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By now, you may know there are plenty of good reasons to operate your call center using a hosted or virtual business model: substantially lower operating costs, greater flexibility, and improved reliability, to name a few.
But there’s one benefit, often overlooked, that plays right into one of the hottest issues in business today: Virtual call centers are greener by a mile, or sometimes, even a million miles.
In this, our first in a series of posts detailing the ecological benefits of hosted call centers, let’s look at perhaps the most obvious savings: Fewer cars on the road, because virtual call centers let you tap into the home based agent labor pool.
Suppose you are a 100-seat call center and those 100 call agents can work remotely. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates the average one-way commuting distance is 19 miles; double that to 38 miles for a round-trip daily commute and the average worker travels nearly 850 miles monthly. One hundred virtual call agents working from their home save about a million commuter miles off our highways and byways.
Now, factor in the Environmental Protection Agency’s estimate that each gallon of gasoline expended emits 19.5 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions into the atmosphere. Using a per-vehicle mileage of 21 miles per gallon and keeping those 100 agents remote reduces CO2 emissions by about 931,000 pounds annually. And your virtual agents? They collectively pocket more than $140,000 in commute-cost savings.
We know that you’ve been thinking green all along, except usually you’ve been thinking in terms of greenbacks and how to add more of them to your bottom line. A hosted call center does that in spades, and, for good measure, reduces your carbon footprint as well, making you a hero in plenty of customer’s eyes not just for the good service you provide them, but the good work you contribute to by running a green call center—a virtual call center filled with good intentions and great results.