Regardless of why a company chooses to outsource some or all of their call center, the one given is that service should not suffer. Yet, this dimension – whether the customer’s problem is actually solved – is rarely evaluated for outsourcers. Furthermore, calls transferred between centers do not retain collected information, forcing customers to repeat themselves and sending a message to the customer that their call is not important.

And for the outsourcer, your customers rely on your expertise and your technology to provide them with superior sales and service. You must take on the colors of the business that contracted you on each phone call. You have to adapt fast, to win and keep business. And now you find that your customers increasingly see you as a commodity provider, seeking more service at a lower cost.

Both parties want effective service, but the technical hurdles of making two disparate call centers behave as one, for call handling and management, are high.

Outsourcing Solutions

Upstream Works has a unique technology portfolio that can unify in house and outsourced call centers, for seamless customer care and measurement/management. Information gathered at the first site is passed to the second site and associated with the transferred call. The result is that the customer call appears as a single call for automation and analytics, regardless of the number of transfers and technology at the sites (e.g. Avaya or Cisco, on premise or hosted).

Agent Desktop

Information gathered at the first site can be used to automate the agent desktop at the second site, giving that second agent a view of the customer experience to date. Agents are able to preview caller information before the call goes live. Using this knowledge, agents are able to deliver high levels of customer service.

Our centralized Customer History captures all contacts, across all sites and all channels. This provides a single place to see every interaction, acting as a resource for the agent and as a basis for repeat contact based First Call Resolution tracking.

To avoid agent mistakes, outsourced call center agents must be chameleons, taking on different personas for different companies. Our desktop automation directs agents to only the appropriate applications needed for the current interaction. We provide outsourcers with the toolkit to add new customer applications with full automation quickly.

Analytics and Performance Management

Our unique ability to provide identical metrics regardless of the switch structure permits “apples to apples” comparison between outsourcer and in house operations, with drillable detail right down to the agent level. As customer metrics are based on the perspective of a single customer call, we can provide powerful repeat call based FCR analytics by call type regardless of call flow.

The above combines with transfer reporting to identify cases where calls are being deflected or are generating repeat calls. This puts outsourcing on a true financial footing, measuring the cost of resolving a customer issue, not the cost of a call.

Analytic tools let the organizations find the root cause of issues between the two parties, so that process and training issues can be addressed.