Companies like Carnival Cruise Lines, Hilton Hotels and JetBlue are now improving their customer services for technical support and phone sales operations for U.S. transactions. They will no longer hire full-time workers to take calls. Instead they have linkages with a burgeoning group of middle-man outfits like 12-year-old Arise Virtual Solutions in Miramar, Fla. Their workforce deals with their clientele at home. This new sector is known as "home sourcing."
Arise announced that they will be adding 3,000 jobs by the end of the year. They will be expanding their home-based workforce from 9,000 to 12,000 range. An additional 800 workers are given contract in U.K. LiveOps, West Corporation, and Alpine Access are the competitors. The number of American home call-center workers will grow from 110,000 today to 325,000 in 2012, this was projected by Independent market researcher IDC.
The field is poised for growth, this is the opinion of Professor Thomas W. Malone from MIT's Sloan School of Management and author of The Future of Work (Harvard Business School Press, 2004). Malone added that in many cases those workers can offer better and more money-making service than offshore call-center workers in low-wage countries. If you want to work in Arise, you must pass a sequence of online screenings that include a diction test, a typing evaluation, and submission of fingerprints for FBI background check. Commit to work in a specified number of hours per week is also a requirement. An accountant in Arise will be given a salary of $100 to $200 depending on the worker's home country. A list of 30 clients should be picked.
A virtual class will be done from 10 to 50 hours. Infrequent "Q & As," or quality assessments is also performed. Then Arise staff will listen in on calls made by agents. Feedback based from their performance will be discussed with them. Workers are paid by hour for time spent on the phone. Agents in Arise working from 15 to 20 hours a week will earn an average of $11/hour. Their paycheck contains $880 a month. Other sales workers can earn $25/hour or more with commissions.
She said, "I'm in my nightdress and my hair's in a pigtail, I don't hurry in the morning to put on make-up or to get dressed. I can work 10 hours or 80 hours a week or more, then pick when you want to work it.” [via]
