The theater, as you know, starts with a hanger, and an outsourced contact center starts with a website, from which you can draw some preliminary conclusions about the supplier. Let’s figure out what a potential customer should pay attention to, while the article will also be useful for autors to improve the image, where necessary.
Dates
It is better to start studying the ACC website with a control procedure and first of all check the correspondence of the domain registration date (whois service) and the number of years that the company reports itself as a market participant. The same reconciliation must be done with any service that allows you to get information about the date of registration of a legal entity. If everything converges, or the term for the provision of services is less than the life of the company, then the preliminary check can be considered successful. But in real life, already at this stage, inexplicable miracles often begin. Of course, all sorts of exceptions are possible, for example, if the “beautiful” domain was bought recently, or the ACC was spun off into a separate organization, but the bell should sound.
Section “About ACC”
The section “About the company” should contain, at a minimum, the period of existence of the company in the market, information on the number of sites and operator places and / or the number of employees. It is necessary to check the figures given on the site for convergence, and at the same time compare them with those given in promotional materials. It can be quite funny: for example, 80 operator positions are indicated on the website, and there are already 150 of them in the commercial offer. It is clear that they usually simply forget to update the content, but how will the company treat the customer’s customers if it treats information about itself so irresponsibly? In my practice, by the way, there was a case when the project manager of the AKC claimed that the company had four sites, and the general director – that there were six. Some incidents have a logical explanation, with the same 80 places, you can make 5 million calls a day, because the quantitative power of robots is limited only by the customer’s budget, the availability of sufficient server capacity and the bandwidth of communication channels. But for dubious suppliers, inconsistencies tend to snowball together. Of course, if for some reason (usually the price) you really like the outsourcer, you can not reject it immediately, but ask the appropriate questions. But life shows that two doubts are already an orange zone, and three or more are practically a guarantee that something is wrong with the OCC. This is not necessarily dishonesty, it is quite possible the usual gouging. However, is it good?
Addresses
A good sign, if it is stated that there are several sites, the addresses of all sites, the address of the head office, directions to it, details of the legal entity and information about key team members are indicated. I also recommend publishing their contact e-mails, but to avoid spamming – have duplicates, for example, d.galkin@domain instead of the main galkin@domain. Letters that fall into them must be manually sorted out by the secretary. Sometimes there are very important questions. And, of course, a contact mobile number instead of a landline (and especially with the ability to make 5 million calls a day at 80 locations) should be alarming.
Call Recordings
It’s great when you can listen to samples of audio files of conversations between operators and subscribers, as well as read chat logs (for some reason no one has posted them yet, but I see that it’s time). In this case, several conditions must be met: there should be no staged conversations, as well as signs of deception or misinformation of customers. On the website of one unscrupulous supplier there are such records, the operators directly lie about the terms of delivery and the cost of the product, I checked. The case is indicative – even for the demo version, “convergence” was not ensured. But in general, in the demo recordings of which only artifacts do not come across: from trade secrets to personal data of customers. How responsible are these providers? Never go to a shoemaker without boots, never shave at a bald barber. It’s great if the records do not contain outdated ineffective sales techniques like What’s embarrassing? Let’s think together and/or blunders in terms of sales/service and/or manipulations with “arm-twisting” to the subscriber. At the same time, the quality of the recording itself should be high, and, yes, pay attention to the background noise. If it is not there, then this does not mean anything, but if it is, then this is a problem: when operators hear each other, they are unconsciously distracted by recognizing what their neighbors are saying, labor productivity drops, with per-minute or per-second billing, this is dramatic affects the account balance.
Documentation
By the way, a responsible supplier is attentive to the documents posted on the site. Here is the minimum list of what you need: privacy policy, information about registration as personal data, regulation on the protection of personal data of subscribers, consent to the processing of personal data of site visitors (relevant for Russia as of June 2021, if you are from another country, check with a lawyer, it is possible discrepancies in laws).
Social network
Pay attention to the presence of the company in social networks. An outsourcing contact center, which is not there, is nonsense these days, at least, because social networks are one of the channels for attracting staff, and everyone traditionally has difficulties with this. The content posted there is also of interest, it says a lot about how the company treats the staff and what values it is committed to.
General requirements for the OCC website
The general requirements for site content are that it must contain triggers that will potentially cause a negative reaction from a potential customer, for example, information about servicing dubious projects. Also, there should not be “water” like a team of young professionals focused on results. The ideal case is when the site contains a clear, sane and justified by figures and facts unique selling proposition that transparently answers the question of why services should be purchased from this particular company. Photos of employees and company infrastructure should look professional. Of the three randomly selected materials from the site, at least one should contain elements of informational and practical novelty.
Reviews
As for information about completed projects and customers, video testimonials from the leaders of these companies are ideal.
Dmitry Galkin, independent consultant on the creation and management of contact centers.
