At Home Professional Overview

Quality Benefits

Cloud 10's At Home Professionals are just that, professionals. Working at home is becoming the employment of choice for stay-at-home parents, the semi-retired, the disabled, those living outside of commuting distance and other professionals who would never consider working in a bricks and mortar call center. The virtual scheduling and flexible hours available in Cloud 10's home sourced model are appealing to those who cannot work full time or during fixed business hours. The benefits of a better balance between the personal and professional demands of life generally equates to an At Home Professional with greater life satisfaction resulting in better service for our clients' customers.

Not only are home sourced professionals more satisfied with their work, home sourcing eliminates language, cognitive, cultural, motivational and other impairments found in the brick and mortar model.

Cloud 10's home sourced model allows for recruiting at a nationwide level and is not restricted to the 20-mile radius of a fixed call or other business process center location. Not only are virtual business process centers not subject to the vagaries of local labor markets, but also they can screen a much larger number of applicants for each available position, ensuring the most qualified person for the job.

Another factor attracting high caliber, more highly educated professionals to work at home is the savings they achieve by not commuting to and working in a fixed business facility. Working from home is equivalent to giving a person a multi-thousand dollar a year raise and is environmentally friendly.

The ability to attract higher caliber workers in a home-sourced model has lead to the following benefits:

Reduced attrition. Agent attrition reductions of 50%-75%.
Reduced absenteeism and tardiness. Those working at home are less exposed to illness prevalent in bullpen-like call centers, traffic congestion and weather conditions, thus resulting in reduced absenteeism and tardiness.
Productivity gains. Productivity increases of 15%-30% for at-home workers.

Flexibility Benefits

Worker scheduling in a traditional bricks and mortar call center environment is inherently inefficient. Real estate, utilities and furniture, fixtures and equipment are fix costs, while transaction volume is highly variable. Matching transaction volume to fixed assets and full time employees is a major challenge for call center and other business process center managers.

At Cloud 10, full- or part- time At Home Professionals drawn from a national pool allows for the elasticity to meet hourly, daily or seasonal changes in transaction volume versus a fixed, full-time, highly localized pool of agents. Scheduling flexibility facilitates larger hiring pools, job satisfaction and retention resulting in increased levels of customer satisfaction.

Employees v. Independent Contractors

The Internal Revenue Service states that those companies using independent contractors have only the right to control or direct only the result of the work done by an independent contractor, and not the means and methods of accomplishing the result.

While using independent contractors may be a necessity for short term campaigns, for any type of term work involving your customers, you will want your outsourced partner to employ its workers - Cloud 10 does not utilize contractors for handling its clients' customers for a number of critical reasons:

Management and Control: At Cloud 10, we believe it is critically important to manage the "means and methods" of our agents' work. This means initial and ongoing training, quality assurance, coaching, counseling and supervising our agents. This is not allowed using independent contractors where the employer can only direct the "result of the work." By then it is too little, too late to provide superior service to your customers.
Tools: At Cloud 10, we provide our At Home Professionals with infrastructure and tools necessary to perform their jobs. These include our network, software applications for CRM, database management, performance measurement and secured access to client applications. These are the "means and methods" of performing customer service.
Culture and Loyalty: At Cloud 10, we are building a culture based on loyalty and affinity to Cloud 10 and the clients who we represent. We do not allow our agents to compete with us or our client's competitors. Independent contractors are just that, independents who can work for whoever they want to when they want to.
Tax Compliance: Not only is it just the right thing to do, but Cloud 10 believes that paying our share of our agents payroll taxes, withholding income taxes and providing W-2 statements, helps build the sense of loyalty and dedication that builds strong enterprises. Those using independent contractors leave tax compliance to their contractors, just another link in the chain removing them from your interests.