At our meeting held January 15, our attendees enjoyed an outstanding presentation by Jim Ball, co-founder of Alpine Access, a call center that pioneered the home-based agent model. Jim currently operates Extension9 (www.extension9.com) where he works with companies to help them develop their own home-based customer service operations.
Control Companies considering home-based agents are often concerned about managing these agents to assure productivity and quality performance. How do you manage what you can’t see? It takes hiring the right people, putting the right systems and processes in place, communications— challenges that are similarly faced by brick and mortar centers. In Jim’s experience, a well designed program actually has more control than a traditional call center.
Technology Yes, technology can be an issue but with current high speed internet, 3rd party applications, and proper planning, home-based agents can be an advantage. With a work force distributed over a larger geographic area, a local power outage, for example, affects a very few agents resulting in higher overall reliability.
Training Often viewed as too complex with no way to adequately view and interact with new hires, there are many ways to successfully accomplish training of home based agents. We are already in a time where distance learning, online courses, and interactive webinars are commonplace.
Culture Maintain a common culture can be trying whether working with widespread home-based agents or multi-location brick and mortar facilities. In either case, communication is the key.
Security The common concerns are both data security and protection from computer virus. This can be perceived as a greater risk than with in-house agents. There are readily available solutions, however. It starts with hiring the right people, minimizing access to sensitive data, and monitoring agent activity. Additional solutions include the company providing equipment to home-based agents, VPN and SSL access, software, and Network Access control.
For additional information you may contact Jim Ball at jball@extension9.com.
| Denver Water hosted our meeting and treated us to a tour of their call center following the meeting. The highlight of the tour was seeing their treadmill workstation! The following article by Joe Watt, Community Relations, is reprinted from Denver Water's publication, The Pipeline. No whistling allowed, but you can
walk while you work.
Working in Denver Water’s Customer Care
call center, taking one call after another, your
fingertips practically glued to a keyboard …
why, it’s almost like being stuck on a treadmill.
Hmmm …What if there were a treadmill, and you could get some exercise while you worked?
The idea might seem crazy (supervisor Kathy
Hurt uttered that exact word when she heard
about it), but when Sandra Miller, Denver
Water’s health guru, proposed a treadmill
work station, call center employees leaped at
the chance to try it.
Miller saw the treadmill at an ergonomics
conference and volunteered Denver Water
as a test site for a six-month pilot program.
Denver Water is the first Colorado company to
test the treadmill work station.
After a demonstration, five people immediately
signed up. Now, they work while they walk
two hours a day, once in the morning and
again in the afternoon. For the study period,
employees keep track of their daily weight,
time on the treadmill, distance walked and
calories burned. Once a month, Miller makes
note of their blood pressure. Five other employees have signed up for a second pilot project, and more are ready to try after them. 
The treadmill’s proper name is Walkstation,
and it was developed by Steelcase Inc., a
maker of office furniture and work areas, and
a doctor at the Mayo Clinic.
“I love it,” Kelly Jackson said between calls.
She likes the idea of adding movement to her
workday, and she thinks there will be health
benefits, even if the walking is not quite a
workout.
Jackson has used a gym before, but she
would “count the seconds” until her workout
was over. The Workstation is different.
“The hour flies by – you don’t even notice the
time going by,” she said. “That’s what I really
like about it.’’ And she saw benefits in her first
week of work-walking. “I have more energy
when I get home in the evening. I feel more
motivated.”
Jackson said she thought it might take some
getting used to, walking while talking on a
headset, navigating her mouse and typing on a keyboard, but pretty soon it was, well, just like riding a bike. The only adjustment she had to make was learning to control her breathing, so customers wouldn’t think she was running a marathon. (The treadmill’s speed is limited to 2 mph, and participants are urged to start at 0.8 mph and then work their way up.)
“It’s a great morale booster,” said Hurt, who
noticed positive changes even in the first
week. “This makes time go by faster, and it
takes some of the grunge out of the day.”
In truth, Hurt said, the call center has worked
hard to free workers from their desks. Before
the treadmill, employees had been given
wireless headphones so they could get up
from their desks and move around, stretch
their legs, windmill their arms.
In that sense, this is just the latest step in
unchaining the deskbound, but Denver Water’s call center workers are definitely off and …walking.
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