Alpine Access: Perspectives from 12 years of managing remote workers (Web worker daily)

In 1998, the virtual call center staffing company Alpine Access opened its doors. All employees to make calls with Alpine Access - now totaling approximately 3,000 customer - service representatives to work from home. In this interview, Alpine Access co-founder and Associate Director current Jim Ball sharing some insights experience twelve years his work with a distributed workforce.

Thursday Bram: How have the Alpine Access of personnel management methods and work with telecommuters changed since the start of the company? What important lessons have you learned?

Jim Ball:When we started alpine access, we knew we weren't what we knew. Also, we knew that the only way to make the evolutionary model is to implement as much driven by technology "management" as possible. Assemble them meant that we need to test our unique business processes manually until we were comfortable, we had it right. Then only build us support systems and automate their. Thus, over time, we implemented a large portion of the technology that allows to manage numerous daily functions in a highly automated way, leaving our human resources to manage by exception. We were very careful, however, make sure that maintain us an adequate level of human touch to ensure that our agents have the sense of community and culture which is so important to have access to the Alps.

The lessons? Automating a process of bad just amplifies the error. Make sure process drives technology - not vice versa.

Thursday:How has alpine access resized working with teleworkers, when many businesses seem to strive to have worked with a few teleworkers?

Ball: The most common problem I've seen most companies make is that when they decide to implement a telecommuting program, they assume that they have really changed the way they do business. In other words, they are often nothing more than their teleworkers with technical tools providing that they need to operate the House. Although step other changes. Are-ce-that you already went on a telephone conference where most of the others was set in a conference room? If so, you've probably experienced the inevitable scratching head side-muffled conversations or even speakers who depend on the hand-waving or other activities that do not translate phone. It is often simple things that make the difference.

Alpine Access began as a pure home agent. By design, we have never a physical call centre. This has forced us to ensure that all aspects of relationship with us agent are centered on the fact that they are not in a common Office. Recruitment, training, operational support, coaching - extracurricular, all activities are designed for remote workers.

Thursday:What kind of infrastructure do you use to manage 3,000 teleworkers? It custom built, or you have tools scale well?

Ball:In accordance with the theme "don't let technology drive process", we were forced to build custom much of our infrastructure for the first years. As appropriate business solutions have come on the market in recent years, we were able to replace many of our customized solutions. Even in these cases, we find generally make us enough significant changes to these business systems to keep their faithful to our needs.

Thursday:What approaches can smooth the process of working with a virtual staff? Are there any tips or tricks that you can recommend?

Ball:The strongest, that I can make suggestion is no doubt that people who are designing the programme live all aspects of the experience. There is really no way to effectively simulate this experience into a vault (from the point of view fall-back), sterile desktop environment. Make sure that your virtual staff feels fully engaged and the technology they use is essentially invisible.

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