The 21st Century Formula for Success – Increasing Value Not Squeezing Out Costs

The 21st Century needs a new contact center model to transform the industry, focused on the customer, not the cost of doing business with that customer.  The contact center industry needs to look at the value, not simply the cost of contact center services with the ultimate goal: to provide extreme customer satisfaction, which will yield an enthusiastic customer who will, in turn, stimulate strong word-of-mouth loyalty, ultimately leading to higher revenues.

Yes, cost is key and some contact center outsourcing can help save costs, but the siren call of the bottom line obscures the high risk of customer dissatisfaction, which is inevitable due to language barriers, extended length of calls, comprehension issues and a lack of cultural context.  This lack of language comprehension and cultural awareness extends the length of the average call and kills contact center productivity.  In fact, as much as a 90% decline in contact center efficiency as been recorded when language problems and cultural awareness issues are introduced to the customer service platform.

As corporate America chases the cost saving buck, customers are rapidly approaching an emotional tipping point and will soon be shouting into the phone or out their windows, “I mad as hell and I am not going to take it any more!”

Corporate management that ignores these truths are violating their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders.  Does anyone remember when the customer always came first?

Contact Centers of America Aims to Revolutionize Outsourcing

Outbound Call Center Featured Article

August 06, 2009
Contact Centers of America Aims to Revolutionize Outsourcing

By Brendan B. Read, Senior Contributing Editor

Sometimes methods become so inefficient, unproductive, and unworkable that they cannot be fixed, but instead must be tossed out in a complete overhaul, a revolution if you like, replaced by new set of approaches.

Contact Centers of America (CCA) is a new company based in Orlando, Fla. that hopes to be that revolution in outsourcing, sweeping away the cost versus quality and onshoring versus nearshoring and offshoring that have crippled the industry. The company is offering what it says is an integrated blend of best practices aimed at delivering the highest quality service at low costs with staff based in the U.S.

The firm is founded and is led by a successful industry revolutionary, Joe Jacoboni. He created Software Support, Inc. nearly 20 years ago that changed the face of customer support by providing outsourced technical assistance which enabled vastly improved service at less cost. He has come out of retirement to do so again for customer service.

“I got SSI going because I was fed up with poor service,” recounts Jacoboni. “I had a problem with software from a large company and I was put on hold for 45 minutes. They then promised to call me back. That was 17 years ago and I still waiting! Not that long ago I had similar experience with my router that was handled offshore. So I said, ‘enough was enough!”

“Customer satisfaction is in a deep decline, customer loyalty is decreasing and churn is sharply increasing,” he adds. “Companies are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with outsourced solutions that do not respond well to the cultural context of the customer. My vision for CCA is to reshape and revolutionize the contact center industry.”

CCA squares the quality and cost issues with these innovative methods:

–Locating contact centers on college campuses that tap into high quality, readily available workforces, whose supply is replenished every semester to avoid labor market burn-through. College employment offices readily provide staff screening. Facilities costs are minimal thanks to partnerships with the schools. CCA has one center currently set up in Orlando which is a thirty-two thousand square foot facility.

–A network of home-based agents, (Jacoboni prefers to call agents ‘representatives’ as it is more uplifting and respectful), focusing on recruiting untapped labor forces such as disabled military veterans and retirees who cannot readily commute to traditional workplaces. Home representatives provide high quality, flexible labor, are ready to be there when disaster strikes, without the facilities expenses to support them.

–Reliance on hosted platforms for routing, call recording, workforce management by inContact and service/support management by Vertical Solutions. Hosting provides scalable solutions without huge capital and installation costs

–Shared-representative as opposed to dedicated-representative programs and per-contact pricing instead to traditional per-hour rates that save clients’ money by not having them pay unnecessarily for idle staff

“I call our approach ‘ExtremeCustomerSatisfaction’ and we deliver it because we combine staff who are our natural and abundant resources who can increase first call resolution, and customer loyalty, and shorten calls with state of the art technology,” says Jacoboni. “I believe America is ready for this revolution with ‘ExtremeCustomerSatisfaction’ because they want and deserve quality competitive-priced service from Americans.”

Not Your Father’s Contact Center

You have a problem with a product you bought or a service to which you subscribed.  You call the customer service number only to get a poorly disguised Indian, Pakistani or Pilipino accent in the person of a Bob or Jim or Mary or Susan.  Of course, you know that’s not that individual’s real name.  No wonder today everyone hates dealing with this kind of customer service.

Companies have taken their eye off the ball as they blindly follow the promise of offshore cost saving and forget about making the customer happy.  This is a very risky business decision

A poll by Opinion Research indicates 69 percent of Americans are less likely to do business with a company after one bad contact center experience. Yet, according to a 2007 Aspect Index report, customers are 33 percent more likely to do more business with a company after a positive contact center customer experience.

Satisfaction drives revenue and margin.  According to CFI Group 2009 “Contact Center Satisfaction Index 2009”, if you improve your contact center satisfaction index by 5 percent, your word of mouth improves by 5 percent so that you increase your top line growth, and churn declines by 22 percent so you improve your margins.

What if someone changed the rules of the game?  How about a contact center that  brings jobs back to the US, uses real Americans to man the telephones and provides an educational path to a secure, long-term contact center career opportunities rather than using uninspired, unmotivated individuals who lack cultural context and receive minimum pay as the liaison between companies and their most valuable assets, their customers.

This would certainly create something that is not your Father’s contact center.

The Business of Contact Centers Must Change Through the Leveraging of “Natural Human Resources”

The winds of change in the contact center industry are beginning to blow.  Although currently at the gentle breeze stage, some visionaries in corporate America are beginning to see that they can gain a competitive advantage through providing extreme customer satisfaction.  These guys know what they want, but it is the professionals in the contact center business that need to wake up and figure out how to provide what customers need.

For the contact center industry to be successful, it must design and implement support systems that use state-of-the-art, hosted, on-demand technologies. Contact center managers must solve customer service and technical support issues with the appropriate technology that achieves the best results, whether voice, e-mail, chat and allows the contact center and remote representatives to be closely integrated and monitored, ensuring the highest level of customer satisfaction.

Contact center managers must develop and implement a strategic workforce management model, which uses “natural human resources” available in America such as students, retirees, stay-at-home parents, special needs individuals and veterans.  We must take responsibility to look not only at the bottom line, but to provide education, training and contact center jobs in the United States.

The upside is tremendous and there are three simple building blocks that need to be put in place: the innovative use of technology, a closely-knit partnership between the outsource organization and the company it supports, and a unique workforce model.

Bringing Call Centers Home: The Business Case For Onshoring

The call center industry has transformed and evolved over the last decade, away from the focus on customer service and customer satisfaction, to bottom line revenue and outsourced services. Not surprisingly, we have seen steep declines in customer satisfaction and loyalty, and a significant increase in call center employee churn. This obsessive focus on the bottom line has led to many large companies going offshore for call center customer service and technical support, with other companies playing “follow the leader”. The result, overall call center customer satisfaction has declined significantly.

Customer Relationships: The Lifeblood of Call Centers and Ultimately of all Companies

A poll by Opinion Research indicates 69 percent of Americans are less likely to do business with a company after one bad call center experience. Yet, according to a 2007 Aspect Index report, customers are 33 percent more likely to do more business with a company after a positive call center customer experience.

So, while everyone understands how important satisfied customers are and how powerful extremely satisfied customers are, many U.S. companies have shipped this responsibility to the lowest cost provider, often an overseas call center with low wage, under-trained workers. In the rush to commoditize services, the call center industry has taken the relationship with the customer—your customer, your company’s “crown jewels”—and overshadowed your customer’s support and service satisfaction by considerations solely for bottom line.

Offshoring call center services fail to tell the whole story—no one mentions customer satisfaction plummets due to the inability to deliver call center service that fulfills the expectations of an American customer. This has led to a loss of customer satisfaction and customer retention for many companies.

In Outsourcing Call Centers we Have Outsourced Our Most Important Person in Today’s Economy: The Customer!

The 21st Century needs a new call center model to transform the industry, focused on the customer, not the cost of doing business with that customer. The call center industry needs to look at the value, not simply the cost of call center services with the ultimate goal: to provide extreme customer satisfaction, which will yield an enthusiastic customer who will, in turn, stimulate strong word-of-mouth loyalty, which ultimately leads to higher revenues.

Yes, cost is key and some call center outsourcing can help save costs, but the siren call of the bottom line obscures the high risk of customer dissatisfaction, which is inevitable due to language barriers, extended length of calls, comprehension issues, Plus there is a lack of cultural context. This lack of language comprehension and cultural awareness kills call center productivity. The net effect of extended calls is a call center productivity decline of 39 to 105 percent.

In addition, many of the behaviors that Americans intuitively expect from call center representatives are literally and figuratively foreign to international representatives. Representatives need to be able to empathize with customers and respond in a culturally appropriate manner. It is reported that problems with comprehension occur in an average of 18 percent of offshore calls (about one in five calls), which is a prime cause of customer frustration.

Offshore Call Center Support and Service is the Life Time Value (LTV) of a Loyal Customer and Customer Retention

Whether it’s a loss of customers due to the fact they reached a foreign country for call center service and immediately hung up, or a customer who had a bad call center experience, current call center industry practices are causing an increase in costs to retain existing customers and gain new customers—to convert prospects!

We have to recognize that not delivering on the promise of extreme customer satisfaction not only inhibits a company’s word of mouth references, but can also destroy a company. An individual’s campaigns against a company, either face-to-face with family and friends or via social media, allows that story to be told again and again and again, and a company is unable to remove or control these negative references.

The key is not just reducing call center costs, but improving overall return on investment (ROI) of the customer experience. at the call center. It’s not about how quickly are calls answered or first call resolution. A real call center partner should understand the traditional variables, but also recognizes the value of an extremely satisfied customer. This means call center managers must understand what it takes to satisfy a customer’s needs. The call center manager must develop a long-term relationship with the customer to continue to evaluate, recognize and support the customer’s ongoing needs—to build a relationship with the customer that transcends a single call center interaction.

The call center industry must look at offering their services as solutions providers, not body shops. We must understand each client’s specific objectives and the service and support needs of our client’s customers. The only way to meet these objectives and provide extreme customer satisfaction at call centers, is to evaluate the processes and procedures of every touch point of customer contact. We must then determine how to support and implement call center services that positively affect these specific areas, so the client’s customers receive excellent support and service.

Re-Evaluate and Re-Invent the Call Center Industry to Make the Customer Number One

The new call center market is based on three things: the innovative use of technology, a closely knit partnership between the outsource organization and the company it supports, and a unique workforce model.

For the call center industry to be successful, we must design and implement support systems that use state-of-the-art hosted on-demand technologies. Call center managers must solve customer service and technical support issues with the appropriate technology that achieves the best results, whether voice, e-mail, chat and allows the call center and remote representatives to be closely integrated and monitored, ensuring the highest level of customer satisfaction.

Call center managers must develop and implement a strategic workforce management model, which uses “natural human resources” available in America such as students, retirees, stay-at-home parents, special needs individuals and veterans. We must take responsibility to not only look at the bottom line, but to provide education, training and call center jobs in the United States.

The Call Center Industry Must Change!