Tami Covington makes her living answering the telephone. Perhaps she’s made your airplane reservation or helped send flowers to your mom.
But instead of working in a cubicle in a call center on the highway, Covington answers the phone from the comfort of her Middletown home.
Her flexible schedule is geared to her two children, ages 11 and 7, and by working while the kids are in school and at night, Covington has patched together a full-time, 35-hour week.
Call centers are an enormous industry in a state of perpetual change, explains Tim Searcy, executive director of the American Teleservices Association. Hundreds of jobs have moved offshore, to India and to South America, as companies try to cut costs, and customer queries increasingly are handled via the Internet, thus bypassing the live human voice altogether.
But at the same time, at-home call center workers such as Covington and Quaye represent an emerging and fast-growing trend, Searcy said. A 2004 industry study put the number of at-home agents at about 100,000, out of a total U.S. call center workforce of 4 million.
“Call centers are either employing people to work at home, or they are thinking about it ,” Searcy said. “This trend is really only a few years old, and it’s a moving force in our industry.”
Photo from Flickr.
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