Call Center Outsourcing - How'd we get here?

Welcome to the Home Agent Consulting, LLC BLOG.  My name is Rick Owens and I have been fortunate to work in the customer care industry since 2002, during a time of massive change in the industry.  This BLOG will get into the intricacies of the Home Agent concept, but as an introduction I'd like to share a little about my background, then a brief yet broad discussion on the recent/ongoing evolution of customer care. 

First things first, a little information about my background - I’m a technical person at the core. An Operating Systems engineer that spent many years in the travel industry technology arena, I learned all about, and had a hand in developing, automation for quicker reservations and faster response times. In developing the Apollo Computer Reservation System, we earned revenue on each reservation transaction.  The more we booked air, car, hotels, cruises or tours, the more money we made.  We brought every travel provider (competitors) to the electronic market called the "Global Distribution System", initially giving "travel agents" access to everything vendors had to offer.  Then with the advent of the internet, the industry gave access of all this capability to the end consumer. I’m also aware of the complexity such access immediately dumps onto the end customers, who only desire to make a purchase, and not be duped into buying something they could have gotten cheaper through another venue. Don't you hate sitting next to someone on a plane and find out they bought their seat at 30% less than you did?  I understand the urge to talk with a human, an expert, to make the buyer more comfortable. That customer desire is in every industry, not just travel. With the growth of customer populations and the complexity of products and services, comes questions, complaints, the need to pay bills, etc. Some form of customer service, and thus the call center, is necessary in nearly all industries. 

My first job in the call center industry was leading the technology organization for a very large BPO (Business Process Outsourcer = fancy name for a call center company). The concept of a call center has been around for a long time. At first, business units created small support teams locally/internally, out of necessity for their specific need. Advanced technology, logistics and communications enabled products and services to reach ever growing customer populations. Large companies would find they had small pockets of these call support operations all over their organization.

The first call center consolidations were internal as companies themselves, pulled together all the fragmented customer service groups into a consolidated operational business unit. Consolidated staff could be trained on multiple products having varied call arrival patterns to keep the workforce optimized (paid for work time, and idle time, waiting for calls that might not arrive). Automation arrived with the ability to route callers based on their specific reason for calling like billing, complaints or sales (called Call Segmentation). Advanced technology helped improve customer service by delivering agent prompts (screen pops) based on call segmentation, account number or even the number callers dialed from.  Some technology actually allowed callers to serve themselves like acquiring account balances or paying bills without talking to a human. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) became a normal front end to calls to identify call type and in some cases, handle the entire transaction and avoid using a very expensive human being at all.  “Call Killing” is a term for automatically handling a customer matter without human intervention.  (Most callers just want to kill the IVR! :-)

But having all this call center investment and capability became very expensive. It's understandable when you think of all the required infrastructure, redundant data centers, networks, call processors, voice recorders, let alone the tremendous real-estate and the general customer service expertise required. The need for and value of customer care is tremendous, and all industries need it done efficiently to contain costs.  This situation spawned a whole new industry: the call center outsourcer.  

Outsourcers focus on this massive complexity, and then partner with each client to build a unique customer interaction environment.  They offer the call center real-estate, employees, training, and massive technology infrastructure and integration.  They optimize all that investment by leveraging it across multiple industries that need calls handled throughout the day, not just the hours of one industry.  Its truly a matter of scale and focus that they offer at a lower cost than a company can do for themselves. 

So that’s my background, and a brief history on how the concept of call center outsourcing started.  Next time we’ll talk about how the continual pursuit of cost containment lead to introducing "near-shore" or lower costs through lower wages, then "far-shore" which achieves massively lower costs by leveraging global economies.  And finally and most recently, we'll get to the attraction and creation of the concept called Home Agent or "home-shore" operations.