Earlier this month, we released the first of a three-part series of whitepapers on home agent contact centers, There’s No Place Like Home.  If you read that paper and found yourself wanting more information about recruiting, training and managing home agents, you are in luck – the second paper in the series is now available.  This paper, Home Agent Best Practices: Operations, covers staffing, onboarding, training, and managing employee relations with home agents.

The home agent contact center model removes all distance and physical barriers from the staff sourcing process. In this win-win situation, customer service agents enjoy the convenience of working from home, and contact center managers gain powerful scheduling flexibility plus access to a vast pool of mature and skilled applicants that might otherwise have been out of reach. Home agents can really move the needle on improving customer experience and optimizing customer engagement. But watch out—national exposure to home-based employment opportunities can attract thousands of potential hires per day.

This flood of applicants can seriously challenge pre-existing application and communication processes. How do you interact with so many candidates? How do you automate the qualification process? And what’s the best way to move new hires through onboarding and training when you never see them face to face?

The key to successful staffing is to quickly funnel candidates through the recruiting cycle to identify the ones who will be successful. This ultimately increases employee satisfaction and improves customer service quality. The level of success you achieve will depend upon sourcing the largest number of candidates and fine-tuning the application process.

Not only must you incorporate new tools and procedures for hiring and training home-based agents, you’ll need to implement new methods for handling ongoing daily operations as well. To get a feel for the level of process change required, it might be helpful to think of it as if you’re launching an entirely new off-shore operation. Every aspect of call center operations will need to be carefully revamped in order to realize the full potential of the home agent contact center model.

Read our new whitepaper, Home Agent Best Practices: Operations, for a closer look at best practices Eventus contact center consulting experts have developed for recruiting, training and effectively managing this geographically distributed home-based workforce. To obtain a free copy of this whitepaper, click on the image below.

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