MELVILLE, NY  – May 20, 2008 – A non-profit initiative taking place throughout the United Kingdom is receiving strong support from contact center leaders CosmoCom and BT, a leading provider of communications solutions and services. Their recommendations are coming during "Work Wise Week," which began last Thursday in Great Britain, encouraging businesses throughout the UK to adopt Green IT practices like telecommuting and homeshoring. The companies are urging UK businesses to be more open to smarter business practices that are more common among US contact centers, but the trend is very much on the upswing in the US too.

"Contact Center Virtualization" is the key enabling technology in the successful work-at-home model, say BT and CosmoCom, the global leader in IP-based contact center technology. Virtualization enables agents to work from their own homes – wherever they are located. According to IDC, the US will have an estimated 330,000 such home-based agents by 2010. CosmoCom and BT say increased adoption by more enterprises in both countries and elsewhere makes good economic sense.

"US contact centers have been faster than their UK counterparts to recognize the flexibility and power of IP-based contact center technology," said Steve Kowarsky, Executive Vice President, CosmoCom. "Virtualized contact centers here are already encouraging the work-at-home model, and as they become increasingly familiar with its benefits, many more American enterprises will adopt this model."

Employees and supervisors in today’s contact centers can work wherever they have a high-speed Internet connection. With desktop or notebook computers and headsets, employees can be located in a physical call center or in a virtual call center, working from remote or at-home offices. Calls can be routed seamlessly to agents anywhere, and supervisors can monitor and manage their work forces as easily as if everyone were in the same room.

BT has benefited from an aggressive "Homeshoring" policy in recent years. They currently have 15,000 employees working from home, and they plan to expand the program. BT’s homeshoring proposition can be specifically aimed at people who cannot commute to an office, such as mothers with children at home, home caregivers to family members, and the disabled, opening up a whole new pool of productive and valuable potential employees. In addition to the savings in commuting cost and time and their associated environmental benefits, at-home employee attrition rates are down from the 26 per cent per year level typical of a physical contact center to just 10 per cent. Absenteeism is also down significantly. All together, homeshoring is a step in the right direction for the carbon agenda that is also helping an organization like BT to reduce its operating costs.

Work Wise Week UK
The third annual Work Wise Week runs from Thursday, May 15 to Tuesday, May 21, 2008. The initiative supports and promotes work-at-home policies among the UK labor force, and educates employers about its benefits. BT and CosmoCom are focused the contact center segment. Of the UK’s 960,000 contact center employees (one in every 60 people in the country) only a few thousand work from home, according to researcher ContactBabel. So there is much room for improvement.

"With proven technology available on the market to enable firms to be much more flexible about agent location, there is no reason for so many of the UK’s contact centers to accept the traditional contact center model," said Natasha Clough, Senior Global Marketing Manager CRM for BT. "Contact center managers should view Work Wise Week as a great opportunity to look again at how they operate and how they could do things differently."

Phil Flaxton, chief executive of Work Wise UK, said that home-working makes sense in today’s economy. "An increasingly competitive world means that employers and employees have to strive to use their resources effectively; one to gain better productivity, the other to balance work-life pressures. Virtualization of the contact center is just one option that can be offered," Flaxton explained.

About CosmoCom
CosmoCom, the global leader in Contact Center Consolidation 2.0, excels in providing IP contact center platforms for enterprises with the largest and most complex requirements, consolidating multiple locations, onshore, offshore, and home-shore agents, formal and informal agents, captive and outsourced operations, multiple communication channels, and multiple applications. Organizations can obtain the full benefits of Consolidation 2.0 by deploying CosmoCom technology themselves or by working with a service provider that hosts CosmoCom platforms on a dedicated or shared basis. CosmoCom customers include Fortune-class enterprises throughout the world and service providers such as BT, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Telefonica, NTT, VSNL, PLDT, Verizon, and many others. CosmoCom is the most-selected provider of hosted contact center platforms to top-tier telcos worldwide. For more information, please visit  www.cosmocom.com.

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