Heroes in Business - Eric Mulvin, Customer Experience with Jason Junge Part 1, Contact Center Cactus Chat

Episode Date: February 4, 2023

The Cactus Chat returns with special guest WebToq CEO and founder Jason Junge. Listen to the story of a veteran of the software world and how he bases his decisions on customer needs. Pt1 of 2.

Welcome to the Contact Center Cactus Chat Podcast. I'm your host, Eric Malvin, coming to you from sunny Phoenix, Arizona. And I'm your co-host, Jay Kayang, from Dumagiri City, Philippines. I'm a serial entrepreneur, started my first business 10 years ago, and six LLCs later, I started PacBiz Contact Center Outsourcing in 2015. Today, we have over 200 employees growing. And I'm the operations manager here in PackBiz, and I've been working with Eric since 2014, and I grew as a company grew. 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. So business managers,

operations managers, business owners, this is for you. So make sure to subscribe. operations managers business owners this is for you so make sure to subscribe welcome back to the show thank you guys for listening we appreciate all our listeners and again i'm joined in person in studio by our co-host it's great to have you in phoenix today thank you um yeah it's been nice and um you, we were last week or this week, early this week, we were in Vegas. It feels like a lot of that's happened already. But, yeah, it's been fun. And thank you for inviting me over. As operations manager at PACT, you oversee about 200 people.

So at the peak of COVID COVID we had about 99% of the people working from home today I think that numbers are right around 70% so what are the biggest issues that you faced managing remote work and what did you do as operations manager to overcome them yeah it's funny because we were expecting a lot of issues when we when we started the first day second day yeah they were pretty minimal you know some connections little adjustments but right after that it went really smooth like people are excited to work because they're working at home and they you know there's no there are no absences if

there are there's somebody's gonna fill in and they're going to cover the shift. Until they get used to it and the excitement fades. they started, we started noticing that people are lacking focus on their job. Possibly, since they're at their houses, probably they're doing something or they're talking to somebody. And so that's the first problem that we saw, the lack of focus. So what we did was, you know, we, it's, you know, number one, number one priority is the quality. So the QA department really, you know, took care of it and with the extra monitoring of the agents who were working from home versus the agents who were working,

there were still few working in the office at that time and yeah that's the you know the lack of focus was you know was improved because of the help the QA and then we also do the live monitoring so we use several you know platforms just to make sure that we see the agents that needed monitoring. And luckily not all of them are needed to be monitored. So those are the challenges and right now it's already a privilege. It's not like I am employed at Pacquia so I have the right to be working at home. It's not like that. You need to provide all the things that need it to replicate the office environment. The things that we have, the silence, the reliable power and internet service.

So that's, those are the things that we have in the office just to, or we ask from the employees so that they can work from home. So I wanna ask you this, Eric. So you've been, you know So you've been here in the U.S. and we are there. And that's another example of working remotely. True. Have you had any problems or issues with that setup?

Yeah, I mean, definitely. That's one of the questions I get asked most often. How do you manage everything in the U.S.? And I think the second question they ask is, how often do you go back? Because I think people are thinking, like, man, I've got to see my team every day almost. I think people are backing away from that now because of more acceptance of working remotely, which, again, may be why you're listening. more acceptance of working remotely, which again, maybe why you're listening, but I

Yeah, I do think I'm a bit unique because based in Phoenix from day one I had to have I had to manage people remotely so from 2014 when we started operations in the Philippines and started taking calls For first business in my taxi company then it was always remote and you know those things that you know that the same challenges for the culture like people are not showing up sometimes they tend to be probably feeling safe just staying at home and they have to participate in all the activities and you know lately they have been going out and I can see people working in the office and even helping other stuff like decorating and preparing for Halloween. And I can see these photos and it's fun that culture was able to pull it off even if we had this pandemic for two years. And yeah, the relationship, the culture, all the things that we used to have before the, is slowly going back. So this is, yeah, the challenge is, you know, it's slowly getting, going away, like, you know,

we're going back to normal, but still, we're still, we still have people who are working from home and that makes us different from others. And yeah, we're embracing it. And since we see that there's a way to make it work, so we will continue giving employees the set up or a chance to work with their families at home. Yep, that's for sure.

Family being one of the top core values at PACBiz, what better way to promote that core value That's for sure. You know, family being one of the top core values at PAC is, you know, what better way to promote that core value than continuing to allow work from home where they could be with family if they could, you know, meet the privilege of providing the level of support we're looking for from them. So hybrid model is here to stay. Working from home is here to stay. Although we still have 30% of the people working out of the office right now, so it's not like everybody's working from home is here to stay although we still have 30 percent of the people working out of the office right now so it's not like everybody's working from home and I'm sure we'll start seeing that number creep up more as things you know the Philippines have

been a little behind in the U.S. and U.K. and Canada as far as COVID some of the restrictions are just now November 2022 just being lifted so they're starting to feel more comfortable doing more events. And so I'm sure we'll see more people working out of the office, but we're excited to continue to offer work from home. So that about wraps up our conversation on remote work, challenges of managing remote work.

And I hope you guys can see, maybe at first it was like a daunting task. How do we get up this mountain of remote work? And we showed you some of the paths up to the top of that mountain. And yeah, it is possible. And if you don't wanna deal with it, and that's what we're here for.

If it's customer support, customer experience, virtual assisting, there's a lot that we could do here at Packbiz to help out. So you don't have to take on that challenge. We take it on for you and then you deal with people like Jake who is also the account manager for some of our clients. Yeah, not to mention that we already figured out what to do so it's very safe to do the work from home set up and of course it would be considered what type of account what type of industry you are working your

where your business is so yeah but yeah if you need anything you need help and you're interested in you know working with us yeah just keep on listening if you need some more information we still have future podcast recordings and a lot of topics and we also have already uploaded several topics that you might need to know yeah so go check check out some of the past episodes because here as you already hopefully realize we talk about outsourcing we talk about customer experience, managing call centers. And so we hope you found something valuable today. And you can check us out on Spotify, Apple podcast, Google podcast, full episodes are on YouTube. So you get to see us in person interacting. So but want to thank you guys for listening to the show. I know, I think Jake and I have gotten a little longer

these last couple episodes because we're in person. So, got a little bit more to say than normal. But thank you guys for listening. And I appreciate it. Thanks for, thanks. And have a, oh, have a great day. Thanks, guys. See you on the next episode.

See ya. See ya.