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Call Center Cactus Chat

Episode 9: (Working with a Taxi Contact Center Part 1) Outsourcing Customer Support

Eric and Jake get into the nitty-gritty on the importance of outsourcing a customer call team for your transportation business.

Listen to the Podcast:

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 entrepreneur, 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: Today’s episode, we’re gonna be talking about taxi companies. And the next two episodes, we’re gonna be talking about taxi companies and outsourcing your taxi calls and customer calls. Even if you don’t own a taxi company doesn’t matter, I think you’ll get something out of these next couple of episodes. And, but really want to talk about for those of you who have never outsourced before, if you’re a taxi business, what is a difference between outsourcing your customer calls, and driver calls? because there is a difference. And so this episode, we’re going to be talking about your customer calls. Next episode, we’ll be talking about outsourcing driver calls. And the big difference there is there are different kinds of customers. And we handle them way differently. And if you guys run a taxi company, you’ll know Jake’s the one that manages operations in the Philippines. So you you have to deal with it a lot. In fact, you know, it takes a different skill set, right? And tell me about that a little bit

Jake:  for the taxi company, you know, to outsource for customer support and driver support, there’s a difference. The customer is, of course, they’re uh, the drivers is also a customer to the company, and we take care of them. And the same way as we treat this, the callers who are the customers that will want to be picked up. That’s how we also take care of the drivers.

Eric: Yeah, and you know, you talked about different companies, like if you’re making, if you’re a restaurant, you don’t have your own delivery people, you outsource that, you know, there’s a lot of examples we can go across. But the big thing that all of these companies have in common, the ones that work with Pac Biz and other businesses outsource, the biggest thing they have in common is that customer support is not the core part of their business. Where for us it is, you know, for Pac Biz we’re all about that that’s our product, is customer support the customer experience. If you’re a restaurant, it’s the food. It’s not, how’s that delivery driver, you know, making their turns when they’re getting to your home? Or how are they like, are they within the speed limit? Are they driving responsibly in the neighborhoods? No, like, that’s not the responsibility of the restaurant, they want to make sure that they have good food. And if they are focused on the delivery driver, they’re not going to be able to put as much attention to the food. And that’s what we’re saying with these taxi companies and it with any business. If the call center is not a core part of your business, alright, then outsource that to companies that were that’s our focus. That’s our that’s what we do. Just like if you go to the restaurant, you expect good food, you go to us you expect good support. And so for the taxi companies, yeah, they’re not, they, you guys aren’t in the business of providing call centers. In the past, that was the case, but now that’s not. And so today, we’re talking about the customer support side of things. And so Jake, tell me why would a taxi company outsource their support?

Jake: Um, yeah, based on experience, what I see and what the taxi company owners are happy about is, you know, they, the, I think first and foremost is, you know, the, the employment, they don’t need to worry about the employees. So we take care of that side. And you know, probably it’s because we’ve been here for you know, for a while now that, you know, all these things that they’re doing over there is you know, exactly what we’re doing over here. And you know, the difference is that you know, the probably if, if they’re having problems with you know, the people their, their agents or your call takers that those problems are already taken care of off here in our end, like we all have these guidelines, the QA metrics and all other stuff like they, you know, all the, I mean, after all the times that we spent doing this thing, we were not perfect, but you know, probably close to it, then we, you know, we made sure that, you know, we deliver good customer experience. So that’s, that’s the thing that you can get when you when you outsource the call taking. And, you know, eventually as these agents, you know, from the beginning, we don’t have dispatchers or controllers, right? And,

Eric: yeah, the beginning, you’re right.

Jake: And they began to have the skills like they know this place, they are very familiar with the map, they are very familiar with the drivers. And you know, even though they’re just being call takers, they already have this knowledge about where these drivers are, or you know, or going home or just drivers are usually located. And, you know, when we were offered before, if we can do the dispatching, and then we try and and there you go, it’s, you know, it’s not really difficult for us to adapt to doing the the, to take driver calls.

Eric: Awesome. That’s great to hear. You’re right. And it’s nice to see that evolution. I know that Pac Biz, one of our core values is personal growth. And like to use that as an example where we started with taxi customer calls. And then what we’ll be talking about in the next episode, driver calls that came later on. And part of it was almost a necessity, because the technology that’s coming into play, too, we have a lot of clients where 50-60-70% of the calls are handled by automation by the IVR. And so we’re only handling that 30% or 20%. And I think it goes back to why these customer calls are so important. You can’t afford to have just some person that you hired, like their first day is taking their calls, and they don’t have any experience about your business when the 20, those are the 20% of the calls that are coming in. So that people are maybe they’ve tried to use the computer system calling in or the AI, the bot whatever, and it hasn’t taken their calls. And now they’re upset, and they’ve been trying to talk to somebody, you don’t want to have someone that is not trained and not ready answering the phone because they’re new on the phones because you keep having turnover. So then you talked about that a bit. You know, they’ve, they’re having issues there with their call center agents were, that’s our that’s our product, it’s our service that we do. So that’s why we really focus on on that part. So we could, we could focus on the call side of things, and they could focus on the operations. So Jake, I just wanted to wrap up with this last thought here about the attrition rate is you are talking about staff that stick around a long time and for years. And unfortunately, we cannot put anybody that comes to us because we’re growing, we can’t put all people that have been working at Pac Biz for for years, because our clients have been with us for years are expecting those people to stick around. But the thing here with us, if you’re hiring someone in the call center, and you’re in the UK, you’re in the US, you’re in Canada, the expectation is not that this person is going to be there for years, the expectation is like we’ll see how long they last, where when you come to work at Pac Biz, or you come to work at a call center that values them that cares about the employee. And we’re, we want these people to stick around. That’s the difference when when people come in to apply. They’re starting a career with us, they’re expecting Okay, that’s gonna be where I might work for the next 5-10 years. Versus the that’s not the expectation they’re coming in when they come in to work locally. This is like I’m doing this for now waiting for the next thing to come around. That’s a big difference. So even if we’re, you’re you’re starting with a company and it’s starting with new people, it makes a huge difference what that attrition rate is at the call center that you’re outsourcing to. So I challenge you guys, if you’re thinking about outsourcing and you’re looking at companies ask them what their attrition rate is, how many people leave that company in the next year. And that, that could that could be the big difference between if you’re going to get a great experience for your business or one that you’re going to be wishing you made a different choice. So with that, I think that’s all the time we have for this episode today. The next episode we’re going to be talking and focusing on the driver side of outsourcing and and working with uh, call centers. So thank you guys for listening and we’ll catch you in the next episode.

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