Expertflow

Callcenters for Outsourcers

Outsourcing = Job creation Callcenters represent a very important proportion of office work places. In mature service industries, an average expectation is that 5% of the total workforce working in an office is working as a callcenter agent. With the advent of better internet and telecom connections to emerging markets, as well as better technical support by companies such as Expertflow, this opens a significant potential for countries in Emerging Markets to provide Callcenter or Business Process Outsourcing services to Europe and the US, and also to local markets. The traditional markets were India for the English speaking market and the Mahgreb for french-speaking markets, but we increasingly see new outsourcers from Africa (Egypt, Kenya) moving into this area. This often comes with significant government support (the Maadi park in Egypt, for example) with the government aiming to create 70'000 callcenter seats over the next 3-4 years.

Outsourcer business models

Hosting provider

The initial investments into a call center infrastructure can be significant, which makes it attractive for certain companies to purchase the infrastructure on a pay-per-use basis . The hosting provider up-fronts the investment into the infrastructure, and rents the infrastructure per agent seat or IVR port per month, or on a traffic base. The hosting provider leverages his investment over several clients, thereby achieving economies of scale. Hosted solutions are mainly interesting for end-clients who have either small callcenters, or a highly fluctuating demand in infrastructure:

• Callcenter Outsourcers (in Emerging Markets) have service contracts with business clients (in mature markets) to serve a certain volume of inbound calls or generate outbound calls. Many outsourcers especially at the beginning start with a small number of service contracts, and face an uncertain demand. Because of the uncertain demand, they are risk-averse to invest into a good infrastructure, which can then impact the service level provided to the client. In typical outsourcer markets such as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, you can see in each country more than 100 outsourcer callcenters, each with 10-50 agents, and each having invested in his own infrastructure, and each having scalability issues. A good alternative for an outsourcer to owning his own infrastructure is to rent the infrastructure from a hosting provider if and when business is there.
• In most sub-saharan African countries (for Example, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia,...) one sees in average 10-20 banks per country. They start realizing the importance of customer care, but are still reluctant to do a significant up-front investment for an callcenter infrastructure that usually starts with only 10 to 20 agents, but would be interested to rent such an infrastructure.

Examples of successful hosting providers are Wateen Pakistan, Raya Integration Services, OBS or Link.Net in Egypt.

Outsourcer

Callcenter Outsourcers sell a call-handling service to business customers. They typically provide trained callcenter agents along with staffing, and guarantee their business customer a certain response time (x% of all calls answered in y seconds). They are either paid by call volume, total call duration, or on business objectives (for example, number of sales leads in an outbound campaign).

In some cases, Outsourcers handle only certain types of calls, or only overflows from other callcenters. In these cases, it is important to have an integration both at the call routing and reporting level with the business customer, to make sure that the caller's experience is not impacted by the fact of involving an outsourcer in certain cases.

Examples of Callcenter Outsourcers (sometimes also called BPO's - like Business Process Outsourcers) are Raya or xceed in Egypt.

Typical services provided by an outsourcer include the following:

• Core callcenter outsourcing
• Directory Assistance Services (see a dedicated chapter on this regard)
• Outbound campaigns to organize appointments
• Invoicing/ payment related follow-up and outbound calls

Callcenters for Outsourcers have to address particular points that differentiate them from in-house callcenters. Some of the differences are:

• IVR functionality is typically not so important, as the main goal of a company to outsource is to get access to agents. If a pure parent-child setup is implemented, then no IVR or queueing ports are required at the outsourcer premises at all. In many cases for example, the client will want to keep all IVR functions in-house including the back-office integrations. The client would overflow the calls to the outsourcer only to get access to agents.
• Outsourced Callcenters tend to grow very rapidly, so the platform has to provide ample room for growth
• Calls should be queued in the country of origin until an agent in the outsourced callcenter becomes free, in order to minimize communication cost.
• Integration with clients, both in terms of call handling and provisioning/ reporting are very important

There are two business arguments for an outsourcer:

• The customer can focus on his core business. Operating a callcenter requires a lot of HR and administrative work for hiring, training, coaching, staffing, scheduling. Callcenter staff  often has a very different profile than the rest of an organization, experiences larger churn rates than the rest of the organization, and tends to be younger and part-time working. Operating in this environment is not the core business of for example a bank or a service provider, and one reason for outsourcing
• Economies of scale: Productivity of callcenter agents increase, as the number of agents increases. Example: A callcenter agent in a small callcenter might be talking only 50 minutes per hour. A callcenter agent in a larger callcenter providing the same services would be talking 58 minutes per hour - ie, 8 minutes more productive. This difference stems from a mathematical law called the "Erlang Law", which say s that to achieve a certain response time (answer time), agents in a callcenter of a certain size have to be idle a certain time per hour, in order to guarantee availability of free agents. Larger callcenter can therefore provide better service levels/ response times at a lesser cost in terms of agents than smaller callcenters. As an outsourcer usually servers multiple clients, he has a cost advantage over in-house callcenters.
• Economies of cost: A callcenter outsourcer might be able to hire callcenter agents at lower cost

Strength of the Expertflow/ Cisco solution

This chapter covers strengths of our solutions in particular for callcenter outsourcers

• With a Cisco Voicegateway/ Contactcenter, the outsourcer is able to queue the calls and provide IVR treatments at the edge of the network. So for example if the outsourcer is serving a client in the US, he would only start paying a communication line to the outsourcer's country once an agent is available to pick the call. Expertflow can provide a cost savings estimate when using this feature.

• With queuing at the edge, a bank could provide Voice self services while all the calls (if they have agents) and sensitive bank information remain within the bank's premises. All they would need is phones and a voice gateway.

With the Parent-Child architecture, a customer who has a Cisco Contactcenter could overflow calls to the outsourcer only when agents at the outsourcer are actually available. All call statistics, waiting times etc at outsourcer would be visible to the customer's callcenter, giving a high level of transparency. The outsourcer would be a child to many parents (the outsourcer's clients).  The calls will only overflow from the client to the outsourcer if and when there is actually an agent available at the Outsourcer's location. As a consequence, little or no IVR ports will be required at the Outsourcer, as calls will always be queued at the customer's premises, thereby reducing the cost in additional IVR ports, and reducing communication cost. The below diagram illustrates this feature. From a licencing perspective, each system (Customer Parents, Outsourcer child UCC) only needs the UCC server licence, and sufficient agent licences for agents actually working on each site.

• The reporting tool CUIC provides tenant-based reporting, so that your customers can access real-time their relevant reports. We suggest the use of CUIC Premium which will allow the Outsourcer to provide customized reports.
• With the initial hardware, you can scale up to 1000 agents and 1700 IVR ports, with additional servers up to several ten thousand agents.
• Find lots of competing systems integrators, so you can rest assured of very good support, wherever and however your technical architecture might look like

If we can support the technical (Cisco) infrastructure, we usually also support the Outsourcers with Presales support if required in the technical pitch for callcenter outsourcing to new potentials, and we assist them with our IPT partners in Europe and the US to capture traffic with Voicegateways. 

Generally, the technical architecture will allow you new business models, ranging from 

• technology hosting (for financial services clients, for example), where you host technical infrastructure, and the customer provides agents
• hybrid scenarios, where a customer has a certain number of agents, but does overflow to the outsourcer
• full outsourcing, but with the advantage that calls are queued at the edge.

Provisioning, reporting and product management

Expertflow suggests outsourcers to:

• define a proper offering, price model, service product portfolio
• define which parts of the solution a client should be able to provision himself (for example, defining agents, changing announcements, changing skillsets,...). Depending on the functionality required, a management tool that that goes beyond the core functionality of CCMP might be required. This could for example be VIM or another AdminTool.
• define what type of reports a client should be able to see (for example, average speed of answer, quality assessments,..) or configure himself.  This might require CUIC Premium or another reporting tool.