Australia's financial institutions are harnessing advanced contact centre technology to allow more call centre staff to work from home. Speaking during a panel session at the 5th Future of Banking and Financial Services conference, organised by FST Media, on Friday, BT Financial's group head of technology for customer service, Craig Carter said it eventually wanted to have 50 per cent of its contact agents working at home.Meanwhile Jennifer Rufati, Westpac's head of customer operations, said the bank already had 70 contact centre agents working from home and was keen to grow that number. Communications technology is now able to take a call to a contact centre and route it over the internet to the most appropriate person - regardless of location.Rod Maxwell, solutions director for communications technology specialist Avaya, claims: "The large majority of companies look to have home-based workers. They are less likely to take sick time or leave."Reducing contact centre churn has significant economic benefits as, according to callcentres.net, replacing an operator costs $20,000 a pop. But Maxwell's claim that the large majority of companies are looking for home-based contact workers is not backed by the research. Only one in five companies had a home-based call centre policy when callcentres.net conducted a survey last year, although that number is set to increase.One of the benefits of allowing call centre operators to work from home is that it expands the skills pool. According to Rufati: "It can also open the pool to regional resources, disabled people and retired skilled people who want to work part time; they all become potential recruitment targets."She said one of the benefits of being able to offer home-based work to older-age workers in particular was that it was possible to organise a better alignment between bank client and call centre operator. "Are your customers going to take superannuation advice from a 22-year-old over the phone or someone with a better demographic fit," she mused.While mute on the issue of home-based contact centre operators, BankWest's chief technology officer, Nick Lewins, said the bank was now routing calls to staff in its retail bank branches during quiet periods. However, he acknowledged it was important to carefully manage how this was tackled, as, generally, call centre operators had different KPIs to branch staff.