Profitable format or a complex of difficulties?
Such model of call centers of course has lots of advantages and disadvantages. Let’s name them.
Advantages of remote call centers:
- Home office will give you the same number of services available in a call center
- Modern technologies allow working remotely without any technical difficulties
- All business-processes can be adapted to home office format.
- It doesn’t matter where your employee is located. Remote call centers can be 1000 km far from your office.
- You can reduce expenses to a call center. You do not need to pay for rent of an office and you do not have to buy needed equipment as an employee should have his own at his home office.
- You don’t need to stay in the frames of standard working hours. Your remote employees will be able to work at any time from home. A time tracker will keep a record of work hours of an employee.
- You will not struggle with the problem of lack of personnel as you can attract candidates from other cities or towns to work for your company.
Disadvantages of remote call centers:
- Difficulties connected with staff trainings. It is hardly ever possible to train remote staff members properly.
- Problems with discipline. Very often working at home is very difficult because of constant distractions. A person should have a high level of self-organization to implement his duties in full.
- Schedule difficulties.
- Technical problems. There is no opportunity to help an employee if there is a technical problem as it is impossible to send an IT pro to him.
- It is easier to control an employee and make him avoid lots of problems if he works at the office.
- Information protection for such format is expensive and won’t give you a 100% guarantee.
- Quality of telephone communications can be not satisfying.
Fortunately, there is a decision for managers which can help to arrange the work of remote call centers and reduce the number of their disadvantages. Such a tool like a time tracker is used not only at the office but also at home office. A time tracker can:
- Raise the effectiveness of an employee
- Improve problems with discipline
- Provide a record of work time which will help you to set a correct wage rate
- Help you to solve problems with schedule
- Help you to monitor the productivity of an employee
We can conclude that transferring of a call centre to home office format has a lot of advantages and disadvantages. But most disadvantages are connected with human factor so their number can be reduced by using of a time tracker. Powerful time trackers, such as CrocoTime can optimize your business processes wherever your staff members are.