EUGENE — For a little over a year, Jackie Harmon, 32, of Eugene, has handled phone calls as a customer service agent for Enterprise Rent-A-Car.
For the past three months, she has been doing that in the comfort of her own home. And she has noticed that the occasional tough call doesn’t sting as much as it might have in the office.
“I know I take it a lot better (when I’m at home),” she said. “I’m in my bunny slippers. It’s really hard for me to take it too seriously.”
Harmon is one of Enterprise’s 20 “home agents.” The company, which is based in St. Louis and operates a 300-person call center in downtown Eugene, plans to increase its Eugene home-based work force to about 75 agents in the next six months, spokeswoman Christy Conrad said.
The concept of telecommuting — employees working from home or another remote location instead of the office — has been around for decades. It was touted as an answer to the energy crisis in the 1970s, heralded in the 1980s as a way to balance work and family, and now is being lauded as a way to boost productivity and trim facilities costs.
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