Work at Home Telecommuting as a Call Center Agent

If you are looking online for jobs you can do at home, you will undoubtedly have come across many home business opportunities where you get to do work such as affiliate marketing or joining an MLM program. Opportunities and advice on starting your own home business are advertised all over the Internet, however, real jobs you can do at home are nigh on impossible to locate.

Why is this? Well, for a start, not all jobs are suitable for home based employment so the opportunities for working at home are reduced. Another reason is that employers have been slow to catch on to the idea of employing staff to work at home. Instead of considering the massive savings they could make in terms of office space, lighting, heating and so on, employers focus on the fact that they will be unable to directly supervise their staff members. If staff are paid by results, they have a better chance of finding jobs where they can work from home than if they were paid a set hourly rate.

All these things combine to limit the number of work at home jobs available. Demand for work at home jobs currently far exceeds the supply. There are, however, a couple of areas where real work at home jobs are becoming more plentiful; one area where the number of jobs at home on offer are increasing is in call-center work.

Anyone who has needed to contact a company's Customer Service Department and has been routed to a call-center will know that many of them are based overseas but there is a less well-known trend for hiring more local call-center staff. Between 2000 and 2007 the number of home-based call-center employees in the USA tripled. According to research conducted by Yankee Group there are more than 670,000 work at home phone agents employed in the USA and Canada alone.

Working at home as a call-center agent has many of the advantages of running your own home business including the obvious ones such as flexible working hours and no commuting. You are, however, an employee just as much as if you were working in your employer's building and your earning potential is dictated by how much work the employer provides. Home-based call-center workers are normally contractors who are paid for the actual number of minutes they spend on the phone to customers. Working hours, although flexible, have to be sanctioned by the employer, so you can't just decide to change your hours without giving any notice.

Hourly rates of pay for work at home call-center staff are not particularly high and depend upon the type of work undertaken. For example if your job is to simply take down customer orders over the phone, you will not earn as much as you would providing technical support or in a position requiring sales skills.

When considering the rates of pay for a home-based call-center agent job, you need to take into account that by working at home, you will be saving money. For example, you won't have to pay for fares or fuel, you won't have to maintain a working-clothes wardrobe and, if you are a parent (as most people who want to work at home are), you won't have to pay expensive child-care fees. Despite the comparatively low rates of pay, telecommuting as a call-center agent is worth considering if you want a job where you can work at home.