Behind the Curtain- Tricks that Some Call Center Outsourcers Play

00:00Hi, guys. Tom Laird here. You've heard me break down contact center technology on the podcast a time and time again. Now, it's time for me to help you with your challenges. As your contact center Thanks for watching. with 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're here to give you actionable items to improve the Hi everybody, welcome back to another episode of advice from a call center geek. The call center and contact center podcast, we try to give you some actionable items to take back back to your contact center, improve the overall customer experience, improve your agent engagement, just improve the overall quality of your center. The goal here is to give you some actionable plays to take back, talk about the theory of customer support or why things are important, but what are some of the tactics and things that you can do or you need to be aware of in running a contact center.

01:34Beautiful fall day here, excited, it's Friday. I've been finding that I do better podcasts on Fridays when it's a little bit lighter, when my day job isn't probably hanging over me as much. But I wanted to pull the, kind of the curtain back, on some outsourcing things today. We've done this on what to kind of look for when you're looking for a contact center platform, right, and those telephony platform guys, and kinda some of the tricks that they'll pull. Today I wanna talk about outsourcers and some of the tricks that outsourcers will pull or try to increase revenue on that probably isn't up to the industry standard, but a lot of them, I don't wanna say a lot of them, some contact centers do this or do some of these things. Let me say this before I start, so I don't get like a lot of nasty gram emails.

02:24Most, the vast majority of call center outsourcers, especially here in the States, that's really all I'm gonna vouch for because I've seen some shady things when you go, near shore offshore, not saying all of them are, right? Cause there's a lot of really great ones, but here in the States, the vast majority are up to really high standards. You really have very little to be worried about when you're looking at an outs. Still, there could be maybe one or two of these things that they try to sneak into a contract that I just want you to be aware of so that when you are negotiating or when you're looking at an outs. You have the knowledge to kind of push back certain tactics that some outsourcers like to do. All right, so I think this is kind of interesting to kind of look behind the scenes at kind of maybe how a call center outsourcer thinks or how certain cultures of outsourcers are. So if you see in your talking, you send an RFP and you get a quote from an outsourcer here in the States and there's like four or five of the things that I'm going to talk about in it, I kind of shy away from that outsourcer and look for somebody else because there's a lot of really good ones that don't do a lot of these things.

03:35All right, so I've got 11 of them for you, right? 11 things that a call center outsourcer or outsourcers, some like to do that probably aren't up to total industry standards. When it comes to certain things, number one, absorbent setup fees. This is a huge way that outsourcers kind of up, you know, they can recoup upfront costs, which is totally fair, right? But, it can get a little crazy sometimes. I'll be honest, I don't think that set up fees should be that high anymore, right? We're not talking about a vast amount of tech for the most part. Now, there's certain programs that have a ton of integrations and a ton of programming and natural speech IVRs and self service and all that. That's a whole different deal. But if you're just looking like, Hey, I have 25 or 50 reps, and I want to set up a customer service program.

04:33Here's my phone number, I have an IVR tree. Can you go do this? Most everybody's in the cloud now, right? Not everybody, you might have your own proprietary system and there might need to be a VPN setup. VPN setups are not hard. That's a couple hours worth of work, right? If you're in the cloud, there's really no work other than username and passwords. [pricing remark omitted] What is this going to cost me? Give me about a 10%, 15% overage. start the program. Let's get this off to a really good start. So that's something to be aware of. Rushback on that. You can negotiate on a high setup fee. You're not going to get it waived unless you have some really great program with a really great brand and those types of things. For the most part, expect to pay something. But if you feel like it's uncomfortable and really high for the amount of hours that it would take, that's the other thing real quick too, is ask how long this is gonna take.

06:01So most places will give you their fee, right? [pricing remark omitted] Ask them how to do math. an hour for a rep hour on a program. [pricing remark omitted] It shouldn't be, right? The vast majority of outsourcers will be much lower at the training end, right? [pricing remark omitted] But it's not gonna be 27, you know, your go live rate. So if your training fees are the same amount as your go live, then you need to push back on that. Now, I will tell you, one thing that we do here too is all of our setup fees, we ask for in advance, right? Because a lot of times, you know, or we've seen it where, you know, a program will go, we'll get a week and a half into training and something will happen.

07:12And then the program never ends up going up and then we, we ended up eating all that training. So, the call center outsourcer I should lower the training rate, right? but it's normal for them to ask for that stuff up front. So that's kind of the give and take with that. But don't pay the same amount as if you'll be going live. The other thing is, I lose my mind on this, is probably my number one pet peeve is having to pay for client support. [pricing remark omitted] Cause that's crap. They shouldn't have that. Client support should be all rolled in. It should be 24 seven client support. It's a little bit different when you start to work with the big boys, the giant call centers.

08:08If you are not a very large program, this is where the differences can happen in why maybe a smaller boutique, a thousand seater under or 500 or under can be much better for your program than a 10,000-seat center or 30,000-seat center or someone who's international and all over the place. Something to watch for. Don't ever pay for your personal or your company's client support with the outsourcer. Number four, the thing that I see a lot is the way that outsourcers will the sell their permanent I am sorry, I'm sorry per minute. [pricing remark omitted] Let's say that one more time so I can probably make sense. Anything that is over 75, getting into the 80-90 per minute is extremely high, right? So be very careful of when a call center kind of quotes you at those prices.

10:15It probably means they really don't want your program but they'll take it if they can get it for that number. So just something to kind kind of keep aware of. All right, number five is up charges for email and chat, right? Everything if you're doing a per minute or you're doing a per hour charge, pretty much your omni channel. And when I'm I'm saying Omni channel now, I'm just going to say voice, email, chat should all be included in that cost. There shouldn't be another set up fee for email or set up fee for chat other than if maybe it's, it's not during the initial, right? So let's say you just say, Hey, Tom, I want to outsource the with the Expivia. We want to start with chat or with, with email and voice. So we, we do, you know, set that all up and we start going.

10:58Now it's six months later and you say, Hey, we want to add in chat. [pricing remark omitted] But don't expect or if you have a outsourcer that right at your initial set up is charging you five grand to set up email and five grand for chat and then an overall set up fee, that's not right, right? Pretty much all those kind of get tied together unless you're kind of doing them piece mailing one at a time at a later time. Number six, you should never have to pay for additional licensing for reporting or for dashboards. This is another famous one that a lot of the centers like to do. a lot of the centers like to do. Now, if they are paying an extra license fee to have you on their platform, I get it.

11:45Maybe there's a small fee for that, but this is a way that they can upcharge. [pricing remark omitted] So that shouldn't happen. Like we don't charge anything for it, right? Every client, it's all rolled in to our per hour or per minute charge is all of the reporting, all of that. And to be honest, the majority of call centers will do that too. But again, be very wary of that. Same thing with number seven is extra to monitor or to have access Right, they're really your recordings, right? [pricing remark omitted] There should be no charge for that. The only charge that may happen is if there's a storage fee, right?

12:46But as you guys know, I mean, most of this is not going to stay directly on a server. It's going to go to like AWS. It's going to go into Glacier. it's gonna be if you need it for seven years or any of that, it's a very low cost. So just be wary of the cost. There may be something very small if you're storing it on a outsourcer server, Um. but they shouldn't be be making a ton of money on it because it's it's very low overhead for for all of us. All right, here's one that a lot about sorcerers won't tell you about and you can get you can a through the nose kind of doing this is if you're paying by the minute. Understand what you're paying for. Is it handle time, is it talk time, is it a mixture of both, is after call work included, is after call work included up to a certain time, 30 seconds, but if a rep is two minutes in after call work, does that get paid as well?

13:48So you have to really drill down, what the metric is for if you're charging for if you're charging or getting charged by the minute. And what does that minute really entail? Because if it's everything, right, if it's from the time, the whole handle time, including all after call work, that could be a. and you could be actually incentivizing the call center to be a little bit lazy on calls. Now we would never do that. And I think most call centers understand, and they would be held up to an efficiency standard. But still, if you open the door to paying them for laziness, right? It's not gonna help you. It's not beneficial to what you wanna do. So scope out exactly the time period Rhat you're paying on the permanent charge and agree to that with the contact center. And also then make sure that have reporting, right?

14:43That can justify and verify all the billing that they're gonna be doing. That's a pretty big way that a call center will just throw in a contract that it's handle time including after call work, that kind of thing. You agree to it, next thing you know, your occupancy is a little bit lower because after call work's included, they're not taking as many calls as they should. You're paying more and it becomes an issue and the, the call center's making a ton. All right, number nine, same kind of thing here. If you're paying by the hour, so we just talked about paying by the minute, but if you're paying the call center by the hour, which is the vast majority of our clients, right? Understand if you're paying for lunches and breaks, right? And that can be negotiated based on a per hour charge, but for the, for a rule, right?

15:35For most of the time, if a rep works an eight hour shift, the call center is for 7.5 hours or 7.5 hours. So, you know, that's kind of how you can kind of think that through. If a call center says, hey, we bill for eight, then I would just negotiate a little bit lower rates to kind of compensate for that half hour lunch, but just understand that kind of going into it as well. Number 10, you should not pay for attrition training, meaning you bucked up to the call center, should be on the hook to make sure that they pay for the training to get that number back to where you need it to be at the third. So you should not pay for that. So that's something that a lot of call centers will do is that they'll have the client pay for a certain amount or a certain percentage of attrition training. I think that's bad too because that does not disincentivize to get really good people on your program. If the call center knows that they have to pay for the training to get back to a to a number, they're they're going to think twice about the type of individual they have on your program, and you're going to get a higher quality person. That's just kind of human nature, right? They don't want to pay for that. They want somebody who's going to stay and going to do a really good job. So if you don't do that, higher turnover can happen on your program. You're going to end up paying for it. And it's just it's again, it's a it's a kind of a bad, a bad situation. I said I had 11. But I number 11 was you shouldn't pay for recordings. And I already kind of threw that in there about in there earlier. So I guess I got 10, right? I got 10 kind of solid, things that that you just need to watch for, especially if you're going near shore offshore, right, again, not saying that they're shady, the vast majority of call centers are not going to do any of this, but you may see one or two, you know, if you do an RFP for for four call centers, some of this stuff may start to kind of sneak in a little bit.

17:43little bit, and you'll have now the knowledge to know like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're not paying for that. We're not doing that. Why would you charge me for that and you can kind of push back. And then you kind of have the right to speak, which I think is, you know, is pretty important, especially when it comes to the, to the negotiations of it. So again, I hope that's helpful and kind of gives you a little bit of a behind the scenes of what some contacts on our outsourcers just like any organization or any sales company, right, any SaaS company, you know, what they're going to do and how they try to look at, you know, revenues and maximize revenues. Well, they can maximize revenues as long as they're, I think, doing it the right way. So again, not speaking, just for my call center, but for us, like, we don't do any of this, right? And a lot of the contact centers won't, you know, it's a a small setup. We try to make money by providing a ton of value, you make more money which allows you to invest more into the customer service realm.

18:45So that's kind of how we've kind of viewed it as more of a partnership. So it's kind of unique when I do go consult or when there is a company that comes to me with maybe I huge program, right? One that I can't handle. They need 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 a seats. And they ask me to kind of be a part of the process bringing out on these contact centers. And we'll go through some of the stuff and we will see some of us. Now that's a little different too because it's a much higher volume, right? So there's a little bit different. Nuance to what some of the the centers and what they do or what they try to do. But if you know what you're looking for, you can save a ton of money for your organization. So again thanks guys. A couple quick things here at the end. I I know you're probably already hung up now or stop listening but if you guys can start to post some reviews again, we've kind of gotten away from that.

19:45Every time I ask, you guys come through and are awesome with the reviews that you're posting on iTunes or on any of the platforms that you guys are listening to the podcast on. I also want to say, hey, if you'd like to join our texting community, just text call Center Geek to 814-247-0366. That will get you part of the community. Again, I don't I sell at all. We just try to give some exclusive content and things to that community. That community has grown to over 200. Same thing with our Facebook community. There's advice from our Call Center Geek Facebook community. Please join. It's just a lot of like-minded individuals trying to help each other. The last thing I want to do is if you do need some help, whether it is from the outsourcing side or if you need help we need to buy a new call center platform.

20:38We're looking to go to the cloud or premise base or if you're premise base and you'd like to just maybe layer on some cloud technologies on top of what you're doing because you don't want to get rid of your entire switch. Let me know if you go to just hit me up on LinkedIn. I'd be more than happy to just have a conversation with you, see what I can do to help from a consulting side. I don't charge anything for it, but just let me know and I'm more than happy to help with any call center, contact center, rep, HR question that you may have as long as it kind of deals with my realm, I'm more than happy to help. So again, thank you guys very much and I will talk to all you guys next week. Have a great awesome weekend.