Thoughts and observations incurred managing the IT department for a medium sized call center.

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Moving to the virtual world

A while ago, KP OnCall decided it needed to do something different to attract and retain nurses, a notoriously constrained workforce. After years of enduring the contrasting issues of double digit growth and difficulty hiring enough staff to sustain the growth, we embarked on the path towards utilizing remote agents.

We thought that offering our nurses the ability to work from their homes would differentiate us from all the other work choices that nurses enjoy. Provided that we could provide an environment where the caller experience and management capabilities were the same as a premise based call center, we should be able to offer an environment that would attract that constrained work force we needed.

Well, it took about three years of iterative implementation, but we were able to develop a sustainable model for a virtual call center. 95% of our nurses now work from home and the program has been deemed incredibly successful. We have improved our annual attrition from 22% to less than 5%, saving the company more than $500,000 per year in recruiting and training expense. More importantly, we have gone from a position of being consistently short-staffed, to having a waiting list of nearly 100 nurses. This means that when we do hire, we are able to choose from the best available in the talent pool, further improving our retention and the quality of our services.

Now we are trying to replicate this success with our administrative staff. While our available space in the call center has grown, our administrative staff has outgrown its available office space. Presented with an estimate of $750,000 to build out new offices, we decided instead to institute a Remote Admin Pilot, to explore the concept of telework and office hoteling. The challenges in this initiative are different than those involving virtualizing a call center. I will describe in future blogs how we are addressing issues like space, productivity assessment and management, communication and, mostly importantly, cultural maintenance.

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Dan Wallis is the Director of Technology at KP OnCall, a nurse triage call center that handles over 1,000,000 calls per year. A dynamic leader, Dan is experienced with managing teams to develop successful technology hardware and software solutions aligned with organizational goals. Since 2000, Dan has utilized this experience to help KP OnCall to grow over 500%. His leadership and vision has been instrumental in meeting the demands of such dramatic growth. The driving force behind many of the call center’s business process improvements, Dan consistently extends beyond IT to be an integral part of the entire organization. For more information, please go to www.danwallis.com.
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