- Contact centres have been impacted by the recession
- The traditional 9-5 isn't practical
- Homeworking appeals to a diverse workforce and solves out-of-hours-conflict
- Homeworking offers impressive cost benefits on both sides
- Homeworkers don't suffer from as much staff churn
There are already reports the the credit crunch is releasing the UK from its grip but since January this year, when Britain officially fell into a recession for the first time in 18 years, few businesses have remained unaffected by the effects of the economic crisis - and contact centres are no exception.
In the past few months, home shopping company Shop Direct has announced plans to close its Crosby call centre with the loss of 1,000 jobs. Meanwhile, German energy group E.On has revealed it is to shut its contact centre in Tannochside near Glasgow and betting firm Stan James has said it will be relocating its 74-strong contact centre from Grove, Oxfordshire, to VAT-free Gibraltar in a bid to save money. While moving contact centre facilities abroad does typically deliver some reduction in operational costs, it is a drastic move – and not necessarily one that all businesses will want to consider. So what other options are available to British call centres that want to achieve greater efficiencies while the recession bites?
Interestingly, one of the most practical solutions has been touted by the contact centre press for some years: homeworking. It received its first column inches back in the early part of the century when it was hyped as a great new way of staffing those contact centres that had traditionally been struck by high attrition rates. The idea was that by giving people the option of working from home, the industry would be able to tap into a brand new pool of workers – including mothers with young children and people with disabilities – who would be able to undertake shifts that tallied with periods of high call volumes.
But while the theory was strong, it didn’t work in reality.