Heroes in Business - Eric Mulvin, Customer Service and Staffi, Contact Center Cactus Chat

Episode Date: September 7, 2022

In Part 2, Jake and Eric give us an even more in-depth look into what goes on behind the scenes at outsourcing companies like Pac Biz,addressing business challenges in hiring,training,staffing and more.

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 PacBbiz and I've been working with Eric since 2014 and I grew as the 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. We're excited to talk to you guys today for episode four, and we're going to continue the conversation around hiring. And we talked in episode three about the challenges that we're seeing you guys are facing, which is around people that aren't ambitious, lots of turnover. guys are facing, which is around people that aren't ambitious, lots of turnover. One thing that Jake talked about was, you know, when we get schedules from our clients and then, okay, work these shifts, then after that, we start getting more requests. Hey, can you fill this time and that time? And hey, you know, can you put someone else extra on today? And it's because

those people that they're hiring, not working out. They're not showing up. They're going to the events that we're supposed to be helping cover or, you know, so stuff like that. So today we're going to talk about what companies like us, call center outsource companies, what we do to help solve those problems and And how can we, how do we eliminate those pain points and what that enables you guys to do in the process? So, so Jake, you know, you're the one again, that's working with these businesses and filling those requests, right?

So talk to me about, you know, what are, what are some of the things that we're doing and how are we running around behind the scenes to help solve their pain points? Yeah, to start with, we have our own people here in the practice. We also have our own problem, same as the people who are outsourcing, but it could be minimal. I don't really know. But what we do is for each account, we make sure that the account is covered. So we have these people

working to learn more about the accounts and be familiar with it. And until they pass and they can be qualified as a backup person. So what this backup person do is, here in the Philippine Labor Code, we provide different kinds of leave, like vacation leave, maternity leave for women and all other stuff. So these backup people will fill in if needed. So we have them already prepared for the account to cover any time including absences we do have that also but

we make sure that we cover the shifts that the clients are providing so that's the reason why we can also cover other requests because we have these people as backup. So yeah, we eliminate this problem of the client. They can call us anytime or send us an email that they need a person to cover for the shift.

This is outside of the agreed number of agents. They wanted to have 20, so we provide 20. Outside of that that uh people who are already assigned with the with the schedule so yeah they can uh the the backup people uh definitely i think you know you you touched on i think it's such a big uh ability of like flexibility that we have that the clients aren't able to have. You know, for us, we have just over right now, as of recording here this summer, 2022, just got about 200 people working at PackBiz.

And, you know, if you're a business that, you know, has a small team, you're trying to conserve cash. You don't have a bunch of you're not well funded like these giant startups like door dash and uber and um airbnb you know they have a limited funding it seems for anything um you guys we can't do that the clients we work with are they're not doing that too they have start like funding that you need. And you're not trying to blow it all in customer support because you're trying to invest into your product, into your software, into operations, into marketing.

So you don't have a lot to put towards that. So when someone is sick or when there is a big increase in demand, all of a sudden, wow, that campaign that we did generated twice the business that we did generated twice the business that we thought. Now our wait times went from something manageable that people don't mind to now they're waiting like three, four minutes on hold, or they're waiting hours for their ticket to be resolved or days. And that's a problem for businesses and the customers,

and especially if you're trying to grow your business. So that's huge. And I really think there's that component of it, where if you're a business that is just trying to run day to day, but growing businesses too. I talk a lot with clients about, like if you're a growing company and you know that in the next three to six months you're going to need more staff how do you prepare for that you know you got to train someone it takes there's a learning curve so talk to me about like what we do and what what a lot of other outsourcing companies do with the backups like how does that backup help when a business is scaling like that yeah and to add to that uh eric i have seen some supervisors

and managers jumped in to help cover shifts on shore like these people are not supposed to be taking calls they're supposed to be thinking you know higher things that could uh you know improve the company and not entertaining and you know receiving calls calls hours and hours to fill in for people who are not showing up or just to eliminate the high number of call waiting on the queue. So yeah, this is the problem that I have seen over the years. And we got that resolved by, you know, providing more people. And, you know, that we always have, you know, as backup, they're always available. So we help them grow. All right, Jake, that is such a great point, you know, and thank you for bringing

that up. Because that is something that I hear so often is, and in every industry, these businesses, they wait until the supervisor is taking calls, the manager is taking calls. They're trying to help bring the queue down. And what ends up happening is those are people, they have other responsibilities in the company too. You need other things to get done and they're not getting done because they're over doing more interviews. They're doing more calls. They're covering the calls. So that is not good for a company. And it's important to cover that, but how is your business going to be able to grow when you're stuck in that situation? You got to get past that pain point so that you can start solving other issues for your business.

And that's where we really come in because, you know, so if you guys have had this problem for your business for the last six months, 12 months since COVID, I'm here to tell you that this isn't going away. It's going to get worse. Like right now, like I heard a statistic last month or last week about hiring that right now there's only there's two jobs for every one person that's looking for work. So if every single American got hired for all the open positions, there's still like five to seven million jobs available. positions, there's still like five to seven million jobs available. So the idea that you're going to be able to fill those positions and that people are going to stick around, it's not going

to work so so but there's a solution and there's a solution that everyone around the US, Canada and UK are turning to. And that's outsourcing. And it's working with businesses like us to outsource these functions so that you can hire better talent and pay your people that are in the higher level roles more. So I think that's our time for today. So thank you guys for listening. Jake, thank you so much for joining and being my host here and talking about outsourcing and what, what you can do to solve those challenges. Yeah. Thanks Eric. And yeah, see you all. Yeah. See you guys in the next episode.