The last few weeks have been quite busy for me, juggling tight deadlines at work with the stresses and struggles of buying my first apartment...

Well, the work deadlines and the apartment are sorted now, but I couldn’t have done it without the flexibility my employer offered me during this period.

This flexibility I am referring to is working from home... and I truly believe that you will not fully appreciate the benefits until you need to work from home yourself. I was able to save the travel time to work, sort out what I needed to do with regard to the apartment and complete the projects required at work by the deadlines.

Working from home not only benefits the Employee, it also benefits the Employer.

Some of the commonly reported benefits of having a Home-Based Agent programme include:

1. Access to a wider resource pool that you would not usually access (e.g. work from home parents, regional/rural communities)
2. Improved staff morale and retention
3. Improved productivity of staff
4. Improved service response to customer needs
5. Reduced travelling times for employees
6. Improved work-life balance

With so many benefits and proven cases of the concept working across the world, it puzzles me as to why only one in ten contact centres in Asia allow agents to work from home.

Western countries such as the US and Australia have higher adoption rates of Home-Based Agent programmes and this looks set to continue to grow and attract increasing support from senior executives in 2012.

With the relevant OH&S and Security measures, working from home makes logical sense and should be the direction that the contact centre industry in Asia head towards.

Welcome back everyone to the first DragonCall blog of the new year, the year of the Dragon (how appropriately named is my blog!). 

While you recover from the excessive eating and drinking over the new year celebrations, I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all good luck, prosperity and health in the year ahead.

Now to other important matters...

Recently I came across a white paper, How Can I Help You?, which talked about how having the right headset can improve agent performance and customer satisfaction.

This is indeed quite interesting because headsets are not really top of mind when organisations think about purchasing technology in the contact centre, typically it is the big items such as ACD, IVR, CRM, WFM and Knowledge Management. 

After reading the white paper it makes sense to place a higher level of priority on headsets – the values of headsets presented in the white paper include: