The West Australian - Tuesday May 29 2001
by Kate Gauntlett

Press One for the virtual call centre - and say goodbye to dozens of operators stuck in a room glued to their headsets, frantically answering the buzzing phones and accidentally leaving you on hold.

Customer service inquiries, seminar registration, consulting, market research, database management and telesales are being run from people's homes.

Sydney-based company Unity4 Pty Ltd, a provider of outsource call centre services, has been operating since August last year.

Specialist software enables Unity4 to contract operators all around Australia, who work for themselves from home.

Unity4 director Simon Strachan, who has a background in call centre campaign management, said he developed the concept after noticing two emerging trends.

Firstly, call centres were growing at the huge rate of 25 per cent a year but were plagued by a big staff turnover. He also recognised many people wanted to generate an income from home.

"The business structure keeps staff happy, we can afford to pay them considerably higher and can invest quite heavily in training them," Mr Strachan said.

Unlike the traditional call centre, which had big overheads, the virtual call centre had few running costs. Operators, who need their own computer, telephone and Internet connection, download a software package. Mr Strachan said the package had most of the functions from the traditional call centre, recording the time, date and duration of the call.

The software does not rely on the Internet to run, meaning the operator is free to use their phone line to make work calls. Logged results are e-mailed back to the headquarters.

Office and phone costs are incurred by the operator, who can claim them as a tax deduction. So far, Unity4 has about 45 operators throughout Australia - including two in WA - with plans for expansion.

Isolation and lack of community was something the Unity4 team had addressed.

NSW-based Teletask, which received $500,000 start-up funding from the Commonwealth Government's regional telecommunications Infrastructure program, provides more than 300 regional-based people for telemarketing, database management and transcription services.

About 30 Teletask agents are based in WA. Teletask has also supplied workers to Unity4.

Managing director Andrew Hunter said many Australian companies seemed reluctant to outsource work to regional Australia because of preconceived ideas that regional Australians were not up to it.

But Mr Strachan said the reluctance to outsource services probably stemmed from the perceived lack of physical control over operators.

"We don't see theses people physically but it doesn't really matter what they look like - it's the business on the phone that is important," Mr Strachan said.