The concept of commuting
daily to your place of work, being caught up in endless
traffic jams or fighting your way unto congested
trains has been part of the western world’s
culture for decades. It has, for many people, become
a way of life…… but does it have to be
this way?.
With increasing emphasis being placed on flexible
working practices and greater reliance on self-motivation
and “management by results”, the adoption
of conventional office practice no longer seems appropriate.
This change of emphasis effectively removes the need
for responsible, knowledge-based workers to be physically
overseen and monitored by management. Furthermore,
with advances in Information Technology, workers
no longer have to sit at the same desk in the same
office each and every day. Managers and their teams
can work effectively, in different locations, and
still achieve their objectives.
This change in philosophy has given rise to the
concept of the Teleworker - a person defined as working “off-site,
at a distance from his/her colleagues or “customers” either
full or part-time.” This might mean working
from home, a local satellite office or local networking
centre, travelling to the main office only when required
or circumstances dictate – and then sharing
a ”Hot Desk” position.
The Telework, Telecottage and Telecentre Association
(TCA) maintain that teleworking can increase productivity
by anything from 15-60%. By way of example, a study
undertaken by The Home Office Partnership for the
Department of the Environment Transport and Regions
analysed the work patterns of 2367 Cambridge County
Council Staff. They found that by incorporating a
range of teleworking opportunities staff could reduce
their commuting time by 70,000 hours a year and their
work time travel by 900,000 miles.
Putting this into context, a massive 80% of UK travel
is by car with 40% of that travelled by commuters.
A British Telecom report entitled the “Economies
of Teleworking”, estimates that if full time
teleworkers increased to 15% of the work force, fuel
consumption would decrease by a dramatic 2.7 million
gallons - every workday.
So who is taking advantage of this culture change?
The answer is an ever-growing number of Corporates
and Local Authorities alike.
Historically, BT has provided remote access capabilities
to some 15,000 staff including 2000 home based
Teleworkers and planned to increase this number
substantially during the course of last year. In
1998, IBM supplied 13,000 UK staff with PC’s,
printers etc, to enable them to work from home.
During the latter part of last year The Automobile
Association undertook a major expansion of its home
based “virtual call centre” programme.
Their stated intention was to increase their successful
trial unit comprising a 25 strong homeworker team,
through rapid growth, to 150 by the end of the year.
This increase was intended to provide the flexibility
for staff shift times and also have “back-up” staff
available for temporary working at short notice (bad
weather dramatically increases breakdown call-outs!).
According to the TCA some 20 or more Local Authorities
began operating Teleworking schemes in 1998. These
include Birmingham, Cambridgeshire and Kent County
Councils and the London Boroughs of Brent, Enfield
and Luton.
With the present Government’s commitment to “Modernising
Government” through the fullest use of Information
Technology and (Tele) Communications, the quest for “Better
Government” also requires the continuous improvement
of public services. Conversely, the demand for more
and better services by the General Public creates
a number of new challenges and considerable pressure
for change and greater efficiency.
The “Modernising Government” white paper
promises 24-hour customer facing Government services.
Understandably, the general public expects to be
treated as customers, able to contact Government
services when they need to. For all of this to happen
seamlessly and efficiently, call centres and/or the
application of call centre technology is a crucial
first step in providing ‘on line’ services
in real time.
When considering the adoption of “teleworking” both
Corporates and Local Authorities alike need to carefully
evaluate and identify the various procedures and
operations that could just as easily be implemented
using teleworking techniques. In essence, any task
that is capable of being undertaken over the telephone,
with or without live access to a database could be
successfully undertaken by teleworkers utilising
Call Centre Technology.
However, “virtual” call centre network
technologies allow “centres” to be grouped
in small distributed networks whilst incoming calls
are routed seamlessly between them to the employees
(or “Agents” in Call Centre language)
best able to deal with the specific enquiry, wherever
they are working from. This could include home working
for part time staff or out-of-hours support.
By far and away the most obvious examples of how
applications for this type of technology could be
used by Councils or Local Government is answering
queries or providing information and dealing with
complaints raised by the general public. This can
be extended to revenue collection, arrears recovery
or even fraud detection.
Specifically designed to deliver Virtual Call Centre
functionality, GemaTech’s Remote Service Manager
(RSM) is probably the only fully integrated “one-stop-shop” solution
available that can provide a seamless delivery of
both telephone and live data calls to remote workers.
This functionality, coupled with a comprehensive
monitoring and management system, can provide the “remote” manager
with all the information he/she requires to ensure
that all tasks allocated are being handled and dealt
with timeously and efficiently. GemaTech’s
RSM can also be extended to seamlessly link (to the
caller) conventional office departments together
(which may be located at different sites) with remote
(home?) based workers.
The RSM was initially developed for a Manchester
based Travel Agent, and launched in December 1997.
Travel Councellors Ltd. became the 4th fastest growing
company in the UK in 1998 (as featured in the Sunday
Times Fast Track 100) and won the Sunday Times/Virgin
Atlantic Customer Care Award.
Utilising state-of-the-art Computer Telephony Integration
(CTI) techniques, GemaTech has developed a system
which provides a fully scalable (2-30,500 simultaneous
telephone calls) “switch”. The unit is
simple to set up and use, insofar as all of the management
information screens are based on “drag and
click” Windows techniques.
What is particularly relevant is the ability for
managers to monitor what is happening to all incoming
telephone calls on a real time basis. Comprehensive “real
time” call statistics, can be captured and
re-presented on any statistical reporting package,
such as Crystal Reports, Excel etc. providing additional
functionality.
The current release of GemaTech’s RSM can
accommodate up to 10,000 employees and handle up
to 120 simultaneous telephone calls per unit. This
call capacity can be increased by simply linking
additional units together.
New “services” such as “help-lines” (in
the case of a storm or flood alert) can be set up
literally in a matter of minutes by anybody who is
familiar with the system and has a knowledge of Microsoft
Windows. It also incorporates the seamless (to the
caller) transfer of both telephone and data calls
from remote Agent to remote Agent.
Future releases planned during 2002 include the
full integration of Auto Attendant, Voice Mail, Call
Logging, Call Recording, Automatic Call Distribution
and Disaster Recovery/ Business Continuity capability
within one, very powerful, unit.
GemaTech’s core technology forming the basis
of both the RSM and Business Continuity Manager,
(BCM) designed to provide full Disaster Recovery
capabilities for any Telecom switch is being hailed
by leading UK telecommunications consultants as a
ground breaking, state-of-the-art solution which
provides a seamless transfer of telephone based traffic
in a cost effective manner.
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