Sitting with the best and listening..... Doctor Millard is talking about an area of Liverpool, where they have middle-aged ladies and even the retired, working at home with a Cisco handset, making calls for Marks & Spencers, a well-known British Store.

I listen in and hear that the Contact Center Advisors are customers of the store - a brochure is placed in my hand, 'Phone Home: The Rise of the Homeshored Contact Center Advisor' (Millard N 2007), and BT Bringing It Altogether.

Cisco are partnering (BT) British Telecom, with the catch phrase, Bringing It Altogether....

BT is a large corporate here in the UK, who had, until the rise of competition, a monopoly on the telephone system in the UK, with the result that they upset a great many users with high cost calls, but here, they are in a different age, office phone licenses sell at US$ 5000 with a monthly income of US$ 240 a month per line anywhere in the world.

Teleworking is the rage, and this is an attempt to distribute calls without losing efficiency to almost anywhere. Can outsourcing create the home worker, i.e. stay at home mum? Millard N (2007), a Customer Experience Futurologist with BT, presents a nice piece of research on corporate paper, suggesting that friendly hours at home offer the over 55's, returning mothers, disabled people and carers greater flexibility.

This is of course BT speak, and an attempt to reduce there overheads in premises. Home workers will reduce absenteeism, improve staff satisfaction, cut traveling time, and improve on recruitment. Moreover the strategy is cost effective, flexible and giving access to skills.

JetBlue Airways entire 1500 reservation 'crewmembers' work from home in the Salt Lake City area, and their CEO, David Neelman, can't figure out why more companies aren't doing it. In the US LiveOps advisers are paid for actual time spent calling cutomers (up to 20 bucks an hour) according to Millard N (2007). 

It's the people who count and Andrew Candish is cited by Millard N (2007), 'the secret to success is simple - get the right people, and the technology is simple'.

Millard N (2007) is well-balanced suggesting, that homeshoring has been dismissed by many contact center managers as great in theory but unworkable in practice. Gartner (2005) in a survey suggested that the inability to train, motivate and manage the advisers remotely were the key reasons for not adopting homeshoring.

Homeshoring is an alternative to offshoring, and there may be a place for it in our society, however  it may prove to be an expensive model in the short term?

CatchFriday, a call center in Makati Philippines, and a registered outsourcer, offers graduates from some of the best universities in the Philippines, a future and a good working environment. The difference with their option lies in the flexibilty and good communication skills, together with reasoning, that has attracted many employers and individual small businesses from the US, UK and Commonwealth to offshore to them.

There is something to be said, before you run out of the door, or leave the house on Monday morning, by your wife, partner, who calls after you, 'there's a problem, and you'll have to stay home, as one of the children is not well'. You are in a frenzy of guilt - just how are you going to do your work, when you've lost the battle to leave?

Catch Friday offer a virtual personal assistant who can do the work, that does not require a physical presence in your office, for you.

Why not ask Catch Friday, a leading Filipino provider of Virtual Personal Assistants to do it for you?

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