| TRG Customer Solutions: All Over the Map |
| Corporate Spotlight | |||
| Written by John Zorabedian | |||
| Saturday, 01 March 2008 | |||
 Frank Kelly explains how performance measuring technology allows this business process outsourcing company to gain an advantage.
The globalization of technology has propelled the growth of business process outsourcing (BPO) in the customer service sector at a dizzying rate in recent years, a trend that an emerging player in the BPO industry, TRG Customer Solutions, is hoping to capitalize on to reach the top tier.  Frank Kelly, CEO The company is investing in technology to integrate and standardize its operations and is building a 1,000-seat call center at the Mall of Asia in Manila to more than double the size of its business in the Philippines. The company also has operations in Africa and South America. “We’re investing in a global footprint,” Kelly said. Kelly has been recruiting high-level talent from several industry players, including Convergys. “We put in a real dream team of talent, and it’s the level of talent you’d find at a much larger company,” he said. “We’re putting the nucleus in place to become a much larger company.” With aspirations of growing into a $500 million company over the next several years, Kelly points to TRG’s technology innovations as reason number one the company will build an advantage over its competitors in the crowded BPO space. Quality convergence With call centers all over the globe, TRG’s challenge has been to not only standardize processes and operations but also to bring service quality to a consistent level. Using a technology platform called SAT MAP, for satisfaction mapping, TRG is looking to improve quality through performance measurement. “It’s one of the things that we use as our special sauce to differentiate ourselves,” Kelly said. “What we’re trying to do is move our average performance up, and we’ve seen 20% to 30% performance improvement from this technology.” SAT MAP is a neural network that measures the company’s customer service agents in various metrics, including average call time, sales conversion, cost, and satisfaction. Rather than routing calls to the next available agent as most call centers do, the technology allows the company to match calls to the best possible agent based on performance. “It keeps randomly testing until it finds patterns and identifies what gives us higher performance and what gives us lower performance,” Kelly said. “Every little percentage point makes a difference in this BPO space. We can go to our customers, deploy this technology, and get a little bit of an edge on the marketplace.” The next level for SAT MAP, which the company is looking to roll out at its call centers, would measure call satisfaction and sales conversion by matching agents and callers based on demographic information, such as an agent’s age, ethnicity, gender, and national origin. Cost control The name of the game in BPO is cost control, not only for the client companies but also for the BPO organization. TRG was the first BPO company for IT and back office functions to operate in Pakistan, where it is listed on the stock exchange. “We kind of have Pakistan to ourselves, likely the result of geopolitical issues,” Kelly said. As BPO companies have sprouted up in India, costs have risen in that country due to competition for qualified workers, particularly in IT and medical claims outsourcing. Pakistan offers the same or better quality workers for a fraction of the cost, Kelly said. Another possibility for controlling costs in the voice BPO sector is the home agent model, in which calls are routed to workers in their own homes. Kelly, who was the COO at a leading home agent company, Willow CSN, said TRG is moving to a hybrid approach by combining home agents with centralized call centers. “We will have physical centers and a ring of home agents around those call centers,” Kelly said. “We found in the home agent space that it’s hard to train people over the Internet, so it really makes sense to have a brick and mortar training location. It becomes the best of both worlds.” Some financial services companies require call centers and will not outsource to home agents because of sensitivity around sharing credit card numbers. But the home agent model, when deployed effectively, can provide employees with scheduling flexibility, making it an effective way to recruit from a broader base of potential workers. Beginning this year, TRG also restructured its employee health benefits to bring all 20 global call centers under the same health plan. “We leveled out our benefits package so everyone is treated the same way,” Kelly said. Although a majority of call centers received an upgrade in their benefits, two US call centers had their health benefits scaled back. As Kelly explained, integrating TRG’s various call center acquisitions means lowering operational costs, but the end goal is raising quality to a level that is comparable anywhere in the world. “I’m creating a world-class BPO player that’s consistent across every center and every geography we play in,” Kelly said. “To be successful in this business, you can’t have one way of doing things in the Philippines and one way of doing things in Pennsylvania. It’s the McDonald’s approach—every McDonald’s you go into is supposed to feel the same.” |
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© 2008 American Executive - RedCoat Publishing. All rights reserved.
American Executive is a RedCoat Publishing publication.
American Executive is a RedCoat Publishing publication.
