Will Call Center Opt for Work from Home? The Study Says So

Around a decade back, Som Mittal  predicted that the Indian IT-BPO sector will likely growth to $1.5 trillion by 2020. On the other hand, Technavio forecasts that this market will be as big as $83.6 billion during 2020-2024 growing at a CAGR of eight percent. While the key drivers remain the same – skilled & educated population, technical know-how, affordable resources and others, the recent times saw this always-on-its-foots industry on its keens. Just like other industries, the pandemic casted cascading effect on this sector.

The Challenges & the Opportunities

Though the demand for the industry declined for a couple of months, it is moving back to business as usual with the markets opening up globally. This being a brighter story, the BPO industry is going to undergo a drastic change it never imagined – work from home. According to a study by Ozonetel, 27 percent call centers will switch to work from home permanently in the upcoming years post pandemic. The report also brings out some important facts about the industry that reported a drop in productivity of call center agents (53 percent businesses reported). The prime issues remained internet connectivity (71 percent), telecom (42 percent), practical constraints of work from home such as lack of privacy, space, noise cancellation, lack of desktops and laptops.

Just like any other industry where employees initially enjoyed work from home, around 61 percent of the call center employees’ enthusiasm too fell low gradually. But in spite of all the challenges that the industry faced in the last couple of months, there were learnings too which they want to carry on with them. Hence around 55 percent call centers will allow agents to opt for work from home, while 16 percent will not open their offices and keep working from home mandatory. Whilst these, around 27 percent of call centers will make work from home permanent, thus ensuring it as a viable long-term strategy to keep the cost under control. But what is important is framing policies to fit this new work module.

But then the study finds an interesting twist. Around an equal number of employees want to join back office as soon as possible, and do not seek cent percent work from home as a viable long-term solution. However, with the spoken and unspoken benefits that work from home brings, around 38 percent of call centers will create a robust work from home process even if they do not switch to the process permanently.

The Solution

Though most of the misses remain technical, companies are working on fixing them through better hardware, direct telecom DID numbers, reimbursement of Wi-Fi charges and others. Chaitanya Chokkareddy, CIO, Ozonetel, said, “The pandemic has made contact centers look at the services that they provide and how they provide it. We have analyzed various metrics to determine and understand trends in customer experience as well as agent efficiency as call centers switch to work from home”.

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