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We
were recently featured on Good
Morning America
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Virtual
Call Center
LiveOps Receives
$28M In Funding --
The Homeshoring Movement Continues To Grow
by Michael Haaren
Call center leader
LiveOps, which employs some 10K
home-based freelance agents (independent contractors), just announced an
additional $28M in expansion funding. Former eBay COO Maynard Webb
has also
joined the company as CEO.
The LiveOps funding
and leadership news is one more log on the
growing homeshoring fire. Competition and growth in the virtual call
center
arena have been heating up for some time now, with several of the
players
announcing major recruiting drives in the US and Canada in the past 60
days
alone, totaling over 8,500 potential hires.
Recently, we covered
VIPdesk’s plans to hire 500 home-based
agents in the Ottawa
area (for more, click here), and Secure Call
Management spoke of 5K agents needed. West Corp. announced a
drive for hundreds of weekend agents,
while Arise, too
(formerly WillowCSN), released plans to
hire 3K agents.
What’s fueling the
fire? Our best guess is
- customer
dissatisfaction with the offshore call center
experience;
- corporate realization
that offshoring can carry hidden
costs and managerial burdens;
- the intensifying Rat
Race and growing boomer retirements deepening
the home-based talent pool and keeping domestic labor costs low; and
- increasing
broadband Internet penetration in the US
and Canada.
Research firm IDC had
predicted in a Jan.
2006 study that
homesourcing could grow from 112K agents to 300K by 2010, and the
number had
grabbed many headlines. However, it’s now beginning to appear that what
had at
first seemed an overestimation may actually turn out to have been too
conservative.
To join (or start) a
discussion of LiveOps, VIPdesk, West and
other call center companies and where the openings are and what it’s
like to
work for them, just click to our message boards, at R3 Switchboard.
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Rat Race Factoids
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Work
From Home Scams
There
is a 42-to-1 scam ratio among "work from home" ads on the Internet, and
that is not counting the ones that arrive as spam in your inbox. [Read
our press release on this statistic.]
Average
Annual Vacation Days by Country:
United
States...........13
Japan...............25
Canada...............26
Great
Britain............28
Brazil..............34
Germany...............35
France................37
Italy.................42
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