The Gig Economy Is Emerging, but Overstated

One reason for the turnover is that contact center workers often don’t feel equal to other employees at their companies. “In some cases, contact center workers are treated as second-class citizens,” says Donna Fluss, president at DMG Consulting. They do not receive the same benefits, and training is often far more limited. “When the company closes down because of bad weather or the company picnic, every department gets to go home or have the day off, but the contact center stays open,” she adds.

Contract work can be challenging for those who choose to accept it. In reality, each contractor becomes a salesperson, with a quota and a president who has to balance the budget. They also often need to hustle just to make enough money to pay their bills.

New variations on contact-center contract workers are emerging to benefit both the company and the employee. Rather than hiring individuals with no interest or knowledge about their products or services, some corporations are now hiring power users to act as contract support personnel.

Recruiting such experts for freelance work can yield significant benefits, according to Ian Jacobs, a principal analyst at Forrester Research. The outside experts might be more effective helpers than traditional agents. The former has chosen a specific piece of work, so they are vested in the area. Also, the contractor has a practical rather than theoretical understanding of the product, so he might be aware of issues that arise but have not yet shown themselves in traditional customer support.

New compensation models are also emerging to improve customer service. Traditional contact center agents are paid no matter how many customer problems they solve during their assigned shifts. In comparison, gig economy agents are only paid when they solve problems. In addition, customers can provide feedback and rate the quality of the service they received. Firms then funnel more work to individuals with higher ratings, in effect forcing lower-performing workers to improve.

The end result is the experts’ interests align with customers’ desires in a new way. Because they use—and often love—the product, the support job becomes something that they want to do rather than something they are paid to do.

This approach could benefit workers. “Contact center workers want control over their schedules,” Fluss says. “The more flexibility in a schedule, the happier they are.”

The gig economy also supports the concept of adaptive real-time scheduling. Here, shifts are not treated in the same generic manner. Weekend and nighttime shifts, for example, are harder to fill, so companies are likely to offer more money—$15 or $20 per hour compared to $10 or $12—or shorter shifts, say four hours rather than the typical eight to 10 hours.

Directly, a start-up with 50 employees and $36 million in venture capital, has built a contact center solution for the gig economy. “We provide companies with a platform, so they can create a network of support experts,” notes Antony Brydon, its CEO and cofounder.

Airbnb, Autodesk, Microsoft, SAP, and Samsung are some of the companies leveraging the platform. LinkedIn uses the Directly platform to offload 15 percent to 17 percent of its contact center work from full-time employees to freelance experts, according to Forrester’s Jacobs.

But this approach might not be practical for all companies. For the gig economy model to work, companies need pools of experienced, passionate customers from which to draw, and if they operate in very small or specialized niches, they might not have enough potential contractors.

Companies also need to make a number of adjustments. Among them, they will likely need to invest in some form of analytics to parcel out work and determine how well these new services work. They might also need to rethink their compensation models. Traditional incentives, like money, might not motivate these contractors as much as fancy titles. Jacobs notes that one gaming company called its support personnel “ambassadors.” And instead of rewarding its contract workers with traditional paychecks, “it gave them gaming items, like hats, joysticks, or other swag, which they preferred,” he says.