We all know the real certainties in life are Taxes, Death and Outsourcing.  Here are a few tips to avoid death by outsourcing:

1. Start with a good business model.   Be certain you have a well-defined call center business model with reasonable target metrics.  You may need to work with outside talent for this.  Be prepared to share this with your outsourcer so that they have an opportunity to help the partnership succeed.  A good outsourcing partner will need to understand your core business model in order to fully contribute as a partner.
2. Plan well.   Be sure to have a written plan with specific dates, deliverables and a set of ‘success milestones’ that escalate from modest results to desired results.   It will be just as important to you as it will be to the outsourcer to know what is expected and what is to be achieved.   A six to twelve week plan laying out accomplishments, spending, and ROI is reasonable.   Parties should clearly understand their respective roles and responsibilities within this timeline.   There should also be a plan for expansion after the testing/transition phase.
3. Define your commitment to the project in advance.  Don’t lose focus at the first sign of trouble.  But don’t get buried in a deep hole either.  I suggest that you clearly understand your limits prior to beginning the project.  If you are starting a project for the first time, there will be a learning curve.  The goal should be that your outsourcer’s thinking and your thinking are aligned and all parties are prepared to respond quickly and adapt within the boundaries of your plan. 
4. Choose well.  Select a partner with experience, integrity, stability.   Close proximity should be the tie-breaker if the first three are a match.   In addition, be sure both parties agree that the calling application and business model are realistic and achievable.
5. Develop a good compensation model.   I am a big advocate that the best compensation models are in alignment with both client and outsourcer needs.   This usually boils down to a modest variable rate and heavy performance-based incentives.  Obviously, both parties should understand that the arrangement has to be a win for all… oddly enough, that’s not always the case.   See # 4 above.
6. Be there.   Get involved with the program you are outsourcing and be prepared to send and receive information with an open mind.   At a minimum, be part of the training, do regular remote monitoring, and insist on call calibration sessions with the outsourcer and their agents.  The outsourcer will bring many of the tactical and developmental tools, but you should be prepared to contribute domain knowledge and quality specs.
7. Expect the expected.   If you have a process problem with your project internally, or have had one in the past, you will likely still have that problem when you outsource if nothing else has changed.   Don’t expect that outsourcing will eliminate your challenges.   Address them head on with the outsourcer.  Staffing problems, legal costs, and other overhead burdens should all be addressed upfront.  It’s also a good step toward mutual respect and trust required for long-term success.
8. Don’t suffocate the project.   Let the experts handled much of the ‘who’ and ‘how’ while you focus on the ‘when’ and ‘what’.   Checkpoint objectives must be achieved, but beyond that, let the Outsourcer do their job.

Presented by:   Steve Trifelos, Vice President,  OKS-Ameridial, Inc.,   800.445.7128  x260

10. Culture—Understand that there are cultural differences that need to be understood to prevent any miscommunications. This is especially critical if you are communicating directly to India. Today, many companies in the US will sell India services and will act as the point of contact through the program.
9. Productivity vs. Price—It has been our experience that productivity with the centers in India can sometimes be lower than that of the US at the beginning. This is mainly due to India agents taking slightly longer in the learning curve. Over time however, the productivity becomes equal. Determining factors include project type, complexity of the call, experience of the call center, and payment method from the client. This lower productivity at the onset of the program is justified by the 25% to 75% reduction in price due to the cost-effective labor in India. After calculating money lost due to lower productivity at the beginning and money saved by the lower price, you will be able to make an informed decision regarding whether your initiative should be outsourced to India.
8. Accent—Accents cannot be totally eliminated and you will usually be able to tell that the call center agent is not from the US. Some agents even take on a British accent. The key is to spend weeks training these agents before they ever get on the phone. This training will include Accent Neutralization, watching US television programs, continuous role-playing, monitoring, and coaching, and other reviews by both the India call center Manager and the Program Manager from the US.
7. Training— In most cases, it seems to work best when you train the trainer. That is to say, train the trainer for the agents in India and let that trainer conduct the classroom training and role playing necessary for your program. It is critical that you clearly define goals and objectives to the trainers including when to stop or move on to another call. (For example, on one recent information gathering program, agents were spending time gathering information on what we would call a “Refusal” when this was not necessary. They did this due to their quest for accurate information, and we took it for granted that they would know to stop and to move on in the calling.)
6. Implementation Time—Too many clients expect a call center to get a project started within a very short period of time. We have found that this does not lead to quality delivery. Give your team 20 business days to ramp up a program and longer if they must hire from the outside for the positions.  It takes about 6 weeks to hire a new employee and have them complete the 5-week Accent Neutralization Training.
5. Project Planning and Management—With so many choices out there, it pays to do your due diligence in assessing the best call center for your company and for your initiative.  Taking the time up front to choose the most appropriate vendor and to set-up the project the right way will save you headaches months down the road.  Choosing a US-based call center with India delivery will also make this planning easier and smoother.  Expectations for the call center and for the project need to be clearly defined as well in order to have a successful relationship.  The set-up phase of a project should take 30-60 days instead of just a few weeks.
4. Redundancy— As with any company you deal with, a good disaster recovery plan is essential for success in the event of a disaster.  The call center should have multiple locations and it would be best if they could also route calls back to their US locations in the event of a large-scale disaster in India.
3. Testing— Never take for granted that data rules etc will be adhered to. Testing not only includes the agents, but also the agents screen and database, the transferring of files etc. As a general rule of thumb, test every system prior to going live.
2. Project Type— There are many projects that have been very successful in India—Technical Support, Chat/E-mail Support, Gather/Verify jobs, Appointment Setting, Mortgage Lead Generation, Credit Card Sales, and Long Distance Sales.  These job types have been outsourced to India for many years, so there are centers with extensive experience in these areas.  You should review your specific application to determine whether India has had success in delivering similar initiatives and then seek out vendors with that experience.
1. US-Based Management Team Whenever Possible—As many call centers now realize, they need to have delivery capabilities in India in order to compete. Some have partners for the delivery and others have made the investment to own their centers in India. The later strategy is the most sound in order to manage the quality of delivery.  Testing, benchmarking, development, and Management can be accomplished by the US locations, while the client still benefits from the low cost of India delivery.  This is a huge win for the client because they have a US point of contact to work with.
 

For further information, please contact either Bob Jackson or Steve Trifelos at 800.445.7128

Bad leads are costly….Have you ever calculated the costs of sending a sales rep out on a bad telemarketing lead? Add up the marketing dollars that you spent on lead generation such as campaign planning, target market selection, list rental(s), creative script writing, training the agents who cold call and qualify, role-playing, coaching, and so on. Then try to put a figure on the all of the costs associated with the sales rep following up. Don’t forget to include full (hourly) overhead burden, including benefits, office space, and so on of both the sales rep and the lead generation group. Was travel involved? Even if the sales rep only contacts the “qualified” prospect by phone, you’ll find that the total cost of following up on a lead is not insignificant. Not to mention opportunity costs. Whatever number you arrive at, it won’t take more than a couple of seconds to recognize that you simply cannot afford to allow bad leads to slip through your lead generation process.

Bad sales are even MORE costly….Now, if you think that you can’t afford to have bad leads slip through, your system you REALLY can’t afford to have bad telemarketing sales slip through! With all the renewed, state and federal focus on consumer fraud, chances are that too many complaints of unauthorized billing will land you directly in the cross-hairs of consumer protection enforcement. Assuming that you prove that “slammed” sales / leads were due to one bad apple on our team or that unauthorized charges were the result of error and that you came out unscathed from an investigation, consider the damage to the brand. That kind of publicity can have a lasting impact. Regardless of the outcome, defending yourself against such claims can be enormously expensive.

Negative Option Sales demand verification….One-time sales are risk enough but if your product or service involves a negative option (whereby product is automatically shipped and billed until the consumer takes some steps to cancel the “subscription”) then your exposure to risk is heightened significantly. Throw in a free introductory offer to your product / service and you have a classic scenario that causes concern on the part of legislators and enforcement authorities alike. Every Compliance Officer will tell you that free-to-pay-conversion, negative option sales MUST be verified.

Regardless of whether or not your offer involves a negative option, it should be obvious by now that you need to verify leads and/or sales. Some may think that the cost of quality is too high, but that thought is often arrived at by not including all of those hidden costs. If we add up all of the previously mentioned costs, we should have a good starting point for a budget. Since there is more risk involved with a bad sale than there is with a bad lead, this article will discuss verification options in terms of sales. It will be a little easier to discuss virtues of alternative approaches without the baggage of waffling back and forth between sales and leads. We’ll also talk about why it’s important that the verifier be a third party verification.

What verification methodology should you use….Obviously, we’ll need to find a verification methodology that both is appropriate for the size of the program and one that ensures that the cost of prevention isn’t more expensive than the cure. The most commonly deployed approaches are: 1) Immediate Verification, 2) Call-back Verification, and 3) Recorded Verification. Let’s weigh the pro-s and con’s of each.

Immediate Verification….Immediate verification typically involves the telemarketing agent raising his or her hand for a Supervisor or Verifier to run over, take over the conversation, to verify the decision. Just to keep things honest, the verifier adds some security or confirmation code to the record. With more recent technology, the Supervisor / Verifier can barge in (remotely) to verify the sale / lead instead of running over and taking over the agent’s handset. In other environments, the agent transfers the call to the verifier. Regardless of how the verifier joins in on the call, the agent is still required to signal or find someone to talk with the prospect - in real time. If you’ve ever witnessed this approach, you can attest that it results in the appearance of pandemonium. People are standing up, frantically waiving and verifiers are running about the call center floor, trying to verify and answer questions at the same time.

Think too about how the consumer feels while this is happening. The consumer is sitting there waiting to tell someone else: “yes, I REALLY do want to give you my money.” Probably less than the ideal consumer experience.

On the positive side, you get 100% verification. Other approaches may dictate that you settle for a statistically valid sample, but immediate verification all but insures contact with each customer. Plus, it saves the expense of sending through a “bad” sale only to spend more time and money on stopping the order from being fulfilled. Think through the logistics of stopping an order after the sale has been submitted. Adjusting reports. Adjusting commissions. Speaking of which, agents know whether or not they earned a commission (and you don’t have the baggage of dealing with charge-backs) when you verify immediately.

Immediate verification allows you to fulfill orders just as fast as your back-office procedures can process them. Faster shipping culminates in improved cash flow. It may also be an appropriate choice when there are very few sales per hour. You probably won’t want to invest in outsourcing verification to a third party if you only get a sale every other hour. Several sales per hour, translating into hundreds of sales per day is a different matter.

Call-back verification…. Compared to immediate verification, call-back verification typically results in a lower percentage of confirmed sales. As the name implies, this process involves a follow-up phone call to the buyer. With today’s hectic lifestyles, a second contact (hopefully in a fairly short period of time) is another challenge to the sales process. Even when you try to establish a specific time for the verification or you try to call back around the same time of day as the original contact, you’ll find that this approach typically takes several attempts to make a contact. Even with a reasonable number of attempts, residential verification contact rates often fall below 85%. As if an additional contact isn’t challenge enough, right-party contacts can cause additional drops. Spouses, other family members, or co-habitants occasionally want to know the purpose of the call, raise additional questions or objections, and in some cases make a request for no further contact.

One the plus side, this approach offers another touch point. Consequently, it can be the preferred methodology in situations where you want to cultivate a personal relationship. Recruiting volunteers for a charity may be a good example. That extra touch point helps emphasis the importance of the mission and stimulates the volunteers to fulfil their pledge / assignment.

It may also be appropriate in scenarios where there can be a high level of buyer’s remorse. Verifiers can be trained to re-emphasis benefits, offer reassurances of a good decision, or at least save against sending out undesired shipments. If you really prefer this approach, just be sure to include a contingency plan for repeat buyers who tell your agent: “please don’t have them call me to confirm!” It happens more often than you think.

Methodology recommendation….Of the three approaches, recorded verification is the least intrusive for the consumer. The other two approaches may be viewed as making your customer prove that they want to buy from you. Plus, situations like the ones discussed above can go wrong during verification. Additionally, verifiers may need as much, if not more, training than the sales agent. They may be called upon to save cancels. They may not be able to lean the scope of the project from the sales rep training kit. You may need to make the investment in an additional training kit specific to their challenges and objectives.

Assuming that you have volume and continuity, there really is a better way. Most companies already have recording capabilities in place for quality assurance purposes. Most companies also send the data records somewhere for fulfillment purposes. A simplistic model for recorded verification is to export / post the data and the recordings to a secure FTP site, allow the verifiers to listen to the recordings overnight, and have verified sales / verified leads back the next morning! A version of this process has been in use for at least since the late 70’s. It’s just that digital recording has speeded up the process and has replaced cassette tapes along with all of the label and library baggage associated with handling physical media.

Recorded verification is less intrusive and less burdensome for the consumer. Furthermore, it can be more objective than the other two approaches. Verifiers can’t help but have some pressure and emotional stake in direct conversation with the buyer. Recorded verification can be set up much like quality assurance scores; where the absence or presence of the criteria – rather than the verifier determines the validity of the sale!

Leverage the experience of an outsourcer….Obviously, no export is involved when the verification function takes place in-house. However, grading your own papers (so to speak) is rarely advisable. . Outsourcing to a Third Party Verification (often referred to as 3PV or TPV) will not only add legitimacy, avoiding any appearance of bias, but it should give you healthy savings. An experienced outsourcer should be able to provide this service at a cost less than what you can attain in-house, plus you’ll benefit from their experience - avoid learning the mistakes that they’ve already overcome.

For further information, please contact Dan Werner at 866-671-0778 or visit our website at www.oksameridial.net/3rdpartyverification.html.