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The growing availability of homeshoring jobs is an outward sign of a mini "industrial revolution" which is taking place in the customer service industry of the United States and Canada.

Homeshoring companies are looking for people to fill home based customer service agent positions all over the USA and Canada. Being able to find home-based employment will help many people caught in the poverty trap of low/fixed incomes because of difficult circumstances. These people include many stay-at-home parents who can't go out to work because the cost of childcare is prohibitive. Work at home jobs will also help disabled persons, students and senior citizens who need extra income to eke out their pensions.

What Is Homeshoring?

Homeshoring describes the practice of using home-based telecommuting staff to handle call center work. Jobs which were previously outsourced to overseas centers and filled by foreign workers are now being kept onshore.

Outsourcing was a huge trend in the 1990's because foreign labour was much cheaper and companies could also save a lot of money on overheads incurred in buying and maintaining buildings to accommodate staff. Customer service workers in the United States were hit hard by job losses, but the balance has altered and home-based customer service agents are once again needed.

Homeshoring and Customer Satisfaction

Homeshoring is a great example of how customer opinion can make a dramatic change to the way big businesses work. Customers got totally fed up with being forced to deal with agents at foreign call centers because of the difficulty in understanding what they were saying. Simple queries were frustrating enough but, people seeking specialised advice, (eg things such as technical help with a computer issue) were outraged at the level of assistance the companies in question were providing.

Of course, dissatisfied customers did not return to companies where they had experienced such low levels of customer service, and the companies' profits showed something was seriously wrong. Shareholders in the companies were not at all happy, so something had to be done to achieve improved levels of customer satisfaction.

Homeshoring Virtual Careers

Customers scored a resounding victory over the industries with poor customer service records, but companies did not want to go back to the former system of staffing call centers. After all, the outsourcing experiment started partly because of the high overheads involved in employing staff to work in physical call centers. Fortunately (for people who want to work at home as well as for the companies who want to save money) the Internet offers a solution in the form of virtual assistance work at home.

Instead of companies having actual call centers, people who want to work at home set up their own "virtual call centers" in their home and offer their services for virtual assistance jobs. The only equipment needed to set up a basic home call center is a dedicated phone line and a personal computer with high speed Internet connection.

This mini industrial revolution is quietly changing the lives of many people who are finding employment at home through homeshoring companies.