Your best CRM representatives could be closer to home than you think

With traditional contact centre attrition rates of 25–35 percent, rising to 40–70 percent for offshored services, attracting and retaining high-quality employees is a growing problem.

The BT Homeshoring solution can help break this non-virtuous cycle. With home-based workers, churn typically drops to 10 percent, absenteeism by as much as 60 percent, and you’ll find it easier to attract and retain the right people.

Bringing home the contact centre

Homeshoring is more than just home working. We provide homeshored advisors with full virtual contact centre functionality, incorporating production level services such as payroll, HR and training, to ensure maximum efficiency and control. Our complete package enables agents to be effectively monitored and recorded as though based in a traditional contact centre.

Establishing a flexible working environment will help you attract and retain an accomplished, multi-skilled and diverse talent pool. We’ll help you empower quality personnel and provide the connectivity to critical customer and back-office information for optimum productivity.

Our comprehensive solution can help you:

• Establish contact centre infrastructure from scratch; providing the equipment, connectivity and people services you need to implement homeshoring.
• Extend your existing Virtual Contact Centre (VCC) capabilities and infrastructure to facilitate homeshoring.
• Transform your existing VCC capabilities and contact centre estate to enable call delivery to both in-house and homeshored advisors when migrating to full IP contact centre infrastructure.

Ringing the changes to bring long-term value

Recruiting and training replacement agents costs on average between £12–15K. When coupled with the inconvenience and disruption caused by constant staff churn, the business case for an alternative approach is significantly strengthened.

BT’s Homeshoring solution can help alleviate your recurring recruitment costs by helping you attract and retain valuable staff. Homeshored agents are comparatively as economical to employ as offshored agents – yet add value through being locally sourced and culturally more empathetic to your demanding customer base.

Homeshoring also enables you to target sections of the community that wouldn’t traditionally be attracted to the contact centre workplace. For example, people aged 50+, full-time carers, and people with disabilities. We can help you create a diverse and stable workforce that enhances the customer experience through improved service – and, in the long term, reduces your dependence on physical contact centre facilities.

In the drive to meet government social inclusion imperatives and demanding Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) obligations, bringing the contact centre home may be the answer you need. 

Helping you source and equip agents of change

With spiralling costs, increasing staff attrition and a perceived customer backlash to offshored contact centres, there is a burgeoning demand for an alternative customer service approach.

BT Homeshoring can help transform your customer service operations. We’ll help you recruit, retain and empower home-based agents to enhance the customer experience, respond more effectively to fluctuating demands and help you satisfy pressing CSR and diversity obligations. 

Delivering the flexibility you need while helping you stay in control

With BT Homeshoring you benefit from a single supplier – delivering the technology and service components you need to successfully equip and support home-based agents.

Our extensive experience of employing and providing home working and contact centre solutions – underpinned by robust relationships with leading industry players –  ensures that we can help you:

• Reduce the risk and maximise the benefits of homeshoring.
• Access a complete portfolio of traditional and new technologies sourced from a single supplier.
• Overcome barriers to adoption through providing the security and confidence of working with a trusted brand.
• Provide end-to-end management and a single, high visibility report to help you stay in control.
• Boost employee productivity. BT’s home-based employees are on average 20 percent more productive than their office-based colleagues. 

Helping your people help you succeed

Your business is only as good as the people you employ. The BT Homeshoring solution can help you to establish a flexible, attractive working environment capable of bringing the best out of your people and delivering significant business benefits.

Establishing home-based agents can enable you to:

• Recruit from a wider, more diverse and multi-skilled talent pool, including people aged 50+, more than 3 million people with disabilities and sections of the community that wouldn’t traditionally be attracted to the contact centre workplace.
• Provide employees with the flexibility to enhance their work/life balance.
• Improve job satisfaction, reducing churn from the current average of 20-30 percent in UK centres – and 40-70 percent offshore – to as little as 10 percent, and lowering sickness leave by as much as 60 percent.
• Introduce split shifts and ‘just-in-time’ agent availability to more effectively respond to peaks in customer demand – delivering productivity increases of between 20-60 percent.
• Bolster your CSR and ‘green’ credentials – by reducing the estimated 6 million tonnes of CO2 created by US, UK and Canadian advisors every year.
• Enhance business continuity through increased resilience in the face of external disruption, such as transport strikes or severe weather etc.

Creating jobs, adding value and boosting economic regeneration

Over 7 percent of UK employees currently work from home at least one day per week and 18 percent of UK contact centres now rate homeworking as very important – up 8 percent from the previous year.

BT is working alongside customers and local economic development agencies to establish homeshored contact centres nationwide.

We’re helping to identify where homeshoring can add business value and are implementing our ‘Quickstart’ solution to get the projects off the ground. 

Recognising the value of local sourcing

With the cost of recruiting and training contact centre agents estimated to be between £12-15K, the long term benefits of attracting and retaining valued employees are clear.

The BT Homeshoring solution enables you to provide the working environment that can:

• Help you reduce the property and associated costs of physical contact centre locations.
• Improve customer service – helping you retain valuable customers and avoid the cost of losing them.
• Help you avoid the spiralling cost of offshored services, many of which are increasing by as much as 15 percent per annum.
• Help reduce costs. According to Exony, homeshoring could save the UK contact centre industry up to £5 per employee per hour, while Gartner estimates cost savings of between 8-10 percent.
• Help retain and gain maximum value from a motivated and satisfied workforce. In one area where the idea has been introduced, Anna Mimms, of Broxtowe Education Skills and Training, said; “The homeshored advisors we have recruited have a real sense of pride in the work they do and the value it brings to their neighbourhood. They are committed to providing quality service as it reflects well on them and the community they are a part of.” 

Contact centre functionality in the home environment

BT’s Homeshoring solution provides you with the broadband connectivity and service components needed to establish, monitor and quality-control home-based contact centre agents in realtime. With our extensive experience of providing global home working and contact centre solutions we can help empower your home-based agents. We cost-effectively provide the media-rich functionality, applications and comprehensive IT support of the contact centre in the home environment. 

Providing the connections to help transform your contact centre operations

As an industry-leading provider of end-to-end contact centre and home working services, complemented by our renowned technological and research expertise, BT offers you a complete Homeshoring solution.

We can deliver:

• The media-rich connectivity, applications and professional services you need to make a success of your homeshoring ambitions.
• Consultancy services to help guide you from the initial ‘green field’ phase, right through to helping you transform your existing Virtual Contact Centre operations.

We can bring:

• Our extensive in-house experience of home working to your business – helping you minimise risk and maximise homeshoring benefits.
• A supplier-agnostic approach, enabling us to choose the leading vendors most suited to your specific needs.
• The knowledge and capabilities resulting from deploying more than 4,000 contact centre solutions. 

It’s more than just home working, it’s about bringing the contact centre home

Implementing a truly effective homeshoring solution involves more than just facilitating home working. You need to equip home-based agents with the full functionality of today’s contact centres. Our homeshoring solution delivers a complete package to help you achieve this.

As part of the BT homeshoring proposition we may include some or all of the components listed below:

• High-speed broadband connectivity and a managed desktop service to support seamless access to critical business information.
• Customer Relationship Management and data capture capabilities to help gather customer intelligence and improve the customer experience.
• Agent performance, contact recording, and realtime Management Information Services to help ensure optimum productivity.
• Network-centric telephony, full hosted IP Contact Centre functionality and integrated billing and services to help cost-effectively support and empower remote agents.
• The opportunity to work with industry-leading technology and recruitment partners to ensure that your people have all they need to effectively operate in the home environment.
• Comprehensive technical support and consultancy to help you ensure the effectiveness of your homeshoring activities.
• The capacity to accurately monitor outputs and track activities to help you stay in control.

Intelligently sourcing a flexible response to customer demands

As widespread access to broadband connections has increased it has strengthened both the opportunity and the business case for establishing homeshored agents.
Increasing numbers of UK businesses are now employing homeshoring solutions, with a leading travel firm now basing 100 percent of its contact agents at home.

BT is working alongside customers and local economic development agencies to establish homeshored contact centres nationwide. Our solution will enable them to:

• Flex resources through introducing split shifts and ‘just in time’ capacity to effectively respond to peaks and troughs in customer demand.
• Schedule and intelligently route calls to appropriately qualified staff.
• Improve productivity – on average BT teleworkers are 20 percent more productive than their office-based colleagues. 

Long-term savings through more efficient use of resources

The cost of implementing a homeshored solution is at present comparable to those associated with offshored contact centre services. In the long-term, however, homeshoring can lead to significant cost savings.

Through providing full contact centre functionality to home-based agents you can:

• Reduce attrition and improve the work/life balance of your employees – helping you retain quality employees and avoid the cost and disruption of recruiting and training replacements.
• Implement flexible shift patterns to enable a more productive response during fluctuating demand.
• Drive down cost. Gartner estimates achievable cost savings of between 8–10 percent through homeshoring, while Exony calculates that the UK contact centre industry could save up to £5 per employee per hour.
• Ultimately reduce, or even eliminate, physical contact centre costs.