Research & Insight

Function

CRM & Call Center

Outsourcing Helps Trade Center Buyers Get Back in Business

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

Outsourcing suppliers are responsive in a crisis. Forty-five minutes after the first plane hit the World Trade Center, Compaq executives were on the phone, putting together a triage of support for its eight financial clients with Recover-All contracts as well as its many other customers headquartered in the twin towers. Tom Simmons, vice president of Compaq Managed Services in Stowe, Massachusetts, says within three hours Compaq had organized a crisis center routing telephone questions to Colorado Springs and opened a walk-in facility near Madison Square Garden manned by its Northeast sales team. A crisis Web site was online that night.

Riding a Wave of Success

Chris Pryer, Business Writer

There are certain times when a confluence of events can create an environment like no other. The moon in the seventh sky, or Jupiter aligning with Mars, for instance. In today’s fast-paced and constantly evolving business world, successful companies must be vigilant and nimble in order to respond quickly and take advantage of such favorable conditions when they present themselves. If these companies don’t possess the necessary resources in-house to accomplish their business objectives, they collaborate with another company who does.

Coping with Increased Development Cycles

Jerri L. Ledford, Business Writer

In the world of packaged software, upgrades usually happen about once a year, sometimes less, and those upgrades are usually pretty extensive. But in the world of an application service provider (ASP), one of the benefits of offering a centrally located application is the ability to upgrade more frequently. And because upgrades can be performed without disturbing a user’s systems, they can be done on a more direct, incremental basis.

Linking Inbound and Outbound Marketing

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

Has this happened to you? You receive a letter in the mail describing a special promotion. You visit the Web site and notice the details are different. You visit the store and no one there knows anything about the vaunted promotion. Frustrated, you call the toll free customer service number and the person who answers the phone is clueless, too.

A New Way to Look at BPO

Michel Janssen, Managing Director, Everest Research Institute

This spring I had lunch with one of our clients, a national retail chain. The chief financial officer, the chief information officer and the executive vice president for human resources (HR) gave me a list of 20 business processes they wanted to shed that weren’t part of their core competency. Read about how they did it.

Outsourcing Disease Management Services Helps Patients and Payers

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

In contrast to an ailment like diabetes or asthma, where there are significant numbers of patients and the prevalence of the ailment is quite high, Accordant Health Services focuses on complex, chronic diseases that require ongoing, specialized care whose patient population prevalence is low. Although Accordant currently handles disease management for approximately 10,400 patients across numerous health plans, this constitutes less than one percent prevalence among the total patient population of these health plans.

Outsourcing Customer Interaction Management

Jerri L. Ledford, Business Writer

Before Del Monte Foods decided to outsource its customer interaction management, the company held yearly sales meetings. Representatives received five-inch binders filled with information about products, clients, and company information. The system proved to be very ineffective because it was time consuming, and the information became out of date long before new binders were issued. \x0d\x0aThen Del Monte began using outsourced Marketing and Sales Effectiveness (MSE) tools from Proscape Technologies.

No ‘Reservations’ at the Inns

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

At LaQuinta, the inbound call center has been an outsourced function since 1996. Jackie Burke, Vice President of Reservation Services for LaQuinta, says the company has no reservations — that is, no doubts or misgivings — about its choice of outsourcing supplier for this extremely important function.

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