Heroes in Business - Eric Mulvin, Customer Service and Staffing Pain Points

Episode Date: August 24, 2022

Eric and Jake talk about a common challenge their clients face around the customer experience when shifts are missed by their local staff and what Pac Biz has done to solve it for their clients in this episode of the Contact Center Cactus Chat with Eric Mulvin.

Welcome to the Contact Center Cactus Chat Podcast. I'm your host Eric Malvin from sunny Phoenix, Arizona. And I'm your co-host Jay Kayang from Dumagiri City, Philippines. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I 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 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. And welcome to episode three. So today we're going to be talking about customer service and staffing pain points. So from your guys' perspective, the people that are hiring the frontline people in the US, in 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 front, 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 have noticed from from helping support the clients when it comes to staffing? Like what challenges are they having that that you're seeing? Yeah. So, yeah, 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 provide. But they also have this request for other days,

some requests on the weekends, some requests on, you know, the weekdays. And i figured that this may be the reason why they're outsourcing um like uh somebody might or somebody probably didn't show up or somebody uh got sick or yeah things like that so those are the things that i noticed and you know it's really part of the uh you know working with someone uh you know you have to be committed and you have that commitment to show up, you know, when you're needed on the schedule. So, yeah, I see this as a problem from our clients and eventually, you know, uh, getting that few number of hours, uh, you know, on a request for that week. And eventually they add one more person to cover that shift.

So, uh, that's yeah, that's, uh, probably, uh, you know, getting that problem, uh, we sold by, you know, having that, person added to us and provided by our consular. So 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, we're talking a little bit about before we started recording. And, you know, you were giving an 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 and i tell like what you've seen that right yeah i yeah there there's two reasons that i see uh you know it's could be uh you know more more volume of calls are coming in uh they are anticipating it so they they added more people and you know in preparation of other people who might not show up um traditions because of the festival or any events that they have going on in their

uh their place so that's yeah we add support uh add support to that to help them to continue the business, you know, especially that opportunity to have large number of calls going in on that specific day. So, you know, those are the days 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, you know, to turn our revenues up. Yeah, this is their Black Friday. This is their like big day, you know, where like you're going to get so many new customers today

that try you guys out. They're like, oh, we're going to like, this is our showcase for people to experience our brand and what experience do they get when they call in and it's a busy signal you know yeah it's yeah it's the wait time you know really persuades people like you've been the phone for for you know for so long like a few minutes uh for uh you know I can also get because I can they're they're 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 colors like to give them to get that booking on the dashboard.

That's really important. And those numbers are, they have corresponding amount of money. We can't miss, we probably miss some, but as much as possible, we can accommodate all of those colors. So yeah, that's the reason why we're here. We, you know, there was there was one time even before like, you know, it didn't happen recently, lately, but we had this experience that somebody called the client called us like anyone should jump in who you know who's trained like you know we're mentioning this they're like anybody that anybody that

is breathing that knows how to take a taxi call can you put them on yeah uh specific for their account of course and uh yeah they were mentioning were mentioning these names of the people who just, you know, who works for that account. And they said, can they go back and, you know, work? And because they're missing these colors. And yeah, we were able to support them because, you know, we have this different energy here in the office, enthusiasm the you know the

willingness to work you know it's you know the the overtime that uh that we have uh uh off do we offer to the agents they really appreciate it it's all they need to you know just answer calls and you know, just answer calls and book those rides. Of course, it's really important to be accurate. Just rebalance, I always mention this, rebalance this 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.

Yeah, we really here to help the clients to make sure that the number of completed bookings are high. Yeah. And whether it's bookings, whether it's completed orders, clearing out the queue for tickets, you know, handling customer e-commerce orders, whatever it is. The one thing I want to point out though, Jake, the big difference that you were seeing from people working offshore versus onshore, you know, that ambition. And I hear that time and time again from business owners they're like people here just they don't want to work that's what i hear you know they don't want to work they you know when you talk about offering overtime and you know our staff are eager to take it and like yeah and uh

or them that that ambition to show up you know like they're gonna be there you give them a shift that ambition to show up, you know, like they're going to be there. You give them a shift like in the U S 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, what about that? Well, we were almost done here with the show. So, um, actually this is a good segue. So in the next episode, episode four, we're going to talk about what do we do and the difference between PACBiz 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 time and um we'll see you guys later