The Global Association for Contact Center Best Practices & Networking

August 2010 -- A FORMER call centre manager who bounced back from redundancy to set up her own work-from-home call centre company has won three major clients.

Susan Lane, from Redcar, ‘walked around in a daze’ for three months when she lost her call centre job last year - now her company Salcallcentre has 18 trained work-from-home staff servicing major national and international contracts.

Now the 55-year-old is on a one-woman crusade to get hundreds of unemployed on Teesside back to work without leaving their own homes.

In just three months, the virtual call centre’s four employees have answered thousands of calls for online retailers.

The company expects to turn over £100,000 in its first year and employ 150 home workers by 2011.

"I was made redundant in 2009 and spent the first three months in a daze, going half-heartedly to interviews," said Susan.

"I thought ‘what am I good at, how can I get that to work for me - and where am I happiest? The answer was at home. And it’s the same for most people.

"I thought ‘if you can do outsourcing, there must be a way for people to service customers from their own home’.

"As long as they have the computer, a phone line, headset and internet connection, they can do it.

"Disabled people can work from home, staff gain two hours a day when they’re not travelling to and from work, especially if they have children, and they chose their work hours to suit them, not a company.

"We have secured a major international client and customers servicing for a supermarket giant. This brings our overheads down substantially.

We can compete for contracts with the off shore companies, where so many call centre jobs have gone in the past few years.

"This is the future for call centres."

Susan bought telephone systems and headsets, computers, projectors and screens, furniture and a broadband connection with help from UK Steel Enterprise, the Corus subsidiary that supports businesses in steel areas.

She has already trained 18 staff in the free four-week NQV-linked training programme and a further 20 are about to start their training programme - now she’s on the lookout for more customer service agents with the aim of employing 60 by Christmas and eventually expanding to Darlington and Hartlepool.

"This is exactly the kind of business that the region needs," said UK Steel Enterprise Regional Executive Nick Johnson.

More than 86 businesses have been supported since the launch of UK Steel Enterprise's £600,000 Regeneration Fund, part of an £8.3m support package announced following the mothballing of Teesside Cast Products, with more than 150 jobs created so far.

Posted by Veronica Silva Cusi, news correspondent
Source: http://www.nebusiness.co.uk

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