'Home Shoring' an Antidote to U.S. Firms 'Off-Shoring'?

February 3, 2006

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February 3, 2006

Many American companies are facing public and government criticism over the practice of "off-shoring" -- moving jobs to foreign countries where labor costs are much cheaper. Now some of those companies, such as upstart discount airliner JetBlue, are trying out "home shoring," where call center staffers in the United States can work from home.

MADELEINE BRAND, host:

This is Day to Day from NPR News. I'm Madeline Brand. The practice of U.S. companies relocating their call centers overseas has become so common that the names for it, outsourcing or off-shoring, are now a common part of business speech. Well, now there's 'home shoring.' U.S. companies are finding it sometimes makes more sense to hire workers in America to field calls from their homes. NPR's Mike Pesca reports.

MIKE PESCA, reporting:

Anyone with a broken laptop or who's in search of the rental car counter these days knows that their call to a 1-800 number is likely to connect to India or the Philippines. This may be changing a little. Industries which look at the enormous savings offered by taking call centers overseas have been realizing that sometimes the savings have costs. Garth Howard, CEO of Alpine Access, sites the case of the company 1-800-Flowers, which originally had a call center abroad.

Mr. GARTH HOWARD (CEO, Alpine Access): Due to language and cultural barriers they really couldn't match up with their customers the way they wanted to and when they came back and went to a home based environment they were able to get much better quality and be able to deliver, you know, for their customers.

PESCA: I-800-Flowers is now Alpine Access's biggest client. Alpine Access bills itself as the nation's leading provider of outsourced call center solutions through the exclusive use of home based agents working over the internet. According to Steven Lloyd, the Senior Analyst at IDC which has researched the phenomenon of 'home shoring,' the number of Americans doing this kind of work is growing.

Mr. STEVEN LLOYD (Senior Analyst, IDC): 2004 was close to 100,000 and 2005 we estimated 112,000.

PESCA: Lloyd says the cost of employing a home based agent is about ten dollars an hour less than one working in a U.S. call center. Garth Howard of Alpine Access, which unlike its competitors has actual employees as opposed to independent contractors gives a profile of his workers, 88 percent of whom are women.

Mr. HOWARD: According to a Booz Allen study, agents working in brick and mortar or facility's call centers, only about 20 percent of them have a college educations. In our agents actually 75 to 80 percent of those have a college education. We find that the average age of somebody working in a facility's call center is about 21, 22. The average age for our agents is actually 38.

PESCA: Barbara Foster, who lives near Alpine's Golden Colorado headquarters fits the general profile except for one detail. The typical Alpine Access worker is caring for children. Foster likes working from home for another reason.

Ms. BARBARA FOSTER (Alpine Access Employee): I'm from New York City. I never learned to drive.

PESCA: But before she started her eight to ten dollar an hour job with Alpine Access she could never find a legitimate work-from-home opportunity.

Ms. FOSTER: When I first looked into it I couldn't find anything. It was always a scam. I never found a company other than Alpine Access that really was like a traditional company in the fact that they pay you for your hours and you work from home through the computer and your phone.

PESCA: Aside from non-drivers or mothers who want to stay with their children, 'home sourcing' also works well for the disabled. Melissa McClain(ph) suffers from a neurological disorder that used to require her to use a wheelchair and still makes driving impossible on certain days. Now she earns nine dollars an hour answering the phones for the IRS, which is the biggest client of NTI, National Telecommuting Institute, a non-profit dedicated to finding employment for the disabled. The word she uses to describe her current job is god send.

Ms. MELISSA MCCLAIN (National Telecommuting Institute): I was off of work for I think five to six years, because employers were not as understanding and so when you got sick, I mean, they had a business to run and they didn't like that. So once this job came around I've been at it for over a year and a half and I'm still going strong and it's a great opportunity for anyone like that.

PESCA: Researcher Steven Lloyd says that more companies will be moving at least some of their customer care service to Americans working from home. He estimates that number to reach 300,000 by 2010. Mike Pesca, NPR News, New York...

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