At-home agents live and work at the intersection of business, societal and technology trends. I've recently spent time with companies that are beginning to embrace the use of at-home resources. Interestingly enough, employing remote contact center agents has been an option for more than ten years, but the recent surge of at-home agents is akin to the social epidemics described in The Tipping Point and largely influenced by three factors:

1) Empowerment: Why put agents through the frustrations of commuting when they can serve customers from home instead? It’s The Death of Distance in action. Today’s communications technology gives agents the freedom to work productively and seamlessly regardless of their location. Arizona, Oregon, California, Georgia and Virginia are just a sampling of the 26 states and 14 countries where the Telework Collaborative offers incentives for empowering agents to work from home.

2) Technology: We've come a long way from hard-wired devices, painfully slow connections and other hallmarks of early attempts at technology in the home. High speed internet is moving past 50% penetration in North American households and rapidly increasing across the European Union and Asia, overcoming technological hurdles. Avaya itself delivers IP agent, a robust contact center solution that is deployed in a number of "Avaya by Example" remote worker sites and other at-home agent scenarios.

3) Results: Some of the earliest concerns regarding home-based agents were around manageability, security and resource isolation. Contrary to these alleged drawbacks, several companies utilizing at-home agents report increased worker satisfaction, reduced fraud and improved cross-selling. For these companies, out of sight is definitely not out of mind.

With at-home agent deployment on the rise, your next customer interaction may be handled by someone working from home. Our next two posts will explore best practices from real at-home agents.