Virtual call centers bring offshoring alternative

When it was preparing to introduce American air travelers to a new U.S. domestic carrier, ExpressJet Airlines faced a tough decision: staff customer service and airline-reservation call centers with low-cost offshore agents, or hire American workers, potentially for more money but who'd offer higher-quality customer service.

"We were a launching a brand-new airline offering domestic flights across the United States. Though money was a consideration and offshoring internationally can be the cheapest option, we knew we couldn't be successful from the start without excellent customer service," says Trish Winebrenner, vice president of marketing at ExpressJet, a domestic carrier based in Houston that worked with Continental for about 15 to 20 years before it decided to spin out its own start-up airline business late in 2006. Winebrenner was given the task of getting a call center, which would handle the airline-reservation and sales system, off the ground in less than four months so ExpressJet could be in business by spring 2007.

That's when Winebrenner considered a third option: outsourcing call-center operations to Alpine Access, a company that staffs virtual call-centers with home-based agents, or teleworkers, to provide customers with flexible staffing options.

Alpine Access and other providers, such as LiveOps, West Corporation and Working Solutions, create virtual call-center operations that tap talent pools not always available to traditional, physical call centers. The virtual-call-center provider hires and trains employees based on customers' needs and business models. Such companies as Dell, J. Crew, JetBlue, 1-800-Flowers and Office Depot have announced publicly they moved call center operations located overseas back to the United States to boost customer satisfaction and take advantage of untapped employment resources in America.

Click to see: Survey results

"The primary reason companies send work overseas is to save money, but if your customers are having a terrible experience on the phone with, say, an Indian agent, then you are losing much more in terms of customer service," says Chuck Wilsker, president and CEO of The Telework Coalition, a Washington, D.C., organization that promotes telework through education and legislative efforts.

According to research firm Datamonitor, many western companies are more reluctant to offshore call-center services than they were in the past, partly because of "concerns around agent quality, location stability, infrastructure and data protection." And while establishing and operating domestic call centers proves to be exorbitantly expensive for many companies, Datamonitor says home-based agents offer higher quality at a low cost that makes it a feasible option for American firms.

"[Virtual call center] providers are in a position to offer potential clients a home-based solution, which would present the security of an agent [who] resides onshore, who has been vetted in terms of security and quality, and who uses a western-standard communications network," a Datamonitor report reads. "This can also be done at a lower price than for an agent [who] works in a brick-and-mortar facility. Therefore, the prospect will be in a position to save on the domestic-agent price while recouping a high-quality end-user interaction," the report adds.