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.”
