Call Center Outsourcing for Today's Businesses

Many successful businesses today have found a way to improve customer service and reduce overall costs by having call center operations run through an outsourced provider.

Call center outsourcing helps businesses to better serve their customers with skilled agents that guarantee high service quality levels. Also, call center outsourcing can be beneficial for businesses looking to succeed in Business 2.0.

A VendorSeek.com article, “Call Center Outsourcing Trends: How Outsourcing Call Center Functions Drive Business 2.0,” highlights the move to Business 2.0 and the role call center outsourcing will play.

According to the article, outsourcing call center activities can help a company to “hold an edge in the market.” For example, the incorporation of social media networking has helped many companies today to improve their operations.

Also, with more and more consumers having wireless services, call centers can utilize the ability to connect with customers whenever needed to lower abandonment as well as increase call satisfaction.

In addition to addressing the new market, call center outsourcing via a hybrid approach allows even companies unwilling to push all of their customer contact outside to select calls to be handled in-house.

Source: tmcnet.com

An Unconventional Approach to Training Call Center Agents

While there are many necessary steps to take in order to properly manage and accurately track a company’s call monitoring system, including the decision of how much – and what – to monitor, according to 3rd party remote call monitoring provider BPA International, there are other pieces of the call center puzzle that need to be put in place.

Just as important as staffing successful agents to conduct the calls, as well as having the appropriate management in place to ensure a smooth operational system, training is a must.

Lisa Renda, CEO, BPA International, told TMCnet in a previous interview that training needs to accomplish multiple objectives including new business process needs, such as pricing changes in various services so that agents can be up to speed when discussing contracts with an agent, as well as new products.

Additionally, compliance and ongoing agent development training are other common steps to take in order to have each staff member as productive as possible.

What’s more, Renda said that training on business process needs and compliance are two of the most important in a growing enterprise.

“There are various media through which to deliver this information: small process changes can be communicated via a standardized format e-mail,” Renda said, adding that another method, namely desk site e-learning, such as multimedia, allows agents to see and hear and interact with the training environment at their desk will help increase comprehension and the ability to repeat the desired skill.

What’s surprising about many of Renda’s suggestions is the amount of time spent training off the phone.

“One of the bigger challenges outside of quality monitoring is getting the operational team to spend the money to take an agent off the phone in order to do refresher or ongoing training,” she said. “In the call center business, there is always competition between answering the phone and educating an associate on a new product launch.”

So, if a company takes Renda’s advice, you can properly train your employees while simultaneously saving phone time and improve productivity.

Source: tmcnet.com

Knowlagent's Calculator Controls Labor Costs In Call Center

Knowlagent offers calculator that will help to find some quick hits if you’re looking to maximize efficiencies in your call center in the new year.

Using standard industry data or own custom entries, the tool will enable to uncover some of the hidden labor costs driven by common call center staffing methods.

The calculator will discover costs associated with:

-Manual agent management
-Off-phone time for training and coaching
-Avoidable attrition
-Inefficient screening processes.

You can download the calculator here.

Frontier Airlines closes Las Cruces call center

For the first time in nearly nine years, Las Crucen Etta Hough won't go to work tomorrow at the Frontier Airlines call center on Hickory Loop. That's because with today's final shift -- set to end at midnight -- the facility will close its doors.

Hough said she is sad to see this day come.

"Very much so," she said. "We have a very tight-knit group. Everybody has been wonderful to work with."

There are still about 100 workers left at the facility, which at one time employed as many as 200. The airline opened the customer support center in the summer of 2000 and Ruben Servando Valdez has been the facilities manager ever since the first day.

He said that even after Frontier's parent company, Indianapolis-based Republic Airways Holdings Inc., announced earlier this year that the Las Cruces facility would close, the employees kept their heads up.

"People have continued to work hard, we have a remarkable group of people," Servando Valdez said. "I'm blessed to have worked with these people."

The genesis of the closing can be traced to April 2008, when Frontier filed for bankruptcy. This past summer, Republic Airways Holdings won a bankruptcy court auction for Frontier, with a plan to buy the carrier after a bid by Southwest Airlines was rejected. The deal was finalized in October and Republic announced it would consolidate functions between the airlines, including the call centers.

Las Cruces employees were given the opportunity to stay with the companyAdvertisementand move. Servando Valdez said 11 local workers have accepted and will relocate to Denver, where Frontier is based. As for himself, the only manager the Las Cruces call center has ever known said he plans to stay in the area.

"I'm going to be seeking employment here, in the El Paso-Las Cruces area," said Servando Valdez, an El Paso resident.

Hough said that representatives of the New Mexico Workforce Connection's Las Cruces office visited the call center to help workers who would soon be laid off. Usually, the state will put together a rapid response team to help the workers who will lose their jobs. The team offers information on training, unemployment benefits and other services.

"They were excellent," she said.

Source: lcsun-news.com

The Tricky Business of Call Center Metrics

Not long ago, I wrote about a DataInfoCom webcast with Dick Hunter, the former VP of global consumer support services at Dell. I was fascinated with Hunter's forthrightness in discussing how Dell made the transition from focusing on call length in its call centers to how often problems were actually resolved. While measuring customer satisfaction rather than transaction time is seemingly a no-brainer, not many companies do it.

That's not such a surprise, though, says Cheryl Coppens, a director at Customer Operations Performance Center (COPC), a group dedicated to contact center benchmarking, and one of the sources quoted in a destinationCRM story. If companies are still struggling with satisfying customers' basic needs, it's a mistake for them to try to emulate such customer-service champs as Zappos.com.

A well-known anecdote about Zappos, related in this Inc. story as well as others about the online shoe retailer, involves a woman seeking help in returning some shoes she'd ordered for her husband, who died in a car crash. The call center agent ordered flowers for the woman. But offering such touches will backfire if agents aren't able to solve common problems. Said Coppens:

To throw "wow’" campaigns on top and expect bottom-box people to move up because you’re nicer is not going to do it.

Source: itbusinessedge.com

State funding helps 911 call centers

The Virginia Department of Health, Office of Emergency Medical Services recently awarded the Eastern Shore 911 Communications Center a Rescue Squad Assistance Fund grant for the purchase of two channel radios and one VHF radio and antenna system totaling $51,317. These new radio systems will allow call center dispatchers to communicate in an efficient and timely manner.


The Eastern Shore Communications Center serves the counties of Accomack and Northampton to field and dispatch all 911 calls to the proper EMS responder. It also serves as an emergency operations center for any EMS crisis that occurs in the two counties and the town of Chincoteague.

"It is important for volunteer and nonprofit EMS agencies to apply for grant funding in order to reduce their operating costs and maintain a high level of functionality with state-of-the-art equipment," says Gary Brown, director of the Office of Emergency Medical Services.

RSAF grant funding comes from Virginia's "Four-for-Life" program, which is administered by OEMS. Through this program, $4.25 is deducted from every motor vehicle registration to provide funding for EMS programs in Virginia, which include the RSAF grant program and other funding that is returned to localities for EMS training and equipment.

Additional information is available at www.vdh.virginia.gov/OEMS/Grants/.

The Emergency Medical Services grants program is for Virginia non-profit EMS agencies and organizations.

Tradeshow Marketing Company Selects LiveOps for Inbound Call Center Services

Tradeshow Marketing Company, Ltd. (Pink Sheets: TSHO) today announced the selection and engagement of contact center industry leader, LiveOps, to handle the inbound contact center services for their upcoming direct response television (DRTV) campaign.LiveOps, based in Santa Clara, California, provides the industry's only full-service, virtual call center solution through a network of more than 20,000 independent at-home agents. The LiveOps independent agents will be answering all of the inbound calls generated through the upcoming Tradeshow Marketing DRTV launch. LiveOps is yet another best-in-class campaign partner to join Tradeshow Marketing's DRTV production/creative partner, Cesari Direct, helping to round out the marketing team. In the DRTV market, LiveOps handles over 80% of the calls for the top ten direct response programs. With high-quality independent agents and unique Results-Based Routing capabilities that help increase conversion and upsell, LiveOps has a reputation as the best performing inbound call center, generating up to 33% more revenue per campaign than traditional call centers. Additionally, LiveOps' cloud-based business model allows for unlimited scalability for each campaign that minimizes call abandonment and allows for more orders to be taken even when a company engages in aggressive media and campaign ramping.

Luniel de Beer, President and CEO of Tradeshow Marketing, commented that, "This selection and engagement of LiveOps marks another key milestone towards the launch of our highly anticipated DRTV campaign. We are actively negotiating the additional vendor agreements needed for our campaign and we hope to finalize these before the end of next week." He continued that, "The process of selecting and engaging key vendors such as LiveOps is indispensable as it directly contributes to our readiness to launch the campaign on national television and will ultimately contribute to the overall success of the campaign."

Source: auto-mobi.info

US Banks Set To Begin Offshoring

As America’s top banks emerge from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and the economy shows signs of recovery, Indian outsourcing vendors
Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro are set to gain new offshoring projects worth around $1 billion over the next 1-2 years.

Among the firms seeking operational efficiencies by outsourcing non-core IT and back office projects to India are JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley—which received approval to buy back government stake worth $68 billion earlier this year, as well as American Express, Bank of New York Mellon Corp and Capital One—which have started repaying government debt. Many of these banks had deferred new offshoring decisions as they attempted to cope with TARP funding requirements and internal restructuring processes.

Experts such as Andy Efstathiou , director of banking sourcing practice at research & consulting firm NelsonHall, said US banks are increasing offshoring. “Since the beginning of the economic crisis, many of these contracts have been put on hold. That is beginning to change. It is looking like Q4 of 2009 is shaping up to be a 20% growth over Q4 of 2008,” he told ET in an interview.

The US government’s decision to allow these banks to repay TARP funds also reflects a growing pressure to operate independently devoid of any political and public interference.

In a September survey of around 480 firms by Efstathiou, only 2% said they plan to reduce offshoring, while almost 37% said they will increase offshoring. “The financial services firms we have spoken to intend to increase spending on offshoring. Specifically, in a survey of firms we did in September 2009, only 2% expect to spend less on offshoring, the rest expect to spend the same (61%) or increase spending offshore (37%),” he added.

The merger of the banking systems of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, among many other such deals, is creating newer opportunities for offshoring and outsourcing vendors.


Source: indiatimes.com

Fortune 500 Financial Services Companies Using Virtual Call Centers More

Denver, Colorado - December 7, 2009 - Alpine Access, the provider of virtual contact center solutions for brand-conscious companies, announced today that over the past 12 months the company has seen a significant increase in the number of financial service companies outsourcing their customer service to virtual call centers.

According to internal Alpine Access data, more than 75% of Fortune 500 financial services companies, including retail banks, credit card companies, mortgage providers, and insurance carriers, are currently using or are considering using home-based customer service agents. As the founder of the at-home call center model, Alpine Access serves numerous Fortune 100 financial service companies, and is currently negotiating contracts with several more. The company handles account inquiries, bill payment and processing, balance transfers, account origination, product/service selling, and collections for several of the nation’s leading financial institutions including one of the largest issuers of charge cards, one of the three largest retail banks and one of the three largest private label credit card issuers.


"We signed our first financial services client in 2005 and now a significant portion of our revenue comes from this market," said Christopher Carrington, CEO of Alpine Access. "The at-home model makes sense for financial institutions because it provides extreme security, high quality service and efficient operations at a low overall cost. As a result, the use of at-home customer service agents is becoming much more mainstream among leading financial services companies."

Virtual contact centers hire agents from across the country based on specific skill set requirements. Alpine Access receives more than 10,000 résumés annually from applicants with previous financial services experience. The ability to locate, hire and train agents from anywhere in the U.S. allows virtual centers to employ the top 2-3% of the nation’s most qualified customer service agents. This is especially important to the financial services industry where agents typically handle complex call types and need specific licenses and/or certifications.

In addition to accessing higher quality agents, financial services companies are turning to virtual call centers for these further benefits:

* Information security. Alpine Access is Level 1 PCI DSS compliant as certified by third party audits. In addition, all agent computers are secured through a remote desktop solution and 100% of all calls are recorded.

*Operational cost savings. Virtual call centers have a more flexible workforce, allowing them to efficiently schedule agents based on actual call volume.

*Effective training. By applying the latest adult learning philosophies to distance-based training programs for one of its financial services clients, Alpine Access’ online university has reduced training time by 22%, while performance metrics are nearly 10% higher than the client’s internal brick-and-mortar agents.

While many Fortune 500 institutions moved call center operations offshore earlier in the decade, they are now bringing the function back onshore as security, quality and overall cost has improved through the use of U.S.-based, virtual call center providers. With more than 1,000 agents expected to be handling customer service for financial companies within the next year, Alpine Access continues to lead the homeshoring trend.


Source: contactcenterworld.com

US firms shift call centre ops back home from India

Two weeks ago, AGL Resources Inc., an Atlanta, US-based natural gas distribution company, decided to shift its call centre operations from India to the US. The centre was operated by India’s third largest information technology (IT) services company, Wipro Ltd.

Along with similar instances of Delta Airlines Inc., United Airlines Inc. and Chrysler Group Llc reported earlier in the year, this could raise a flag for Indian business process outsourcing (BPO) firms which earned nearly $15 billion (Rs69,450 crore today) from such back-office work in the year to March.

In-house services: A file photo of a TeamLease Services call centre in Bangalore. Some US states have legislation that requires public utility companies to locate their customer call centres within the service area. Hemant Mishra / Mint

In-house services: A file photo of a TeamLease Services call centre in Bangalore. Some US states have legislation that requires public utility companies to locate their customer call centres within the service area. Hemant Mishra / Mint
The move comes as the downturn in the US and subsequent government bailouts, combined with rules that require service centres to be located locally, are persuading companies to move jobs back home.