Eric: Welcome to the contact center cactus chat podcast. I’m your host Eric Mulvin coming to you from sunny Phoenix, Arizona.
Jake: And I’m your co-host Jake Cayang from Dumaguete City, Philippines.
Eric: I’m a serial enterpreneur, started my business 10yrs ago and 6 LLC’s later, I started Pac Biz Contact Center Outsourcing in 2015, today we have over 200 employees and growing.
Jake: And I’m the Operations Manager here in Pac Biz and I have been working with Eric since 2014 and I grew as the company grew.
Eric: So whether you’re looking to outsource for the first time, whether you manage a Contact Center or you’re just looking to improve your customer experience, we’ll be covering topics for you.
Jake: So Business Managers, Operations Managers, Business Owners, this is for you so make sure to subscribe.
Eric: And welcome to episode 3, so today we’re going to be talking about customer service. And staffing pain points. So from your guys’s perspective, the people that are hiring the frontline people in the US and the UK, in Canada, Australia. What are the issues you guys are having? And because we want to talk about that because you know, Jake, he’s the account manager that works with me. He’s the one dealing with the clients and their challenges and how we can help solve them. And we’re seeing these issues for, like, the frontline issues that you guys are facing as well. So, Jake, tell me you know, what are some of the things that you’ve noticed from, from helping support the clients when it comes to staffing? Like what challenges are they having that, that you’re seeing?
Jake: Yeah. So, you know, we have you know, at the beginning we had the agreement of getting the number of people to work with us. So those are the exact numbers that we we provide
But they also have this requests for other days. Some requests in the weekends, some requests on the weekdays, and I figured that this may be the reason why they’re outsourcing like somebody might, or somebody probably did not show up or somebody got sick or Yeah, things like that. So those are the things that I noticed and you know, it’s really part of the you know, working with someone you know, you have to be committed, and you have that commitment to show up, you know, when you’re needed under schedule. So yeah, I see this as a problem from from our clients and eventually, you know, getting that few number of hours, you know, a request for that week and eventually they add one more person to cover that shit. So that’s, that’s probably, you know, getting that problem resolved by, you know, having that one person added to us and provided by our call center. So that’s
Eric: that’s really interesting, you know, because that is something that we’ve offered from the very beginning was this on demand, like role so that if your business, someone is sick in the office, your office that if you’re already working with us, and you have a couple of people taking calls at our company, we’ll provide you another person on demand, as long as we can meet that demand. It’s gotten to the point lately, and we need to pull the numbers and look at the data but we’re breaking records every single month for the number of shifts that are requested on demand. And Jake and I were talking you know, you’re talking a little bit about before we started recording, and you’re giving the example about like if there’s a big festival going on in the city, and they’re asking for extra call center agents to meet demand because they know they’re going to be busy. And what ends up happening. The call center agents are going to the festival too, so now they need even more people.
Like what you’ve seen that right?
Jake: Yeah, I yeah, there’s two reasons that I see. You know, it’s it could be you know, more more volume of calls that are coming in, they are anticipating it so they added more people and you know, in preparation of other people might not show up during the shift because of the festival or any events that they’re they have going on in their, their place. So that’s, yeah, we added support to that, to help them to continue the business. You know, especially that opportunity to to have large number of calls going in on that specific day. So, you know, those are the days that you that some of the clients are waiting for, like this is the time that we can have more profit and you know, more number of calls and needed to turn our revenues up and yeah
Eric: This is our Black Friday, this is like, their big day. You know, we’re like, you’re gonna get so many new customers today that try you guys out and like, Oh, we’re gonna, like, this is our showcase to people to experience our brand. And what experience do they get when they call in and it’s a busy signal
Jake: Yeah, it’s yeah, it’s the wait time you know really frustrates people like you’ve been in the phone for for you know, for so long, like few minutes for you know, because I can, there really busy shifts. You know, before pandemic that I can see that there are 30 calls waiting. That’s a lot. And during events, we see those numbers and how do we cover all those callers? like to give them, to to get that booking on the dashboard? That’s really important and those are you know, those numbers are, they have corresponding amount of money and you know, we can’t miss, I mean probably missed some but you know, as much as possible, we can accommodate all of those callers. So, yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s the reason why we’re here. We, you know, there was, there was one time even before like, yeah, it didn’t happen. listening lately, but we had this experience that somebody called the client called us like, anyone should jump in, you know, who’s trained like, the, you know, mentioning this, desperately mentioning these names.Yeah.
Eric: Anybody that is breathing that knows how to take a taxi call Can you put them on?
Jake: Yeah, specific for their account, of course, and yeah, they were mentioning their name, these name’s the people who just, you know, who works for for that account, and they said, Can they can they go back and, you know, get work and because they’re missing this, this callers and yeah, we were able to support them because, you know, the, we have this different energy here in the office, the enthusiasm, the, you know, the willingness to work, you know, it’s you know, the overtime the that we have of that we offer to the agents, they really appreciate coz all they need to you know, just answer calls and book those rides of course, we, it’s really important to be accurate, cause we balance, I always mentioned this, we balance these numbers, the completed booking and the no shows, there are reasons why there are no shows and there are reasons why bookings are not completed.
and yeah we we we’re really here to to help the clients to make sure that number of completed bookings are high.
Eric: Yeah, And whether it’s bookings, whether it’s completed orders, clearing out the queue for tickets, you know, handling customer, ecommerce orders, whatever it is. The one thing I want to point out though, Jake, the big difference that you were seeing from people working out offshore versus offshore, you know, that ambition, and I hear that time and time again from business owners. They’re like, people here just don’t want to work. That’s what I hear, you know, they don’t want to work. You know, when you talk about offering overtime, and, you know, our staff are eager to take it and like, yeah, and or them that that ambition to show up.
Jake: Yeah
Eric: you know, like, they’re gonna be there. You give them a shift, like, in the US or UK, Canada? I think they’re so used to people not showing up. That’s not even surprising for them anymore. Right? Like, I mean, what about that what? We’re almost done here with the show, so actually, this is a good segue. so in the next episode, episode four, we’re going to talk about our like, what did we do and then the difference between Pac Biz and our offshore agents and what we’re seeing from the onshore agents with our clients. so, Jake, Thank you very much for the discussion. today. I really love the perspective you brought from working with the clients. And so, yeah, so join us next time and we’ll see you guys. Alright
