to
and, more importantly outbound calls made by, home
/ remote workers. As with traditional ACD/PBX technology,
the cost of secure voice recording technology has
been perceived to be expensive, but today this is
no longer the case. And with many call centre outsource
customers requiring calls received and/or made on
their behalf to be recorded, failure to incorporate
same into your “virtual call centre capability” will
put you at a sever disadvantage to win future business.
And how do you facilitate the expansion of your
existing call centre to incorporate any number of
disparately located home / remote workers with the
delivery of both inbound and outbound calls as well
as connectivity to centralised office systems and
customer databases? By the use of ever faster Broadband
connections of course.
The advent of Broadband in its increasing number
of formats, here in the UK at least, is probably
the fasted developing enabler of remote working technologies
where extensive competition is driving capacity up
and prices down. The most common form of Broadband
currently available here in the UK is ADSL (Asymmetric
Digital Subscriber Line) which transforms a normal
BT telephone line (or any other directly connected
telephone line from another carrier) into a high
speed Broadband (data) connection. It is “Asymmetric” because
it provides much faster “download speeds (from
the internet to the user) than upload speeds (the
user sending information via the internet to another
user). This is probably the most mis-understood aspect
of broadband where providers talk about 2Mb, and
increasingly greater, download speeds – forgetting
to mention the restricted upload speed of, until
recently, only 256Kb. Furthermore Broadband is commonly “contended” (shared)
with a number of other users with BT’s standard
home user package being contended at 50;1 – so
lightening fast if used by a single user at any one
time, but painfully slow if all 50 subscribers are
using the connection at the same time – which
is why Broadband connections invariably “slow
up” after 6.00 pm. It is of course possible
to pay more than the standard published charges for
lower contention rates – as low as 5:1 which
obviously provide much quicker download speeds but
the same 256Kb upload speed.
For those users who wish to benefit from the same
upload speed as download speed then SDSL (Symmetric
Digital Subscriber Lines) can be procured – but
at significantly extra cost. As in everything these
days, you pays your money you takes your choice!
Greater speeds are now becoming available with ADSL
Max offering “a downstream speed of up to 8Mb” and
up stream speeds of 832 Kb for business connections
and 448Kb for home packages with ADSL2+ on the way
offering speeds of up to 24Mb. HOWEVER as with all
of these new technologies, nothing is “guaranteed” and
all of these speeds are often distance related (the
further your home is from the connecting exchange
the slower the speed) and can also be affected by
the quality of the connection – which may have
been broken and repaired several times over the years – something
to seriously consider when thinking about the deployment
of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) but more of
that next month.
And finally, we need to consider briefly the use
of a PC or laptop by your, now fully enabled, home
workers. The need for ever greater security to prevent
viruses, worms and other cyber attacks affecting
your centralised office systems means that you have
to be even more vigilant and security conscious where
the use of homeworkers is concerned. Consequently,
it is strongly recommended that dedicated PCs or
laptops are provided by the company for work use
which can only access centralised office systems
via the most stringent of firewalls. The use of home
PCs should not be permitted unless the same levels
of firewall security have been applied to the home
PC.
Next month, the final article I the series I will
be looking at the viability of using VoIP as a means
of effectively working from home in either a business
continuity or normal “all day every day” working
environment as an expansion to your existing call
centre.
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