How to Properly Manage a Call Center Outsourcer

00:00Hi guys, Tom Laird here. You've heard me break down contact center technology on the advice from a call center Hey, guys. Welcome to the channel. We're here to give you actionable items to improve the quality of yours and your customers' experience. This is an 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. What's up everybody, welcome to another episode, episode 87, who would've thought that? Of advice from a call center geek, the call center and contact center podcast where we're trying to give you some actionable items, right? We're staying away from theories and what people may think, but trying to give you some actionable plays to take in your contact center, improve your agent experience, experience, improve the quality, and the whole point of this is to improve the customer experience as well.

01:30How's everybody doing? I am the CEO of Expivia It's October 16th, it's a beautiful a beautiful Fall Friday. I've had an, just an amazing week this week of, we've had a ton of RFPs and a ton of things that we're bidding on and to be able to. a bunch of potential clients and had a couple client reviews and that's what I really love. You know, know, I love the operation side. I love talking to clients and kind of feeling the vibe of kind of how they're seeing things going, seeing how the industry's going.. So. It's kind of cool to take a breath,. Do a podcast episode, be able to talk to you guys here on a Friday. Pretty cool. I have a funny story for you and I want to thank. so many of you that that were that kind of took part of this, if if you guys didn't weren't, aware I did a webinar on actually, actually yesterday was Thursday and you know I had a bunch of you guys text me afterwards to say hey we just wanted to Tom let you know that we we represented the geek nation, so I really appreciate that. I guess you know some of you and hopefully you are improving your operation and we can have a small piece of that.

03:01So for you guys to kind of reach out in that way and kind of you know. I had a couple of text messages and I had a couple of Thank you guys so much for the love that you guys have been given and the respect back that hopefully, you know, we're trying to earn from from all of you guys out there. So today, what I wanted to talk to you on the podcast is something that I've steered away from because I thought it was closer to selling, right, and I don't want to sell it all in this thing. I want to just provide value and provide, you know, ways to improve your call center..

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04:56when you're looking to out-source the call center or your call center operation, because it's scary, right? You, a lot of you, I know you feel like you're giving up power or you're giving up the experience that your customers are going to receive to a third party. So it's really important that you manage that relationship well and that that partnership really becomes a partnership, right? So, that's my number one tip and I. I'm not going to count these down or tick them off, because I have a bunch of them, and every time I try to do this live, I look at my notes and. I'm like, was I in 4, was I in 5, I always screw up the counts. So, I'm just going to in no particular order, I want to give you guys some things that I think can help when you're looking to outsource or how to handle that that partner relationship is.

05:44Number one is guys you can't, guys you can't treat us and I'm going to say myself and my industry you can't treat us like a vendor, right? It's too important of a relationship, right? This isn't a software vendor that you're buying a piece of software from a from. There has You really have to treat them as a partner or as an extension of your business. If you're going to go in there with a kind of the stick mentality, right, where if they they screw up or they make a rstake they you don't like something them hard, that relationship. That partnership is not going to work, so there has to be some give and take. It's a little bit of a, a a different relationship than a vendor-client relationship. It's got to be more than that to be successful, you know, when that's and you need to work than we can with a larger organization.

08:05But when you can get, speaking again for myself, when my company can get to a partnership relationship for a really large organization, which we do where all the time, that's when really special things can. Thank you for watching! that you, and your team are doing the training with the BPO for that first group of agents. Now, let's say you're going to onboard 180 agents or 200 agents. I'm not saying you've got to onboard every class, but you need to be a part of that first three or four classes. We can do a the trainer model.. That's important. You should do a train the trainer, but still be a a part of that, the initial couple classes coming out. Pre COVID we would say We would say we want you on site as well for the launch. I think it's important as much as you can be a part of the launch, whether that is now being on an IM, I am or a, a, Before you go live a and you pay the BPO partner to kind of a take it from there. So those trainers, those dedicated trainers should be able to then take that baton and train the next classes or any type of attrition training that's going to happen.

09:47They should be able to deal with it and maybe they want to bring you in to do an introduction which I think is really important. Those kind the reps should always be able to put a face right with the client. They should be able to at least know who you are. So you don't want to be really standoffish where you're just dealing that training, know who the reps are, know who the names are. You want to make sure that there's one point a put a trouble ticket in, right? And then they'll kinda get to. Like, you don't want any of that when you're dealing with a partner That you have a kind of one point of contact, that you can form that relationship with, that you can pick the phone up, that is a 15 minute to 30 minute SLA and anything that you have if you send an email, and which is another kind of the next tip is make sure that again, we don't want to micromanage our BPO partner, but at least understand that there's going to be a 15 to 30 minute SLA.

11:16send something. If you send an email, there's going to be where I'm not saying you and 30 and most BPO partners will kill. That time right. They'll do away before that if they don't answer it It could be recorded.com, you know, when you, when you're going to get a report and you're going to get a QA report that a 90 is a 90 and you feel comfortable that that 90 is for real. Right. If you The partner thinks it's a 92. So there can be issues there that you need to make sure that you're scoring things in the same mentality in the same way so that you're feeling very, very comfortable that their culture and what they, they're doing from. I'm not talking about if there's a call that needs to be escalated to your call center maybe internally. because you might do tier two or tier three, I'm talking about if there is a rep issue, because it's going to happen.

13:17It's going to happen in your internal call center. So if a rep just loses it or a maybe it's not a rep-rep, but it's a caller whose irate and who's using foul language and it's just a one-off call that something's going on there that needs to get to the client. You need to have, have a process for that within a certain amount of time, whether it's the 12 hours, 24 hours, there needs to be a whole written procedure on what happened that needs to be sent to the client, sent to you so that you guys can be on top of things, right? Make sure that your partner, if they make make a mistake, right, they should, should be able to feel comfortable Come to you. This is a really important piece. If you treat someone like a vendor, then they're going to hide things from you because they're going to be afraid of you.

14:04You don't want your call center partner to be afraid of you. You want to have an open relationships, so when a mistake does happen, they're gonna be able to bring that to you, understand that we're gonna work through it together. If a rep needs to be let go, or fired, or whatever needs to happen, that's gonna happen, right? But we're gonna work through that thing together, and they know you are not gonna come down on them, and pull the program, or find them, or do those types of things, that a partnership really doesn't evolve. So I think that's a really, really key, key thing. On top of the escalation, or I'm sorry, the correlation calls, you also want to have weekly status calls, right? Just a weekly catchup. Hey, I know know we talk probably once, but let's take this half hour, talk about where service-levels are going, talk about where handle time is, talk about anything that we're seeing It's just kind of a take a step back and let's do a weekend review everything is status and or we might be the opposite the holidays Like, I like hey, we sent an email out, I forgot to tell you about that.

16:37You may be starting to get calls, right? Little things like that, that you want to get to the floor really quick, the client services,- services manager at your partner should know that as well, but it's a way that you can have kind of a direct-access to the floor, there's no reason anymore that, you know, everything has to have a veil, right? Have kind of a firewall between you and the actual You still want to really keep that manager involved, but there's no access and you should have access to to the floor, you can't hammer them with a lot of stuff, but this and this is for quick changes quick things that you want to make sure to get out because you know there could be You need to be flexible with a partner to be. Just make sure that you're being flexible with them as well. I mean, I've been so lucky at my time here, you know, in our previous call center, but especially here at Expivia.

17:58The, the clients that we have, they're unbelievable, right? They're great people. I've learned just as much from them, I think, as what they've gotten from us and those, those relationships, They last through a COVID, right? a COVID happened because if you had a client that just was a pain in the rear and COVID happens and you have to go from brick and mortar to home, right? that client's gonna start to be

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18:55span that whole deal. Again, they are treating that as a partnership. I know I keep hounding on it, it's probably getting annoying in this R&B podcast, but I I can't say that enough that's the number one reason why these relationships and why programs fail. It's just a lack of coordination and a lack of understanding and flexibility between the client and the VPO partner. So again, guys, that's kind of my rundown on that I hope that that's helps. I hope that gives you some insights on the mentality of upheavable partner, but also on some of the things that you can do,

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19:59and I don't charge anything for it, all you need to do is text call center to 814-247-0-3666. It'll get you all signed up. Anything I post you're going to get. It's totally secure. Anything you post, no one sees other than me. Any questions, any comments, any issues you have, I've been able to help so many people. We had a couple of sessions this week where we had an hour-long session. of you guys just being able to ask me questions, or there was a couple of community members who just had some questions on, they, the call the center operations industry and I was able to kind of glared a little bit. So anything I can with I can help you guys with, I'm please let me just let me know, please let me know, please let me know, please., please let me, please let me know, t please let me know, prospective also if you guys could please post some reviews on iTunes I would really, really appreciate it.

20:52Thank you guys, it's Friday. Have a great weekend. I will talk to all you next week.