Tag Archives: Quality Contact Solutions

News

AnswerNet Acquires Quality Contact Solutions

AnswerNet, a full-service provider of inbound, outbound, automated, and global BPO contact center services has acquired Quality Contact Solutions and its subsidiary QCS At Home.

The acquisition was officially finalized on December 31, 2021. As a result, AnswerNet retained all employees of Quality Contact Solutions. Chris Grothe, Quality Contact Solutions’ vice president of operations, was appointed to oversee the company.

Quality Contact Solutions (QCS) specializes in telemarketing call center solutions that achieve sales results for its clients. Their areas of expertise include B2B outbound marketing, B2C outbound marketing, TCPA call center consulting, and outsourced telemarketing quality assurance. Their experience covers a wide variety of industries for clients whose brands are world-renowned.

“We are very excited to welcome the Quality Contact Solutions team to the AnswerNet family,” said Gary Pudles, AnswerNet’s president and CEO. “As one of the most respected providers of call center services in the United States, Quality Contact Solutions offers additional telemarketing, BPO, and compliance expertise and bandwidth that our clients can take advantage of immediately. In addition, the disciplined experience the QCS team adds will benefit all facets of the AnswerNet organization.”

“I am proud of the Quality Contact Solutions team and what we have built in the last 15 years.” added Angela Garfinkel, the former owner of QCS. “With more than 1500 employees and 30 plus call center locations in the U.S., nearshore, and offshore, the combined resources of the AnswerNet companies and Quality Contact Solutions will give the QCS clients access to more services and operational efficiencies in 2022 and beyond,” said Garfinkle.

The Quality Contact Solutions acquisition complements the other brands included in the AnswerNet family of companies, which include business process outsourcing (BPO), telemarketing, education, nonprofit, answering service, appointment setting, and third-party verification.

Articles

Complying with the Latest Telemarketing Rules

By Angela Garfinkel

There have been many changes to telemarketing rules and regulations in 2021. The most notable change was the April 1, 2021, U.S. Supreme Court decision in Facebook v. Druid. 

That decision effectively neutered the plaintiff’s bar in their pursuit of Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) class action lawsuits across the U.S. Here are the top takeaways from the decision: 

  • The decision narrowed the definition of an autodialer. Now virtually all telephony equipment (including predictive dialers) is non-Automated Telephone Dialing Systems (non-ATDS). 
  • This decision does not impact the restriction on robocalls or prerecorded voice messages. 
  • The decision does not impact the other provisions of the TCPA, including compliance with the National Do-Not-Call list. 

Florida Telemarketing Rules

On June 29, 2021, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law CS/SB 1120, a telephone solicitation bill effective on July 1, 2021. 

This law amended the Florida Do-Not-Call Act and the Florida Telemarketing Act and provides a private right of action for telemarketing and text marketing violations. Some industry insiders are calling it a mini-TCPA. 

Also, many other states are expected to follow Florida’s lead, so watch out. Florida was the first state to create Do-Not-Call regulations in the nineties. 

The Florida Do Not Call Act now requires a company to have Prior Express Written Consent (PEWC) from the called party before placing calls or sending text messages using an automated system or a prerecorded call. 

Penalties for Violating Telemarketing Rules

Now, here’s the bad news. Unlike the TCPA, Florida widened the definition of an ATDS, making virtually all telephony equipment and dialers an ATDS. As a result, each per-call violation of $500 can triple to $1,500 per call; companies must capture PEWC before calling or texting a Florida telephone number or a Florida resident. 

The Florida Telemarketing Act now restricts how many times a company can place a call to a customer or prospect and when the calls can be placed. 

Permissible calling times are now 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. (the previous call times were 8 a.m. to 9 p.m.). Plus, a telemarketer may only place up to three calls in 24 hours to one person, regardless of any particular number called. 

In addition, the amendments added an anti-spoofing provision that prohibits utilizing technology to deliberately display a caller ID number that conceals the caller’s true identity. 

Some programs are exempt from the Florida Do-Not-Call Act and the Florida Telemarketing Act, including most Business-to-Business programs. Still, conduct a careful review of the Florida law before placing outbound telemarketing calls to Florida phone numbers or Florida residents. 

Angela Garfinkel is the president and founder of Quality Contact Solutions, a leading outsourced telemarketing services organization. Angela has the pleasure of leading a talented team that runs thousands of outbound telemarketing program hours each day. Contact Angela at angela.garfinkel@qualitycontactsolutions.com or 516-656-5118.

News

Quality Contact Solutions Now SOC 2 Type 1 Certified

Quality Contact Solutions, Inc (QCS), a leading outsource call center and telemarketing company, announced that it is now SOC 2 Type 1 and HIPAA certified. The SOC 2 Type 1 and HIPAA certification report prepared by A-LIGN, a cybersecurity and compliance professional services firm, confirms the company’s information security practices, policies, procedures, and operations meet the SOC 2 and HIPAA standards for security, availability, and confidentiality.

“At QCS, our priority has always been to protect our clients’ data and implement the highest security and privacy measures available, stated Angela Garfinkel, president and founder of Quality Contact Solutions. “Our SOC 2 Type I and HIPAA certification demonstrate our continued commitment. Having a respected third party confirm the strength of our systems validates our efforts.” 

Established by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, the SOC 2 examination is designed for organizations of any size, regardless of industry and scope, by ensuring the personal assets of their potential and existing customers are protected. SOC 2 reports are recognized globally and affirm that a company’s infrastructure, software, people, data, policies, procedures, and operations have been formally reviewed. 

Quality Contact Solutions expects to achieve SOC 2 Type 2 certification by the end of November 2021.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) defines policies, procedures, and processes required to protect electronically protected health information (ePHI). As the regulatory oversight related to HIPAA increases, healthcare providers and their business associates like QCS must ensure compliance on an ongoing basis.

Quality Contact Solutions (QCS) is a certified woman-owned business enterprise and an industry leader in call center and telemarketing services solutions, including B2B and B2C programs. For more information, visit www.qualitycontactsolutions.com

News

Telemarketing Services Firm QCS Hires SOC 2 Auditor

Quality Contact Solutions (QCS) hired Align Assurance, a third-party independent audit firm to perform a SOC 2 audit. A SOC (System and Organization Controls) 2 audit report provides detailed information and assurance about a service organization’s security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy controls, based on their compliance with the AICPA’s (American Institute of Certified Public Accountants) TSC (Trust Services Criteria). Over the past year the company has prepared and is now ready to begin the audit process.

“We are committed to ensuring the privacy and security of our client data and systems,” said Angela Garfinkel president and founder of Quality Contact Solutions. “To demonstrate our commitment, we are investing in SOC 2 Type II certification. The certification will assure current and future clients of our commitment to data safety.”

Align Assurance will handle the audit. The expected SOC 2 Type 1 certification completion is June 2021, with SOC 2 Type II certification completion expected by October 2021. 

Designed by the AICPA, the SOC 2 examinations assists organizations of any size, regardless of industry and scope, by ensuring the protection of the personal assets of their potential and existing customers. The SOC 2 attestation demonstrates that the services and systems assessed to achieve the rigorous security standards, processing integrity, confidentiality, privacy, and availability. 

Dean Garfinkel, QCS’s chief operating officer, will lead the project along with his team of IT and compliance professionals. “SOC 2 Type II certification is considered to be the benchmark for data security. By no means is the process quick and easy but it’s essential. We believe an in-depth review will demonstrate our commitment to data security and meeting the compliance needs of our clients today and in the future.”

Quality Contact Solutions is a certified woman-owned business enterprise and an industry leader in call center and telemarketing services solutions, including B2B and B2C programs. QCS offers many telemarketing services, including outsourced sales, upselling, cross-selling, surveys, lead generation, sales lead qualification, appointment setting, inside sales, and inbound customer service. 

News

Chris Grothe Joins Quality Contact Solutions as VP of Operations

Quality Contact Solutions, Inc (QCS) announced that Chris Grothe has joined the organization as vice president of operations. Grothe is responsible for driving business performance and ensuring clients achieve their business process outsourcing (BPO) goals. 

Before joining the QCS team, Grothe racked up nearly three decades of call center and telemarketing services industry experience. Throughout his extensive career his passion for identifying opportunities and executing new strategies within an outsourced call center setting has fueled his success. In addition, Grothe has key experience in leading organizational change initiatives. As a telemarketing services professional, Grothe has immersed himself in the servant leadership philosophy and prioritizes removing obstacles that may hinder his team’s success.

“We are thrilled to have Chris join our team. He’s a skilled leader and is a great fit for the hungry, humble, smart culture we’ve built,” said Angela Garfinkel, president and founder of Quality Contact Solutions. “With his record of successful organizational development, operations improvement, and change management, Chris perfectly complements our talented leadership team.” 

Grothe is excited to make an impact. “I’ve been impressed with the tremendous ownership, effort, and passion from the entire QCS team,” Grothe noted. “When it comes to executing client programs, the team is persistent and works with urgency to achieve objectives and goals. It is my intent to ensure we continue to leverage the vast talent and knowledge we have as a company and to position the QCS operations team and our owner-operator partners for continued success.”

Quality Contact Solutions (QCS) is a certified woman-owned business enterprise and an industry leader in call center and telemarketing services solutions, including B2B and B2C programs. QCS offers many telemarketing services including outsourced sales, upsell, cross-sell, surveys, lead generation, sales lead qualification, appointment setting, inside sales, and inbound customer service. The QCS expertise resides in providing turnkey outsourced call center services that augments sales and marketing programs across a variety of industries. 

News

QCS Launches Division to Serve SMB Market

Quality Contact Solutions announced that Steve and Marie Korn have joined the Quality Contact Solutions team to head up a new small and medium business division (QCS SMB). QCS SMB will focus on serving the unique needs of small and medium businesses by offering an elastic pool of agents to handle both inbound and outbound programs with an emphasis on lead generation, lead qualification, and data enhancement, along with other B2B sales support functions.

Both Steve and Marie have extensive call center experience. Steve is responsible for sales for QCS SMB, while Marie is responsible for client services.

The QCS SMB team is headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska. Angela Garfinkel, QCS president and founder, shared “The Omaha labor market is a great place for us to launch this team. Our initial plans call for 20 full-time agents who will work on about 30 different client initiatives daily, Monday through Friday. The goal is to grow the team to forty full-time agents by the end of Q1 2020. We think Omaha is the right place to be.”

Quality Contact Solutions provides outsourced B2B and B2C telemarketing and call center solutions. 

Articles

Important Forecasting Considerations for Inbound Contact Solutions

By Rich Hamilton

The heart and soul of most companies is their inbound contact solutions operation (their inbound call center, including voice, email, text, and chat). This vital department within an organization has an opportunity to get key customer insights, and the call center interactions often make or break the customer relationship.

Have you ever sat on hold, trying to get through to a company, and finally gave up, never to interact with that company again? Making sure your inbound contact solutions operation is properly staffed is important. Whether this is a first impression or an angry customer giving the company one last chance, each inbound contact is vital.

Forecasting call volumes and appropriate staffing and scheduling is critical. Keep in mind that there are some sophisticated algorithms used to forecast call volume and the needed workforce to answer those calls. I’ll focus more on the data that needs to be considered. Here are the key data points used for forecasting and scheduling: call volume, average handle time, absenteeism, service levels, and occupancy rates.

Now that we have listed the key data points, let’s break these down and look at a few other considerations for workforce forecasting and planning for any inbound call center operation.

Historical Data

Data is king. The best place to start is with data from the past. The more data you can get your hands on, the better. The key metrics to focus on are call volume and average handle time. Look at these metrics by day, week, month, and time of day. If possible, instead of just looking at the last couple of months, consider the same period over the last several years. This especially will be helpful in industries where there are seasonal call volume changes (think Christmastime for anyone selling consumer products).

Looking at call volume and average handle time will give a good picture of the number of FTEs you’ll need in your inbound contact solution. This will get you about 80 percent there.

Don’t forget to look at absenteeism. You will need to know what percentage of your workforce may call out sick on a given day. This can be hard to forecast, but with enough data at least you can forecast more precisely. For example, let’s say your call center needs to staff twenty FTEs for Monday.

Based on your absenteeism, historically one person calls out sick on Mondays. Wouldn’t it be prudent to schedule twenty-one FTEs on Monday, so that when the one person calls out sick, you still have the right number of call agents to handle the expected call volume?

There are still a few more factors we need to consider to get the whole picture, which we will discuss in the following sections.

Future Events

Not only do you need to look at metrics from the past, but you also need to look at any events happening in the future that are out of the ordinary.

Marketing and Company Initiatives

The marketing department might plan to send out an email announcing a new product or a new promotion that they predict will increase call volume.

Weather

This one is tougher, but it could affect you in a couple different ways. One would be if your industry relies on the weather. Maybe there will be extra snow forecasted over the next month, and your call center takes ski resort reservations.

The other way is how it affects your employees. Increased snow may mean your absenteeism will be higher than normal, so schedule more employees to cover all the inbound calls.

Other Events

These events could be specific to an industry or a specific group of industries and the amount of calls the call center will receive. It might be a new federal law that affects a certain industry and the volume of calls they will receive. For example, when HIPAA was first implemented, healthcare providers received more calls, and the calls were longer than normal.

Management Expectations

Each call center has specific metrics from management that need to be adhered to. These metrics might include service levels (the percentage of calls to be answered within X amount of time) and occupancy rates (the percentage of time actively working on calls, including talk time and after-call work time). The higher the service level required, the more call center agents needed to answer phone calls. Higher occupancy levels mean you won’t need as many call center agents, but it also means agents will burn out faster, and sometimes it is difficult to achieve higher occupancy levels and higher service levels if the call volumes aren’t consistent.

But you’re still not done. Here are some more considerations to keep in mind as you identify the inputs for forecasting and scheduling for your contact solutions operation.

Human Resources Policies

HR policies concerning required break times and lunchtimes will impact your workforce management and scheduling plan. Obviously, there is a huge difference in scheduling when a call center agent has a thirty-minute lunch versus a sixty-minute lunch. Other HR policies could include union rules that dictate start and stop times for shifts, and possibly when the breaks would need to occur (after so many hours of work).

Agent Skills

If your call center has multiple departments, this adds another level of complexity. Calculating call volume and average handle time, along with the other considerations, will have to be done for each department because the skill required will vary most times from department to department.

When scheduling, it’s good to know which call center agents are cross-trained. I’m not saying that you can count a call center agent for both departments if they are trained for both, but at times when one department is slow, and another is busy, knowing that a few agents can help with the overflow is helpful.

Forecast and Workforce Management Resources

Typically, the larger the organization, the larger the budget for workforce management software and systems. Smaller inbound contact solutions operations typically get by with spreadsheets.

Conclusion

Whether you have access to sophisticated forecasting and workforce management software or you’re working with Excel spreadsheets, you’ll find this aspect of the business is equal parts math and art. In my organization, we often gain a little more flexibility by adding some outbound calls into the queue. This helps justify more staffing while getting a higher occupancy rate.

Rich Hamilton is the director of marketing and product development for Quality Contact Solutions, a leading outsourced telemarketing organization. Rich works to bring new products to the teleservices and call center market. In addition, Rich is a telemarketing compliance guru with a Customer Engagement Compliance Professional (CECP) certification. Contact him at rich.hamilton@qualitycontactsolutions.com or 516-656-5105.

News

QCS Now Qualified for Government Call Center Contracts

Quality Contact Solutions (QCS) registered as a Federal Contractor, both as a certified woman owned and as a small business enterprise. QCS will qualify for contracts reserved by the government for small businesses (23 percent) and woman-owned businesses (5 percent). Angela Garfinkel, president of QCS, said, “A significant number of our current clients in the private sector have relied on our Woman Owned Business status for many years to ensure their company’s compliance with supplier diversity. Now we’re able to leverage our certifications to qualify for government contracts supporting inbound customer service, help desk, or even market research projects.”

Since its inception in 2007, QCS has continued to be a highly regarded call center organization. This is demonstrated by year-over-year growth since their first year of operation. At their core they are a sales organization specializing in a wide variety of outbound telemarketing and inbound call center programs for large and small clients. QCS also provides associations and non-profits with membership renewal programs.

Dean Garfinkel, chief operating officer, is excited about QCS’s status allowing them to bid for government initiatives. “There are numerous government agencies that rely on call centers to support consumers and business programs on an ongoing basis. From education to healthcare, to disaster recovery, state, local and federal governments must provide call center resources to support their programs utilizing today’s best technologies. It is important to provide communication channels that align with today’s consumer preferences. Whether that is text, voice, email, chat, or web, our state-of-the-art call centers are a great place to cost-effectively provide those services.”

Quality Contact Solutions is a woman-owned call center organization, which conducts high quality, telephone-based outbound marketing and inbound customer service programs for a wide variety of industry verticals. For more information contact Dean Garfinkel at dean@qualitycontactsolutions.com or 516-656-5115.

News

Garfinkel Earns Customer Engagement Compliance Professional Certification

Quality Contact Solutions, Inc. announced that Angela Garfinkel, president of Quality Contact Solutions, has earned the Customer Engagement Compliance Professional (CECP) certification through the Professional Association for Customer Engagement.

Garfinkel was part of the first class that was tested and certified in early September 2015. The CECP certification program includes rigorous instruction and testing to ensure the individual has a thorough knowledge of telemarketing regulations (both U.S. and Canada), CAN-SPAM regulations, Canada Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), do-not-track regulations, faxing regulations, and regulations that affect text messages and telephone calls to mobile phone numbers for both sales and non-sales purposes.

“Keeping up with customer engagement compliance is a large part of what we do as a normal part of our daily activity at Quality Contact Solutions. Our clients expect us to be vigilant and up to date with the multitude of vast regulations that concern customer contact. As part of our investment in maintaining our expertise it makes sense to participate in third party certification programs as well as the required continuing education credits,” stated Angela Garfinkel.

News

Quality Contact Solutions Appoints Director of Sales and Marketing

Quality Contact Solutions (QCS) specializes in B2B telemarketing solutions that achieve sales results. Many Fortune 500 clients rely on QCS’s capabilities and seasoned management team to achieve their inside sales goals. “Our customers want to leverage our core competencies to supplement their internal teams, thereby meeting their goals,” explained Megan Fallis, QCS’s new director of sales and marketing.

“B2B inside sales teams have been growing at an average of 35 to 50 percent per year for the last five years. Large and small companies have found that the our services are a cost-effective way to augment sales support to existing accounts, and to prospect for and acquire new accounts without the challenges of hiring, training, plus the necessary layers of compliance and technology” added Angela Garfinkel, president.

Megan will be responsible for growing the company’s internal sales team and developing new business opportunities for the company’s B2B telemarketing organization and the company’s enhanced local Caller ID business unit, which helps increase outbound calling answer rates.

Megan joins QCS after fifteen years as the marketing and OTM manager for one of the top healthcare providers in the USA. Her experience overseeing multiple campaigns across a large vendor network provides QCS clients with a unique set of unparalleled skills that will effectively achieve sales results.

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