TMCnet Speaks to Andrew Kokes from Call Center Outsourcing Provider Sitel

Founded in 1985 and based in Nashville, Tennessee, Sitel, a call center outsourcing provider has over 135 global contact centers in 27 countries around the world. Recently, the Company launched the Sitel Work@Home Center of Excellence (CoE), designed to meet the increasing demands within the home agent model.  The CoE is a centralized management hub designed to raise the standard for virtual workforce performance, security and scalability to align virtual customer service quality levels comparable to or better than any call center.

I recently had the chance to speak with Andrew Kokes, Sitel’s global vice president of product management, about the previous obstacles call center outsourcing clients faced before Sitel’s Work@Home Solutions were unveiled, and how Sitel’s CoE is driving the current trends within the work-at-home industry, as well as the future of the work-at-home model.

 “The Center of Excellence is the biggest and most exciting part of our recent announcement, as it is the next step in the evolution of the work-at-home model, said Kokes.” If you follow the history of work-at-home solutions across the industry, most of it came out of relatively simple, low complexity work types. Some of the biggest players in this space were also the leaders in the shared agent service bureau model, which is where an agent might take a call that is a direct TV response type and got thrown into this work-at-home model for the purposes of taking people out of the finite center and then making it a virtual, more on-demand type that could align work to the need for the people to do the work.”  

“Sitel sees the Center of Excellence enabling us to move beyond that, to do more complex work types by centralizing the management and best practice sharing of how you oversee and direct a virtual workforce through bringing all of that frontline management together in a centralized hub, and then using that to overlay to the distributed workforce,” explained Kokes. “The Center of Excellence provides a hub of management overseeing all of the hiring, training, day-to-day management and interactions and bringing in potentially larger scale opportunities to bring frontline team managers together, so they are comparing notes, sharing best practices amongst each other and really drive ongoing improvement into our Sitel Work@Home Solutions®.”

In essence, Sitel manages the CoE like a traditional contact center site with a site director that boasts over 20 years of experience in the contact center space and has managed over $20 million contact center operations. This senior executive oversees and manages this operation with full support staff, including a human resources director for Sitel Work@Home Solutions® and a learning and development manager dedicated to setting the  parameters for how the company hires, trains, manages the work-at-home environment.

Some of the trends taking place within the work-at-home environment mostly fall around the maturity of the model. “I think there is more and more demand in the marketplace as we have now moved beyond some of the big concerns including security,” said Kokes. “There has been a lot of development that has helped move us beyond that initial security concern, for example, biometric profiling that actually can determine the typing pattern of the home agent, and can raise a flag and even shut down the system if it suspects it’s not the right user or ask for some type of authentication. “

 “When there is sensitive data that’s being exchanged within the contact center or customer care interaction in a work-at-home environment, we can use our Sitel Secure Call to actually remove the handling of that sensitive information from the agent,” explained Kokes. “If a customer needs to give an account number or social security number for payment purposes, they can enter the digits as key tones so the agent never needs to see or hear the sensitive numbers. All of that is now protected so it is no longer an issue, threat, temptation or risk of exposure because it is all being masked and handled securely through our advanced technology.”

Within the next few years, the work-at-home industry will continue to grow. Kokes added, “I think the need for flexibility and scalability is going to continue to push this type of work environment. I think that the ability to come together and have flexibility is going to drive not just from a demand from what customers or companies are looking for, but what the workforce is looking for.”