If the phone runs in a browser, an agent can be anywhere with a steady connection. That makes home working possible. Whether it is a good idea depends on things that have nothing to do with software.
What genuinely gets better
You can hire outside Nairobi. A good agent in Nakuru or Kisumu is a good agent. Removing the commute removes a constraint on who you can employ, and often on what you must pay.
People stay longer. A two-hour daily commute is a reason to leave a job. Removing it is one of the cheapest retention levers available.
You can cover awkward hours. Early and late shifts are far easier to staff when nobody has to travel in the dark.
The office gets cheaper. Obvious, though usually the smallest of these.
What genuinely gets harder
The quiet room problem. This is the real one. An agent needs somewhere they can speak without a child, a television or a neighbour’s generator in the background. Many homes do not have that, and discovering it after hiring is painful for everyone.
Ask directly at interview, and ask kindly. “Where in your home would you take calls, and what else happens in that room?” is a fair question and the answer is usually honest.
The supervisor loses the room. Walking the floor tells a supervisor things no report does — who sounds tired, who is struggling, who has gone quiet. That disappears entirely, and nothing fully replaces it.
What partly replaces it: a live board showing who is on a call and who is free, listening to a few recorded calls every day, and a short deliberate conversation with each agent each week. All of that has to be scheduled, because it no longer happens by accident.
New people learn slowly. An agent in their first fortnight learns most by overhearing the person next to them. At home there is nobody next to them. Which is why the first week needs designing.
Connections vary. You are now dependent on twelve domestic lines instead of one business one.
The practical setup
Connection. A steady 5 Mbps is plenty for voice. Stability matters far more than speed — the detail is here. Ask for a speed test at the hour they will work, not at midnight.
Headset. Supply it. Do not let people use whatever came with their phone; it is the difference between sounding professional and sounding distant.
Power. A laptop survives a cut; a desktop does not. If someone is on a desktop, they need a UPS or they will drop mid-call.
A fallback. Configure the system to ring their mobile if the browser connection fails. Set this up before the first outage, not during it.
What to put in writing
Four things, agreed before the first shift.
Hours, exactly. Including when they are expected to be reachable and when they are not. Home working blurs this by default and resentment grows in the blur.
What happens when the connection fails. Who they tell, how, and what the system does with their calls. Without this, an outage becomes a disciplinary conversation instead of an operational one.
Confidentiality. They are handling customer information in a room other people walk through. Say what that means in practice — screens not visible, calls not on speaker, records not written on paper left on a table.
Equipment. What you supply, what they supply, what happens to it when they leave.
A hybrid is usually best
The arrangement that works most often in Kenya is not fully remote. It is most days at home, one day a week together.
That day is when new people learn, when the supervisor sees faces, and when the team becomes a team rather than a rota. It costs one day of commuting and solves most of what home working breaks.
If you are running a desk where everybody is remote and nobody has met, budget deliberately for the things proximity used to do for free.