SMB Networks / Managing Remote Users /

Coming to a city near you, perfect part-time jobs

By Toni Kistner
Net.Worker, 08/27/01

Stay-at-home moms, seniors, students and the disabled know the challenge of finding good part-time employment. Even if you manage to land a job that fits your lifestyle, you'll still have to tack on time commuting each week. So the perfect part-time job is one where you work from home and where you dictate your own hours each week based on your needs, which of course are always changing.

Think there's no such thing? That they're all commission-based telemarketing jobs, or worse, scams advertised on telephone polls and unsolicited e-mail? ("You send us $300 and we'll send you a list of companies that will pay you big bucks for growing mushrooms in your basement.")

I'm happy to report that a Denver company called Alpine Access is creating good part-time jobs, and over time may manage to single handedly clean up the tarnished reputation of work-at-home employment.

An outsourced customer service (or call center) firm, Alpine has to date hired 2,000 part-time local employees for its Denver Web-based virtual call center. All front-line customer service reps work at home; they set their own hours, make a good wage, and all they need is a computer and a telephone line. (Alpine's model dictates that agents be able to take local calls, so they also need to live in the Web center's area.)

When it's time for work, Alpine employees log on to their personal portals on Alpine's Web Center. They put on a headset, connect to the client for whom they'll be taking support calls that day, and voila, the phone starts ringing.

Of course, Alpine's magic is backed by some pretty complex technology. Say you call an 800 number to reach one of Alpine's client companies: The call is routed to the telecom carrier's routing switch, then to the Alpine Access switch, then sent on to the agent assigned to the client company. Alpine's Web center is built with an Avaya Definity G3 telephone switch, Cisco routers and Sun servers. Alpine has partnered with Denver network management provider Inflow, which uses several carriers to house Alpine's network. Most of the call center management applications were built in-house.

Alpine's co-founder and president Steve Rockwood comes from the traditional brick-and-mortar call center world, which has always suffered from high employee turnover and low morale.

"Taking phone calls eight hours a day can be quite miserable; you're forced to work specific times when the call volumes are the largest, and that might not be conducive to your life," Rockwood says. "You try to make it pleasant by adding cafeterias and water coolers, but you're still putting people in cubes close together, making them work long hours, serving clients they can't relate to."

So in 1999 Rockwood and his partner, Steve Ball, set out to create "the ideal office place." They put every business process on the Web - the hiring, training, management, quality assurance, client interaction, and social and cultural interaction - and got rid of what Rockwood calls "the distracting subculture of the brick-and-mortar call center: the cafeteria, smoking section, parking problems."

"My hiring is pure," Rockwood adds. "I don't hire you based on what you look like, but based on the skills you exhibit in the auditioning process."

Alpine's model isn't just good for workers - it's good for business. The system can integrate a client's existing call center system and distribute it out to its home-based agents securely without compromising security, Rockwood says. From Alpine's Web portal, clients can monitor call activity such as duration of calls, amount of revenue generated and view individual agents' report cards. And because Alpine's working conditions are so attractive, it can hire high-quality agents who match its clients' customers' demographics.

Rockwood even claims to have increased the revenue of one client (a doll company) by 30%, simply by matching call center agents to the company's target customers - in this case, the highly educated 40-year-old women with 9- to 12-year-old daughters. "It's a highly emotional sell," he adds.

Alpine's gearing up to expand to other labor markets - possibly Washington DC, Minneapolis and Pittsburgh.