JobCenter

Instead of outsourcing overseas, some companies are taking the telecommuting approach

By VICTOR GODINEZ / The Dallas Morning News

Call center operators have been sending jobs away in recent years, but not just to other countries. Many are going to home offices in the United States as the business becomes more decentralized.

Companies that use home-based workers say they can offer the same cost savings without the language or cultural difficulties that often come with overseas operations.

One such company is Working Solutions Inc.

CHRIS HAMILTON/Special to DMN Tim Houlne, CEO of Working Solutions, believes some call center jobs are in less danger of outsourcing.

The call center operator has only a handful of employees at its Plano headquarters but about 10,000 remote call center agents in home offices across the country.

Variety of industries

Working Solutions ( www.workingsol.com) handles call center duties for companies in a variety of industries, including travel and leisure, health care and energy.

Tim Houlne, chief executive officer at Working Solutions, said call center workers who specialize in those areas are unlikely to see their jobs shipped overseas.

"Destination travel is very hard to do offshore," he said. "It's something that we're able to do here very easily."

Mr. Houlne and others said the demand for remote agents is growing as companies try to limit costs and improve working conditions.

Nosa Eke, publisher of Dallas-based Call Center Times, a trade publication, said that people who have the freedom to work from home typically have higher morale.

"When you have high employee morale, the other portion of that is you're not going to have a lot of people leaving you," he said. "It then justifies the cost of initial training. You don't have to go back and keep hiring over and over and over again."

He said the remote agent system is still much smaller than the traditional call center model, where thousands of workers squeeze into cavernous office buildings.

But there have been some notable successes, such as JetBlue Airways, which uses all remote agents.

And firms similar to Working Solutions, such as Florida-based WillowCSN Inc. (www.willowcsn.com), are having success with the remote system.

Highly educated

Kim Houlne, founder of Working Solutions and Mr. Houlne's wife, said remote workers have strong educational backgrounds and work experience in a relevant field.

"Our agents are typically highly educated – 80 percent of them with some college education," she said.

"Then, of those, probably about 10 or 15 percent have an advanced degree of some kind. Most of them are not people coming right out of high school."

Working Solutions' agents also need to have their own computer and high-speed Internet connection, and, in some cases, specific operating systems for their computers.

Remote agents have to be entrepreneurs, Mr. Eke said.

"They understand that there is an unwritten contract here that I am going to be trusting you to do what you need to be doing, and in return, I'm not going to make you go through the daily hassles of driving to work and so on," he said.

Mr. Houlne said pay varies, depending on the hours that agents work and the projects they work on, but salaries generally equal or exceed what agents can earn in a traditional call center.

Ms. Houlne said Working Solutions is always accepting applications.

"We've never advertised for agents," she said. "Agents have always come to us. We have a nice supply of agents, but that does not mean that we're not constantly looking for different skill matches."

E-mail vgodinez@dallasnews.com