Identifying Critical Success Factors for Labor Flexibility in the Non-face-to-face Service Industry

The primary purpose of this study is to identify the success factors for the design and development of home-based call centers. Both Delphi and survey methods were adopted to conduct this research. This study included 13 participants with experience in working from a home-based call center. The Delphi method is designed as a group communication process, which aims for the convergence of experts" opinions on a specific real-world issue and extracts important factors in a structured manner. Content Validity Rate(CVR) invented by lawshe(1975) was used to judge the most effective factors. Using the Delphi method, the major criteria were grouped into human resources characteristics, physical resources characteristics, organization characteristics and job/task characteristics and 46 factors, including (1) agent"s sense of responsibility, (2) security systems equipment, (3) special career development program for home-based agents, and (4) simplicity of job/task, were identified. The findings of Delphi will be the starting point for next step of verification. The results of this study would provide practical guidelines to the home-based call center workers and a wider perspective to the researchers on the subject.