Trends Favor Working from Home

by Steve O'Keefe on November 8, 2010

A Santa Clara company is combining the hottest technology trends with shifting demographic trends to revolutionize the business of customer service representatives. The firm is called LiveOps, and it’s fair to say the owners have their heads in the clouds.

Cloud computing, that is. LiveOps offers several major technology solutions for businesses based on cloud computing. One is called “Workforce in the Cloud,” an on-demand workforce for outsourced call centers. If you operate a call center, you know there are slow times when most of the employees are idle, and peak times where you really could use more staff to handle the volume.

LiveOps solves that problem by allowing you to scale up or down the number of customer service reps available in half-hour increments! The company claims it operates the world’s largest virtual call center, with over 20,000 agents available to handle whatever their clients need.

But don’t think that LiveOps has those agents on a cloud somewhere waiting to be called. LiveOps hires independent contractors on the same basis as it sells its services: in half-hour increments. Work-from-home agents can choose the times they are willing to be available with 30-minute contracts. LiveOps is thus riding the trend of work-from-home contractors that John and Carrie Vanston explore in their new book, MINITRENDS.

“It is estimated that as much as twenty-five percent of all white collar work is now being done in private residences,” say the Vanstons, whose book points out several promising Minitrends in providing services for work-at-home contractors.

LiveOps was profiled in a USA Today article last month by Paul Davidson, who covers economic news for “the nation’s newspaper.” Davidson says that a stunning “68% of the 593,000 jobs added by private employers” since September are temp workers. The trend the Vanston’s explore in their book is accelerating.

Davidson looks at the ups and downs of the issue in a lengthy feature article in a newspaper not known for its depth. The upside is mostly for employers, who find that firing all their workers, losing the company headquarters, and avoiding all those benefits and taxes is liberating. Even if it translates into lower revenues, profits usually improve.

For the employees, the picture is not so rosy. They tend to lose benefits and stability, but enjoy an increase in flexibility and independence. Sometimes they earn more as contract workers than they made as employees.

“It appears likely that the fraction of people working at home will continue to grow,” say the Vanstons. “As a result, the need for support services and facilities — and the market for providing them — will also grow for the foreseeable future.”

STEVE O’KEEFE
News Editor, Minitrends Blog

Source: “Freelance workers reshape companies and jobs,” USA Today, 10/13/10.
Source: MINITRENDS: How Innovators & Entrepreneurs Discover & Profit From Business & Technology Trends, Technology Futures, Inc., pp. 78-81.
Image by Dave Dugdale of rentvine, used under its Creative Commons license.

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