Staffing Industry Review – January/February 2007

“Say ‘call contact outsourcer,’ and the first thing you’d expect is a call center, right? Yet, this is exactly what Miramar FL- based WillowCSN [now Arise] doesn’t have. That’s just one of the many differences between Willow and more conventional outsourcers in the contact center industry. Willow’s 3,200 call agents are entirely based in their own homes in 43 of the United States, and not one of them is an employee.

Each agent is an incorporated, independent contractor who pays $2,000 to start up his of her own home-based call contact business. They pay for their computer and phone equipment as well as their own voice and high-speed data lines. Agents choose which of Willow’s 37 customers they wish to work for. Then they pay for their own customer specific training. ‘Our agents are entrepreneurs,’ says Willow CEO Angie Selden. ‘They are invested in selecting and servicing a particular client.’

‘We can find people with any particular skill set of special knowledge the client wants because our recruiting area is the whole U.S.,” Selden says. Willow gets more than five times as many applicants for home agent positions than it accepts. A rigorous, patented screening process winnows out those who don’t have what it takes to run their own home-based call contact business.

Willow’s business model, like its agent model, is completely different from conventional call center outsourcers. The company doesn’t operate in eight-hour shifts, as a bricks-and-mortar contact center does. ‘We work with our clients to determine how many agents they need at different times,’ Selden says. ‘We can very specifically tailor the number of people on the phone in 30-minute increments.’

Clients don’t pay for those 30-minute increments, either; instead they pay only for the time an agent is actually involved with customer calls, e-mail or chat. ‘That changes the [contact center] model from an hourly –rate fixed-cost model to one that’s completely on-demand,’ Selden says. Home agents are paid a base rate plus incentives that depend on meeting of exceeding performance targets in areas such as sales or customer satisfaction.

Selden says that Willow’s business model is a winner for all parties. ‘It reduces cost, increases job opportunities, matches specific skills and experiences between the agent and the client, and produces better quality,’ she says.”