The Future of Office Space in Telemarketing


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The Future of Office Space in Telemarketing

This isn't normally looked at as part of the overall infrastructure of a telemarketing company, however it is probably one of the most costly.

Renting office space has changed very little over the course of the last 40 years, you search for a suitable property and you lease it for a certain length of time. Of course variations such as serviced or co-working spaces can change the cost base, but in principal its the same as it was in the 1980's

With the current trend of moving technology into the cloud and using browser based software, there is little need for people in telemarketing jobs to be physically present at a give location, so where are we likely to be in the future?

There still seems to be a feeling that if you have a business, then you need an office, so in the short term there will probably be not much change to how things are currently.

Hot desking may become more widespread as people strive to keep overheads down, but this will only be a short term trend.

People are becoming more aware of climate change and frustrated by travel times to work. Couple this with town centre office costs are high and issues such as the current public health problems with the Coronavirus (see enforced homeworking), means that in the medium term it is likely that agents will work from home and only a virtual office will exist. Of course meetings with clients will still need space, but these can easily be rented on a per use basis.

While this will allow business to "move the cost" of floor space to the operator, people will still need to chat with each other or collaborate on documents, so there is already a rise in tools to support this with a small sample being:

  • MSFT Teams
  • HeySpace
  • Wire
  • Winio
  • Slack
  • Zoho Connect
  • VOIP providers have realised that there is money to be made in this area and vendors such as:

  • RingCentral
  • 8x8
  • Vonage
  • CloudCall
  • are all moving towards a collaboration platform, but from the telco perspective.

    In the long term, the trends seem pretty clear that the internet will rule and home working with be the most normal way for people to work.

    The office commute will be a thing of the past, with video conferencing and collaboration tools taking over from face to face meetings.

    Telemarketing companies will become virtual with little or no overheads relating to office space, with only the occasional “real world” meeting happening.

    While Aha! Is not a telemarketing company, they are an entirely remote based organisation who have released a nice blog post about this. See office-vs-remote-team-meetings

    To generation X this move towards "virtualisation" may seem like its far fetched and "will never happen", but you only need to look at organisations such as Aha! and how much time Generation Z spend on line to realise that this trend is happening already.