Disabled at-home workers save call centers forced to go remote

This article is the first in NTI@Home’s #WorkforceWednesday series, celebrating 30 years of the ADA by showcasing employment opportunities available for the 1 in 4 Americans with disabilities.

The coronavirus pandemic has forced many companies to switch customer service models to remote work. While the current public health concerns have expedited this transition across industries, the move of brick and mortar call centers to the virtual workplace shown the benefit of having employees with disabilities.

In 2007, Princeton economist and former Clinton administration official Alan S. Blinder predicted more American call center jobs would turn to international markets because of an effort to save money and increase profits. In his report, “How Many U.S. Jobs Might be Offshoreable?,” Blinder wrote that potentially 22 to 29 percent of jobs were going to be headed overseas.

That prediction came true for telemarketing positions (selling products or services using a scripted approach), but it didn’t happen for call center jobs, which require trained individuals to provide information and technical support to customers. The explosion of technology meant Americans – particularly those with disabilities – could conduct customer service jobs remotely, from their homes.

"While the telemarketing jobs might work there, it doesn’t work for companies’ call centers,” said Alan Hubbard, chief operating officer of the nonprofit NTI@Home, which helps Americans with disabilities find at-home job opportunities working in call centers and on IT help desks. “They need to be here because they are customer-service based and understand the customer experience.”

As companies were building onsite call centers, Hubbard and NTI@Home were at the forefront of championing the benefits of remote work and providing job opportunities for Americans with disabilities. Thinking and preparing for the future has been a major reason for the nonprofit’s continued growth in its 25-year history.

“At that time, most of the people went to a building to work,” said Hubbard. “People weren’t predicting what is happening now with more and more companies offering work at home opportunities and workers seeking those opportunities in their job search.”

With COVID-19, call centers were faced with extraordinary challenges. Those working onsite in foreign countries had to move their operations back to the United States, because the Internet technology wasn’t available for those workers to operate remotely. Then pandemic spread to the U.S. and onsite workers in the states had to transform into a remote work force overnight. While states closed businesses, NTI@Home was ready to meet the challenge with its remote workforce already in place.

“We were ahead of anyone else,” said Hubbard. “Our clients were very happy we didn’t have to slow down or make any more adjustments, like other call centers did. It was business as usual for us.”

“Where, in retrospect, I missed the boat is in thinking that the gigantic gap in labor costs between here and India would push it to India rather than to South Dakota,” Blinder told the New York Times. “There were other aspects of the costs to moving the activities that we weren’t thinking about very much back then when people were worrying about offshoring.”

Upwork, an online employment agency for freelancers, recently did a study using United States census figures that showed companies opted to keep jobs here to take advantage of the talented workforce and provide more remote work opportunity, which provide savings costs for them.

Adam Ozimek, an economist at Upworks, said remote work opportunities have given Americans more freedom and flexibility, eliminating or shortening commuting times and redistributing jobs across the United States. Jobs which used to be done in a New York City office are now being done at home in Oxford, Miss.

As a remote business, NTI@Home has been able to provide work opportunities for people in areas where unemployment is traditionally high.

“Companies who hire people in remote areas are having a huge effect on the economy there,” Hubbard said. “We are talking about places where they might have one or two industries in the town and they have closed, leaving people without a job. We see how this works at NTI@Home when we train people who live in rural areas. They are able to spend more money in their communities and better their lives and their families’ lives.”

Looking towards the future of call centers and customer service jobs, Hubbard sees increased demand for disabled workers as companies look to increase efficiencies – demand that can help the 1 in 4 Americans with disabilities thrive.

“In the eyes of businesses, this has opened up a whole new population of workers,” added Hubbard. “We have less turnover than onsite call centers, and our technology allows us to provide outstanding training. Companies who don’t hire Americans with disabilities are missing out.”

NTI@Home, a 501 (c ) (3) nonprofit organization, helping Americans with disabilities find job opportunities in call centers for government organizations, Fortune 500, and large and small companies. You can register for free at www.ntiathome.org to receive free job training and job placement services.