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By Patricia Qvern

As consumers, we want every call center that provides us with service to operate twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We want to be able to call and order a “thingamabob” at 1:00 a.m. or reach a live person when it’s 90 degrees and the air conditioner isn’t working. As consumers, we love to have the convenience and reliability of picking up the phone and getting what we want or need on our schedule. The reality is, thought, we don’t always get what we want. We must compromise, and this often means calling during regular business hours. In some instances, this is okay—just a little inconvenient.

But what about the times when you need immediate customer service? And how does a business determine if offering 24/7 inbound call center services is necessary?

When I step away from being the consumer and look at it from a business perspective, there are several factors that companies should consider to determine if a 24/7 contact center vendor is necessary for handling their inbound customer contacts.

24/7 Challenges

First, the bad news is that 24/7 staffing is more difficult and more expensive than normal business hours staffing.

• When a contact center vendor provides staffing for sixteen hours a day or twenty-four hours a day, the added cost isn’t just the additional staffing. The contact center vendor must also ensure that the team has support from management, quality assurance, and technical staff.
• With a 24/7 operation, your contact center vendor never closes, so making software adjustments or equipment repairs require careful scheduling. This minimizes any disruption to the service provided to your customers.
• With a 24/7 call center operation, you must determine how to handle holidays. Do your customers expect 24/7 coverage 365 days a year? If so, scheduling can become a significant challenge, and many state laws require paying employees double time on holidays.
• Forecasting call volume to staff the nonstandard hours is more delicate. It’s on a smaller scale than standard hours, and this means your accuracy could make the difference between being understaffed or overstaffed.
• Managing a 24/7 call center operation with different call types, including order taking, customer service, billing questions, technical support, and other types of calls may require you to cross-train more staff to work the nonpeak hours of operation. This will ensure that you have needed staff to cover all the different skills required for different incoming call queues.
• Another factor to consider when evaluating if your contact center vendor needs to be 24/7 is the availability of a good quality workforce during the graveyard shift. If your selected contact center vendor can’t recruit good, reliable people for the middle of the night, then your program may be better off playing a message letting callers know your hours of operation and asking them to call back—especially if the volume of calls is very low.

24/7 Situations

The following questions can help you determine if you require a 24/7 contact center vendor.

• Is the volume substantial enough to cost-justify staffing the contact center vendor operation during all hours of the day, seven days a week?
• Do your customers and prospects require 24/7 support? For healthcare organizations or home service contractors, the answer is often yes. Life happens at any hour and can require immediate attention or the outcome could be life altering. Some professional services, such as financial, insurance, and legal, may also benefit from around-the-clock phone coverage. Also, consider the retail industry, where accessibility, convenience, and being able to talk to a customer service representative at 1:00 a.m. makes them stand out from the competition.

While the decision isn’t always clear, these are some points to consider when analyzing if your contact center vendor needs to be 24/7. Many companies can benefit from providing an open line of communication with a live person at all hours. It promotes confidence, trust, and reliability. It’s up to you to determine if the cost is worth the benefit.

Patricia Qvern is an operations manager at Quality Contact Solutions, an outsourced contact center vendor. Patricia has twenty years of experience in the telemarketing and call center industry. As an operations manager, she is responsible for managing the day-to-day relationship with clients and front-line contact center teams.

By Melissa Hinrichs

Capturing data during a telemarketing call seems straightforward, doesn’t it? The telemarketing agent simply types in what the customer says. However, when it comes to analyzing data and running reports from that data, it becomes evident that the more streamlined the data capture process, the better the data is. Here are four basic steps I follow when setting up the data capture process with any new telemarketing program.

1) Understand Client Expectations: The first rule is: Never assume anything. Assumption can be a killer for all parties involved. Make sure you clearly understand what data elements are required by the client. In addition, make sure you clearly understand every data field that will be required, the file layout format requirements, the data capture limitations, and the fields that can be overwritten with updated data during the telephone call.

Set up a meeting with a client or make a phone call to clarify some of these answers if necessary. A client will respect you for caring about their data enough to take the time to ask.

2) Set Up Data Capture: Once you have identified the data capture requirements, make sure you set up your program so you are able to limit any possibilities of mistakes during the data capture process. While this may seem to be a time killer in the beginning, it will save you time in the end. There are many ways to try to limit the possibility of errors. Here are my recommendations:

• Drop-Down Lists:It’s helpful to limit fields to specific answers, such as yes/no or a list of choices. This enables the telemarketing agent to move through the script more quickly and also helps ensure that the captured data is accurate. One example is providing a drop-down list of relevant or acceptable titles to choose from to prevent getting VP of Sales, Vice President of Sales, Sales VP, or some other combination. Check with your client and create a single list of standard titles.
• Field Requirements: This can mean many things. For instance, for required fields, make sure the agent must provide an answer in those fields. If it’s a field that should only be a number, restrict it to a numeric field so agents can only enter a number. In addition, if the data field has a length restriction, limit the data capture field length. This will ensure that data isn’t truncated, and it saves valuable time later spent trying to figure out how to fix the data on the back end.
• Rules: Determine what capitalization rules the data must follow, and then make every field require the proper use of capitalization. It looks sloppy if you have some fields in uppercase, while others are both uppercase and lowercase. Take a close look at all drop-down lists or pre-populated fields to ensure that you’re following consistent capitalization rules.

3) Create Checks and Balances: The program is now up and running and the data is captured. Great! You’ve set up everything so the data should be captured correctly, so go ahead and send the data to your client. Wrong! As much as I wish that all data collection processes resulted in perfect data, there always seems to be occasional errors. As data specialists we must catch those errors before the client catches them for us.

The best thing is to set up a system to double-check the results. This step takes place after the raw data is extracted from the telemarketing database and before we send data to a client. It’s best to do this double-check on a daily basis. If you find an error on day one, you can create a systemic fix that potentially prevents that type of data entry error from occurring again.

Ask the following questions: Are there answers in a field that should be blank? Are there answers missing in fields that should be populated? Are all the required fields completed with the relevant data? Doing a careful double-check on a daily basis helps ensure that data errors are not passed on to a client.

4) Deliver the Data: Bravo! You’re ready to deliver the data your client has been waiting for. There are three key pieces of information when delivering data:

• Is the file type comma-delimited, tab-delimited, or in Excel?
• What is the deadline for the data to be submitted?
• Will the file be submitted via email or SFTP?

When you’re working with a new client, it’s a good idea to find out the answers to these questions before you start the telemarketing program. This helps ensure that you’re not scrambling to access this information at the last minute. In addition (and particularly with more complex data files), it is always a good idea to send a sample data file for the client to approve before sending actual data.

When it comes to the world of data, following these four steps ensures the delivery of good clean data.

Melissa Hinrichs is director of client services for Quality Contact Solutions, an outsourced telemarketing organization. Melissa leads a team that ensures that client data and reports are delivered on time and without errors. With more than twenty years of database management and reporting experience, Melissa loves helping her clients make better business decisions by providing them with relevant data and reports on a daily basis. Reach Melissa at melissa.hinrichs@qualtiycontactsolutiosn.com or 516-656-5125.

[From Connection Magazine – July/August 2016]

By Stephen Ferber

Although my wife and I have been in the car-buying market before, this time is different. The car is not for us. It is for our soon to be sixteen-year-old daughter. For the first time, so many new factors have been part of our decision-making process: Buy or lease? New or “pre-owned?” How much to spend? How does cost play into safety concerns? What do we do with the car when she goes to college? Does our thirteen-year-old son acquire primary rights to the keys when he turns sixteen during the middle of our daughter’s freshman year in college? I could go on, but you get the point.

So, after we made our automobile decision, the complex (or dysfunctional) circuits in my brain, no doubt affected by my years in the call center industry, sent the following question to the front of my mind: Can we draw parallels between buying or leasing a car with making an informed decision about picking the right outsource call center solution?

I found an article on Edmunds.com, the self-proclaimed “US Online Resource for Automotive Information.” The article is called “10 Steps to Finding the Right Car for You.” It was comprehensive and well-structured, yet simple as well.

I took Edmunds’s ten steps for acquiring a new car and applied them to selecting the best outsource call center solution. This is not meant to be something formal – just something you can add to your file of call center resources.

There is nothing super-mystical about this. As with most strategic business decisions and transactions, there are three steps to take: 1) sound planning as to what you want to achieve; 2) a well thought-out and implemented process to get there; and 3) trusting your experience, your advisors or teammates, and your gut instincts to make a selection.

Step #1: Consider Your Needs Rather Than Your Wants.

Automobile Needs: How many passengers do you want to carry? What type of driving do you want to do? Is fuel economy a priority? Which is more important, functionality or styling?

Call Center Needs: How many call center agents do you currently need? How many do you anticipate needing at any seasonal or other peak periods? What about permanent ramping down the road? Do you require customer service, technical support, sales, inbound, outbound, back-office, social media support, or a combination of capabilities? How important are the economics to you? Can you evaluate your call center options based on a healthy balance between quality and cost? Or is cost the driving factor? How much weight do you assign to operational processes, company culture, results, and management versus the beauty of the building, furniture, flooring, layout, overall appearance of the facility, and desirability of the geographical destination?

Step #2: How Much Can You Afford?

Automobile: What is your budget?

Call Center: What is your budget?

Step #3: Should You Lease or Own?

Automobile Lease Pros: You can drive a more expensive car for less money. You can drive a new car every few years. There are no trade-in hassles at the end of the lease.

Call Center Outsourcing Pros: You can save capital expenditures, not carry fixed costs, and avoid underutilization of resources. Your outsourced provider is responsible for hiring, training and management, facility and technology maintenance, and upgrades. At the end of your outsourcing agreement, you do not have any hard assets to sell or try to re-allocate.

Automobile Ownership Pros: There are no mileage penalties for increased driving. In the long term, your car expenses will be lower. You have the right to modify your car to your tastes.

Call Center Ownership Pros: To the extent your available capacity exists, you can leverage your fixed costs and investment. If you can run your call center efficiently and at full capacity, in the long term you could save money after covering your initial capital expenditures, continued fixed costs, and ongoing maintenance and upgrade requirements. You have the ability to modify anything you want in the call center to your tastes. Step #4: Have You Considered All of the Costs of Ownership?

Automobile: Depreciation, insurance, maintenance, financing, banking fees, repairs, fuel costs, and more.

Call Center: Capital investment, depreciation, amortization, salaries and wages, benefits, payroll and other taxes, healthcare, utilities, technology licenses, maintenance, fixed costs (selling, general, and administrative costs), disposition costs, and more.

Step #5: Have You Considered Comparable Options?

Automobile: Have you evaluated similar cars in your class (based on your analysis in Steps 1-4)?

Call Center: Have you evaluated call centers with similar capabilities (based on your analysis in Steps 1-4)?

Step #6: Check Availability.

Automobile: What dealers have the car you want in stock?

Call Center: What specific locations, geographies, and call center providers have the capabilities to meet the above conclusions?

Step #7: Schedule a Test Drive (“Kick the Tires”).

Automobile: Take a test drive.

Call Center: Conduct a site a visit and perform due diligence.

Step #8: Take Your Test Drive.

Automobile: Drive it the way you would use the car if you bought it. Spend enough time to look it over. Consider your intuition and follow your instincts.

Call Center: During your site visit, evaluate the call center’s capabilities based on the criteria that motivated you to go there. Consider whether the people who work for and manage the call center operation are people you trust, who are qualified, and who you would enjoy working with each day. Spend enough time at the call center so you can really digest what makes it tick, and see it for what it truly is. Then, consider your intuition and follow your instincts.

Step #9: Make Your Decision.

Automobile: Sleep on it. If you need to, take several steps back and drive more cars. Realize there isn’t one perfect answer. There could be several good choices, and it’s really a matter of individual taste and intuition.

Call Center: Sleep on it, but maybe for more than one night. If you need to, take several steps back in order to determine if there are other call centers you should visit. Realize there isn’t one perfect answer. There could be several good choices, and it’s really a matter of you and your team’s taste and intuition.

Step #10: Complete the Deal.

Automobile: Make sure the agreement for the car you choose matches the deal and specifications; make sure it is the exact car you acquired. Then drive it off the lot.

Call Center: Make sure the agreement reflects what you wanted, contains all the important business terms, and matches the expectations set between the parties. Then begin the implementation.

As for my daughter, we bought her a new four-door Honda Accord.

Stephen Ferber is the managing partner for Golden Gate BPO Solutions.

[From Connection Magazine – December 2013]

By Richard Hamilton

The difference between a good program start-up and a poor program start-up is well-executed implementation. There are many variables to an implementation plan, and every call center program is different. What type of communication will take place – inbound calls, outbound calls, emails, IM, or mail? Know the goal of each communication: Is it sales, customer service, lead generation, collections, surveys, or appointment scheduling? Are there any regulations that need to be adhered to? What kind of reporting will be required, and how will it need to be transmitted? What type of technology is necessary and available for the program? How many seats will be required for the campaign?

Even though any two programs can be completely different, each one should follow the same general plan for successful implementation.

Steps to Successful Implementation: The first step is to clearly define and understand the vision for the new program. This means taking the time to speak with the client – whether internal or external – and any other stakeholders. Make sure you are in agreement about how the program will function, when it needs to launch, and the goals associated with it.

With an understanding of the client’s vision, create the plan to achieve that vision. The key to this phase is the internal team used for the project. Stephen Covey aptly noted that the greatest success comes from teams, not individuals. “Dependent people need others to get what they want,” Covey said. “Independent people can get what they want through their own efforts. Interdependent people combine their own efforts with the efforts of others to achieve their greatest success.”

The first step is identifying who needs to be on the program launch team. In addition, consider the following: What types of technology will be used? What reporting demands will there be? Who can best manage the program after the initial implementation? Does anyone within the company have past experience with a similar program? What agent resources will the staff need? Getting the right people involved early and often will lead to a more successful program.

Second, meet with the newly created program launch team and help them understand the client or stakeholder’s vision so that each member can better contribute based on their area of expertise.

Then, as you begin to put the program together, listen carefully to each member’s ideas, thoughts, and concerns. Along with using proven processes, encourage team members to think creatively and suggest new ideas. Each member’s input will help to establish the milestones and the tasks needed to reach those milestones.

Finally, based on the team’s input, create the plan complete with milestones, tasks, and dates to accomplish them. This will help the team understand how their individual tasks tie in with the rest of the team and the project. Set up a timeline to achieve all tasks based on these needs. (However, be aware that the time determined by the client is usually shorter.) Carefully creating the plan is vital to an on-time completion.

The new program plan can be organized in many ways, such as with project management software or a Gantt chart using a spreadsheet. The important thing is that it’s a plan all team members understand and refer to as needed.

Implementation: Once the plan is in place, set up reoccurring team meetings. Communication is the key to a successful program implementation. These meetings will help the team to communicate progress as well as bring up any issues the team needs to be aware of, and solve problems together.

It is important to be flexible and solution-oriented, since a new program will always encounter unforeseen issues and obstacles needing resolution. If timelines slip, be prepared to make adjustments so that the end date is still attainable.

Make sure to spend sufficient time testing the new program. After the team has tested all processes, have other employees – including the agents who will work on the new program – test each process to make sure everything works as planned. It is better to adjust the program during the testing phase when only a few people are involved then after it is launched and an issue affects the success of the whole program.

Before launching the program, take the time to properly train your staff. If management was involved in the creation process, they can be more heavily involved in the training of the agents. Although having agents help with testing is a good way to familiarize them with the program, formal training is still needed. Focus your efforts on those processes that are new to the agents, while briefly reviewing processes they have used before.

Follow Up: After the program launches, there should be a specified timeframe (agreed upon during the planning stage) to continue to monitor the new program to make sure it is running properly. It is important to respond to any issues or concerns the agents or client have as quickly as possible.

During this time, an evaluation should take place, looking at the new program from all areas. Make note of those ideas and concepts that worked well so they can be used on future programs. Don’t forget about the obstacles and issues that came up, and learn from them so they can be avoided or planned for in the future.

Throughout the entire process, make sure to document the processes and procedures associated with the new program. You will want to have everything written down so everyone involved in the new program understands how the program is designed to run most effectively.

Starting a new program can be exciting and stressful at the same time. Strive to strike a balance between following a proven game plan and engaging in innovative thinking. Clearly understanding what your client’s goal is and working hard towards achieving that goal using the steps listed here will lead to a successful new program launch.

Richard Hamilton is director of implementation and team improvement at Quality Contact Solutions.

[From Connection Magazine – September 2013]