In the past, barriers to moving a call center back on shore included the high cost of staffing, training, technology, and terminating a contract early. Organizations can now handle their move back onshore cost-effectively and get up and running again quickly. Here’s how.
South West Water provides water and sewage to 1.6 million customers in the U.K. During the transition, South West Water was adamant that anything other than business as usual was completely unacceptable — even though Accenture was implementing new processes and shipping work across the globe. The result: Complaints about billing are down by 20 percent.
In today’s economy, the majority of companies are cutting back to survive the downturn. But Alejandro Graham and Roger Pena are bucking the trend and starting a new company. Their BPO delivery center in Managua, Nicaragua, opens this month. Here is why they feel confident they will succeed.
Eric Rea, president of se2, believes outsourcing may be one of the best ways for insurance companies to survive the current difficult times. He sees them as a call to action to make the necessary changes to an outmoded business model. se2 even has an innovative way to finance the transition.
Research by three leading companies finds a new trend in contact center outsourcing: a growing preference for domestic or nearshore locations. Why? Greater ease in managing the engagement and lower risk of alienating important customers due to accent and cultural issues. Today, more companies are increasingly reluctant to consider offshore locations. Read about changing landscape and the forces creating that change.
ARO, an outsourcer of marketing back-office services, has to have the most compliant caller information. But it didn’t have the time or money to subscribe to all the available lists or interact with the do-not-call watchdogs, who can assess thousands of dollars in fines. So the outsourcer turned to another outsourcer. The result: better data and the ability to run leaner and meaner.
Virgin Atlantic, a long-haul airline, is known for thinking outside the box to enhance the in-flight experience. Less known is the way Virgin has applied similar innovation to its behind-the-scenes operations. Offshoring to WNS allowed the airline to consider business streams it had not previously imagined. And the cost differential allowed it to add more people to its call center to provide better service.
Overhead Door Corporation’s Genie call center gets 55,000 plaintive calls a month. The manufacturer outsourced its call center operations unsuccessfully to two different U.S. suppliers. So it decided to bring the call center function in-house and hired Veritude to populate it…which it did 30 days early because the incumbent supplier abruptly decided to close its doors. Here’s the story.
Online customers communicate through email. But some want to do things the old-fashioned way–they want to talk to a real person about their needs. Small entrepreneurs with day jobs can’t answer their calls during the workday. Outsourcing provides a professional alternative.
ACS collects child support payments for the state, which increased scope and added customer care. Soon after that transition, Hurricane Katrina hit. ACS went into overdrive to get child support payments to parents, many of whom had fled the state.
How does a start-up airline offer classy customer service and save well over a million dollars in up-front capital? Easy–outsource the function. Alpine Access, a provider of home-based employee CRM agents, recruited, screened, and hired ExpressJet’s agents in a matter of weeks.
AMO, a debt collection firm, looked at a number of suppliers, then set up a 60-day champion/challenger test. Who could collect more money–AMO’s dialer or the supplier’s system? We wanted to test their situations under combat conditions, says Michael Chamberlain, AMO’s President.
Hughes, America’s 15th largest ISP, outsourced a call center for inbound direct marketing. Today, half the company’s direct sales come from this outsourced relationship. Sales doubled while costs fell 30 percent. ACS turns 14 percent of these calls into sales, up from three percent. Increasing the conversion rate allows Hughes to do more marketing with the same dollars.
One of the victims of September 11 was the airline industry. Delta had to service its call center customers at a lower cost. The solution was offshoring. That decision turned out to be a lifeline when hurricanes hit the US last year, shuttering some US call centers. Wipro routed extra calls to Mumbai and Pune, stretching its resources to support the airline in its time of need.
Call centers can impact a travel agency’s market share because of the large number of customer interactions. Yet a March study of North American consumers sounded an alarm for call centers that don’t have the requisite technology to ensure satisfactory customer experiences. Here’s how two travel-related businesses solved that technology problem.
A New Orleans insurer introduced a product that soared in popularity, causing it to upgrade technology to handle the volume. That prepared it well for operating after Hurricane Katrina.
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