Call centres and home working

Call centres and home working

Call centers are a necessary part of almost any business that is engaged in selling products to consumers . They are the frontline of a business enterprise , including the people who are in direct contact with the customer on a daily basis . Operating an efficient call center is important for securing customer satisfaction . Another distinctive trend is the increased use of home working solutions that leads to so-called home-shoring ' - employing homebased , virtual workers in the U .S (Pentilla , 2005 . These solutions seem to resolve many issues in

operations management , but at the same time they pose problems that require a new range of solutions

Speaking of home-shoring , a report issued in November 2004 by IDC , an international market research group , at that time there were at least 100 ,000 home-based phone representatives working in the U .S (Pentilla , 2005 . The same report provides an explanation for the trend it costs only 21 per hour to keep a worker who will make calls from home as opposed to 31 for someone working from a call center

While this is a faovorable trend for US employees who can in this way compete with offshoring , there are also a number of challenges . For instance , the manager who supervises a person working from home cannot adequately monitor what this individual is doing during the day . The employee can then visit websites that are not work-related or simply relax instead of working . In contrast , in the offices 62 of businesses monitor and review the websites their employees visit (Pentilla , 2005 . If workers do their jobs at home , managers need to come up with an effective mechanism of monitoring their activities . For instance , they may want to install a program that tracks what appears on the computer screen . Alternatively , they may want to come up with a system that will pay the workers based on how much they have done and thus stimulate them to do more . Relaxing at home in the working hours can be an ethical problem that each employee solves on one 's own . Each may decide what is more important : to be fair to the employer or to spend `working ' hours doing nothing

Call center , whether home-based or office-based , are growing into a large segment of the US market , especially in terms of employment . It was estimated that as of 2001 , approximately 3 of Americans worked in call centers (Mehrotra , Fama , 2003 . Any manager who runs a call center faces several challenges . First , the manager must balance between three alternative values : costs , service quality and employee satisfaction (Mehrotra , Fama , 2003 . These three indicators should be in balance to each other . For instance , not all managers have similar skills and qualifications . Some are more experienced than others in certain areas Thus , the manager has to define how to schedule employees ' work including lunches , breaks , shifts etc so as to have the necessary quantity of managers with each type of expertise on hand at any moment The manager also...