The Successful Outsourcer - NICE inContact


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The Successful Outsourcer Top ways to avoid common roadblocks to success and overcome the challenges you face every day

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The Successful Outsourcer To win in the outsourcing business, you have to deliver the impossible day in and day out. One misstep and your competition is more than willing to take over for you. You must constantly be on the lookout for ways to contain and reduce costs, meet or exceed your customers’ expectations and attract new business. Anything that detracts from those three objectives can be a roadblock to success. While meeting these objectives can be challenging, it can be done— and if done properly can reap significant reward.

“Software-as-a-service or cloud-based technology can reduce TCO by 45%.”

The first step on the road to success starts with identifying your contact center’s opportunities for improvement. While all contact centers are different, most call centers problems are most often found in these three categories:

This eBook was written to help you choose a cloud-based technology partner that will enhance your ability to overcome the challenges you face every day.

Business Challenges You are in business to make a profit. In this section, we’ll explore a few “margin killers” and learn how software-as-a-service (SaaS) technologies help you eliminate them. The message from outsourcers has always been that companies should focus on their core business and use outsourcers for everything else. Sadly, traditional contact center

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outsourcers have been unable to heed their own advice and have been forced to lead a double life as both a provider of human talent and of technology. In their role of technology provider, outsourcers have been forced to buy expensive and complex premise-based technologies—often referred to as customer premise equipment or CPE. Owning CPE is like owning a taxi; it’s great when it’s brand new, when it’s clean and smells nice. Your passengers are happy and may even seek you out to drive them because your taxi is the nicest taxi in the city. A year later, your taxi isn’t new anymore. Other taxis have more cup holders, leather seats, a sun roof, or some feature that makes them better. Pretty soon, your customers have all started riding in the new cabs. As you watch your revenue and savings disappear, you do the only thing you can do: you lower your prices. Now you have enough revenue to survive, but it’s barely enough to pay for the upkeep on your aging cab, let alone put any away to replace it when that time comes. Outsourcers who own CPE find themselves in a similar situation with a fixed cost structure. Not only are they making payments on a depreciating asset, they’re paying 15-25% of the purchase price in annual maintenance and paying an army of IT professionals to keep the technology running for 5-7 years until it has to be replaced. Like the cabbie, outsourcers who invest in CPE have to make the payments even if they don’t have any income. To add insult to injury, every minute CPE sits idle is a cost the outsourcer can never recover. Unused capacity

“SaaS or cloud-based technologies allow outsourcers to ramp capacity up or down on a moment’s notice based on call volume. Coupling dynamic scalability with a flexible pay-as-you-go model, outsourcers only pay for the actual capacity used.”

becomes an unbillable expense and erodes profitability. Studies show that contact centers that embrace SaaS or cloud-based technology can reduce their TCO by up to 45%1. Cloud-based contact center solutions enable you to operate more efficiently, optimize the cost and quality of every customer interaction and create new pathways to profit. With a SaaS solution you can avoid hardware investment expenses, upgrade charges, maintenance fees and professional service charges associated with adding new capabilities. SaaS or cloud-based technologies allow outsourcers to ramp capacity up or down on a moment’s notice based on call volume. Coupling dynamic scalability with a flexible pay-as-you-go model, outsourcers only pay for the actual capacity used which eliminates any unused capacity—one of the biggest margin killers.

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1Yankee

Group, 2006, “VoIP and Lower TCO Will Drive Adoption of Hosted On-Demand Contact Centers”

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Technical Challenges As we’ve already discussed, outsourcers have invested a lot of cash in their CPE. That CPE doesn’t run itself, hence the army of IT guys to keep it running. We’ve already discussed one of the most important roles of IT: capacity management. Effective capacity management can be the difference between profitability and bankruptcy. The role of IT, however, is not limited to managing the capacity of the CPE. Availability and uptime play a major role in service delivery. The IT team works hard to prepare comprehensive disaster

“A reputable SaaS provider will offer a written uptime guarantee of 99.99%.”

recovery and business continuity plans. Generators, UPS systems, and other forms of CPE are purchased and deployed to protect the original CPE purchase. Unfortunately, there are too many factors at play for CPE providers to be able to really offer any form of uptime guarantee or for the IT team to plan for every possible scenario. A reputable SaaS provider will offer a written uptime guarantee of 99.99%. They’ll be able to do this because they’re not reliant on your power, or your fire protection systems. Reliable SaaS providers house their technology in geographically dispersed, hardened bunkers with redundancy built into every system - a model that is simply too costly for any company using CPE. Redundancy and guaranteed uptime are key differentiators for any outsourcers that want to meet their SLAs and keep their customers’ trust.

Business Development Challenges “We can lower your operating costs and maintain - or even improve - your customer satisfaction ratings.” Sound familiar? It should. It’s probably the message you use to sell your services. Unfortunately, it’s the same message your competitors are using. What makes you different? In-house contact centers have the luxury of operating inefficiently so finding someone to take their calls for less than they’re currently spending is pretty easy. The challenge for outsourcers is to find a way to be different. But how? Adding features and differentiating functionality requires more capital investment in CPE. As with all CPE, the

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hidden costs of maintenance and added IT staff must be considered. Add to that the fact that CPE deployments take months to execute. If you have a customer asking for a new feature, you’d better find a way to deliver it faster than that. You can’t be expected to have every possible feature available all the time on the off chance that one of your customers needs it. Or can you? Your inability to say yes to your clients’ and prospects’ requests will break your company. While quickly adding contact routing and workforce optimization tools when needed is critical to your success, it’s not enough. To truly differentiate from the competition, you must provide a business value to your clients and prospects that they can’t benefit from without you. Smart SaaS solutions can provide you with the technology that can enable you to differentiate yourself and do for your customers which they cannot do for themselves. For example, a good SaaS technology partner has powerful business analytics tools that can provide you with the insights your customers need but don’t have the technology to discover themselves. They can then take that business intelligence and understand the affect each of their internal systems and policies have on call volume, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty.

“To truly differentiate from the competition, you must provide a business value to your clients and prospects that they can’t benefit from without you.”

This business intelligence will enable your clients to more profitably grow their business—and it’s all because you provided them with information they couldn’t get themselves. Only those outsourcers that adopt SaaS technologies for their centers can offer new features like this on the fly, guarantee the latest and greatest technologies, and provide more capabilities so you can differentiate on a comprehensive and powerful feature set.

inContact Portfolio of SaaS Solutions Through its powerful portfolio of cloud-based contact center solutions, inContact enables you to get the edge on your competition. It enables you to increase profitability, deliver higher levels of service, and differentiate and grow your business through its ability to help you: • Enable cost efficient and productive operations through the automation and streamlining of key service indicators and processes, development of relevant, targeted customer experiences, and a SaaS delivery model that lets you realize a lower TCO and a positive ROI from day one.

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• Drive value through every customer interaction by optimizing the cost and quality of every customer interaction, create brand-building and differentiated customer experiences, and improve the quality of your workforce to ensure increased customer satisfaction and decreased churn. • Create new pathways for growth through on-demand scalability, pay-as-you go services, seamless integration with your existing environment, no equipment and upgrade charges, and location independent connectivity (i.e., multi-site, at-home, and remote locations). • Ensure success today and tomorrow through a continuously evolving platform, innovations and

inContact enables you to get the edge on your competition. It enables you to increase profitability, deliver higher levels of service, and differentiate and grow your business.

expertise that gives you a competitive edge and ensures ongoing business improvement and growth. When you want to achieve higher success, inContact gives you the tools to beat the outsourcing competition by enabling you to deliver the features and services your clients demand at the price they want and the profitably you need.

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