There are few things more popular with working-class Americans than bringing work back on shore. And nothing pleases investors more than when you can do it cost-effectively and profitably. Matt Zemon, president of Element Customer Care, is doing both.
His company provides call center, tech support and CSG systems billing solutions for cable, broadband and telecommunications operators. It incorporates industry best practices, processes and some heavy-duty automation to create excellence in customer service using service reps from all over the country. This country.
Zemon will present his best practices for managing remote agents at the upcoming 2010 Billing & OSS World Conference & Expo on Wednesday, June 9, in Washington, D.C. He spoke recently with B/OSS editor Tim McElligott about his company and what he plans to share through his session.
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| Element Customer Care's Matt Zemon |
B/OSS: Can you give us a high-level view of your presentation coming up at B/OSS?
MZ: It will be about some of the reasons companies like ours chose to move jobs back to the states and some of the initial basic savings. It also will focus on the processes and software solutions that need to be put in place to allow [service providers] to have a successful virtual home agent.
We’ll start with how to recruit and hire across the country when you can’t easily do face-to-face interviews, how you monitor and route calls, how to train and qualify reps. We focus not on the tools themselves but on the idea behind the tools. We drive the message home that there are people in other parts of the country that really want to work for a reasonable wage. And we’ll talk about how we blend home agents with local offices and call centers of different clients.
B/OSS: How is your “go American” message being received?
MZ: For us, we couldn’t have grown without doing this. But it was a pretty big learning curve from pitching a service based solely on price, knowing what it took to get to the price. We could justify it all we wanted that way, but it was still an offshore experience. Now we have been able to hold the cost pretty close to where it was before while bringing the work on shore.
It raises an eyebrow when it first comes up for discussion, but once you explain how it works and what types of practices and assurances you have, the response is overwhelmingly positive. I am surprised by how much this story sticks, for lack of a better term. We get a lot of people who like that we did this; we get that a lot. So it is working well.
B/OSS: All the feel-good benefits of putting Americans to work would seem to fade unless there was good quality behind it. How do you translate that sentiment into long-term satisfaction for your customers?
MZ: You’re exactly right. What using virtual employees really forces companies to do is think about how they really communicate with their employees. Period. If you are relying on someone walking behind someone else’s desk to see what they’re doing, then you have much bigger problems than you think. Using virtual employees focuses you on how you do each aspect of your processes. And we have a bunch of tools that can help you do that.
