By Nathan Teahon, Vice President
For over 10 years I have been part of the Quality Contact Solutions team and frequently one of the longest conversations I have with people outside of our organization is how our business model works. People generally understand what contact center vendors are and what outsourced telemarketing is. If they know those things they also understand the role of brokers in the telemarketing services and call center industry work as well. It’s hard for people to understand that there is something else that isn’t necessarily in the middle of those two but does lie somewhere in between.
Managed Outsourced Telemarketing: What is it?
We call our business model Managed Outsourcing and what that basically means to our clients is that we provide the highest level of call center sales management solutions available in the market today and we are successful because of the careful allocation of responsibility between QCS and our owner-operated brick and mortar call center locations. We first evaluate our client’s requirements and place the outsourced telemarketing program with one of the 15 Owner Operated Contact vendors within our network that has been carefully curated over 11 years. Our role essentially is to find the most compatible call center for the calling campaign and to then provide that call center with the proper ongoing tools, guidance, and direction that will allow them to be successful and hit client goals.
On a more granular level, our company manages the data inputs, data outputs, daily reporting, program evaluation, process improvement, training, and program development. We take responsibility for the program results and provide our clients with a turnkey solution. For large programs, we split the work across multiple locations for performance management and disaster recovery purposes.
We do not layer on top of existing organizations. Our owner operator partners typically do not allocate significant budget to business development, nor campaign management; instead we provide those functions for them, with our staff. The benefit to our clients is that we bring our expertise and connect clients to multiple centers, providing redundancy and scale on demand.
Here is one example: A 125 seat call center in Cedar Falls, Iowa has been in continuous operation for about 20 years and has a strong reputation in the community for being a great place to work. They have fantastic supervisors, a fantastic manager, and a local city economic development group that is supportive of putting in money and investments as needed. The challenge for this center is that they don’t have the expertise to find new clients, to develop the programs and to successfully onboard new clients. The call center management team (manager, supervisors, trainer, quality assurance) is busy hiring, training, coaching, developing and running other client programs which were largely developed by QCS, as well as other work from clients that they’ve serviced for years. Again, finding new clients and getting them onboarded goes beyond their internal capability and they are not large enough to hire the senior level industry people that would be needed.
Why our clients love managed outsourced telemarketing
The key benefit to our clients is that they do not need to invest as heavily in managing the outsourced telemarketing program. When a client utilizes a contact center vendor for outsourced telemarketing, they should be prepared to staff two or more full-time employees to support the outsourced partner and act as an internal liaison. When working through us, we take on the majority of that support role, effectively lowering the in-house support staff that is required.
Another key benefit for our clients in working with us is that they obviously have access to our management team and the expertise that comes with that. Our team has managed thousands of successful outsourced telemarketing programs. We know what works and the appropriate levers to pull when something isn’t working.
Additionally, our clients love the ability to use our team’s infrastructure of multiple Owner Operated Contact Center vendors to test one team against another on a periodic basis to ensure maximum performance is being delivered. Even a small increase in sales conversion rate or contact rate can mean significantly more sales for an outsourced telemarketing program. It also provides access to scale a program while utilizing a higher mix of veteran agents vs. new hires, which can make growing a program a much smoother endeavor.
Why contact center vendors love working with QCS
Our owner-operated call center teams know from the outset that with our experience we will work to put them in a situation where they will succeed. We carefully curate each new client program to ensure we set the team up for success and we also screen out client programs that we believe will be too difficult or burnout inducing.
In exchange, we have found our owner-operator call center teams are highly motivated to perform on each client program. High motivation and success on client programs leads to very low attrition rates, a feeling of family in the call center and a love of the work that they do for clients.
These owner-operators are hungry and motivated, and we provide them with worthwhile work that their entire team is proud to work on in addition to the tools they need to be successful on that work. The bottom line is that our owner-operated teams are excellent at executing the game plan that we give them.
When we’re explaining the concept, we liken it to a franchise operation. The call centers doing our work must do it 100% our way and we’re continuously checking, monitoring, coaching, developing, cheerleading, providing resources, education, analytics, etc. And we go to bed knowing that someone in the center cares as much as we do because it’s their bottom line also.
Other Articles You Might Find Interesting:
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Nathan Teahon is the Vice President at Quality Contact Solutions, a leading outsourced telemarketing services organization. As a highly competitive person, Nathan brings his ‘A’ game to work every day, ensuring that each of his clients wins on a daily basis. Nathan carefully balances the operations resources and client goals to ensure his clients receive the highest possible results at the lowest cost. Nathan is a true, born and bred telemarketer. He grew up in the business and intimately knows (and has played) every position on the field, including supervisor, quality assurance, call center manager, program management, account management, and call center psychologist. Nathan can be reached at Nathan.teahon@qualitycontactsolutions.com or 516-656-5133.
