Distributed contact centers have a lot of momentum. Siebel is just the newest company making noise—Siebel bought Ineto last year to get this capability and compete with the likes of Contactual, not to mention companies including Cisco, Avaya, and Siemens, who along with many of the other conventional hardware players in the space are working out their own solutions. Telecom costs are dropping and the virtualization technology is improving to the point where, operationally, the difference between an on-site cubicle and a spare bedroom is vanishing. Broadband and voice over IP comfortably solve the problem of multiple phone lines, and the better virtualization systems treat any node with any type of phone equally. PCs have enough horsepower to play the role of "softphone" with room to spare, so discrete equipment costs are remarkably low—one company-managed PC and a headset will do.

Arguably, even the entry-level virtual contact centers offer more features and functionality than a conventional call center, depending on the age and sophistication of the network, simply because the cost to add "one more feature" for control, monitoring, or data collection over the IP network is so low. Why am I not fully convinced that virtual contact centers are going to sweep the world, then?

Perhaps it's because I haven't seen how virtual centers navigate a major challenge yet. One of the upsides of the virtual contact center is that a hurricane, a broken water main, or some other localized physical disaster can't shut down the company's customer care organization. But the virtual contact center suddenly creates countless little points of frailty—from the home agent's circuit breaker panel to the available bandwidth on their loop of cable. These problems are difficult enough to weed out of a conventional contact center, but impossible to manage at every agent's home.

Then there is the connectivity question itself. Will another Code Red-style event take enough individual users off the network to dent the company's ability to answer the phone? Domestic broadband ISPs are not normally inclined to make hard-and-fast uptime guarantees, either. Business-class DSL or, more rarely, cable is always an option, but those prices tend to be considerably higher than the consumer variety—high enough in aggregate, perhaps, to start making those dedicated T3 circuits in the brick-and-mortar call center look like a savings. Only time will tell.

The other challenge for those looking to employ virtual contact centers is management. I'm not talking about call monitoring or break enforcement or scheduling management. I'm referring to the hands-on coaching and training and reinforcement that is a key part of so many contact center operations. Some of the better contact centers I've visited are big on recognizing their employees, building teams with awards and recognition systems which, honestly, had me flashing back to early grade school. But if it works for them—and, more importantly, is the way their agents are accustomed to working and being rewarded—can they translate that "gold star on the wall" to the virtual world, where the agent's velvet Elvis may hang instead?

The typical answer I have received from virtual call center managers is that they look to hire self-starters and reliable, professional people—people like working mothers, who have honed their sense of duty and responsibility and don't need a constant eye over their shoulder or hands-on positive reinforcement. Thus far, virtualization has largely addressed overflow or incremental offsite work. I'll be very intrigued when a few bold companies mothball a physical center in favor of a large-scale virtualization project, and see just how well the infrastructure—technological, and interpersonal—holds up to the challenge.