Jack Heacock: Hi, my name is Jack Heacock and I'm a Vice President with the Telework Coalition in Washington, DC and I'd like to welcome you to this conference. And just a couple of things about the Telework Coalition; we're a non-profit organization headquartered in Washington, DC, set up and organized to promote telework, telecommuting and to help make that happen throughout the land and make it a mainstream activity throughout the business world and government. Take a look at our website at RLINK "http://www.t-e-l-c-o-a-.org" www.t-e-l-c-o-a.org and I would encourage you to do that.

At this time I'd like to introduce our four panelists and I would like to start off with GR Badger who is a Supervisor at Jet Blue Airways who trains and manages just about 900 home-based agents, agents from Salt Lake City. GR also handles Jet Blue's learning and their eLearning program and online and self-training method for reservation agents. So GR, would you like to say a little bit now please?

GR Badger: Sure, I'm just glad to be here and it's exciting to see how the virtual call centers are actually starting to come more and more populated throughout the country. Jet Blue has been around 5 years. Our headquarters are based in New York City, we do have our call center though here in Salt Lake, and even when Jet Blue got up and running this has been our main focus to always do a virtual call center. We haven't done anything else except have home-based agents and it's been a wonderful experience not only internally but outward, externally as well. I know the customer really enjoys when they call in and are able to talk to someone at home and they have, they're talking to someone in their slippers and pajamas as we always like to say here in our offices. But we have about 900 agents that are all based at home and it's just been a wonderful operation for us ever since we started 5, years ago.

Jack Heacock: Okay and another panelist is Julian Carter who is Director of Operations at Office Depot and he's responsible for managing the company's domestic and off-shore centers including the remote call workforce that Office Depot relies upon for peak and valleys in their customer services demand. So, Julian?

Julian Carter: Hi, everyone. First of all let me thank everyone for the opportunity to be on this panel. I'm excited also to talk about the virtual business and how it's helped us here at Office Depot and share some of our thoughts. Like Jack said, we actually are responsible for managing a virtual business here within Office Depot as well as our offshore portions. We have been doing virtual for some 3.5 years now. We have actually about 1,400 remote agents spread around a few different companies that are partnered with us and we will grow probably double that by the end of this year. We have some pretty aggressive time-lines to consolidate some of our call centers and a lot of that is based on our belief in this program.

Jack Heacock: Thank you, Julian. The next panelist is Merle Sandler who is a Senior Researcher and Analyst for IDC and their home-based, or their home office programs. She is involved in conducting surveys, analysis and forecasting for advanced technology products and services primarily designed for small and medium size businesses and the home office. Merle?

Merle Sandler: Hello everybody. I'm very pleased to be with you all today, and I'm going to be looking at things from a slightly different perspective. With my background in research I'm looking at things in a far more macro point of view. Jet Blue's home-based reservation agents and the remote workers in Office Depot are actually part of a larger work-at-home group called telecommuters, and the move to the virtual workforce can't be divorced from trends that IDC sees among telecommuters as a whole.

Just some background first; there are roughly 9 million telecommuters in the United States at present and that might sound impressive but that's actually less then it was a whole 7 years ago. There was a ramp up in the number of telecommuters in the first half of the `90's, it peaked in 1998 and then declined steadily through 2002 and it's only just beginning to recover. So what happened, why were less people interested in telecommuting? And in fact, the decrease in the number of telecommuters was actually related to the return of telecommuters to the traditional workforce rather then a decrease in the number of telecommuters. It's very much a sort of economic bell weather. When things get tough, people tend to return to corporate life, giving up their potential lifestyle gains for closer daily contact with colleagues and supervisors. It's that, you know conversation around the water cooler that actually has benefits so you know what's going on.

And in the past, telecommuting was seen as a career destination. The telecommuters is now, it's more regarded as a path, one of the steps along the path in your corporate career. And also what has impacted the number of telecommuters over the past few years is the level of support and encouragement provided by the employers, and when there's an economic downturn and employee reductions, there tends to be a reduction in resources and that has been contention devoted to telecommuting support. My definition of telecommuting is actually fairly broad, much broader then we are dealing with today, that's somebody who works at home 3 or more days a month. And those who work full-time they're about 1.6 million that work exclusively out of the home. Now what sets these virtual agents apart is that their likely to have formal telecommuting arrangements. The majority of telecommuters is very much on an ad hoc basis and they're not formal policies. And also what's interesting is that the majority of employers don't actually provide much equipment for telecommuters, there maybe only one office that is given a computer and maybe 1 in 5 has got Internet access. So, while the appeal of telecommuting might change based on the economic climate, but independent of the economy, some workers will find it an important option based on personal circumstances.

Jack Heacock: Okay thank you Merle and our last panelist is Basil Bennett who is President and CEO of Willow CSN who has pioneered virtual agents and is one of the premiere outsourcing call centers in the United States. Basil has helped Willow expand its pool of home agents nation-wide as that helps the various types of companies understanding how to make use of this workforce and this greater pool of labor to represent their respective companies. Can we have a few words from you, Basil?

Basil Bennett: Thank you very much, Jack. Thank you very much and welcome everybody. Willow is a Fort Lauderdale headquarters company, we've actually been in business since 1997, so I know there's a lot of excitement about virtual today, but we have actually been building up and to this point for many, many years. We are known as the pioneer of the virtual agent, the virtual call center but more importantly to us, we are also known as the innovator of the tools and some of the policies and practices that go along with managing a virtual workforce. Today Willow has a little over 2,000 active agents that are actively working. We are in 12 different states, we moved to a national presence last year. We're at this point in time we're actually recruiting another 400 agents for January, and the last 12 months we've seen a significant growth. We have doubled the size of our virtual agent pools. We have added 16 new clients and Willow has been benefited from tripling our revenue.

Some of the things I'd like to always point out when I'm talking to people is, when you've been in business since 1997 and you're considered innovator and pioneer some recognition comes along your way and Willow has in 2004 was Call Center Magazine's service product of the year. We have two patents for different types of innovative tools that we use. We also received the Smithsonian Technology Award a couple of years ago and one of the final recognitions is Willow received the Presidential Task Force Award for employment of people with disabilities. So that's a little bit about the company and again thank you very much for joining us today and look forward to talking to you.

Julian Carter: This is Julian Carter with Office Depot, I could start off here. I think for us as far as productivity, it's enabled us to actually do more training, do more off-line activities which goes back to rewards and recognition. It does a lot for us in the, in the manner of getting agents involved in other things that are beneficial to sort of the share of mind trying ensure that people are up-to-date on everything that can possibly benefit the customer on, thereby of course building the customer loyalty by having happy engaged agents, and prior to our consolidation, retained agents who, our attrition was quite low and obviously from a quality standpoint, that has benefited both our company and the customer which of course on the service, on the service value profit chain, goes back around to the investors.

Julian Carter: Sure absolutely and when we - prior to us starting virtual, we had attrition as high as 60% on average in a couple of centers that we had at the time. After virtual, which was one of our means to stabilize scheduling internally, that was cut in half and then shortly afterwards within the year we were down in the 20% range, and just recently we were actually in the teens.

Julian Carter: I think on the productivity side the biggest thing that we obviously see is reductions in absenteeism on our, on the part of our internal. It gives us a better ability to manage training. We've increased our percentage of training hours - I think we do some 30% more training now than we actually did in around 2000 -- which for us the amount of training hours obviously goes back to quality and so forth.

GR Badger: Yeah that's correct, and what I was going to say also Jack and that is I think it's a simple principle. When agents or when employees are happy, revenues are going to go up and that's one thing that we've noticed. Our agents love working from home and that reflects in their tone of voice when they are actually talking to our customers, and that obviously makes it great for sales because then sales are obviously going to increase. I agree with Julian as well and that is retention, retention has been great for us. We don't have as a high of a turnover rate, I think because people are just happy, and if they're on a break and if they can go ahead and - I'm going to take that 15 minute break they can either throw in a load of laundry or get dinner cooking for their children - it's a good experience for them and that's relayed to the customers as well.

Basil Bennett: This is Basil Bennett from Willow. Our experiences - and prior to coming to Willow, I was the Group President at Convergys so I had some experiences with a more traditional outsourcer - and our attrition or turnover rate was at 100%, which is very typical for that class type of outsourcer. With Willow, with the type of model that we have, our attrition is at less then 8% and I think that a lot of people get that experience that once they start to work in a virtual environment where you have at-home agents you see a significant reduction in your attrition rate.

Jack Heacock: I think that… in my own experience, whether it was with Amtrak's networks or with the cable industry but not, the comparisons that I found were simply that agents tended to have greater job satisfaction by somewhere between about 11 and 20% and at the same time customer satisfaction improved when people, when agent, when their agents were virtual agents versus on-premise agents or traditional agents.

Merle Sandler: Yes, I was just saying again, just stepping back because we're talking to the committed today but I think, among employers in general they saw a level of suspicion - you know how do you actually measure the cost, how do you actually measure the ROI? And I think maybe some education is necessary to say yeah there are ways of, you know, looking at the happy workforce and the levels of absenteeism which are a lot less.

Jack Heacock: I have a question for Merle and Basil. Recent analyst research, especially from IDC, has pointed to the legitimacy and the growing trend in home-based agents and CRM. In the December 2004 report, it was estimated that there are more than 100,000 home-based virtual agents. What do you think is the main driver for the growth in the industry? I think we've already touched on a few of them, but just specifically the main drivers?

Merle Sandler: Well I've said I don't think there is one single driver I'd say first of all that the work-at-home industry as a whole is growing. You've got a skilled workforce that is available that people perhaps who have been laid off over the past few years. There's a problem with the quality in some of the offshore call centers, you know, people are fine if they've got very straightforward questions but not necessarily able to, to think outside the box. And I think also, just from a technology standpoint, just the growth of Broadband in the home has been a big enabler.

Basil Bennett: Yeah, I think those are all great points. Some of the things that we see when we talk to our clients and our prospective clients is they're looking for a flexible workforce, someone that can really help them with the coverage that they need, and what is very unique about the model with virtual at-home worker or virtual agent is that as the client is looking for a flexible workforce the virtual agent is looking for a flexible schedule. So it actually works quite well from both, both perspectives. The other thing that the clients are telling us is they just need more skilled workers and with the virtual workforce you're not confined to a 25 mile radius around a brick and mortar building that you built, you can go find that skilled worker regardless of the skill where ever they happen to be residing, and I think that's another thing that we hear.

Productivity is always, how do you get good solid agents performing and I did just for today's call I did some numbers and I - if you take the total number of agents and the total number of calls that are answered last year the average agent answers just over 6 calls an hour. The virtual agent, and I only have Willows number, we answer about 8.5 calls an hour. So you immediately is you start to see these productivity numbers start to come through. And of course IDC and Gartner and even Buzell, and all in the last 60 days, reported their clients and some of their research indicated that a virtual agent will be someplace between 25 and 35% more productive. I mean I don't know how Jet Blue and Office Depot have seen; maybe they have some better data from productivity?

GR Bennett: For us we've had a -- it's kind of a difficult thing to look at and say how has a res agent's productivity gone up or down - I go back to just what I stated earlier and that was our Jet Blue agents are just very, very happy working from home and I think that reflects in our customer service that we are able to provide, again the simple principle of when employees are happy sales are going to increase.

Jack Heacock: Well this is Jack I have one comment. I've very much tracked the productivity issue for the last decade and if I go back to the mid 1990's there was the smart valley project around San Jose that a number of large companies in California participated in, and at the end of five years they basically came up with the notion that a teleworker or a virtual worker was 22% more productive then their in-house counterpart and this was across the board. In most every piece of research that I've seen since then, AT&T research and others, has confirmed that to the point when I got to address the annual SHRM Conference a couple of years ago I asked a question of the audience “is it worth something to you to have 4 people do the work 5 five used to do,” and predictably you can just picture all the heads bobbing up and down. So I think it's just a phenomenal thing that happens.

Basil Bennett: Well from my perspective I think that's great to see that type of growth, in fact I think even IDC is predicting some of the similar things. I do believe that when you look at some of the numbers, and that is 85% of calls are still handled in in-house operations and yet there's still some challenges that the in-house operator has trying to run his call center business. There's a large opportunity of people still looking for a solution and the solution was not with offshore and it was not with a traditional call center. And that's the market that we're looking at, is people are still looking for better return on investment, trying to find productivity, trying to find that skilled worker, trying to balance out a very difficult coverage problem with a flexible, needing a flexible workforce and I think that's one of the reason you're starting to see these large numbers where there's going to be 500,000 virtual workers by the year 2006. I think it's because there's an opportunity to solve a lot of the problems that an in-house call center manager has had for years and hasn't been able to resolve up and to this point, and they are now seeing that virtual is not just the next step in the evolution of call centers it's actually a real, a real service that can solve a lot of problems that have been imbedded in the call centers for many years.

Jack Heacock: Question for GR and Julian. Let's talk about cost differentials. IDC says compared with traditional outsourcing and offshore operations, companies utilizing home-based agents can access highly skilled representatives that are closer attuned to the U.S. market just as Merle mentioned for up-selling. How are businesses like Jet Blue saving with home-based reservation agents and how much can outsourcers like Willow save companies?

GR BADGER: Well I think the biggest thing again for Jet Blue has been retention. We're able to hire a group of 30 people, train them and then keep them on board. I mean I know some people from our very first class that was back in December of '99 that are still working for the company. Out of those 30 people we still probably have 20 to 25 people that still work for the company. I think that is a huge saving, savings for the company as we continue to grow. We don't need to retrain people and bring people on. I think this is, I think that's probably our biggest way we're able to save in our costs is through retention.

Julian Carter: And this is Julian Carter with Office Depot, I think for us in regards to productivity and retention, we were making pretty big strides in it and I think virtual had helped us. By the time we really started to get really in-depth in the virtual business I think our cost savings really came from the benefit load that we currently are burdened with internally, and also the fact that we have to pay for the operating and the benefits shrink and also pay for the call to be handled, when we went to the virtual market obviously we didn't have those costs and we are able to actually get a broader variable structure as opposed to what we would have burdened internally. So we've automatically saved within 30 or 40% per call.

Merle Sandler: Well I think one of the problems with the offshoring is often the question of time zones; you've got people who are working at 2:00 in the morning perhaps just because the U.S. is awake so you get rid of that problem. I think that also security related issues perhaps I think people are less concerned if it's something onshore they've got more, they've got more control over it. And again, just looking for the higher agent quality and the ability to up-sell as I said earlier I think that's also a move that's going to attract the locals.

Basil Bennett: When I talk to the different business executives of our clients and new client prospects there's really 5 things that they always bring up, and they do believe that these 5 things are in balance. One is they want to find a way to decrease their costs. Number 2 is they want to find a way to increase revenues and increase profits. Number 3 is increase customer satisfaction. Number 4 is increase customer loyalty and kind of wallet share as they would describe that and number 5 is increase market share. We have a tendency when we're talking about offshore to only talk about the first item and that is decrease costs, so how can I decrease costs? But most business executives are trying to look at all 5. You know, it is important to them decrease costs but they also want to make sure that they continue to grow their revenue, continue to show profitability, high levels of customer satisfaction, customer loyalty for long periods of time and gain a larger market share from the competitors. And I think when they look at offshore, not all clients get all, a good picture of all 5 of those and so that's why I think that there's still 85% of calls are handled in-house because they couldn't address all 5. And I believe very strongly that companies that are doing virtual work, like Jet Blue and Office Depot, that they're, they get the benefit of all 5, that they start to see some of these long-term benefits like customer loyalty and customer satisfaction and increasing their market share.

Basis Bennett: Well, I actually believe that most business executives thought about that all the time, I think 911 required them to act. Business, businessmen are good businessmen and they're always trying to figure out a way to make their business sustainable over long periods of time. And what we have now even with our own clients that we have a distributed network with them, they are asking us to distributed it even more to have, you know, people spread out even more around the country. So I do believe you're right, that there is a heightened awareness to act now and actually get things in place.

GR Badger: You know Jack, there are a number of different solutions that people can use if they want to have a virtual call center or work or have agents working from home. When we started this 5 years ago there wasn't as many options as there are today. We use actually direct dial-up and our solution is we use an Avaya Fault Switch but our home, our home agents, what they need to do is they need to have 2 phone lines, 1 phone line is used to call into the company or call into Jet Blue or a phone switch, then Jet Blue calls them back to funnel calls to them as, or funnel our customers to them.

As we continue to grow and as the industry continues to change, Broadband and DSL those types of solutions, would definitely benefit us because the agents when they're working from home it is a slower connection depending on where they're at in the valley - some of them may only have a 26-6 connection to our server here on site - and that, that creates a little bit of a problem for our agents because the speed isn't as quick as they would like it to be or as we would like it to be. So DSL and Broadband, those are some solutions that definitely would benefit us down the road.

GR Badger: Oh yeah, as we continue with this Blue Learning, as what we call it which is online learning, and if we do have more of a Broadband type of connection we would be able then to funnel graphics, more pictures. Right now the training that is done online is strictly text based and we have to do that because to push that stuff through their dial-up just takes a lot more time.

Basil Bennett: Well, actually this is the first time I've heard that. So I think it's great. You know I really do, we were, we require our agents to have DSL and Broadband capability for several different reasons, but it just, it just makes for a better network in our environment, and we believe it provides a much better experience for our customers like Office Depot. But I just, I'm happy to hear that because that is just going to open up a very wide, we have a wide ability to get to almost millions upon millions of agents out there and if they're going to go into something whether by 2007 there's are going to be a lot of markets that are currently underserved that have very talented workforce sitting there that we'll be able to tap into.

Jack Heacock: Wonderful. For Julian and Basil a new question, IDC says companies are turning to home shoring in response to call center challenges such as the need for superior agent quality that we mentioned earlier, plus the frequent turnover and the seasonal nature of some businesses. How are the peaks and valleys and services able to be addressed differently with home-based agents?

Julian Carter: Sure, this is Julian, I, you know, I think clearly when you look at the virtual model there is a lot more flexibility than if you have full-time equivalent agents staffed in your own business. You know if you look at a typical head and shoulders chart in order to really meet the demand you have to staff well above those, the head and shoulders. However, on the virtual side what we've done here at Office Depot is built a quite elastic model that really essentially meets the half hour demand with half hour FTE and, as such, we can really kind of ride on that line on the demand curve obviously thereby decreasing costs and still ensuring that we meet or increase our quality. And so when you look at the half hourly model, or the daily model, that really just expands itself to the entire business cycle particularly here at Office Depot. We have cyclical periods where we have increased demand some 30, 40% higher than our average. For instance in January when we get the, our peak volume with businesses getting new budgets and such, or our back-to-school timeframes, so we are able to meet that demand, and then the antitheses of that would be we are also able to only use agents where we need them for the down times, for the valleys. So if you look at our night volume which is, which is very small we have 24 by 7 business year, so in the night volume when you only get a couple hundred calls for the entire night we are able to appropriately staff that and still meet the customer's demand at a cost that's quite economical for us and also meeting the quality.

GR Badger: Well for Jet Blue it has definitely made a difference because when agents - one thing that I've really noticed and I think this has been so nice for Jet Blue and that is not only are the agents happier working from home but I think also they are able to teach a good work ethic to their children. There'll be times when we'll go out and we'll visit the agents to make sure that they are in a safe working environment and it has been so refreshing for me Jack, to actually see these people working and then have maybe a 5 year old or 7 year old daughter or son who is either coloring or doing their homework right next to them and they realize that hey that the things that we have in our home aren't, don't just fall from the sky but actually that they, you have to work for the things that we have in life, and I think it teaches them a really good principle of work ethic. So psychologically, I think that has really been beneficial to us to teach many things to all sorts of different people.

Jack Heacock: It's good to hear you say that because while I think most would agree that having a parent at home is a good thing it's certainly no substitute for child care or even elder care for that matter, yet I think just having the presence of an adult in a household has a lot of social implications that we could probably spend hours discussing.

GR Badger: Yeah. And we really emphasize that too, and you're correct that even though they are able to work from home it isn't a substitute for child care and we monitor our calls very closely, we have team supervisors who are monitoring these agents making sure that they don't hear any background noises and making sure that it is a very professional working environment that the customer is hearing.

Jack Heacock: Okay a question for everyone; we've kind of hit on it a little bit but Gartner has estimated that annual churn of about 25 to 30% for outsourced even, even work-at-home agents, but that is still as we've indicated significantly lower than the on premise traditional agent which is oh anywhere from 35 to 100% a year or can be. Can you explain exactly in your experience what, what is causing the drop off from the traditional to the virtual agent beyond what we've already said?

Julian Carter: This is Julian; I'll kind of answer it in a sort of round about way. As part of our initiative this year, which is public knowledge, we are closing down many of our call centers. Along with that we actually have offered or partnered with people such as Willow to see if we can have our agents go through the criteria to become work-at-home agents. Many of our agents saw this as an opportunity to be able to increase their lifestyle benefits. I mean this was really a means for people to have a better quality of life by cutting down their transportation time to and from work. In some of our areas I mean the average commute could be 45 minutes to an hour so that's an extra 2 hours a day, 10 hours a week that people could do other things with.

So I think when you go back to looking at why people are retained in the work-at-home agents those are some very strong reasons. I think the other thing is when it comes to the work-at-home agent you're getting paid for the hours you work and so you can really maximize your earning potential, and I think that is also a really big reason. And it's for the most part it's an entrepreneurial spirit, people feel like they have some control over their life or their lifestyle, over their earnings and I think that does a lot for their psychological perspective.

Jack Heacock: In the interest of time, since its quarter to the hour, I have one more question I'd like to ask everybody and then open things up to the greater audience. But could you describe some of the security myths associated with home-based teleworkers and in your opinions, collectively, is security better or worse if you will, for home-based agents?

GR Badger: I'll speak on behalf of Jet Blue. It wouldn't really matter if we had home-based agents or if our call center was here on site. We monitor our agents so closely that would not be a problem from an internal security issue, and then even when we have agents that do come in and work in the center here they still need to dial into our network, and so whether they're at home or whether they are in the center they still need to dial into our network and our network obviously consists of all sorts of passwords and fire walls and different ports that they need access to. So virtually or if you're on site, it really is exactly the same for Jet Blue.

Basil Bennett: Yeah, this is Basil, those are good points and I think that, the other thing that I would like to point out is - you kind of brought it up about -- forward a few minutes ago -- about profiling the right type of agent and GR was talking about, you know, the work ethic. Willow actually spent almost 6 years developing a psychological profiling test and we've worked with our leadership companies like Office Depot to help us really find the right type of agent who can be successful. And what we've done is, through this time is, we've come up with a set of questions that we're very confident you identify certain things and what you're looking for is integrity and work ethic and discipline and you know honesty and many of those things that every employer wants to have in their workforce. And I think that every security aspect always has to start with did you select the right person and that's one of things we spend at Willow a lot of time making sure we've done. We have all the other capabilities of the monitor and the voice recording and the network security, and the special triple encrypted VPN, but, it really, the one thing that we have done is also start at the very, very beginning to make sure that we've identified the right candidate.

Chuck Wilsker: Hi everybody Chuck Wilsker, I'm the President and CEO of the Telework Coalition. I heard one of you, I'm sorry I don't recall who, mention that you actually visit the homes of your remote employees to ensure that they have a safe working environment. The question is number one; do you then have a concern for the liability that you are assuming by actually having been there? And number two, overall for everybody, how do you address health, safety, ergonomic and environmental concerns for your remote employees? Thank you.

GR Badger: Thank you very much for the question, question Chuck, that was actually me who is with Jet Blue Airways, GR Badger, who - we actually try and go out every quarter and visit our, our agents to make sure that they are working in a safe environment. When our agents do go home, we do have them go through a home training class which consists of about 3 hours. We actually have them sign an agreement which is between themselves and also Jet Blue that they will provide a safe working environment for them to work in. So we don't really assume much of a liability when we do go out and visit them because once they sign that agreement before they go home and start working, it really is up to them that they adhere to that agreement that they have signed.

GR Badger: Theresa, I'll go ahead and handle it, I don't want to take up everyone's time, but how we work it Theresa, again Jet Blue Airways, is a res agent is composed of a team of about 30 people on a team and they need to answer to a team supervisor, that team supervisor monitors them on a daily basis, everyone on their team, and then who would go up from a team supervisor would be a manager, a manager makes sure that the team supervisor is doing their monitorings. We also ask our home agents to come in every other month, well once a month, for a team meeting and then every other month for a one-on-one with their team sup, and so we're still able to manage our res agents very, very closely even though they are working at home. We still want them to be a part of Jet Blue even though they are not actually physically here in the office.

Basil Bennett: This is Basil with Willow, we actually have a little different approach and what we have found with, when we talk to a lot of our clients, is that they try to take their current thought process about their in-house management style and how they do an in-house call center and try to apply all of those to the virtual environment and it doesn't barely work. And what we have done over the last many years is developed, and I refer to it as a science of managing the virtual workforce but there are some people that say, it's maybe even an art, but there are certain techniques that you do have to understand that are different from managing an in-house operations. When I was at Convergys, I had over 10,000 people working for me and I thought I knew how to do that. When you get here and you have a virtual workforce and they have different types of requirements and different needs, you have to manage it differently. And I think a lot, a lot of it is just misunderstanding or not understanding what it takes to do a virtual workforce.

Jack Heacock: This is Jack, just to comment if I may. I've kind of observed that most managers in a traditional sense and even what is advertised from business schools, very rarely manages for objectives whereas the virtual call center industry you're very much managed and monitored for the objectives that we talked about early, earlier. So from an HR point of view there is a very much of a management shift in how you manage, i.e.: for objectives, rather then by what used to be called wandering around or other criteria. Can we have the next question please?

Basil Bennett: This is Basil; I actually had a question for Merle since she probably has the most knowledge in this. We kind of missed you when we were talking about profiling of the, you know, the most likely candidate to be successful as a virtual worker. Has IDC done some work in that area and is there anything unique that you've found?

GR Badger: I guess Jack, I see that the virtual call centers just continue to get, to grow more and more. I, the biggest hurdle that we need to overcome with, here at Jet Blue, is we still want to make sure that employee feels as if they are part of the company and that's why we do have them come in once a month just to, again, feel the culture and feel that we care about them and make sure that they know that they are important to us because the job that they do not only is outstanding but it's a huge a job that they do for us every single day. So I don't think a virtual call center is perfect, obviously there are going to be challenges, but from what I've seen in my experience here compared to other call centers it's just been leaps and bounds above anything else that I've ever experienced, so. I think you're just going to see more and more companies down this road especially when you have a company like Willow who does this outsourcing. I mean I think, I think it was Basil who mentioned you can really target select individuals, high individuals that are very skilled and just do a fabulous job of providing good service.

Julian Carter: Well this is Julian I think a lot of my peers in the industry all want to find out how we're doing it. There is, there is a lot of interest in it recently and I think with our recent announcements of us closing our call centers down and going for the most part 80 to 90% virtual I think says a lot on the strength of our belief in this virtual model. And I think when you can meet or exceed quality, which we have done with our virtual agents, because I think we do get a better quality agent, individuals who have previous management experience, supervisory experience, people who have been in the workforce for some time and have children, to become entrepreneurial, you get a different quality agent that just really cascades down to the customer, and of course you get all the residual benefits of customer loyalty, increased quarter values and other things. So for us, I'd like to consider us sort of champions of this because we are expanding the model and I think people are interested in how we do it and also interested in how they can do it. So I think it is just going to keep continuing to expand.

GR Badger: I think the epitome of call centers happened really this past weekend with the big snow storm in the Northeast. I mean there was a big snow storm, people were trapped and if you had virtual call center or if you worked for a virtual call center you didn't have to worry about going out and digging out your car, or brushing it off with snow, and then even fighting the traffic. All you'd have to do is go downstairs or go into your office and log into the network and go ahead and work your 4 or 8 hours that you need to do for that day and while you're again staying nice and warm in your home and not having to worry to go outside and deal with all the stuff that is going on with the storm and everything else.

Jack Heacock: So it would be real interesting to contrast this blizzard with that blizzard and see what the difference is. Just in a summation kind of comment, one of the phrases that I heard, I think it was Julian used, was elastic model and I haven't really thought about telework that way but I really like that phrase because I think it encompasses a whole lot of flexibility for everyone. And as we move forward I think as a society the need to, if you will, re-employ the semi-retired or the person that's changing jobs or locations, I think can be huge and have many benefits as the society changes and the needs for skilled workers increase when demographics change. I was wondering if I could have a final comment from each one of the panelists? GR do you want to go first?

GR Badger: Sure, I'd just want to thank everyone for the opportunity that I had to get to meet you and hear how you are operating things with your virtual call center and I hope that we can do something else like this again down the road. But if you ever need any help or if we can assist you in anyway we would, feel free to contact me, we would love to help you guys out in anyway we possibly can to sharing any of our ideas or brainstorm new things that might be coming up in the industry.

Julian Carter: Yes I too thank everyone for the ability to participate here. Hopefully we've said some things that made some sense to people. And as far as the virtual model is concerned I just think it's a fabulous method, it's a wonderful alternative to completely going offshore and I think when you can meet or exceed quality at a cost that's reasonable and keep shareholders and customers happy that's the best of all worlds.

Merle Sandler: Again thank you everybody and just sort of a note of caution I think it's, the virtual call center is not necessarily applicable to every single industry so we're not going to have everybody dismantling their regular call centers. It's very much what types of calls are you getting, is there sense of geographical affinity and perhaps if you don't necessarily want to your own, do it yourself but to partner with somebody who has the expertise.

Basil Bennett: Thank you. I would like to first of all thank and congratulate both GR and Julian and their companies I mean we have 2 great representatives of real leadership companies here that both approach problems a little differently but have used some real creative business solutions to come up with some problems that they had in their business. And I think it's remarkable when you have companies of this size doing such, so well and providing real leadership. And of course thank you very much Merle, IDC's been a great company for a long time, we appreciate the affiliation we have with you.

Jack Heacock: Okay and I think at this time I would as moderator, would just very much like to thank Willow for organizing this event and everyone that dialed in to listen and I believe there's going to be a transcript created of the highlights of this discussion and I think you can look forward to having that e-mailed to you. So with that, I'd like to once again thank you all for participating today and once again encourage you to look at the Telcoa website and happy teleworking!