Mark Fichera
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OnBrand24 will make its annual pilgrimage to the Internet Retailer Conference and Expo (IRCE) in Chicago next week, and this year, our booth will offer something extra.
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OnBrand24 will be at next week’s Annual Call Center Expo in Seattle, ICMI’s 10th annual edition and a global gathering for the call center services and contact center industry.
It’s a four-day forum for education, networking and a source for up-to-date information about the call center services industry. It includes workshops, site tours, case studies, panels, and discussions on a wide-ranging selection of industry-specific topics including the latest technologies and services.
We are first-time exhibitors at ACCE, which draws a national audience from the retail and e-commerce industries, from business services (continuity, loyalty, membership), technology, healthcare and hospitals and manufacturing.
Mark Fichera, CEO
OnBrand24
Call Center Services
Beverly, MA
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Account managers at ad agencies play multiple roles for their clients, and one of them is helping them find marketing services vendors. This can include call center services providers, and it happens when clients launch a new product, have a promotional campaign or need to replace a poorly performing call center.
But how do you find one?
Certainly, account managers can ask colleagues and friends for a recommendation. But if that doesn’t work...?
The best approach is to establish a series of qualifications that the call center must meet.
These can include:
- Experience – Look for a call center with at least 10 years of experience. Call centers can be like restaurants. They come and go. The good ones stay.
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When customers call after 6 p.m. to make a purchase they often get customer service from machinery -- an answering machine, telling them to call back during normal business hours.
No one likes treating customers this way. Not sales managers, not operations managers, not customer service managers. But none of them likes paying call center staff for after-hours idle time when call volume is light.
However, there’s a price to be paid for this practice. Bottom line: retailers and e-tailers may be losing significant revenue.
To measure lost after-hours sales, first calculate your after-hours call volume. Here’s a rule of thumb: for every eight inbound calls during an average day you get one after 6 p.m.
Then figure out how many inbound customer calls results in a sale during a typical day. Take that ratio and apply it to your average number of after-hours calls per week.
Lastly, multiply your after hours sales calls by your average sales order.
Let's assume you get 75 after-hours calls per week and your average order is $100. If one call in five calls results in a sale, then each week you get 15 after-hours sales calls that go to an answering machine. Multiplied by $100, that's $78,000 in annual lost revenue.
But that's not the entire cost. You also lose repeat customer sales, opportunities to build goodwill and referral business, to encourage customer loyalty and to demonstrate your commitment to excellent customer service.
What's the cost of live after-hours customer support?
For OnBrand24 outsourced call center services, we charge by the minute (no charge for idle time) and a typical inbound call costs about $3. Three dollars to capture $100 in revenue is ahealthy ROI.
Mark Fichera, CEO
OnBrand24
Premier Call Center Services
Beverly, MA
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Forrester Research reports that the U.S. and European ecommerce sectors are extremely healthy despite lingering recessionary conditions in both regions.
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OnBrand24 went north of the border last week to participate in the Dx3 Conference in Toronto, attended by several hundred exhibitors and companies.
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OnBrand24 has continued its steady growth to the point where we need additional office space here in the Cummings Center, Beverly, MA. By April we expect to occupy a total of 20,000 square feet to accommodate 225 workstations and more than 250 employees.
Our growth has been company-wide: both inbound customer service, order processing and help desk call center services as well as outbound B2B lead generation, appointment setting, customer win-back and customer surveys/database scrubbing and market research. It’s a reflection of the effectiveness of our customer service specialists and B2B lead generation professionals who deliver our call center outsourcing service, along with our strong management team.
Our success can also be attributed to our call center services business model: Premise-based representatives (no home-based staff); an advanced agent model that provides our clients with experienced, talented representatives for their programs; dedicated senior managers who maintain our “boutique” culture, which means delivering custom programs for each client and giving each client direct access to our management team.
All signs point to continued growth in the future. I wouldn’t be surprise if we’ll need additional space in 2014.
Mark Fichera, CEO
OnBrand24
Call Center Services
Beverly, Massachusetts
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We recently implemented a new call center services system from Five9, a global contact center software company that pioneered the use of cloud-based computing in the call center industry.
No doubt you’ve heard about cloud-based computing, and you may have implemented it already at your company. Or you might want to find out more about it, in which case, here’s a good primer.
Here at OnBrand24, we decided Five9 technology could enhance our goals of maintaining the highest call center services quality standards while also bringing greater operational efficiencies and cost controls.
For starters, Five9 software is pre-integrated with many of the leading on-demand CRM solutions used by our clients, including SalesForce, RightNow, Lead360 and NetSuite.
For another, Five9 is architected for a high degree of reliability and fault tolerance, leveraging redundant phone carriers, internet connections, hardware components, and software servers.
It enables us to conduct more in-depth historical reporting to gain insight into our call center services performance, using over 100 customizable reports on ACD queues, agents, calls and campaigns. Five9 also uses personalized dashboards, views and alerts to generate real-time performance statistics and feedback.
And it offers a contact history database with contact information and prior call activity available for IVR applications and at agents' fingertips while handling calls.
Five9 also helps ensure a positive call center customer service experience by enabling OnBrand24 managers to silently monitor order taking and help desk conversations, and enable either whisper coaching in real time or post-conversation consultation with our customer service specialists.
Five9 released its first hosted inbound call center services software in 2003, and its solutions are used across all of our clients’ industry sectors: retail and e-commerce, manufacturing, healthcare, insurance, financial services and technology.
Taken together, Five9 is an excellent addition to the OnBrand24 technology infrastructure.
Mark Fichera, CEO
OnBrand24
Call Center Services
Beverly, MA
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Senior managers commonly view outsourced customer service, order processing / order taking and help desk call center services as cost centers. But beyond delivering improved inbound customer service, customer loyalty and brand awareness, outsourced call centers can also increase revenue and profits – if you have the right call center strategy – the right call center perspective – in place.
Here are strategic guidelines for maximizing your call center outsourcing service strategy and growing your company’s bottom line.
• Align the Call Center with Your Company’s Goals
To get the most out of your call center outsourcer you need to work in tandem with them, bring them inside. Create a true partnership, not just a vendor relationship. Tell them about your vision, your objectives and your corporate, product and services messaging.
Tell them how you want your company to be perceived. What distinguishes you in the marketplace, what are your most effective sales messages? What are your vulnerabilities and how are they most effectively overcome?
Get together with your marketing department. What product launches and marketing campaigns are in the offing? How can the call center services provider support marketing’s goals?
Make sure the call center services provider understands the valuable role it plays. Talk to them about the value of each customer, about the revenue the average customer represents each time s/he makes a purchase, highlighting the importance of delivering excellent customer service and instilling customer loyalty. The message: the customer who is treated well will be a return customer, and this is a priceless asset to the company.
Introduce the call center to your service manager. What is the price of a maintenance contract? How many are lost because of poor customer support?
• Align Outsourced Call Center Services with Your Program Needs
It’s one thing if you have a relatively straightforward product or customer service need that does not require a great deal of skill from your customer support specialists. But it’s different if your customer support needs are complicated, or if you have significant sales order maximization opportunities that require advanced upselling and cross-selling skills from your order processing representatives.
So calibrate your call center outsourcer’s capabilities to the level of the need you have.
• Training Is Crucial
Managers are often at a loss as to who will train outsourced call center representatives to work on their programs. The answer: you. No one knows your products, messages and brand better than you. So no one is better qualified to pass on that knowledge to the call center you hire.
Equipping your call center services representatives with the knowledge and messages that support your company’s business goals is critical to getting the most out of your outsourced provider. In addition, well trained agents are happy agents because there are equipped to do their jobs well – whether they are providing outsourced customer service, order taking or help desk services. Happy agents tend to be stable employees who remain with their call center, delivering long-term pay-back to you.
• Continual Coaching is Key
Giving feedback to the call center outsourcing services provider is an absolute must. This means making sure your call center services company can provide you with recordings of their representatives. Listen to the recordings and provide feedback on the good and the bad of those calls.
Think of your inbound call center program as a work in progress. It’s never finished. You and your call center services program managers should look for ways to continually improve the program, test new messaging, try new tactics. Besides, looking for ways to improve your program keeps everyone engaged and on their toes.
• Everything Is a Number
This means everything an outsourced call center services company does can be captured and analyzed within a framework of call center services performance metrics. They measure your program KPI’s: average speed of answer, number of transfers or escalations, time taken to resolve the customer’s issue, abandonment rates, average sales order size, increase or decrease in customer service complaints. Make sure your call center services provider has the technology infrastructure to capture these data and provide detailed, frequent reports that let you track your program’s progress. The objective: create strong customer loyalty at the lowest cost.
Implement these principles and your call center outsourcing service will be an effective, efficient contributor to your company’s strategic goals.
Mark Fichera, CEO
OnBrand24
Call Center Services
Beverly, Massachusetts
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