Kunnect Nation,

I have written on this topic before, and I was getting ready to blog about it again today, when an industry collegue shared a very interesting piece she recently wrote. I thought I would share it wth you today. It is from Lauren Carlson, a CRM Analyst from Software Advice.

In December 2011, a bill was introduced to Congress that, if passed, will refuse federal grant or guaranteed loan programs to companies that have offshore call center operations. The U.S. Call Center and Consumer Protection Act, or H.R. 3596, will also require all offshore call center employees to reveal their location to U.S. consumers and give them the option to be transferred to a U.S.-based call center. The primary purpose of the bill is to provide more jobs to qualified U.S. workers.

Those companies that do offshore their call centers do so for obvious financial reasons. It is typically more cost-effective and results in reduced overhead costs, as well as provides companies the ability to scale up or down accordingly. But what if those same things could be achieved by hiring onshore? Below, I’ve highlighted three companies that have developed smart alternatives to the offshore call center that not only keep costs down, but also prevent your company from feeling the pain of H.R. 3596.

See the complete article at http://blog.softwareadvice.com/articles/crm/alternatives-to-your-offshore-call-center-1040412/.  By Lauren Carlson, a CRM Analyst from Software Advice, a free online resource for service software buyers.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Thanks Lauren.

Fred Cote

Kunnect Nation,

If you have been working with most of the Tier 1 carriers, like Qwest, Verizon, etc.., then you have undoubtedly received notices in the past 18 months about “short duration call” penalties. Why are they so diligent about monitoring your call completion rate?

One would think that operating a call center has its fair share of challenges, so why do carriers no longer want to place your calls? I’ll tell you why.

Over the last two decades, the Sales division of carriers ran the show. Sales reps were making hefty commissions on all your calls…everyone seemed happy. Times have changed!

Firstly, most tier 1 carrier sales reps don’t even get commissions on your calls anymore. Now the IT department runs the show. All carriers have been converting their infrastructures to be VoIP enabled in the last 7-10 years. This means that even your T-1 (TDM) calls are being processed (at some point) by a session border controller (SRC – which manages VoIP calls). These machines are very costly, and given the fact that margins on long distance calls are way down, spending money on infrastructure isn’t very popular.

Carriers are making most of their money on bandwidth, not long distance calls. Telemarketing is a sacred American tradition and employes of over 300,000 agents around the country. It needs to be protected.

Fred Cote

Kunnect Nation,

I thought I would share with you an interesting story told to me by a customer last week. He owns and operates a call center in the U.S. with about 25 agents. At the begining of March, he took his family on vacation to Mexico for spring break. As usual, he brought along his iPad 2. Along with his usual checking of email and surfing sport websites…he discovered something new.

He could manage his Kunnect enabled call center from the beach!

More to the point, obviously, he could access the XVP admin site to run reports and view productivity in real-time…but he discovered that he could also monitor his agents, and send them IM messages, all from his iPad.

By downloading a softphone, he was able to use one of his Supervisor licenses to register his phone and monitor/coach his agents right from the Extensions View. As well, he now used the Instant Message capability to send directed messages to his agents.

This was an eye opening experience, he said. I smiled :-). The real kicker was that once he had his softphone registered, he was able to make calls back home to his friends and fmaily without incurring any international dialing costs.

If you have a story to share, let me know.

Fred Cote

Kunnect Nation,

With gas prices continuing to skyrocket, and commute times only getting longer, the ability to work remotely from home is a welcome practice enjoyed by call center agents around the world. That being said, I have noticed a significant rise in the number of call centers in the U.S. that have been adding “remote” personnel to thier workforce.

There are obvious savings to be had (i.e. overhead costs, etc…), but it does come with a few challenges as well. Here is a short list of those I find most pertinent:

1. Training: This can be difficult with remote at-home agents. I have seen some companies deploy web based training videos or webinar sessions with their remote staff.

2. Monitoring Performance: Conversely to walking the ailes of your call center to make sure your agents are producing, you need to leverage good reporting software for your call center solution. You need to know the benchmarks and baselines for what to compare your agents to.

3. Technology: Not every call center can just roll out an at-home workforce. You will need the right, flexible techonology to do so. A cloud based solution, like Kunnect’s XVP, certainly helps make that possible.

If you want to share any insights on the remote at-home agent market, feel free to let me know your thoughts.

Fred Cote

Kunnect Nation,

Whether you realize it or not, telemarketing touches (or calls us, I should say) one way or another everyday…probably 2-3 times a day.

I say this because one-on-one conversations with a prospect or customer still remains one of the most sacred business interactions out there. It is definitely better than a mailer piece, SMS or an email. Voice interactions touch more than just one sense, sometimes two or three. That’s why they have a more profound impact on the callee.

I have seen companies employ telemarketing (cold calling, post sale survey, etc…) in many different industries. It never ceases to surprise me when I hear from a customer in some obscure industry who wants to try calling on his or her customers.

Long story short, telemarketing is a key element in any business-client relationship. It might not be the only interaction point you have with your client, but at one point or another, it will happen. Use it, and don’t be afraid to experiment with it.

Fred Cote

Kunnect Nation,

All the signs have been pointing here for the last 18 months; the U.S. Call Center market is poised for renewed growth. With renewed growth comes renewed technologies.

Being a Hosted Call Center provider, I have been able to garner numerous stats over the last year about our increasing client base. Here are some interesting facts I have put together:

* Of the new customer sign ups in 2011, only 2% are new to the call center industry.
* 40% of new customers have migrated from an in-house premise based solution to a cloud-based solution.
* 95% of all customers have lowered their call center operating costs by over 25% by going to the cloud.
* 66% of our clients have grown their business by at least 20% this year on our solution.
* 45% of our customers use cloud-based solution so they can have at home agents.
* Only 29% of customer have actually implemented at home agents.

I think these statistics speak for themselves and help paint a picture of a surging U.S. based call center market. We are happy to keep offering economically priced, yet feature rich solutions, to are customers.

Fred Cote

Here are some predictions I made earlier in the year.

2012 might be associated with the Mayan end of the world prophecy, but it also signals the start of a new era for the outsourcing industry – the cloud age.

The current landscape of the outsourcing industry will shift in 2012. Most notably, we’ll see a strong transition to cloud computing.

Cloud-based technologies have made a notable impact on the business community in the past five years. However, it has been in the last two years that we have seen cloud providers increase ten-fold.

2011 was the beginning of an amazing era, which will prompt change, especially to cloud-based technologies and the call center industry.

Here’s what we can expect to see in the year ahead:

1. “100,000 new jobs will be created in the call center and BPO field. Two new proposed laws will prompt this job growth – the U.S. Call Center and Consumer Protection act, which seeks to restore outsourced call center jobs, and the Veterans Job Bill, which will provide employers with tax credits for hiring veterans.”

2. “The US call center and telemarketing industry will see $23 billion in revenue in 2012 – roughly $5 billion more than 2011 due to significant job growth. In 2011, there were 336,000 telemarketing employees. New initiatives like those set forth by Jobs4America are already creating new jobs.”

3. “75 percent of companies will choose cloud subscriptions lasting more than one year. The adoption rate for cloud-based services is increasing dramatically. Consumer-based familiarization with the iPhone 4s’ iCloud will further support the cause for cloud-based solutions. Organizations are also witnessing ROI in the cloud, as evident in a CSC study showing that 82 percent of businesses adopting cloud services save money.”

4. “The ‘at home’ remote agent call center workforce will see 30 percent growth.This will be due to the paradigm shift in employer perception in the productivity of this employment segment. In an economically critical time, companies will do whatever they can to increase productivity, grow revenues and control expenses.”

5. “50 percent of all traditional BPO workers will be doing some form of multi-channel work. This implies that agents are doing more than just one form of client interaction like email, telemarketing or chat. This will be substantiated by the continued growth in companies adopting multi-channel CRM solutions and it will translate into companies buying new state-of-the-art hosted multi-channel solutions.”

6. “There will be 2.5 billion global internet users by the end of 2012. As the availability of broadband and smartphone connectivity increases globally, this number will continue to grow at a rate of more than 20 percent annually. We crossed the 2 billion internet user platform in January 2011, as reported by ITU.”
The Future of BPO/Contact Center Outsourcing in the U.S.: How to Prepare
Despite seeing a steady stream of interest from offshore BPOs for cloud-based telephony solutions, there has been an impressive increase in demand from U.S. based firms. This is a sign of an improving business environment in the U.S., one that will rely heavily on optimization, cost reductions and increased efficiency – all deliverables of cloud-based solutions.

According to research from Datamonitor, contact center outsourcers saw significant cost saving benefits from home based agents compared to contact center facilities. Based upon estimates from brick-and-mortar providers, cost savings estimates can vary between 20% to 30%.

With cloud-based solutions gaining momentum, U.S. companies have a responsibility to “know the facts” and make informed decisions, while offshore outsourcers need to firm up their value proposition if they want to remain competitive on more than just price.

Fred Côté is president of Kunnect, an industry leader in cloud-based call center telephony solutions.

Kunnect Nation,

Over the course of the 12 months, I have noticed an important increase in business to business (B2B) calling. I also get asked my telemarketing managers if it is worth it to employ a predictive or preview dialer in these cases. That’s a good question.

Being a hosted call center vendor it seems easy to say yes, but I think hosted dialers, like the Kunnect solution offers more than just calling a ton of people faster. Here are other very important factors to consider:

1. List Management…Stop kidding yourself…you can’t do this manually
2. Securing your data…keeping your data in a dialer is a lot more secure that call sheets in your office.
3. End of day processing….Just the payroll saving for clerical work required to enter sales into a CRM or email off to a processor can be eliminated with automation.
4. Getting past the gate keeper – with Kunnect, you can store script information as well as information captured on previous calls for display on your new call.

I think I’m just scratching the surface here, but I’m dumbfounded that people still dial manually. Automation is the way to go. Join the Kunnect revolution 🙂

Fred Cote

Kunnect Nation,

I wasn’t always a “dialer” guy. In my previous life, I used to manage the leads for a small telemarketing company. Some of the basic principles I learned then, albeit we were dialing manually at the time, still apply today in the dialer world. Here are some pointers:

1. We added a Sunday evening shift and canceled our Friday evening shift. The people we did reach on Fridays were never interested in talking to us. Also, our agents appreciated being off on Fridays. Sunday evening calls worked out quite well.

2. We would call all our AM (answering machine) leads on the weekend shifts. We never tried fresh leads on the weekends. We were able to finally reach those people that worked during the week, and keep more fresh leads for the weekdays.

3. Now don’t laugh…this used to work quite well. We took a copy of the USA Today and looked at the country’s weather map. Would would target areas where it was raining (or snowing) in the hopes that more people would be home during the day.

4. Lastly, we realized that most people were home from 9am to 11am and after 4pm duing the day. As we would be calling into all time zones, we would cycle through them with the aforementioned schedule in mind. This way, where ever we were calling, it was morning in that time zone (i.e. calling at 1pm EST, it was 10am PST). This helped avoid afternoon slowness.

If you have some ideas of your own you want to share, just drop me an email at fred@kunnect.com. I’d love to hear them.

Fred Cote

Kunnect Nation,

It’s one of Amazon’s best-kept secrets. How many computers does it take to keep its Elastic Compute Cloud platform afloat? And now, a researcher with Accenture thinks he has the answer: 445,000.

That’s the number that Huan Liu came up with when he did a bit of internet sleuthing. “It’s a fairly big site; it’s pretty impressive,” he says of the entire EC2 operation

That same Amazon EC2 Cloud is where all of Kunnect’s global XVP infrastructure resides. It has allowed us to grow our foot print, as well as increased our hardware redundancy ten fold. Amazon boasts eleven 9s in terms of uptime on its data nodes…which means your data is safe.

We are continuing to better leverage the true power of the cloud, and this will be evidenced in future versions of XVP.

Fred Cote