Top 10 Questions You Always Wanted to Ask a Call Center Outsourcer

00:00Hi guys, Tom Laird here. You've heard me breakdown contact center technology on the podcast time and time again. Now it's time for me to help you with your challenges. As your contact center technology advisor through our new company, Expivia Digital, I can help you with things, like CCaaS selection, any type of AI implementation, and nice studio and integration services. It's the same honest advice you hear on the geek applied specifically to your operation. Visit ExpiviaDigital.com to get started, that's ExpiviaDigital.com. This is advice from a call center geek, a weekly podcast with a focus on all things call center. We'll cover it all from call center operations, hiring, culture, technology, and education. We And we're here to give you actionable items to improve the quality of yours and your customer's experience. This is industry with creative minds and ambitious people like this guy. Not only is his passion call center operations, but he's our host. He's the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing Group, and the call center geek himself, Tom Laird.

01:03Hi, everybody. And welcome back to another episode of advice from a call center geek, the call center and contact center podcast, where we try to give you some actionable items that you can take back into your call center, improve the overall agent quality, improve the culture, your call center, and hopefully, you know, improve the overall customer experience. I guess that's the whole point of why we're here. For those of you who don't know me by now, and if we have some new listeners, which I see that we do, which is kind of exciting. My name is Tom Laird. I I am the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing. We are a 500-soucer outsourcer located here in beautiful, wind guys I want to thank all of you this has been a kind of a of the podcast to the Facebook page, you can get to the No sales, not selling any, any, anything. Just trying to help. Each other.

02:49Also the YouTube page. We have advice out sourcing. So many of you have sent me emails and said hey Tom we're looking to outsource. well they, pay for out sourcing. Can you integrate into our systems? Do we have to use your systems? There's a ton of questions about it and again I'm not selling my services you're not going to hear Expivia other than me saying that word right there. But this is for any of you that are looking to and wondering what an outsourcer does, what are some of the things that, we pay pay for, what are some of the things that you guys are responsible for? How does that whole kind of connection and partnership work? So I've, you know,. We've gone in with my staff. We talked about kind of the 10 things that we're constantly hearing, especially our client services guys that really deal with the clients every single day.

04:08So let's start with this. I think it's kind of interesting and this should, an outsourcer does, or if you're ever looking outsourced, you can be a little bit more intelligent when you're talking to them....... So number one, the number one thing that, we really hear is, hey, we have our own CRM. do we have to move to your CRM? What CRM do you use in your in your BPO at Expivia? Well, I guess I said the word again, but and the question is, we always say here that we use the F-word, right? And it's not what you think it's flexibility... So any CRM and this is, and again, when I talk about Expivia, I'm really talking about all really high-end, especially USA, BPOs, even offshore, nearshore BPOs. We can all use whatever you have. So whether it's Zendex, Zoho, Salesforce, your own proprietary system, we can connect with that.

05:03If you say, hey, we need you to create a CRM for us, most of us can create a CRM for you, or we can just say, hey, it's way cheaper if we just go to Zoho or Salesforce or Zendesk that process for you. But, we've done everything, and I know that most outsourcers have from utilizing our client systems to integrating with their proprietary systems to creating our own specific CRM for clients. So, don't panic on that, they're real flexible. Number two is how do you connect to our systems? Let's say we have our own proprietary system, we need your reps to be on it, how do we do to that?, and there's a lot of ways we can do that., you know, we have clients, some clients it literally just drop a router here. And we connect directly to their, to their a desktops in your internal center, most outsourcers can just mimic that through a kind of a terminal server or a VPN that we can actually pull up the exact screens and the exact software and the apps that you guys are working on, so it's really just another extension of your business.

06:18So instead of having it really in your internal center, think of the outsourcers kind of So, number three is what does the outsourcer pay for and what do we have to pay for? And this varies, obviously, but in general, right, you're gonna pay one flat fee. So that's kind of the cool thing about any using any outsourcers, whether you're paying by the hour, by the minute, money's moving to still a lot of per minute charges though. And the outsourcer pretty much pays for everything.? So everything from telephony to If you have sales force, you're going to pay for that, and you're going to pay

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07:26hour, that's not just going to the rep, that's going for all the instances that you guys are getting. So when you wrap all that up, it's actually most of the- a cost savings. So really the only thing that a internal center or somebody's looking to outsource is going to pay for is one, is your CRM licensing. And that can negotiated, but paying for that- and then you're paying a flat fee, whether per minute or per hourly charge for everything else. And then again, the call center's paying for all the staff, they're paying for all the QA staff, And Number 4. Can we blind monitor? And if you use, if any reputable call center should be yes, right, it's pretty cool now, like if you use provider, like we use

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08:41going on in your program you see you see the actual agents names you can double click on those agents you can put your cell phone number and you can put your conference number in and we're gonna that phones gonna actually bring and you can monitor that agent anywhere in the world in the world And I'm going to I'm going to just speak for us. We like to have the client involved as much as we possibly can through the process of training. And that's for the first initial train. So if we can have a trainer from the actual client here, we want that, right? We want them to do the training with us, with our trainers. We'll do a session before? to train the trainer session, and sometimes we'll handle it from there, but we really like get that first time if the client kind of does the training with us, at least do it with ours and now in Webex, which we can do as well. So if you're, you know, if you can't afford to send somebody for six weeks to Pennsylvania, right, then we, we can do a Webex or a Zoom meeting every single day where you guys are involved or the client is. And then, we definitely want them here for launch day. After that, though, then and we to take care of it.

10:21And that's the other kind of cool thing with, with all outsourcing is, and we'll get into set up fees, but you'll pay for that class, but any attrition training for the outsour pays for, and we handle all the training from I'm from from now we might say, hey, can you guys help us with this little piece because that was a little confusing or can you maybe be on the phone for this if in if we have any question rather than that the outsourcer should be able to handle it handle it from there. which goes to the next question, which is number six, which is other setup fees. And normally, the answer is yes, right? Normally, there's an IT setup fee. [pricing remark omitted] Most of the time, like, like if I see that there's a growth or potential for growth, I try to get that setup fees, those setup fees.

11:12And I know most BPOs gouge on the setup fees. We want to kind of work the partnership.

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11:48, I highly recommend going to the Number eight is something you probably don't think about, but I think it's really important is You know we have questions like you know that I've gotten through advice from call center consulting. Not a consulting But just questions that people have asked me like hey should we We really ask the call center to

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13:07if. If they going to kind of balk at that. If they do, then maybe you should be balking at using them. Number nine, should you negotiate the price with the call center? And the answer is yes and no. I mean, I think you should always negotiate. We're willing to work with, with a back and forth on a negotiation on a per hour or on a set up fee. [pricing remark omitted]

16:36But there's a couple of things that I want to really hit on when it comes to AI, when it comes to speech analytics that I want to talk to and talk through for next week so again, thank you guys so much for all the follows And, again we're almost at 17 followers here or downloads on-loads on the podcast so, so you guys are rocking it or just find