The difference is one of geography. Until recently, recruitment was limited to areas in and around those cities with brick and mortar call centers. Today, BPOs can recruit from the majority of US states, which permits greater selectivity. And because agents value the option to work remotely, that benefit can be factored into new-hires' rates.

The benefits of breaking free of geography extend beyond finding more experienced licensed agents.


In 2019, which now feels like the old days, new agent training took place in large, tightly packed rooms filled with people living within a drivable radius of their facility. These classes were led by individuals of great competence but possibly more expert in some areas than others.

The pandemic ended that approach and forced the BPO industry to re-imagine agent training.

Today, remote collaboration technologies permit surprisingly high levels of fluid interactivity between students and trainers, and as well as among fellow students. Pop quizzes and other focusing activities keep trainees on their toes and progressing, with the added benefit of alerting trainers to potential problems early on. Subject matter experts residing anywhere in an organization can own and teach what they know best.

All this produces better prepared agents that achieve greater efficiency, sooner.

The move to home-based work also helped the industry solve the long-standing seasonality problem affecting both in-house and outsourced healthcare member support programs.

Enrollment periods produce temporary demands on support that are many times higher than that experienced the rest of the year. Historically, large groups of agents were trained and put to work for just those few months, then either released, which is terribly inefficient, or allowed to sit idle – which is terribly uneconomical. BPOs with diverse client lists can now cross-train and cyclically reassign healthcare agents to, say, financial services leading up to tax season, and from there to tourism accounts, with their large numbers of summer travelers, and from there back to open enrollment.

The outcome is greater access to the higher quality work that full-time, tenured agents produce in ever greater abundance over time.

One of the thornier issues confronting home-based customer support has been data security, and the lack of an on-site supervisor to enforce rules safeguarding personal health information (PHI). Here, too, technology steps in. Remote worker security applications are reaching the market which use video to monitor agent activity and hide PHI or other sensitive data if it detects a phone camera aimed at the screen or the presence of an unauthorized individual within sight of the monitor. Some of these solutions use facial recognition technology to assess emotional wellbeing and assign each agent a score on a sort of contentment index, alerting supervisors if the score drops in concerning ways.

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