This IDC study updates U.S. Home-Based Agent 2005–2010 Forecast and Analysis: Converging Economic Forces to Drive the Expansion of Homeshoring in the United States (IDC #34514, December 2005). This market forecast is specific to outsourced home-based agents in the United States and also examines particularly important trends that are impacting how some types of customer care might best be delivered.

In late 2005, IDC proposed an important irony embedded within the outsourcing model — that "offshoring's underestimated sibling, homeshoring," could play the role of a safe haven of sorts for American workers in a globalized world. Two years later, an additional irony is being pondered — that the bursting U.S. housing bubble actually may serve to increase the value of homeshored customer care solutions.

"Housing's headwinds come at a time when American wage earners — a significant portion of which are customer care representatives working at bricks-and-mortar centers — are already facing myriad challenges to their productivity and their wallets. At the same time, service providers need productive, professional, and dependable agents like never before," notes Stephen Loynd, program manager for Contact Center Services at IDC. "Therefore, with regard to the delivery of high-quality customer care, the American home may become increasingly valuable compared with the American automobile that has long enabled customer care agents to commute to bricks-and-mortar centers."